Silence Observed

by Michael Innes

  “Good morning,” Appleby said. “I don’t think I got your name.”

  “James, sir.”

  “Oh.” Being engaged in looking rapidly round the gloomy shop again, Appleby took this for a naively familiar reply. “James what?”

  The young constable blushed.

  “Just James, sir. Henry James.”

  “I see.” It would have been odder, Appleby thought, if the young man had said “Joseph Conrad” or “Aldous Huxley”. He walked over to the desk across which Trechmann’s body had been sprawled. “Nothing been happening here, I suppose?”

  “Nothing at all, sir.”

  “Have our people taken anything away?”

  “No, sir. Or only the weapon. There were more photographs being taken and inventories being made nearly all through the night. But I understand nothing has been disturbed.”

  “You can’t have got much sleep. Why didn’t you have them send you off duty this morning?”

  “Well, sir, it’s interesting, a case like this. Out of the ordinary, like.”

  “Quite so. Well, lock the door again, and turn on some lights.” Appleby waited till this had been done. “Have you ever seen a stage farce, James? The good, clean English variety, of course.”

  “Well, yes, sir – I think I may say I have.”

  “Plenty of doors and windows, and people tumbling in and out on the dot. It was rather like that here last night, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Very much so, sir. Split second timing. But without a stage manager, so to speak. Just happening like that.” It was evident that Constable James was delighted at being thus engaged in a discussion of the mystery. “And some of the cast too, sir, in a manner of speaking. That odd old woman, for instance. Walking in on a murder, and then walking straight out and going to the pictures. Like a play, that is. Not natural, at all.”

  “You regard Mrs Huffkins’ conduct with suspicion?”

  “Well, no, sir. That’s the funny thing. You do get people behaving more like a play than the people who write plays would ever venture on. And that’s Mrs Huffkins, if you ask me. It’s the young gentleman – Heffer the name was, wasn’t it? – that I’ve been thinking on.”

  “Have you, indeed? Well, go on thinking, James – about Heffer and anything else. And if anything you think might be useful comes into your head, mention it to me at once. And now I’m going to have a look round on my own.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” And Henry James retired to a corner of the shop, sat down, and knitted his brows. He was an ambitious youth, and disposed to take his instructions very seriously.

  There were certainly plenty of doors. Two led from the front shop to the back, and a third from the front shop to a narrow corridor leading to a narrow staircase. From both the back shop and the corridor one could make one’s way through different doors to a small enclosed yard at the back of the building, and from this again there was an exit to a dingy and more or less deserted cul-de-sac, curiously remote in feeling from the bustle of traffic which could be heard beyond it, from which the outer world could be gained through a low broad archway at one end. There was nothing much to be seen here except a row of garbage bins and three or four melancholy urban cats.

  Appleby turned back into the shop and made a cursory examination of the stock. His impression was that Jacob Trechmann had operated only in a middling-large way, but that he had done so on a number of fronts. If you had gone into his establishment and expressed disinterest in the face of Professor von Zinzendorf’s volumes from the first cradles of printing, Mr Trechmann would have been in a position to ask you whether you would care to buy a few drawings by Francesco Cossa or Baldassare Franceschini. If that in turn had elicited no response, he might – had he trusted the look of you – have conducted you to a small strongroom rather notably well-stocked with erotica and curiosa. The constable who had been so laudibly vigilant in the matter of possible pornography in the local newsagent’s would have found an altogether higher class of article here. Appleby edified himself with a quick glance through some of this – he wondered whether Henry James had done the same – and then moved on.

  Presently it was occurring to him that the disorderly manner in which Trechmann’s business was conducted was in fact a matter more of appearance than reality. The random way in which things lay about or piled themselves up was perhaps no more than a trick of the trade. Conceivably it conveyed to innocent collectors the impression that any sort of treasure might be found lurking in the litter, and that the proprietor owned a constitutional carelessness in material matters which in favouring circumstances might be happily exploited by a shrewd purchaser. Certainly the stock and all recent transactions were carefully indexed in a filing cabinet. It had been on one of these cards which was for some reason no longer needed – that recording the Monumenta Germaniae et Italiae typographica – that Trechmann had scribbled his message about working in the British Museum. Now it occurred to Appleby to turn up the name of Manallace. And he found:

  MANALLACE, Geoffrey (English scholar

  and forger, 1853–1922); manuscripts

  purporting to be by George Meredith

  (English novelist and poet, 1828–1909).

  Privately purchased.

  It seemed impeccably respectable. On the bottom of the card there had been added in pencil a date and the note:

  Charles Gribble Esqre. £500.

  Appleby smiled grimly. He wasn’t puzzled by the sum of money recorded. Gribble had been asked to write one cheque for £500 and another for £300. And Gribble had not thought it incumbent upon him to ask why. If Trechmann fiddled his tax returns that was Trechmann’s affair.

  Neither the front nor the back shop yielded any further matter of interest, and Appleby thought he would try upstairs. The upper regions had also been Trechmann’s, and they consisted of room after room – none of them very large – crammed with books. There was an enormous amount of eighteenth-century theology of the controversial order. The calf bindings of these works were probably a good deal harder-wearing than their arguments. And that, of course, was why they were here. As long as there is money to be made in England there will be gentlemen in need of making too. And English gentlemen – even if of the variety apt to establish a private bar and bartender in their wives’ drawing-rooms – must be equipped with ancient-looking libraries. So good calf is never a drug on the market.

  But criminology rather than sociology is my business, Appleby thought – and moved up to the next storey. Here one turned out to be back with the fine arts again. But not so much with Baldassare Franceschini and that crowd as with more modern masters. There was a large body of biographical material here which looked as if it might be a private collection of Trechmann’s own rather than destined for piecemeal sale. Appleby mulled around this for some time, although the stuff was more up Judith’s street than his own. There was a privately printed volume of reminiscences of Sickert, Steer, Tonks, George Moore and their circle that he knew his wife had always wanted to get hold of. There was a similarly privately printed book about Utrillo and his mother. There was a collection of familiar impressions of Gauguin that it would have interested him to sit down and read himself. And so on. But he wasn’t here fossicking for junk. He went up one higher still.

  But here there were only attics. And these, except for some broken furniture and stacks of mouldering periodicals not fit to pulp, were empty and thick with undisturbed dust. So that was that.

  Only it wasn’t quite true that the dust was totally undisturbed. It didn’t hold of the single narrow passage which led from the head of the stairs. Here footprints were discernible. They belonged, almost certainly, to the police who must have raked through the whole place on the previous night. Appleby followed them, all the same. They ended before a blank wall. But up the wall climbed a fixed iron ladder. There was raw plaster where it had been clamped t
o the wall. It hadn’t been in position very long.

  Appleby looked up at the trapdoor before which it ended. The fall of the roof was such that he saw this could scarcely give upon a further enclosed space accommodating a cistern or the like. It must take you out on the leads. And that was sensible enough. There was a very real risk of fire in an old place like this. And if fire broke out when you were high up in the building, it might well be that your best line of retreat would be to get up yet higher and escape by an adjacent building. Anyway – Appleby told himself – always go on till you’re stopped. He put a foot on the lowest rung and went on.

  The trapdoor was bolted from the inside. That was only prudent, if any precautions against burglary were to be taken at all. He pushed back the bolt. It moved very easily. He pushed up the trapdoor. That moved very easily too. And from the narrow ledges upon which its perimeter rested no dust fell. Not uninstructed by all this, Appleby mounted higher and shoved his head into open air. It was raining hard. But that couldn’t be helped.

  He was in a sort of broad lead gutter between sloping roofs. Water gurgled merrily over his shoes in a little river which seemed to run contentedly the whole length of the street. Nowhere were there any attic windows opening inwards upon this long tiled valley. Only here and there were chimney stacks. And at more or less regular intervals – raised a foot above the level of the gutter to avoid flooding – were trapdoors similar to the one through which he had emerged. No doubt they would all be bolted too. If he were really a fugitive from some ghastly conflagration, he would presumably have to cool – and wet – his heels up here until somebody came along and rescued him.

  But, of course, there was a job to do – and for a moment he thought half-heartedly of summoning Constable Henry James to do it. But he himself was already rather wet, and Henry James was presumably still thinking. So he might as well carry on himself. He advanced to the next trapdoor and tried to lift it.

  Of course it wouldn’t budge. As one might expect, it was secured from below. He moved on and tried the next. At least there was nobody who could possibly detect him in this odd procedure. This one was immovable also. He went on and tried a third. And up it came.

  At this he had to pause and take thought. Being the most law-abiding of policemen, he might have paused and taken thought for longer, if only the rain hadn’t now been getting down his neck. There was a perfectly good ladder at his feet – although, unlike the one by which he had ascended, it was of a sloping wooden sort, approximating to a rudimentary staircase. He climbed down, and let the trapdoor close above him.

  He saw at once that this building – three along from Trechmann’s – had in some way been remodelled so far as its interior went. Its roof-line was uniform with those on either side of it – hence his unimpeded progress along the gutter. But he was now standing in a single attic room which was both loftier and larger than any of Trechmann’s. It was quite empty, and it lay in a clear cold light from one big northward-facing window. In one corner a space had been partitioned off. He crossed over to this, and found himself in one of those small indeterminate apartments, dubiously hovering between bathroom and kitchen, and with an unappealing lavatory beyond, which in London entitles a set-up of this sort to describe itself as a self-contained flat. He crossed to the only other door and found that it gave directly upon a staircase leading down to the next floor. There was nothing else up here. This big room and its adjacent chopped-off hutches occupied the whole area of the building.

  The emptiness of the place was almost unnatural. There wasn’t a wisp of straw, a match end, a cigarette butt negligently cast aside by the last removal man who had bundled the last tenant’s last possessions out of the place. There was nothing at all. Or there was only a smell.

  And at least there was no mystery about that. Appleby had sufficiently moved about in his wife’s world to recognize it instantly. A painter had, comparatively recently, occupied this studio flat.

  But if this was no very startling detective deduction, neither was it, in all probability, a fact of the slightest relevance for Appleby’s present enquiries. The amount of cubic space devoted in London to the lower reaches of artistic endeavour is – he was accustomed to say – one of the most depressing statistical facts that the metropolis afforded. And artists, moreover, are an impermanent and drifting community – perpetually deciding that this or that place is no good, and moving on to another. In London the number of studios of this kind that were vacated daily must be quite considerable. And he was himself in this one now only as a consequence of detective investigation that had degenerated into idle curiosity.

  All the same, he decided not to go back as he had come. So he took one more barren prowl round this swept and voided space. And then he opened the door and walked downstairs.

  But he hadn’t gone down half-a-dozen steps before he halted in perplexity. He had seen something significant. Or rather he had seen something that remotely stirred a memory, but which he couldn’t now place for the life of him. He climbed up again – and then realized that, as he had drawn the door of the studio to behind him, he could enter it again only by the roof as before. This was tiresome. And he was about to turn away when he became aware that, to fulfil his present object, he didn’t have to re-enter the studio at all. For what had pricked at his memory was something stuck in the outside of the door. And it was nothing more than a drawing pin.

  He levered it out, examined it closely, and stowed it away in a matchbox. Then he looked carefully at the door. Perhaps because everything was rather damp up here, the vanished object which the drawing pin had pierced had left on the paint an oblong impression so precise that it could be accurately measured. Producing a pocket rule, Appleby accurately measured it. And then he turned and went downstairs again.

  It wasn’t, as in Trechmann’s place, the sort of staircase that went down through the body of the building. Here, too, there had been some alterations, and this was now an enclosed outer staircase off which doors opened on several small landings. On the ground floor there was no doubt a shop. But the rest of the property had been converted into flats. And there didn’t seem to be much life about them. He met nobody. He didn’t hear a sound. You could do a lot of coming and going here without attracting notice.

  And the entrance was at the back. This wasn’t unexpected. The frontage on the street would be valuable as shop space. So access to the flats had been arranged from that cul-de-sac at the rear which Appleby had already inspected.

  There was again nobody about. There were only the cats and the garbage bins. Turning up his coat collar – for it was again raining hard – Appleby began to make his way back to the late Mr Trechmann’s yard. And then – once again – he stopped. Precisely the same thing had happened. It came, he supposed, of being out of training at this game. He had seen something. But what?

  He retraced his steps. A dog had joined the cats, and was investigating one of the garbage bins with vigour. And that, of course, was it. Most of the bins were overflowing and with their lids askew. There were a couple like that at the bottom of a service hoist beside the flats. But there was a third…

  Yes – on this one the lid was fitting snugly. And when he lifted it the bin was empty. More than that, it was unnaturally empty. Just as that flat had been unnaturally empty. No dustman had ever coped thus with such a receptacle since dustmen first began.

  The spectacle – he was to reflect afterwards – must have been an odd one: a dampish person, formally dressed and carrying a certain professional authority, competing with a dog and a number of cats in the hopeful inspection of these humble but necessary utensils. And now he tilted the thing over to get a better light in its interior. He saw that it wasn’t absolutely empty, after all. An irregular scrap of white paper – no more than an inch square – adhered to the bottom of the bin. He reached in, fished this out, and turned it over. He was looking at a representation of a human eye. More than th
is – he was looking at a familiar representation of a human eye.

  It didn’t make sense. Or, at least, at first it didn’t do so. The eye wasn’t even a whole eye, but only part of one. What there was of it was in colour – very much in colour. For a moment Appleby supposed that it might be from the cover of a magazine. But no pin-up girl ever had that eye. Nor was it likely that an eye from such a source would strike him with this mysterious sense of familiarity.

  On second thoughts, there was only one explanation of it. What he had found was a scrap torn from a coloured reproduction of some painting with which he was acquainted. One more square inch, and he would probably be able to identify it. Once more he looked carefully in the bin – and carefully over the whole area round it. But a second square inch wasn’t there. Of course – he reflected, as he made his way back to Trechmann’s shop – an expert would probably know. Gulliver would know. He’d ask Gulliver.

  “Sir Gabriel Gulliver, sir.”

  Henry James, pale with excitement, had got this out on top of something incoherent that Appleby hadn’t caught.

  “Gulliver?” Appleby was shaking the rain from his overcoat. “What about him, man?”

  “A telephone message from the Yard, sir. In his private office at the gallery. And would you go at once.”

  Appleby stared in dawning comprehension.

  “You mean–?”

  “Dead, sir. Shot through the back of the head.”

  9

  At the top of the broad shallow steps, sheltered from the rain by the great portico, Inspector Parker stood with an elaborate air of negligence. When Appleby approached, he turned and walked ahead. Parker was much given to such harmless manoeuvres. At the moment, he was busy not attracting the attention of the Press – supposing the Press to be about. Gulliver’s death – if it really was his death – had presumably not yet been made public.