“What is all this leading up to?” demanded Sir Walter.
“I am suggesting,” Bobby said slowly, “that the dates make it so improbable that mahogany was used by Rembrandt in 1625 or so that the idea may be ruled out. During the next half-century, covering Rembrandt’s lifetime, it is in Amsterdam. Mahogany is still hardly known and it would be against all reason to suppose that a copy of this not much regarded picture was made on this almost unknown wood or the copy included in a marriage settlement. During the century of its stay in the Chateau D’If, one can hardly imagine why its owner should want it copied. Nor certainly while it was in the possession of a local peasant. But the picture hanging in these galleries is in fact painted on a mahogany panel. Therefore of two things, one. Either it was not painted by Rembrandt or else it is a copy of one now lost. How or when there is nothing to show at present.”
Sir Walter got slowly and laboriously to his feet. He was trembling slightly and he seemed to feel a need to support himself by resting his hands on the desk at which he had been sitting. He said slowly:
“This is all too absurd. There must be some explanation. The picture here is the one I found in France. That is absolutely certain. That picture was not a copy. That again is certain. It is not thinkable.”
“Could a copy have been made while it was in America and the copy sent you instead of the original?”
Sir Walter straightened himself. He was staring hard at Bobby but not as if he saw him. His eyes were at the same time strangely piercing, strangely vacant. He lifted one hand and pointed it straight at Bobby. He spoke in a loud voice:
“Do you think I should not have known?” he cried. “Do you think I could not have told? I knew every brush stroke as a mother knows her own child! It is not possible that the panel should be mahogany. Therefore it is not. Therefore you are wrong. Come and see.”
CHAPTER XVIII
PROOF POSITIVE
AS FAST AS his rather short, not very well-shaped legs could carry him, Sir Walter sped, almost ran, to Room Thirteen, at the moment empty, even the attendant being absent for one reason or another.
Bobby followed at a slower pace, undesirous of attracting too much attention. One man on the run was, he felt, enough. In Room Thirteen he found Sir Walter had taken the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ from its place on the wall and now was standing staring at it as if he saw nothing else. But he was aware of Bobby’s arrival, for to him he said:
“If the panel’s mahogany, then mahogany is what Rembrandt used.” When Bobby made no reply Sir Walter transferred to him that direct and angry and frightened gaze. “That’s all,” he said.
“There is the actual painting, too,” Bobby said. “You said you knew every brush stroke. Are they Rembrandt? When I saw the picture the other day I seemed to miss something. There seemed to be a change. I thought then the change was in me. Now I think it is in the picture.”
“He always said he would ruin me,” Sir Walter said in a low voice, speaking clearly to himself, oblivious of Bobby’s presence.
He turned, still holding the painting, and hurried off back the way he had come. Almost at the same moment the attendant returned, coming from the opposite direction. He saw the vacant space on the wall, he saw Bobby standing near, he rushed forward, panic-stricken, shouting—and in these usually quiet, decorous rooms where a gentle, not to say a sleepy, hush generally prevailed, his shouting sounded like the hooting of a siren.
“The curator has removed it for further examination,” Bobby told him.
The attendant looked at him, hesitated, and then dashed back to the entrance by which he had returned and there bellowed for help. Two or three attendants came running. The first attendant pointed wildly to Bobby.
“He’s got it, he’s taken it,” he shouted. “He says it’s the Guv, but it’s him.”
“No, it’s the curator,” Bobby said, sitting down, thus frustrating the concerted rush the attendants were plainly planning. “You had better close the galleries. Tell any visitors there’s danger of fire and to wait near the entrance till it’s over.”
There was a general hesitation, a general tendency to close not the Gallery but around Bobby, though he still remained placidly seated. Evidently they all suspected that he had the missing picture concealed somewhere about his person. A girl came running. She was in fact Sir Walter’s secretary. She called out:
“He’s in his room. He’s locked the door. What’s happened? It’s that man,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at Bobby.
“It’s that painting,” Bobby corrected her.
Another girl ran into the room, followed by a scattering of visitors, all wondering what was happening to cause so much commotion. The second girl gasped out:
“He says to shut up. He says he’ll sack everyone in the place. He’s gone mad.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Bobby said. “He has only removed a painting for fresh examination and doesn’t want to be bothered just now. There’s no need for you all to get so excited. You had better, the whole lot of you, go back to your places. He is fully capable just now of doing what he said. You’ve made fuss enough. Look at all those people wondering what on earth’s happening. Tell them it’s a false alarm and get back to your posts.”
The calm authority with which Bobby spoke had its effect. One of the men asked him who he was. Bobby replied that that didn’t matter. If they wanted to know they could ask Sir Walter, but that he did not advise.
Gradually they began to accept his advice, drift away, though with many a backward glance of suspicion and of doubt. Bobby departed with them, explaining that as it was getting time for lunch he would have his in their excellent restaurant and could be found there for the next hour or so if the curator emerged from his retreat, or if any message arrived for ‘Mr. Bobby’—he had taken recently to using his first name when he did not specially wish to be identified as the Mr. Owen whose name had been associated with one or two widely publicised cases.
In the restaurant he enjoyed an excellent meal, uninterrupted by any message. Apparently Sir Walter had not yet re-appeared. Bobby feared this meant Sir Walter had lost his appetite, and his own having been satisfied he returned to his room at the Yard. However, his stay was short, for there seemed to be nothing requiring his personal attention at the moment and he was soon on his way to Camden Town with the intention of paying Jasmine a visit in the hope of obtaining from him some more information.
The address he had was that of one of those big old houses, relics of the days when domestic help was cheap and plentiful, but all now converted to other uses. This one where Jasmine lived was one of those whose fate had been division into flats. A card in a metal frame at the door announced that Mr. J. Jasmine was to be found on the top floor and invited visitors to ‘walk up’.
The top floor, known in earlier days as ‘the attics’, was shared between three tenants, Mr. Jasmine and two others. On one door the name Jasmine was painted in a wreath of that shrub with its salver-like flowers in full bloom, all most beautifully executed. Bobby paused for a moment to admire this ebullition of the artistic urge and then knocked but got no reply. He knocked again, and when there was still no reply he knocked in turn at the two other doors. No reply from them either, the tenants there being presumably also out. He decided to leave a note asking Jasmine to call at the Yard, but when, having written it, he tried to push it under the door, the slight pressure thus exercised made it swing slowly open. Apparently the bolt of the lock had been shot but so carelessly that it had not caught and the door had remained closed but susceptible to a push.
Now the door had swung wide open, and after a moment’s hesitation Bobby entered. It was a squalid, comfortless apartment, sloping at one end to a height not greater than three feet, ventilation and light coming only from a skylight in the roof. The floor looked as if it had not been swept for weeks; clothing, towels, rags, hung together in friendly huddle on a row of pegs; shelves held anything that could be pushed there out of the way. In one corn
er were some empty bottles—milk or beer. In another corner stood a number of canvasses. The furniture consisted of two or three chairs in various stages of decay and decrepitude, a trestle bed, and in the centre of the room a three-legged table, the additional support it needed being provided by an upturned packing-case. It was loaded with another miscellany of objects, from dirty teacups to the small, smooth, flat pieces of mahogany Groan had mentioned. Looking at them more closely, Bobby saw lying by them, half hidden, an empty torn envelope. He saw it was addressed to Mr. Philip Shirley, at his place of business, and it did not seem to have passed through the post. Presumably the letter it had been intended to hold had never been sent, though possibly another envelope had been used and this one simply discarded.
In any case it did seem to Bobby that here was at least a suggestion of a possible link between Jasmine and Philip Shirley. Hitherto Bobby had been careful to touch nothing in the room, though more by force of instinct and training than for any special reason. But this old envelope he picked up and presently pocketed. Strictly speaking, of course, he had no business to do anything of the sort, and in such matters he had become, with higher rank and greater responsibility, something of a pedant—though on occasion he could still break rules happily enough.
Then he crossed the room to the corner where the canvasses stood. The first one he looked at was a copy of the younger Teniers’s ‘Shepherds’, a companion picture to the equally well-known ‘Milkmaids’ he remembered seeing Jasmine copying at the S.B.G. At least, he supposed this ‘Shepherds’ was a copy. Yet the more he looked at it, the more doubt grew in his mind. At any rate, for this picture, canvas had been used, not wood, whether mahogany or other, so that for it no such easy and certain test existed as there had been for the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’.
A quick glance at the other paintings showed them to be all indubitably Jasmine’s own work: often incomplete; occasionally, only just begun; sometimes in traditional representational style with a meticulous, almost photographic accuracy, but often again showing signs of that clear depth of vision which can penetrate to the hidden reality informing all matter, and then again in that new abstract, geometrical manner, a mingling of blobs of colour with apparently unrelated circles, lines, squares, into which the artist seems to retire as into a private world of his own where communication can only be established with those like-minded with himself. Bobby found himself wondering to which impulse would Jasmine’s talent—or was it genius?—ultimately respond? Not to both, he felt, for in the end one or the other must certainly prevail. But that was a problem, not for him but for time to solve.
The question to be dealt with at the present was what was to be made of such apparent proof of a close connection existing between Jasmine and Shirley? Impossible, without knowing more, to assess the importance or significance of this new development, but that it was both important and significant Bobby had no doubt.
He had no more time to spare to wait for a return that might not be till late that night. He replaced the canvasses as he had found them and then with the aid of his penknife attended to the lock, forcing back the tongue into place, and then closing the door and shooting the tongue again so that this time it caught and would respond at once to the key.
He was still busy completing this task, which indeed presented no great difficulty to anyone who, like Bobby, had made himself familiar with locks, when the sound of steps made him turn. A woman who had just ascended the stairs was there looking at him with marked suspicion. She turned, and to someone on the floor below she called:
“There’s another bloke here, mucking about with Mr. Jasmine’s door.”
“Is it the same, him with the lame arm?” came the shouted response, and there followed the sound of heavy footsteps running up the stairs.
CHAPTER XIX
THE MONTGOMERIES
BEFORE BOBBY COULD say anything, a man appeared at the head of the stairs. He was a rugged-looking individual, of middle height, strongly built, and with the somewhat flattened nose and the ‘cauliflower’ ears that are often the trade-mark of the old professional boxer. He, too, looked with an equal dark suspicion at Bobby, standing by Jasmine’s door. To him Bobby said:
“Do you live here? Do you know Mr. Jasmine? Or when he is likely to be back?”
“Mucking about with Mr. Jasmine’s door, he was,” the woman said. “After no good.”
“What do you want to know for?” demanded her companion. “Mr. Jasmine said to chuck the other bloke down the stairs if he came messing round any more.”
“Well, I hope you won’t do that to me,” Bobby said mildly. “Are you in the habit of chucking people downstairs?”
“My job,” retorted the other, and looked as if it were one he was fully capable of undertaking. “Better hop it, chum, before I start in.”
“Don’t talk like a fool,” Bobby snapped. “This somebody else you say was here before me—was he—?” And Bobby gave a short description of Monkey Baron of whom he had at once thought on hearing the reference to ‘lame’ arm.
“That’s him,” the other agreed. “Pal of yourn?”
“No,” Bobby answered, with a grim sort of smile as he remembered one or two of his earlier encounters with Monkey Baron. “But I think I know who you mean. When was this? To-day?”
“No, yesterday, about this time, wasn’t it, Liz?”
The woman nodded agreement and Bobby went on:
“You live here, do you?”
“That’s right,” the other answered, his manner growing less truculent as unconsciously he began to respond to Bobby’s equally unconscious manner of authority.
“Mr. Jasmine seems to be out,” Bobby said. “I can’t get any answer. Can you give me any idea when he is likely to be back?”
This time the woman answered the question.
“He may be in there all the time,” she said. “He don’t always answer when he’s at his painting. Proper fierce, too, if you go on knocking till he comes. Language such as never was, and you don’t know what it means, only something bad.”
“Bit of a scrap out here last week,” the man chimed in. “Two or three of ’em mixing it proper.”
“Them Vigors, that was,” interposed the woman; and by way of enlightenment, the man jerked a thumb at the third door on this attic landing. “Not respectable, they ain’t,” she went on, “and special not her, and her married an’ all.”
“Mr. Jasmine,” the man took up the tale, “wanted to stop it. Tried to interfere. I had to pick him up and put him back in his room. Very nice young gentleman and I wouldn’t like him hurt.”
“Mrs. Vigors getting her nails in like as not, same as she can,” the woman continued the chorus. “Not to mention hair pulling,” and her hand went up to her own hair as if, Bobby thought, past memories had been evoked.
“Not all there, if you ask me,” said the man. “Educated he is,” and whether this was said as an excuse or in explanation seemed doubtful.
“Drawed both our kids,” the woman said. “Almost as good as a photo, only not the same likeness.”
“You couldn’t expect it,” the man pointed out. “Not at sixpence each. You don’t get a snap for that.”
“Indeed, you don’t,” Bobby agreed. “When you see him tell him I was here. Say I had a chat with him the other day when he was making a copy in the South Bank Gallery of Teniers’s ‘Milkmaids’. My name is Owen, but he won’t know it. I don’t know your name, by the way, you didn’t mention it, did you?”
“Montgomery, same as the General’s,” the man answered proudly. “Called me the General, they did, in the old North-shires, though I never got more than only one stripe.”
“Well, sometimes generals get called corporals,” Bobby consoled him, “so that evens things up. Work near here at a pub, don’t you?”
“The Wild Goose, down the next street,” answered the Field-Marshal’s namesake. Then he began to look puzzled, even suspicious once more. “How do you know?” he demanded. “I never s
aid nothing.”
“Well, Mr. Montgomery,” Bobby explained. “You said your job was chucking out and that means either a night-club or a pub. It was probably near here, whichever it was, or you wouldn’t be back home at this time, so it didn’t seem likely it would be a night-club. Not so many about here, anyhow, and no job for an honest man. So it was a pub.”
“Good at guessing, ain’t you?” the other grumbled.
“My job,” Bobby told him. “Just as chucking out is yours. I must be off now. Good day. Good day, madam,” and with that he departed, and, as he descended the stairs, he heard Montgomery saying:
“What’s he mean? Guessing ain’t no job.”
“Bookie,” came his wife’s sharp retort, “and if you did a little less of that sort of guessing, we might have a place with three rooms, and not so many stairs.”
“Not for untold gold,” declared Mr. Montgomery, “would you get that around here, so you wouldn’t. None such being vacant. Park Lane you’ll be wanting next.”
Bobby, who had paused to do this bit of eavesdropping, heard no more, except for the closing of a door which probably indicated that the pair of them had retreated within their own domain.
Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 13