Gently With the Painters

by Alan Hunter

  Farrer winced under the attack, but clung to the shreds of his official smile. Too clearly he was a man who couldn’t be bullied out of his composure.

  ‘He asked to use that way out as a favour, as he had done once or twice before. It happens to be nearer for his office. I am very sorry if it discommoded you.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll bet you are!’ Hansom could detect the delicate taunt. ‘But don’t think we’re so dumb as people make us out, either. There’s a little misdemeanour called “obstructing the police”, and I wouldn’t like to say that we couldn’t pin it on you.’

  ‘Always supposing that you had evidence to support it, Inspector.’

  Hansom gave one of his snarls, but he knew when he was beaten.

  ‘This money …’ Gently took up the ball again. ‘Can you remember what sort of notes it was in?’

  Farrer glanced at the memo. ‘Mostly in ones and tens. But I had to give him the odd five hundred pounds in fivers.’

  ‘And you’ve got a note of them?’

  ‘Yes. They were new and numbered consecutively.’

  ‘We’ll have the numbers, please, and all you can remember about his securities.’

  That was all there was to it: Gently picked up his hat. But Farrer now seemed to be wanting to add something unsolicited. He fiddled with his memo, smiling once or twice at nothing, then:

  ‘You know … I’ve seen as much of Derek Johnson as most people.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, just that I thought him fairly trustworthy. We don’t come to be bank officials without having a flair for judging character.’

  ‘You’re saying that he wouldn’t have murdered his wife?’

  ‘Yes … no. I don’t want to interfere! But I feel it my duty to say that to one who knows him … well, it’s unlikely.’

  For once he wasn’t smiling but looking at Gently with an earnest directness, and in a flash Gently understood what the bank manager was trying to convey.

  ‘And you were prepared to back your judgement?’

  ‘The bank is always prepared to back it.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to be so frank, Mr Farrer!’

  ‘I think, in justice, I could be no less …’

  Hansom, as sore as a baited bear, slammed the car door with a fearsome crash. ‘It makes my blood simmer – and we can’t lay a finger on him! For all we can show it was just the way he tells it – and then the grinning chimpanzee has to go and rub it in!’

  Gently closed his door more quietly, though he sympathized with Hansom. On the other hand, one had to spare some admiration for Farrer. The man had stood by his friend at a certain risk to himself, and had risked a little more to impress his faith in Johnson on Gently.

  Whatever faults the ex-pilot had, at least he could command a great deal of loyalty …

  ‘So what are we going to do about it, besides sitting on our fannies?’

  ‘I’m going to have lunch. You dragged me away from it.’

  ‘But this geezer’s got a gun!’

  ‘That’s regrettable, of course. But I don’t feel any the less hungry because of it.’

  Surprisingly, Hansom didn’t go up in smoke – he was learning to take his Gently more temperately, perhaps. He extricated the Wolseley with much clashing of gears, but Hansom at his best was no trophy winner with a car.

  ‘I’ve alerted the rail police and put a man on the bus terminus – and one each, of course, on the office and the flat.’

  ‘You remember young Huysmann?’

  ‘Hell yes! And you were right there. I’ll ring up the river police and have them check on the boats. That’s it, I reckon, apart from putting out the numbers.’

  ‘Just one other thing … he left his car behind.’

  ‘You think—?’ Hansom’s eyes left the road for a moment.

  ‘We’d better check on it, since he’s so flush with the ready. In his place, my next move would have been to buy another car.’

  Also, Gently thought, he would have shaved off that moustache, though whether Johnson could have borne to part with it was quite another matter. With him it was probably a gimmick like the chair and the horseshoe, and he would doubtless sooner hang with it than face the world clean-shaven.

  ‘You’re not forgetting Miss Butters, sir …?’ These were the first words Stephens had spoken; from his behaviour one would have thought that he was personally responsible for Johnson’s escape.

  ‘No, I haven’t forgotten Miss Butters.’ Gently eyed his confrère humorously. ‘She’s probably the best bet of the lot – perhaps you would like to keep an eye on her?’

  Stephens flushed. ‘I was going to suggest it …’

  ‘Righto, my lad! We’ll find you some transport. But remember that Johnson has got a gun … If he should turn up, just ring us at Headquarters.’

  He had Hansom drop him off outside his hotel, where he went straight down to the below-stair dining room. Being Saturday, the place was crowded in spite of the lateness of the hour, and the waitress who served him looked fagged as well as heated.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a plate of fried chicken, would you?’

  In the end, he settled for steak with new potatoes and peas. Cramming the tables round about him were red-faced farmers, those who were attending the weekly cattle market that was held beneath the Castle. Watching them, he wondered how many would stray into the exhibition, which, well found in posters, opened directly off their sale ground. Their wives, perhaps, but what about the menfolk …?

  He could imagine their reaction to the Wimbush fishes!

  After the steak, with which he had drunk half a pint of bitter, he ordered an apple turnover and custard sauce. The noise and clatter of the farmers, whose Saturday lunch was an institution, had a pleasantly lulling effect in the warm and gravy-scented room. As happened so often, his mind relaxed over a meal. It seemed to loosen the ideas that until then were held rigid. Apparently without assistance they began to sort and adjust themselves, forming patterns and suggestions like the pieces in a kaleidoscope.

  There was for instance that sketch of Mallows, which lay photographed on his brain – was it merely an hypothesis or had Mallows taken it from life? Did he know of such a man, and know him to be infatuated with Shirley Johnson, or was there another and secret reason why Mallows had suggested this to him?

  For a little he toyed with the idea that X had been a self-portrait, given adjustment, naturally, to obscure the resemblance. But no, such an assumption had to be fundamentally impossible; what assurances did Mallows need for his spreading, triumphant genius?

  Aymas fitted the description a good deal better, allowing his angry young mannishness to be a case of inversion. Mallows, Gently was convinced, was capable of applying misdirection, and a misdirection of this kind would be characteristic of him. But was Aymas’s choler an example of inversion – or the sort of inversion required to satisfy X? Though he had seen little of Aymas, Gently was disinclined to think so; his impression had been of an irritable extrovert who suffered from glands rather than from psychopathic troubles.

  Who, then, was next in line –Wimbush? Baxter? Farrer? The latter had a smile, though it could scarcely be called a shy one! Or was it one of the members whom he had yet to meet – or somebody else entirely, beyond the orbit of the Palette Group?

  From the way that Mallows had drawn the portrait Gently could swear that it had had a definite subject, and this was the point which kept emerging through the various permutations. It had been sketched with such vivacity, such unhesitating strokes, as though Mallows had long since explored what he described. Thus it followed that X was a familiar acquaintance of Mallows’s, or one at least whom he had had good opportunities to observe. Was it his knowledge, then, which had suggested this interpretation of the murder to him, or did he possess some information which more positively indicated X?

  If X were indeed a familiar acquaintance, the academician’s hedginess was explicable. Unless he was positive that X had
done it, he would take pains not to give him away. But his suspicions, however founded, were strong enough in one article: he had wanted to deflect Gently’s interest from Johnson, and so had partly shown him his hand. What would have happened if Johnson had been charged? Would Mallows have volunteered information?

  Gently tossed off a cup of coffee which had stood until it was nearly cold. Going back again to the beginning, had Mallows some other reason for that hypothesis? As a man he attracted Gently, but that was a bad excuse for passing him over; on another occasion Gently had met an engaging murderer, and nearly made a third on his list of victims. And there was another point which kept reappearing. Mallows was the last person to see her alive. He had tried to make fun of it but it was hard to laugh it away, and a motive of blackmail was more convincing than the most strongly argued psychological theory …

  Impatiently, Gently thrust this angle into the background. Somewhere, at some time, you had to trust your instinct about people. About Mallows there was something too sane, too balanced – his reaction to attempts at blackmail would probably have been a public lecture.

  So, you were left with the conviction that his suggestion was bona fide, and that his X was a serious alternative to the missing Derek Johnson. And the problem remained, where did you begin looking for X? His outward marks a shy smile, and a trail of hopeless paintings. The field seemed to embrace the Palette Group and the whole acquaintance of St John Mallows … unless, by the aid of their pictures, one could winnow out some of the former.

  From the hotel kiosk he rang HQ:

  ‘You wouldn’t have an art expert on the strength, would you?’

  ‘Art expert my foot …!’ Hansom’s disgust was scathing.

  ‘I’d like a really good man.’

  ‘Well, you won’t find one here!’

  After thinking about it, he referred Gently to a couple of dealers and to the Art School, but neither of these alternatives seemed to promise much on a Saturday. Instead Gently decided he would try his luck unaided – his judgement of pictures was far from professional, but clue in hand, he might ferret out something.

  He met a newsboy while crossing the Paddock and stopped to buy a lunchtime paper. It was still the doings of Pagram which overbalanced the front page.

  GUNMAN CHARGED WITH FISHER MURDER

  37 More Arrests

  Yard Make Clean Sweep Of Criminal ‘Empire’

  Frederick Peachfield, 39, alleged to be a building contractor, was this morning formally charged with the murder of Harold (‘Jimmy’) Fisher. While resisting arrest during last night’s raids he shot and seriously wounded a Metropolitan Police Constable.

  Mopping-up operations are still going on and 37 more arrests have been made in the East End. In a statement to the press made by a senior Yard officer, it is claimed that the Warehouse Gangs have been virtually wiped out …

  The inference was plain though not explicitly stated – they had recovered Peachfield’s gun, and it was the gun which had killed Fisher. Nothing else would so have telescoped the ‘arduous routine’, and have enabled Peachfield to be charged so promptly on the heels of his arrest. He was an open and shut case. He would never pull another gun …

  The Saturday influx of country people had not been limited to farmers, and the Gardens were much more crowded than they had been the day before. Their pièce de résistance was certainly missing – it was still locked away in the Super’s office; but the space it left vacant had not been filled, and curiously enough, it exercised a strong attraction. Gently noticed again that most of the patrons were women. It suggested an amusing extension of Mallows’s dictum. If art had to be for someone, and that someone was women, then didn’t it follow that women were the principal directors of the course of art …?

  A good number of the exhibits were now marked with red stars, and Phillip Watts, in his booth, was being kept busy with inquiries. Gently sifted the jostling viewers for a Palette Group member; after a few minutes’ hunting, he spotted the angular figure of Baxter. He made his way across to him.

  ‘You’re doing a roaring trade, I see …’

  Baxter turned to examine him distastefully through his steel-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a jacket of chalky tweed over a neat, plum-coloured shirt, with dark worsted trousers and impeccable sandals. He gave an impression of being enormously hygienic, as though he had scrubbed himself with carbolic soap.

  ‘I don’t know if you can refer to this as trade … sensation, I would call it: a cheap sensation.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s selling pictures.’

  I am quite aware of that. But I am not convinced that that is entirely the object of the exhibition.’

  Gently grinned to himself – he could imagine Mallows’s reply to that one! – but it was not his present purpose to start an argument with Baxter. If it was possible he wanted to get the poster artist’s cooperation, to use him as a pick-lock to the problem he had before him. And for this it mattered little that Baxter himself might equate with X, since he could equally well serve as a pointer to himself or to another …

  ‘I’m just a layman, of course … I think I know what I like.’

  ‘That goes without saying. Only an artist knows better.’

  ‘But naturally I get puzzled, faced with a lot of different pictures … in a way, they all seem good. You understand what I mean?’

  Baxter did, it was plain from his expression, he could see that Gently was a moron; by his opening remark he had betrayed the soul of a shopkeeper. But there was a note of humility in the policeman’s approach, and Baxter forbore absolutely to crush him.

  ‘It seems to escape the majority that art appreciation requires training. One does not, by a stroke of brilliance, become a connoisseur overnight. One must learn to judge a painting as a surgeon does an appendectomy – not by the health of the patient but by the skill of the operation.’

  Gently nodded his head woodenly. ‘I felt there was rather more to it. It’s not enough to like a picture … you have to know why you shouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Simplifying it, that’s the point. Your emotional reaction must be set aside. Unless you can train yourself to do that, you will be perpetually floundering in a sea of preferences.’

  ‘So if I like a picture I should reject it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the first step in appreciation.’

  Gently nodded more profoundly, his head a little on one side. He really was learning something, his expression seemed to say! Baxter, unmoved, took off his glasses and proceeded to polish them on a scrap of leather; it still seemed touch and go whether he would bother with Gently or not.

  ‘This exhibition here, for instance … I can’t help feeling lost in it.’

  ‘They are not a difficult collection.’ Baxter replaced his glasses severely.

  ‘I can’t make up my mind about them … those fish, there, take them …’

  ‘You mean those planitonal variations which Arthur Wimbush is exhibiting?’

  It was a start, however unpromising, and Gently kept Baxter quietly travelling. He quickly learnt, to his mild surprise, that Wimbush was not the crank he had thought him. The reverse, indeed, was true: Wimbush rippled with significance. Each and every one of his fishes was a planitonal triumph. Like the patient, they may have expired, but nothing could fault the appendectomy.

  ‘You would say, then, that Wimbush possesses a fair degree of talent?’

  ‘A rare planitonal cognition. I think you would say that.’

  ‘Isn’t he friendly with Mr Mallows?’

  ‘On the contrary, they are unsympathetic.’

  Gently made a mental cross against the name of Arthur Wimbush.

  They passed on to Shoreby, with whom Baxter was more censorious. He pointed out traces of involuntary emotion which were marring that gentleman’s work.

  ‘With geometrical panels one must preserve discipline; there should be no undercurrent of excitement, either in grouping or brushwork. You can see for yourself how those triangles pulsat
e, while the parallelogram is tantamount to a slap in the face. Until he is more mature, Shoreby should leave geometry alone.’

  ‘He lacks talent, perhaps?’

  ‘I disagree. He lacks control.’

  On the other hand, he was notably friendly with Mr Mallows …

  In one way Baxter was showing a scrupulous justice: he had sunk his partisan feelings in a desire to educate Gently. Impartially he treated with the concrete and the abstract, letting nothing of his bias interfere with the lesson. He chided Aymas for the unbridled sensuality of his colour – praised Lavery, in spite of his clumsy-looking splurges; he allowed talent to Farrer, though hampered by bourgeois sentiment, and found planic sensitivity in Allstanley’s wirework. The difficulty lay in getting a comparative judgement from him. All his geese were to be swans for the necessity of the moment. It was Gently’s business as a layman to consider the mechanics of appreciation; the estimation of degrees of talent did not lie within his province.

  ‘I was looking through the pictures that Mrs Johnson painted …’

  Baxter was ‘whiffing’ his stalk-like pipe, making successions of quick popping noises.

  ‘Oh? Then you noticed the subliminal approach, I suppose, and the regressional tendency towards prenatal cognition?’

  ‘I noticed erotic fantasies in medieval trappings.’

  Baxter looked surprised. ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘Would you say that she had talent?’

  Baxter whiffed. ‘She had emotive power. But it was probably entirely posited on a disassociated psyche.’

  ‘Sexual frustration, to put it bluntly?’

  ‘Y … es. It’s safe to say so.’

  ‘And was she the only group member with a psychopathic motivation?’

  Baxter looked a little startled, but he still kept popping away.

  ‘I hadn’t thought it before, though of course, you may be right.’

  ‘Could you give me any suggestions?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Not at the moment. It’s an entirely new conception, and I would need to give it some thought. What put the idea in your head?’