Black Plumes
Margery Allingham
STILL-LIFE WITH CORPSE
"I shouldn't come in if I were you, madam." The unnatural sharpness in the butler's voice gave the words a macabre quality of their own. "I shouldn't come in," he repeated stubbornly, "he's he's just as he was, you see. We mustn't move anything before the police come."
Phillida shook her head. "No. Get out of the way, Norris."
Robert Madrigal had died and stiffened and grown limp again. He sat squarely in the bottom of the cupboard, his back supported by the wall and his legs doubled up before him. Across his knees lay a raincoat, a pair of yellow gloves and, final touch of ghastly incongruity, an upturned bowler hat.
Norris caught Phillida's full weight as she heeled over.
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Doubleday edition published October 1940 Bantam edition I October 1983
ISBN 0-SS3-2359O-7
1
The October wind, which had promised rain all day, hesitated in its reckless (light down the moist pavements to hurl a handful of fine drops at the windows of the drawing room in the big Hampstead house. The sound was sharp and spiteful, so that the silence between the two women within became momentarily shocked, us if it had received some gratuitous if trivial insult.
Old Mrs. Gabrielle Ivory continued to watch her granddaughter. Her eyes were bright still, as shrewd and black as they had been on an evening nearly seventy years before when they had refused to drop before the stare of another dominant woman who had sat on a little gilt throne at the first Court of the season. Gabrielle Ivory had been quite as forceful as Queen Victoria in her way and certainly very much more beautiful, but now, as she sat in her high chair, surrounded by a lacquer screen and swaddled in Grey satin, she was very old.
The girl standing on the rug before her was barely twenty. In her severe dark suit and Paris sailor, with her foxes dangling from her hand, she looked even younger, yet there was a very definite likeness between them. The eldest and the youngest of the Ivorys both had the family's beauty, the fine bones and that expression which was sometimes railed "straightforward" and sometimes "arrogant."
"Well!"" said Gabrielle. "I'm an old woman, my dear, nearly ninety. It's not much use coming to me. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?" Her voice was unexpectedly clear in spite of its thinness and there was a quiver of amusement in the final inquiry.
Frances Ivory's long narrow Grey eyes flickered. The old lady was devastatingly right, and it was not going to be easy to explain the sense of dismay which had crept over her at the discovery, Meyrick Ivory, a widower who adored his mother, had brought tip his younger daughter to see the old Gabrielle as an almost legendary figure. To his child she had always been presented as the beloved beauty of a golden age, a link with the great Victorians, a creature larger than life in power and importance, so that all through these last perturbing weeks Frances had comforted herself with the recollection that if the worse came to the worst, even though Meyrick himself was half across the world, there was always Gabrielle up at Hampstead. It was hard to realist now that the moment of appeal had come, that she was perhaps just a very old woman, too old and too tired to be disturbed.
The tiny figure in the high chair stirred impatiently, as if she had read her visitor's thought and was irritated by it. It was an old habit of hers which many people had found disturbing.
"Meyrick is not expected back from China for some time, is he?" she remarked. "How is Robert Madrigal behaving without him? I never liked that young man. Why your insane half sister married him I cannot imagine. Not a very suitable person to be in charge of The Gallery." She gave the title the capital letters which were its due. From the early years of the last century, when her own father-in-law, the famous Philip Ivory, had first purchased the fine house off St. James's and had exhibited there the collection of Gainsboroughs which had drawn a world of rank and fashion still in stocks and beavers, 39 Sallet Square had been The Gallery and so it was still, with a history of wealth and prestige behind it unequaled in Europe,
"Well?" The old woman was persistent. "How is he behaving?"
Frances hesitated. "He and Phillida are staying with me at 38, you know," she began cautiously. "It was Meyrick's idea. He wanted Robert to be near."
Mrs. Ivory's narrow lips curled. The mention of the house next door to The Gallery, where she had reigned throughout her career from its heyday in the seventies right up to the fin de siecle, always stirred her.
"So Phillida's at 38, is she?" she said. "Meyrick didn't tell me that. You're finding it difficult to live with her, I suppose? I don't blame you. I could never abide a fool in the house even when it was a man. A silly woman is quite insufferable. What has she done now?"
"No, it's not Phillida," said Frances slowly. "No, darling, I only wish it were." She turned away and glanced out across the room to the barren trees far over the heath. There was a great deal more to worry about than the shortcomings of her elder half sister. "Granny," she began awkwardly, realizing that the words were childish and inadequate, "there's something going on."
Gabrielle laughed. It was a little tinkling sound, as gently malicious as ever it had been in the great drawing rooms of long ago.
"There always was," she said.
"Yes, I know, but this is rather different." Frances was taking the plunge. "This is deliberate malice and it's dangerous. I'm terrified of sounding melodramatic and silly but I really do think that something irrevocable may happen at any minute and something must be done to stop it. There's nobody to go to, you see. The staff at the gallery is going to pieces. You can't blame them in the circumstances..."
"Oh, my dear, not business." The old woman's protest contained distaste. "Leave business to men. When I was your age we thought it rather indelicate for females to understand business. That was imbecile, of course, but we were saved a lot of unpleasantness. You should marry. Phillida has no children a mercy, of course, if there's anything in heredity but someone must carry on. Come and talk to me about marriage, not business."
Frances stiffened. Her suspicion was founded. There was going to be no help here. She turned away.
"Robert has just told me I ought to marry Henry Lucar," she said. It had not occurred to her that Gabrielle might recognize the name, since Meyrick would hardly have mentioned so unimportant a member of the firm to his mother. The rustle in the high chair came as a surprise therefore.
"Wasn't that the man who was rescued from Godolphins expedition?" demanded the old lady. "I thought he was a baggage man in charge of the camels, or was it mules?"
The girl laughed in spite of herself. "Oh no, darling," she said. "Be fair. He did go out as Robert's batman, as a matter of fact, but that's nothing to do with it. He came back a hero and he's in the firm now. I don't like him. Since Daddy's been away I've liked him less. He was always, a bit of a smart aleck but just lately he's surpassed himself, cocky little beast. Still, it really isn't snobbery that's made me go on turning him down. I wouldn't care what he was if I liked him. I just don't, that's all."
She was speaking defensively, repeating the argument she had used to Robert at that astonishing interview just before lunch, and she stood squarely on the leopard rug, looking surprisingly brave and modem in the big room which was so cluttered with forgotten allegiances.
Gabrielle sat up. Marriage was a subjec
t which her generation had entirely understood, and her bright eyes were hard.
"Did this person have the impudence to ask you to marry him?" she inquired.
Frances writhed. The demode snobbery embarrassed her. It was so like great age to get the whole thing out of perspective and to pounce upon a single aspect.
"There was nothing impudent about it. darling," she protested, "It was only that when Robert began to badger me to take the horrid little brute seriously I added it to these other mine serious things that have been happening and I got the wind-up. You can't blame Lucar for merely asking. Why shouldn't he?"
"Why?" Mrs. Ivory sat very stiffly, the Grey lace scarf over her head hanging in graceful lines by her withered cheeks. "Don't be a foot, girl, and don't forget yourself. This man Lucar is a servant, or was a servant until a gratuitous piece of good fortune saved his life and made him notorious. You are a pretty, well-bred, well-educated girl with a great deal of money. It is a ridiculous modern affectation to pretend to disregard money. It does not deceive anybody. No one thinks of anything else at heart. Your mother left you two hundred thousand pounds. That is a fortune. Of course it's impudence for the man Lucar to ask you to marry him. Any man who proposed to you is going to be in an embarrassing position unless he is either very wealthy himself or has some special advantage which makes the exchange fair and respectable. This camel man is presuming. Don't, for heavens sake, sentimentalize over him or flatter yourself that he is anything else. Robert appears to be out of his mind. I shall certainly speak to Meyrick when he returns."
She lay hack, closing her eyes after the effort, and the girl stood looking at her. her cheeks flaming. A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, hot there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
Frances came away.
Meyrick's Rolls had never seemed more comfortingly magnificent than it did as she climbed into it out of the irritating wind which snatched at her hat and whipped at her knees. The interview had been worse than useless, and she reproached herself for attempting it. She glanced out of the window at the wet streets and huddled more closely into the corner of the car. She was frightened. That discovery was alarming in itself. It is one thing to go on from day to day with a growing feeling of unrest and suspicion, but quite another to find oneself suddenly convinced of serious trouble and to be in charge, especially when one is not quite twenty and one is alone.
The chauffeur drew up outside 38, but she signaled to him not to ring. If Phillida was still there the chances were that she was still in bed with drawn blinds and her latest medico in attendance.
She left the car and walked on down to The Gallery, which opened austere arms to greet her. At first blush 39 Sallet Square, where one could negotiate anything from a castleful of Rembrandt to a humble modern woodcut, was a cool and lovely private house. At the moment, however, the normal elegance of the building was ruffled. The girl, who was already apprehensive, noticed the changed atmosphere as soon as she set foot in the hall. Most normally sensitive people admit to some such experience, for a house where violent emotions are being stirred seems to have a flavor, a sort of restlessness in its very air, and that afternoon as Frances crossed the threshold it came down to meet her like a wave.
2
"Of course. It's a serious thing and naturally Mr. Field is furious."
Miss Dorset leaned back in her chair in the secretary's office and her thin face flushed.
"What painter wouldn't he angry if he was rung up by a gallery in the middle of an exhibition and calmly told that one of his best pictures had been slashed? Oh, Miss Ivory, I do wish your father was hack."
She was one of those thin women who had once been sandy and she had grown old in the service of the firm without anyone noticing it, not even herself. Now, as she pushed back her notes and prepared to rise, her lips were unsteady.
"Is David Field here?" Frances' tone betrayed her, but the other woman was in no mood to notice it.
"Or course he is. They're all up in Mr. Meyrick's office talking it over, making a fuss and giving Mr. Field something to tell everyone in London. If Mr. Meyrick was here he'd explode. Formby's story has made everything only too clear, and a very dreadful thing it is too. It's that big portrait of the Mexican dancer, number sixty-four. It's a very fine picture.
"I don't understand. Did Formby see who did it?" Frances was bewildered. Formby, the commissionaire, had been with the firm for years and it seemed hardly possible that any such unparalleled active violence could have taken plate under his nose.
Miss Dorset did not look at her. "He sticks to his story," she said reluctantly. "He insists that everything was all right at two o'clock when he went into the big gallery to speak to Mr. Robert, who was there talking to Mr. Lucar. When they came out about fifteen minutes later he went back again and found the damage. He gave the alarm and North phoned Mr. Field. It's just like all the other out-rages, malicious, dangerous and obvious."
"Does Formby actually say that nobody was in there except Robert and Luear, and that they were together? Does he see what that means?"
"Don't ask inc." Miss Dorset's suppressed agitation lent her a certain defiant rakishness. "In my life I've learned to hold my tongue and shut my eyes to all kinds of things in business, but now I'm beginning to wonder if discretion hasn't got a limit. I've worked for your father since I was seventeen and I've got a great respect for him. I've been making up my mind to go out of my place and write the truth to him ever since the Royal Catalog affair. Now I'm not so sure that I ought not to send a cable, This is a very wonderful old firm with a great tradition and it's a shame to see it floundering in the hands of a lunatic, if he's nothing worse. I've never said such an indiscreet thing in all my life, but it's the truth and someone's got to say it."
Frances went slowly upstairs. The door to Meyrick's private office was open, and as she paused in the corridor she could hear the voices within. She recognized the sturdy obstinacy of the commissionaires polite cockney.
"Ah, but I looked at it most particularly, sir," he was saying. "It was quite all right when I came by at two o'clock. That I'll take my dying oath to. I should say the same in a court of law. I can't speak fairer than that, can I?"
"No, you can't, old boy. You've made yourself perfectly clear. And so what? Can your people downstairs repair the thing, Madrigal? How long are they likely to be about it?"
The second voice was not unexpected and Frances was irritated to find herself jolted by it. David Field was reputed to jolt a great many women in his casual, friendly passage through life. She went forward briskly, but the heavy carpet deadened her footsteps and she stood on the threshold unobserved.
The white-paneled room, once an eighteenth-century duchess' boudoir, looked odd with Robert sitting behind the high desk and Lucar lounging idly by his side. Of all the unprepossessing people she had ever met Frances was inclined to give Lucar first place. He was a pipsqueak of a man. inclined already to fatness, with red hair and a red face which clashed with it. Yet even these defects might have been tolerable had it not been for his conceit. Lucar's conceit was a visible thing. It oozed from him like an essence, tipping up his nose, quirking his mean mouth, and clothing his shoulders and the stance of his plump little legs with a veritable aroma of perkiness. He alone of the group looked perfectly pleased with himself. Robert was even more nervy than usual. His coffin-shaped face was Grey, he was punching small holes in the blotting paper with a dry pen, and his hand was shaking.
Formby was standing solidly with his back to her, and in the armchair beside him there was a tall thin figure at whom Frances did not look. She was not given to shyness in the ordinary way but she did not glance at David Field.
"Don't worry, Mr. Field. We'll patch it up for you." It was Lucar who spoke, and his jauntiness was insulting. "It may be out of the show for a day or two, but there you are. It can't be helped, can it?"
Robert c
ut in at once. "You can rely on us absolutely. We shall see to it immediately," he said hastily. "I can't tell you how shocked and horrified we all are that such an accident should have occurred to such a fine picture when it was in our care."
"You're insured, of courser'" Field put the question absently and an awkward pause ensued.
"Yes, we are, naturally. Fully." There were unaccustomed spots of color in Robert's cheeks. "Naturally. But in this particular circumstance, I mean in view of the slightness of the damage, I think a claim would hold up the repair work unnecessarily. After all, we do want the canvas on show, don't we? That's the main thing."
It was a bad cover up and very obvious. Field rose and his lean figure was silhouetted against the light.
"Yes, I suppose so," he said, regarding them, his head slightly on one side. "Look here, Madrigal, exactly what sort of accident was it?"
It was an invitation to frankness typical of the man. yet Robert did not avail himself of it. He looked up, and his deep-set eyes, which could cloud with fury at the least irritation, were disconcertingly blank.
"I have no idea," he said stiffly. "No idea at all."
The painter shrugged his shoulders. "Oh. all right," he said. "I'm probably a fool, but get it repaired and back in its place by the end of the week and we'll forget the incident. Hut meanwhile, for the love of Mike, do look after the stuff. Meyrick Ivory was a good friend to me when I was beginning, and I don't want to hurt the old man, but these things are painted in blood and sweat. I can't let 'em be carved up indiscriminately. One more disaster and we'll have to call the show off."
Lucar opened his mouth. He had a curious sell-conscious wriggle of the shoulders before making one of his more unforgivable utterances and fortunately Robert saw it coming.
"Quite," he said quickly,"Quite. North is upstairs now arranging for it to be taken down. Perhaps you would go up to him, Lucar. Impress it on him that he must take every possible care. It's a terrible thing to have happened, terrible."
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