Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  He put the picture down and suddenly there came to him the feeling that the painting was one great cry of despair, that it came from the hand and heart of one who had abandoned hope, who had wished to express a humanity, lost, bewildered, and afraid, pressing blindly on to atomic devastation.

  ‘Anarchy treading the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire’, was the title that might well have been given to it had the artist wished to express in words what apparently he had tried to show in paint.

  “Done on a bit of mahogany board,” Monkey interrupted these thoughts. “What’s that for?”

  “Yes, a bit unusual nowadays,” Bobby agreed. “Quite common at one time. I wonder why it was used for this thing?” And as he spoke vague thoughts flitted to and fro in his mind and were gone again.

  “A pal gave it me,” Monkey went on. “He said he got it from the bloke who did it. In a fit of d.t.’s., if you ask me. The bloke told him it would be worth thousands some day but his missus said she wasn’t going to have it in her house, gave her the creeps, and now there’s my missus says it’s not the sort of thing for decent, respectable folk to have about, and to chop it up for firewood.”

  “There’s a signature in the corner here,” Bobby said. “I think it’s ‘J.J.’ Do you know anyone with those initials?”

  “There’s Jack Jones,” Monkey replied doubtfully. “Has the barrow at the corner, first turning on the left. T.T. and chapel. It wouldn’t be him, would it? Respectable sort of bloke, though a bit easy on weights, my missus says.”

  “I shouldn’t think it’s likely to be his work,” Bobby said. “Well, if you’re thinking of chopping it up for firewood I’ll give you ten bob for it.”

  “Right,” said Monkey quickly. “You wouldn’t believe how tight things are with the shop sort of coining money—and now the missus locks the till and takes the key with her every time she goes out.”

  “Does she though?” exclaimed Bobby. “If that isn’t too bad.”

  Monkey poured himself out another drink. “It’s my belief,” he said moodily, “though you wouldn’t hardly credit it, that she’s putting money in the Post Office all the time—and me with hardly enough in my pocket to pay for a pint with a pal.” Bobby glanced at that well-stocked cupboard. “Rationed,” said Monkey sadly. “Rationed strict. It just shows. And says I ought to get myself a job of work.”

  “Well, why not?” asked Bobby.

  “I was never one for a job of work,” Monkey replied with simple dignity. “Of course, I could scrag her,” he added thoughtfully.

  The door from the shop opened suddenly and Mrs. Baron put her head in.

  “Why don’t you give Mr. Owen a drink?” she demanded, and disappeared as quickly as she had shown herself.

  “You don’t think she heard, do you?” Monkey asked Bobby with very obvious discomfort.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if she had,” Bobby told him.

  “Might set her thinking about weedkiller,” Monkey observed, still more uncomfortably.

  “Better not think of that sort of thing, either of you,” Bobby warned him. “I don’t want to have the job of getting after you.”

  “No,” agreed Monkey. “No. I wouldn’t like it that way. Not by a long chalk. Never lets up, they say you don’t. The whole trouble is she wants to save enough to go and live at Bournemouth and be respectable all the damn day long.”

  “Jolly good idea, too,” Bobby said, picking up the picture. “I wonder if you would get me some paper and string to do this up in? By the way, talking of pictures, you’ve heard about what the papers call the vanishing art critic? It’s that made me think of looking you up again. Was there any special reason for your visiting the flats where Mr. Atts lived?”

  “Not much you miss, is there, guv,” Monkey complained. “I just happened to be around there, so I took a bit of a dekko. Interested, as you might say. Passed the time of day with some of the newspaper boys. It’s them let on to you, wasn’t it? The Evening Announcer had a piece about a picture, ‘Girl Eating Apples’ or something, as Mr. Atts had been mixed up with looking for it, only some other bloke got it first and sold it for ten grand and now worth double or more. It did cross my mind as Atts might have done a bunk with it. If it’s worth a pot of money like that, there’ll be a reward likely, and Atts being an amateur it would be O.K. to turn him in, not as if he were a pal.”

  “There won’t be any reward,” Bobby informed him. “For the very good reason that it’s in the South Bank Art Gallery. I was looking at it this morning. We haven’t heard much about you lately, Monkey, and very glad not to. But we haven’t forgotten you. Recruits are sometimes shown the places you climbed.”

  “Ah, those were the days,” Monkey sighed. He touched his twisted and crippled arm. “If it hadn’t been for this—guv, you don’t know what it’s like, doing a climb other blokes wouldn’t ever even think of trying. Standing on a window-sill a hundred feet up, it’s like another world.”

  “You ought to have been a mountaineer,” Bobby said, not without sympathy for this professional pride. “Climbing places like Everest.”

  “You want to be born privileged for that,” replied Monkey. “Education. A bloke like me’s got to think of earning a living, hasn’t he?”

  “I’ve heard you still keep in touch with some of your old pals,” Bobby went on without attempting to deny this truism. “Is it only to talk of old times that they come to see you again? How often is it? Regularly, I think?”

  “Mr. Owen,” Monkey said reproachfully, “that’s a thing I never would have thought of you, keeping observation after all this time and me as innocent as—” He paused, trying to think of a simile sufficiently strong to express his feelings. Then one occurred to him. “Innocent as the untrodden snow,” he concluded.

  “No one’s been keeping observation on you,” Bobby assured him. “But—” He glanced at the still open cupboard with its imposing array of bottles and glasses. “Quite a supply,” he remarked. “Rationed, too. Means kept for special occasions? A shop’s a convenient meeting-place. No inquisitive neighbours to wonder why you have so many visitors. You can always slip into a shop without being noticed. And a good supply of drink does help things along; encourages talk, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Guv’nor,” Monkey protested earnestly. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s our Football Pools Club. Every Thursday. We have a palaver to fix up lists, every man putting up ten bob. I’m secretary and we send the lists in in the name of the Monkey Syndicate. We’ve not had much luck so far, but we work on a plan. It’s bound to come.”

  “Is that all you meet for?” Bobby asked, and for the first time Monkey showed signs of anger under this questioning.

  “What are you getting at?” he almost shouted, banging his fist on the table. “How should I know what the boys talk about when me and the missus have gone to bed—having to be up early so as to open prompt,” he added, as if feeling that getting up early was a circumstance demanding explanation.

  “Of course,” Bobby agreed. “Business demands regular habits. But somehow the idea has got around that you know a lot of what’s going on? A go-between, so to say, the chap who collects the information, knows things, introduces the man with hot stuff to get rid of to the fence making the best offer.”

  “Calling me a fixer, aren’t you?” Monkey snarled. “I remember when I would have pushed in the face of any man who called me that. On the shelf now.”

  “All the more dangerous for that,” Bobby said, and Monkey brightened up as if he took this for a compliment.

  “There’s no glamour in it,” he confessed sadly, in the manner of the old actor barred from the stage by age or illness and who now can do no more than advise and instruct. “There was a time when if I went most anywhere in Soho the boys would turn and stare and whisper to each other. Now I’m just a card index. It’s a come down,” and again he touched his crippled arm in an oddly pathetic gesture of excuse.

  “Keep one?” Bobby asked. “Card i
ndex, I mean?”

  “In my head,” Monkey explained, tapping it. “No one as oughtn’t to can get hold of it there,” and a little nod towards Bobby indicated clearly what and who was meant.

  “So it is,” agreed Bobby, “so long as it stays there. Well, can you remember if a youngster called Jerry Jasmine ever came to any of these Football Pool parties of yours?” And to this he added a brief verbal description of the boy he had seen at the South Bank Gallery.

  But Monkey shook his head.

  “No one like that,” he declared. “Not that I know of. Jerry Jasmine, you said? No one I’ve ever heard of. What’s he wanted for?” Then he remembered. “Jerry Jasmine?” he repeated. “J.J.? Same as on that picture? Is it him did it? Been after him all the time, haven’t you?”

  “I’m not after him at any time,” Bobby retorted. “No reason why I should be. But I would like to know who he gave that picture to. And why.”

  “To get rid of it most likely,” suggested Monkey. “Don’t wonder either. When the bloke that got it showed it round most of ’em just laughed if they didn’t throw up and that goes for experts, too, same as them at the shop in the High Street where they’ll fix you a frame a treat if you want one. Dirt cheap, too.”

  “Could you give me his name and address?”

  “Now, let me see,” Monkey said, apparently trying his best to remember. “Billy, was it? Yes, Billy Brown. Sailor. Talked as if he came from Glasgow. I shouldn’t wonder if he isn’t at sea now. You never know with sailors.”

  “No, you don’t, do you?” agreed Bobby, quite well aware that if Monkey knew he had no intention of telling. “Do you think he peddled drugs?”

  CHAPTER IX

  PRIVATE PICTURE GALLERY

  IT WAS A question that evidently both surprised and startled Monkey. Bobby waited. Monkey said, rather sullenly, choosing his words with care:

  “How should I know what the boys talk about when me and the missus go to bed and they go on talking?”

  “Do you do that?” Bobby asked, interested. “Aren’t you afraid of finding the till missing next morning and most of the stock gone?”

  “We take the till to bed with us,” Monkey explained, “and soon as they’ve gone I come down to lock the door and see all’s O.K., and I never hear a word of what they’ve been saying nor want to either.”

  “Very sensible,” Bobby said. “I see you take your precautions.” He got to his feet. He never pressed a reluctant witness. Better by far to let him mull things over in his mind. That nearly always brought results. The witness of truth might remember more. The other kind of witness was apt to try to add convincing detail and so entangle himself in a net of lies of his own weaving. Or occasionally he would panic and decide to make a clean breast of all he knew. Now Bobby picked up the picture carefully wrapped in the brown paper and string Mrs. Baron had provided. “I’ll be going,” he said. He turned towards the door. Then he added over his shoulder to the sullen, silent, watchful Monkey: “I don’t like drug peddlers. Do you?”

  “What’s the harm?” Monkey growled. “If a bloke wants a pinch of forgetting, why shouldn’t he have it? Free country, isn’t it?”

  “Perfect freedom to go to the devil your own way,” Bobby agreed. “All I’m saying is that I don’t like drug peddlers—especially those who sell the stuff to youngsters.” He was watching Monkey closely. He could see no reaction. “I don’t like murder either,” he added.

  “Murder?” Monkey repeated. “This Atts business? No one likes murder. It makes too much fuss all round and busies everywhere. I’ve heard talk. It didn’t amount to anything and what’s a picture of apples being eaten got to do with it if it’s locked up in a museum place where no one ever sees it?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Bobby said. “If you hear anything more let us know, will you? The sooner it’s cleared up, the sooner ‘busies’ will stop being busy. After all, when people disappear, sometimes murder is the explanation.”

  Without waiting for any answer he departed, his parcel under his arm and a cheery word of farewell to the uneasy, waiting Mrs. Baron behind the counter.

  It was late now, so Bobby went home, fully expecting to be greeted by his wife with the mournful announcement that dinner was absolutely ruined and now hardly worth eating. So to get in first and divert attention he displayed immediately his new acquisition, and Olive’s lamentation died on her lips.

  “What is it?” she asked in an awed voice.

  “Work of art,” said Bobby.

  “Do you mind covering it up?” Olive entreated earnestly.

  “Not at all,” said Bobby and did so; and dinner proceeded peacefully, though Olive remained unusually silent, except for now and then a pregnant reference to the recent rise in the cost of living.

  Next morning, as soon as Bobby could get away from the desk work waiting for him at the Yard, he picked up the old suit-case, in which before leaving home he had placed the ‘Everlasting Bonfire’ picture, provided himself with three or four photographs of Mr. Atts—there were plenty to be had—and once more set out for the South Bank Gallery. For there he believed, without quite knowing why, lay somehow, somewhere, the key to, the explanation of, whatever it was that had caused Atts to disappear so strangely. There he found Sir Walter in his office, busy with preparations for an exhibition of ‘The British Tradition in Painting’ he proposed to hold at the South Bank Gallery and that he hoped would knock spots off the exhibition already planned at the Tate of ‘The Surrealists of Tomorrow’.

  “Anything fresh about Atts?” Sir Walter greeted Bobby, looking up from his work.

  “Nothing much,” Bobby said, as he accepted a cigarette from that lovely Georgian silver box he had seen before, and at this announcement Sir Walter, showing no visible sign of disappointment, remarked that no doubt Atts would turn up in his own good time.

  “Miss him on television, I suppose,” Sir Walter commented sourly. “The home from home of every exhibitionist. You know. Gives a kind of spurious immortality. You know. Are you still taking this Atts business seriously?”

  “I am afraid we’ve got to,” Bobby answered. “I’ve had a talk with Mrs. Atts. Apparently Mr. Atts took nothing with him. No money, no passport, nothing, except the clothes he stood up in. He is known to have visited the Tate that morning. He had an appointment there with Lord Derrytoms. He told Lord Derrytoms he was coming on here, and he was seen walking off in this direction. That’s the last trace we can find of him. Somewhere between the two Galleries he seems to have vanished. Can you suggest any possible reason for his intended visit? Could it have any connection with the lecture he was going to deliver and didn’t?”

  “None that I know of,” Sir Walter declared. “None that I can imagine. I’ve told you my own idea—that he had found out he was about to make a bloomer of the first dimension, so he thought he had better go into hiding till it had all blown over. Personally I’m bored with the whole thing.”

  “The papers don’t seem to be,” Bobby said. “Every reporter in London hot on the scent. Unlimited time and expense no object. And we can’t afford either—or being bored for that matter. We have to be sure nothing’s happened to him. Our job.” Sir Walter grunted to indicate he didn’t think much of a job like that. Bobby produced his photographs. “I wanted,” he explained, “to ask you if you would help us by circulating these to your staff for identification. If any of them can remember seeing Mr. Atts, here or near on the day he disappeared, it might be a great help.”

  “Certainly,” agreed Sir Walter. “I expect most of them would know him from seeing him on television. Unless they instinctively switch off the moment a word is said about art. Fed up with art, most of them. You know. Except Hyams. Remarkable chap. I go in terror of losing him.”

  “Is that likely?” Bobby asked.

  “I hope not. I don’t believe he would ever leave his pictures as he calls them, if he could help it. He tells me he has collected reproductions of nearly all our best things. Sort of
private picture gallery of his own. You know. Brings his neighbours in sometimes to see them and then advises them to come on here to see the originals. I don’t expect they ever do. He won a very substantial prize in one of the football pools a year or two back so he is quite independent. I know he runs a much better car than I can afford. Turns up in it every morning and nearly killed himself only the other day driving up from somewhere Greenwich way.”

  “That reminds me,” Bobby said. “Speaking of copies, I mean. I noticed a young chap here the other day, copying a Teniers. Really caught the spirit of the original, I thought.” From the suit-case he had brought with him, Bobby produced his ‘Everlasting Bonfire’ picture. “I wonder if you would mind telling me what you think of this?”

  Sir Walter gave it a quick glance and did not seem much impressed.

  “We don’t go in for that sort of thing here,” he said. “Show it to the Tate people. They might hail it as a new masterpiece. I don’t think they would. Those eyes on top of each other and the dabs of colour probably made by flicking a brush at the thing, hit or miss, are all in the best modern style. But look at those two little nudes. Representative. And the primroses. Talk about the grapes birds would peck at. Why, you could almost want to gather a bunch of those primroses yourself. Where did you get it?”