“Yes – and, although it wasn’t very informative, it seemed to support the rural Venus theory. It was a hotel in Bloomsbury. One of those largish unassuming places one’s never been in. Full, I imagine, of bed-and-breakfasting families from Wigan and Glasgow.”
“That doesn’t seem quite to fit, after all.”
“No more it did fit, as you’ll presently hear. I said I was worried, didn’t I? Well, the worrying began almost straight away. There was surely something odd about a girl drifting round with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of art under her arm – to say nothing of its being an infernally good picture. I tried to think what such a state of affairs could all be about. I imagined some condition of pretty severe poverty.”
“Did the girl’s clothes suggest that?”
“Well, no – I can’t say they did. But these things are relative, after all. I imagined the father – a retired colonial governor, you know – dead, and mummy and the girl living with some terribly gaga and unreasonable old grandfather. And the ponies having to be sold and the spaniels going mangy and the drawing-room chintzes in tatters and the gardener crippled with rheumatism and the garden boy demanding a man’s wage and–”
Appleby mildly interrupted.
“I think I have the idea, my dear fellow.”
“And mother and daughter putting their heads together and remembering this old picture – and perhaps remembering, too, something some knowledgeable guest may have said about it – and then the girl’s saying that she’ll jolly well find out. Something of that sort, eh? Her expedition not really an authorized one, but at the same time entirely innocent. The conjecture I built up was roughly like that.”
“It’s most convincing. You know, Gulliver, it occurs to me that you ought to have been a novelist.”
“Do you really think so?” Gulliver seemed pleased.
“As a matter of fact, I have sometimes thought that, at a pinch, my imagination could contrive pretty well.”
“Or a detective.” Appleby glanced curiously at his eminent friend. “You would make a detective, without a doubt.”
“Wait, my boy, wait! There’s real sleuthing to come. I visited that hotel.”
Appleby stared.
“Now you do surprise me. Very much.”
“I surprised myself. But the incident had gone on bothering me, and I felt I ought not simply to let it drop. Of course it was, in a sense, no longer any business of mine. We’d done what we hold ourselves out as offering to do, and if I chased up that Rembrandt I might fairly be called a busybody. But it was undoubtedly an important picture.”
“And worth all that money. For my own part” – and Appleby glanced at Gulliver in what might have been whimsical apology – “I think I’d have felt the simple vulgar fascination of that.”
“Quite so, quite so. It was very much in my mind that the girl mightn’t have formed an accurate notion of that. I decided I’d feel easier if she – or whoever she was in one way or another acting for – had a written communication from us. Or perhaps I was just curious. Anyway, I went to that hotel yesterday morning. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly dignified. But who cares about that?”
“Who, indeed? And I’m sure you could carry off any mild awkwardness there might be.”
“Very handsome of you to say so, Appleby. Well, I decided I’d ask for the girl, although she would almost certainly be gone. They’d be bound to have her home address. If it turned out that I couldn’t simply ask for it with an adequate appearance of propriety, I could at least get them to forward a letter. But all this was a miscalculation. The hotel had never heard of Astarte Oakes. They looked back through their register for a full fortnight. There was no trace of her.”
Appleby made no attempt to receive this denouement with astonishment.
“And that’s where the matter now stands?” he asked.
“More or less. But I’ve discovered one other thing. If it is a discovery. I have a colleague called Mountford, who has made something of a hobby of graphology. Would you ever have heard of him?”
“Lord, yes! It’s a good deal more than a hobby. He’s a recognized authority on handwriting. I’ve heard him give expert evidence in court.”
“Well, this morning it occurred to me to show Mountford our visitors’ book. He took one look at ‘Astarte Oakes’ and declared it wasn’t the writer’s real name. He was quite persuasive about it. He said it had been written by somebody who had suddenly been required to do something unexpected, and that the writing betrayed the writer as making up the name as she wrote. What do you think of that?”
“I’ve very little doubt that Mountford’s right. To his sort of eye, any true signature has a character that will be missing from any other written name. Your Astarte Oakes made up Astarte Oakes on the spot. By the way, wasn’t it the opinion of some that Astarte and Aphrodite were the same divinity? I think your lass has a very good notion of the impression she makes.” Appleby paused. “And – again by the way – doesn’t your young Jimmy Heffer rather fade out of the story? I’d have expected you to make him do the chasing round.”
“Jimmy? He went on holiday the day after the girl called on us. He had about ten days saved up.”
“I see. And he’d given you whatever sort of notice you expect about holidays?”
“Well, no. There was just a scribble from him in the morning. I keep everything of that sort very casual, you know. We’re a small group of intimate colleagues, and even with the quite junior people it seems the right note to maintain. So it wasn’t entirely out of the way. Still, I confess that I was just a little surprised. Particularly as Jimmy said nothing about where he was going off to. He’s usually a very friendly, as well as an impeccably civil, lad.”
“Well, well.” Again Appleby paused. “Isn’t what you’re really confessing something rather different? To be quite honest, Gulliver, haven’t you got it in your head that your young man has gone off after the false Astarte – and may in consequence be getting himself into mischief?”
“It seems very absurd, I know.” Sir Gabriel Gulliver seemed almost embarrassed at owning to the trend of his thoughts. “But there it is. You’ve hit the nail on the head. And I can’t even decide whether I suppose Jimmy to be after the girl or after the picture.”
“Might it be both? Heffer seems to be a connoisseur. And here are two articles which, if you’re to be believed, are both quite first-class in their line.”
“It might be both, no doubt. Jimmy might feel that the girl and her picture go together. But, whether that’s the way of it or not, I do feel that the whole matter ought to be – well, investigated.”
Appleby looked rather grimly at his companion.
“I’m surprised,” he said dryly, “that you don’t appeal to the police.”
“I don’t know that I could do that. Not, that is to say, officially, my dear chap. After all, one hasn’t any suspicion of a crime. Or has one?”
Appleby shook his head. He had quite ceased to respond to Gulliver with any appearance of pleasantry. Moreover he now took out his watch and glanced at it.
“It’s my unfortunate business,” he said, “always to be suspecting crimes. Or it was until I became rather a busy administrator. You’re not seriously proposing, are you, that I should myself go chasing after these people, or that picture?”
Gulliver rose to his feet.
“No, no,” he said urbanely. “I know you have your hands full of weightier matters. But I have an obscure feeling, as I’ve tried to hint, that this matter is delicate. And interesting. Even, conceivably, odd. In short, my dear Appleby, very much what used to be your sort of thing. A long time ago, of course.”
“Quite so,” Appleby said dryly. “When I was at the height, you might have added, of such modest but useful powers as I possessed.”
Gulliver laughed easily.
“Come, come,” he said. “I don’t think I’d care to cross swords with you, my dear man, even in your present self-declared decrepitude. As for my Rembrandt and so on – just give it a thought or two. No more than that.” Gulliver moved to the door. “Dining?”
Appleby shook his head.
“I’m going home. We’ve guests, I think.”
“Then, good evening to you.” Gulliver paused at the door. “By the way, you’d like it – that Rembrandt, I mean – if you ever – um – ran it to earth. It’s terrific. My love to Judith, please.”
4
It was an axiom of Appleby’s that nobody can possibly live through a London day without being badly in need of a bath before dinner, and he remained unimpressed before his wife’s contention that this was merely a genteel superstition, to which 98 per cent of the metropolitan population rose superior every evening. It wasn’t, Appleby would explain, just a matter of the physical dirt with which the place systematically encrusted one. Such intellectual pores as an ageing drudge still possessed had to be unclogged too. He got into his bath with a dozen of the day’s issues continuing to scurry round in his head. When he got out of it they had either all departed for ever, or they had all so departed except one, which thus stood revealed as really meriting a little further thinking about. Not that it continued to make that claim there and then, for as the bath water drained away it regularly vanished too. But it had, somehow, made its mark, and occasionally it consented to painless elucidation during the slumbers of the succeeding night.
And there was no guessing beforehand which of many matters might thus survive ablution. In the course of this very day, for instance, he had read several reports on issues of serious moment. It was hard not to feel at the end of them that London, as a civilized city, pretty well had its back to the wall. In face of them, certainly, Sir Gabriel Gulliver’s yarn ought to have faded at a first grab at the soap. Yet here it was, spotlit in Appleby’s mind, and the whole of the rest of a busy day blotted out.
“Judith,” Appleby called, “I’ve got a message for you.”
Lady Appleby appeared at the bathroom door. She had the abstracted and slightly forbidding air natural in a much-occupied professional woman and housewife who must, within the next fifteen minutes, transform herself into a leisured hostess in the Edwardian mode.
“A message, John? Is it something you ought to have remembered as soon as you got in?”
“Oh, no – nothing like that. Just that old Gulliver sends you his love.”
Judith, who had been distracted from a crucial operation before a looking-glass, made a resigned noise and turned back into her bedroom.
“Nice of him,” she called back. “Old habit, of course. Gabriel Gulliver has been sending his love to women for half a century – and drawing lucky from time to time.”
Appleby lay back in water that was agonizingly hot. In the early hours of that morning an eighteen-year-old Stepney lad, having unfortunately been rather heavily shod when feeling entitled to the contents of an elderly shopkeeper’s till, had taken a first and certain step in the direction of the gallows. Appleby always made the water hotter, somehow, when anything of that kind had occurred.
“Dear me!” he said. “I think of Gulliver as a respectable old connection and family friend. Your uncles were devoted to him. Are you suggesting he has been a person of irregular life?”
Judith gave a shout of laughter. It was delighted laughter, because in the looking-glass things were coming right.
“John, dear, your way of expressing yourself is getting nearer and nearer to that of a High Court judge. Gabriel Gulliver has been a restless and unsatisfied person all his days. And he was tiresome with women.”
“Well, well. Perhaps he’s being tiresome about you. He says you don’t call in on him in his blessed gallery. You don’t mean to say he’s been making improper advances to you?”
“It would be inconceivable, wouldn’t it?” Judith appeared in the bathroom door again, carrying a necklace. “Fasten this, will you? I must go down and see that everything isn’t chaos. Was old Gabriel entertaining?”
“He had an extraordinary yarn about an unknown Rembrandt which is being carried around by a girl calling herself Astarte Oakes.”
“Good. You can tell it at dinner. It sounds just right for the Bendixsons.”
“It’s more or less confidential, I’m afraid. I’ll tell you about it afterwards. Who else is coming, besides the Bendixsons?”
But Judith, having got her necklace to rights, had vanished. Appleby went into his dressing-room. He was rummaging for a shirt when the telephone rang. It was the routine report he always received at this hour. For two or three minutes he listened to the precise voice from the other end, only now and then interrupting with a brief direction. Finally he asked a question.
“And that Stepney affair? There’s no doubt that the lad took the money?”
“None at all, sir, I’m afraid.” The voice would have been slightly impatient if it hadn’t been perfectly correct.
“I had my mind on the lodger upstairs – the old man with the petty criminal record. It seemed to me just possible that, immediately after the killing, he might have taken advantage of the confusion to help himself from the till.”
“Yes, sir. The possibility has been very fully investigated.”
“If that were the way of it, then the lad’s motive might not have been robbery at all. The old woman might have refused him credit.”
“It would remain a poor reason for kicking someone to death, sir.”
“I don’t need to be told that, Parsons.” Appleby snapped this out in a tone he didn’t often use. “We have to consider the interest of the accused man, you know, in the existing state of the law.”
“Yes, sir. But we found nearly six pounds on him. And, only a couple of hours before, he’d struck his mother because she wouldn’t let him have half-a-crown. He’s a very violent lad – and perhaps a bit crazy. The defence will be more interested in diminished responsibility than in that old man upstairs.”
“Very well, Parsons.” Appleby’s voice was briskly approving again. “Anything else?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Another probable homicide – in Bloomsbury this time. Fellow calling himself an antiquarian bookseller. Would you like particulars now?”
Appleby glanced at his watch.
“No. But send me up a note about it tomorrow. And thank you, Parsons. Good night.”
Appleby put down the receiver and reached for a black tie. People who got themselves murdered, whether in Stepney or Bloomsbury, were no longer any very direct concern of his. If a corpse ever came his way now, it was only after having passed, so to speak, through a beautiful electric typewriter and then having been analysed under half a dozen intelligently chosen headings. It had been better fun when he had dealt with them in the raw. And sometimes they had been very much that.
When Appleby opened the drawing-room door he saw that someone had already arrived. So he entered with an air of cheerful apology which he maintained while Judith introduced him to Mary Wildsmith. He was sure he had never seen her before, and almost sure he had never heard of her. She was old rather than young, and small rather than large – and at a first glance one would probably have ventured that there was nothing more to be said about her. For her face couldn’t be held to possess features, nor her voice character – so that all in all she seemed to Appleby, as he poured her sherry, to be pretty well the essence of the unmemorable. This made it the more annoying that Judith had presented him to this stranger with a total lack of explanations coupled with the largest suggestion that it was a moment in which one of her husband’s longest cherished ambitions was being realized.
“It’s frightfully good of you,” Appleby said, “to find time to come to dinner with us. You must be tremendously busy and tremendously in
demand.”
Miss Wildsmith – for she seemed to be that – was amused. And it was in a fashion, somehow, that told Appleby at once that she was a clever woman. Moreover as her amusement took the form of a momentary and entirely deliberate transformation of her neutral expression into one of extraordinary mobility and charm, he realised that at least he had got hold of her profession. And at once Judith, who had tumbled to his blankness before Miss Wildsmith’s name, confirmed this.
“Mary’s last enchanting part,” she said, “was as the Hungarian refugee in Thunder Without Rain.”
Appleby registered appropriate enlightenment.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Everybody talked of it. I was extremely sorry not to see it.”
“But your wife says you did see it.” Mary Wildsmith again looked amused. But this time she looked, so to speak, like a different person being amused. She was a character actress, one must suppose, who enjoyed moving freely around.
Appleby nodded easily. If Judith said he had seen Thunder Without Rain then, no doubt, he had seen it. But it appeared to him absurd to expect any rational being to remember one West End play from another.
“Only the first act,” he said firmly. “Most unfortunately, I was called out of the theatre. So the last time I really had the pleasure of seeing you” – a genuine flash of memory about Mary Wildsmith had seemed to come to him amid all this nonsense – “was as the Countess of Rousillon in All’s Well. It must have been at the Old Vic.”
“We’re a theatrical family,” Miss Wildsmith said. “And that was my aunt.” She held out her empty glass. “But your sherry, Sir John, makes up for a great deal.”
It was at this moment – and rather to Appleby’s relief – that the Bendixsons arrived. He did at least know Carl Bendixson and his wife Gretta, and they were entirely estimable people. Bendixson was an auctioneer – but an auctioneer of the exalted sort who banged his hammer over the heads of Maillol bronzes and Renoir nudes. His wife was a painter of dazzling technique and – as far as Appleby knew – very little else. The Bendixsons lived in a much grander way than the Applebys did. Hammer-banging, after all, had been booming for years. But Judith was ahead of Gretta Bendixson as an artist favoured by the well-informed. And that no doubt evened things up. As Appleby handed the Bendixsons the sherry of which Mary Wildsmith approved, he was quite clear in his mind that they wouldn’t approve of it. Or not, that was to say, as an offering that could appropriately be commented on. But they were a reasonable couple, all the same.
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