Gently With the Painters

by Alan Hunter

  ‘Oh, just a general curiosity about painters.’

  ‘It’s possible that you’ve hit on something – I must really consider the matter.’

  Now, instead of drawing him out, he had shut Baxter up. The artist seemed to have nothing more that he wanted to say to Gently. His back leant against a booth, he stood whiffing on and on at his pipe, his eyes far away above the heads of the passing viewers. Gently watched him for a little, equally silent, then he grunted and turned away.

  His round with Baxter hadn’t been completely fruitless, nevertheless, since he had got from him a fair idea of how the group members stood with Mallows. There were five who were friends of his, outside the group, and if X was a group member then this quintet was likely to contain him. On a page of his personal notebook he scribbled down these five possibles adding, as was his habit, what seemed most relevant about each of them:

  [1] Stephen Aymas. Paints gooey landscapes with some success. Noisy, extroverted. Mallows thinks he will make the grade.

  [2] James Farrer, bank manager. Seems a good man at his job. Paints chocolate-boxy flowers. NB Would Mallows think his smile shy? NNB Shouldn’t think Aymas smiles much.

  [3] Frederick Allstanley. Still to meet him. Sculpts mainly in wire. Elementary schoolteacher (grounds for delusions of grandeur?).

  [4] Jack Seymour. Pal of Aymas’s. Paints minutely worked still lifes. Shy, with shy smile. But only in middle twenties.

  [5] Henry Baxter. Pedant. Rather secretive. A professional (and successful) poster artist. Another non-smiler (was Mallows truthful about smile?). NB Does Baxter feel frustd. painting posters? NNB Does he paint anything else?

  There were small grounds for optimism in this varied group of possibles, unless Allstanley turned out to be the living image of Mallows’s description. By the car test Aymas was the number-one candidate, but Gently felt less and less inclined to value that theory. There had been no need for a car to have been left on the park. It was enough to represent it there to lure Shirley into the darkness. But it had needed a person who was known to have a car, and this seemed to eliminate Seymour, his gratifying shyness notwithstanding.

  Over the remaining two names Gently pondered narrowly. Against Farrer, of course, a black mark already stood. With more or less culpability he had assisted Johnson to escape, which, if he were guilty, it was in his interest to do. Unfortunately his qualifications seemed to end there. He was a success in his profession and it fitted him like a glove. He painted badly, it was true, but there was nothing to show that he took painting seriously; the city had an artistic climate and suggested daubing as a hobby.

  This left him with Baxter, his non-smiling pedant, whose head was stuffed with jargon and critical theory; a man the complete antithesis of the brilliant and fertile Mallows – if you liked, the born failure, as against the born succeeder! Of him one could readily believe an inner frustration, a delusion of greatness that smouldered in neglect. Now he was merely a poster artist, but some time, when he would, he could burst through that disguise and blaze his name to the high heavens … perhaps, when Shirley Johnson became his worshipping mistress. Yes, one could believe it of the nervously whiffing Baxter: it needed only the conscious smile – and wouldn’t that have been lost on Monday night?

  Gently snapped shut his notebook and pushed his way across to the booth. There, temporarily free of inquirers, Watts was adding up some figures on a pad.

  ‘Are you making plenty of hay?’

  ‘Yes, sir! This is our best … our best ever. Even Arthur Wimbush … I really think we’re going to sell out …!’

  ‘Have you sold Mr Baxter’s poster?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I saw you talking to him …’

  ‘Doesn’t he paint anything else besides posters?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. He paints landscapes too.’

  ‘Hmn.’ Gently appeared to meditate the point. ‘Has he done anything that might suit a detective’s den?’

  ‘Well, sir …’ Young Watts was equally thoughtful. ‘He’s done a fine view of the Heath with a prospect of the prison …’

  ‘Good is he – apart from these posters of his?’

  Watts flushed. ‘I don’t think … I couldn’t say, not really. He usually sends several things to the exhibition … I believe they think that he’s best at posters.’

  So that was Baxter lined up behind the absentee Johnson, with, in a manner of speaking, Allstanley still to play. But to them one was obliged to add an unlimited number of outsiders, since suspicion could not be confined to the group members alone.

  On returning to Headquarters he found, already, a message from Stephens:

  ‘Couldn’t we have the phone tapped? I’ve seen her using it, I think …’

  This conjured up a picture of Stephens lurking among the laurels, and trying to stifle a treacherous sneeze as the gardener passed by him.

  Hansom, who had taken the tip about checking on car purchasers, had so far only uncovered a minor misdemeanour.

  ‘A chummie with an expired licence bought a car and drove it home …’

  He seemed to take it much to heart that they hadn’t immediately grabbed Johnson.

  Gently arranged for Stephens’s relief and then departed again for Glove Street. The manageress, treating him now as a regular, found him a table beside the window. Most of the patrons had evening papers in which they were reading of Pagram’s triumph, but the local titbit, Johnson’s flitting, had been temporarily placed under wraps.

  Beyond Glove Street, in St Saviour’s, one heard the weekend exodus in motion, and several patrons were claiming suitcases when they went to pay their bills.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NO CALLS HAD been put through to the hotel during the night, and Gently heard nothing about the slashings until he checked in at Headquarters.

  The morning was dull and uncommitted, promising neither sun nor rain; it was a morning when you didn’t much care whether you were stuck in the city or out of it. Stephens he had seen the evening before, and the Inspector was gone again before Gently got up. After the degenerate custom of Elphinstow Road, he had ordered his breakfast to be sent up to his room.

  There, among the pillows, he had disembowelled the papers, making them greasy with his buttery fingers; then, feeling irritable and inclined to a headache, he had taken himself off to a tepid shower.

  Up here, the Sundays were so intensely sabbatical! In place of traffic one heard the chirping of sparrows under the eaves. And there were huskily crooning pigeons in the elm trees beneath the Castle, and the weird, unanalysable cries of an itinerant news vendor.

  While dressing he had looked through his window into a street completely deserted; there wasn’t even a Sunday stroller where a traffic jam had been yesterday. He was tying his tie when he caught sight of the first pedestrian, and then it was a bus conductor on his way to the terminus. As for cars! Well, a couple of them were parked across the way, but there was nothing else in that line except a locked and deserted motor coach.

  Not until he reached the marketplace did he discover a semblance of life. Here some corporation employees were hosing down the numerous gangways. The water had spread across the Walk, bearing litter and shavings with it, and there was a smell of damaged fruit and an echoing grate of shovels. A shabby old man stood furtively watching … was it the same one who had discovered the body? Suddenly he dived into the heap of rubbish, producing a coin which he rubbed on his sleeve …

  Hansom had also bought a sheaf of papers and he was digesting them in his office. He was chewing a short, black cheroot, his favourite form of nicotine ingestion.

  ‘Well, I found that car dealer for you!’ He tossed a report sheet across the desk. ‘He flogged Johnson a nice quiet ’53 Minx – a bit of a change from MGs, isn’t it?’

  Gently took up the report sheet and glanced over it, shrugging. A Minx was an obvious choice for Johnson. It was a car as unobtrusive as any car could be: the unregistering norm, a car to go unnoticed.

  ‘You
’ve put it out, have you?’

  Hansom ringed him with cheroot smoke. ‘We made it an all-stations, because where the hell is he by now? Not in Northshire, that’s a safe bet, and maybe not in England either. But my guess is that he headed straight for the Smoke.’

  ‘When did you find this car dealer?’

  ‘Just this morning, like it says.’

  ‘Any message from Stephens?’

  ‘Nope. His relief is in the canteen.’

  Gently went to talk to the relief, who was sombrely eating a canteen breakfast. The man had spent a tranquil night and had nothing of interest to report. Previously, as Stephens had told Gently, Butters’s family had arrived in two cars; lights had been burning when Stephens was relieved and had continued to do so until past one a.m.

  ‘Did you see any traffic go past the house?’

  ‘Not till seven, when the milkman got there.’

  ‘You had a good look at him, did you?’

  ‘Yes. He was a young fellow; short; dark brown hair.’

  It was five minutes later, when Gently was back in Hansom’s office, that the desk sergeant buzzed to say that Baxter wanted to see them. He was shown up straight away and he arrived strangely breathless; his glasses were held in his hand, which added to his distrait appearance.

  ‘I’ve just come from the exhibition – run all the way …!’

  He brushed aside Gently’s suggestion that he should take a seat.

  ‘No, this is serious – deadly serious, you understand? That fellow – that barbarian Johnson! He’s slashed all the paintings!’

  ‘Johnson!’

  Hansom was on his feet in a moment. From the beginning, one felt, he had looked on Johnson as personal meat.

  ‘You’ve seen Johnson around?’

  ‘No … don’t be silly! But he’s slashed them with the knife – the same one. It’s still there!’

  A minute or two of careful questioning was required to get the facts from him. For once he had been rattled out of his disdainful sang-froid. He stuttered and gestured and stared with his naked eyes, too upset, apparently, to clean and replace the smeary glasses.

  ‘I – I … this morning I had to go there – Watts gave me the key – on Sundays it’s closed … the exhibition, I mean! And that’s how I found it – slashed, every one of them! The glass all broken … the knife stuck in a frame …’

  ‘Just a minute! What were you doing at the exhibition this morning?’

  ‘I … well, if you must know! I went to touch up my exhibit …’

  ‘And where does Johnson come into it?’

  ‘He … isn’t it too obvious? It’s his revenge, because he thinks that one of us killed his wife …’

  Hansom was watching Baxter curiously, and now he shot a look at Gently. Gently shrugged, looking wooden, but he understood his colleague’s hint.

  ‘Well … we’d better go and look at it. Did you lock the gate after you?’

  ‘Yes – no, I can’t remember! I ran all the way …’

  He had entered the Gardens by the gate at the rear, the one which gave access to Market Avenue. Here, as at the provision market, men were busy with brooms and hoses, and in the air lingered the musky smell of animal occupation. Baxter’s Singer stood alone by a granite horse trough. It was a pre-war ten with rather dubious tyres. He had not locked the gate, which was secured by a chain and padlock, and in fact it stood ajar with the key still in the lock.

  ‘Holy smoke … just look at this!’

  A single glance took in the havoc. It was as though a malicious child had been let loose among the pictures. Raw destruction, it was just that, the very sight of it kindling anger. Profoundly shocked, one could only feel enraged at the insensate author of it.

  ‘That’s just how I found it … I didn’t touch a thing …’

  Faced with it, Gently could better appreciate Baxter’s distraction. They weren’t masterpieces, perhaps, those scored and tattered canvases, but they were the products of civilized people patiently cultivating their talents. And now, in an hour of savagery, they had been brainlessly destroyed. It was the treachery that hurt: one felt that something had been betrayed.

  ‘You see? It couldn’t have been one of us …’

  That was true: such a thing seemed unbelievable. An artist might conceivably have mutilated another’s picture, but unless he were completely crazed he could never have stooped to this barbarity.

  Silently they moved along the line of damaged exhibits, each one of which had been separately, conscientiously attacked. Canvases hung in ribbons, glass lay shattered under empty frames, Allstanley’s ‘Head of a Laughing Woman’ was stamped out flat beside its pedestal. It seemed the work of some berserk gorilla which had been trained in the arts of destruction. One couldn’t comprehend the mind behind it; the single reaction was of seething anger.

  ‘Where’s that knife you talked about?’

  ‘Here, look … at the end. Stuck in this stupid thing of Farrer’s – he didn’t think it was worth a slash.’

  There was no mystery about the knife – it was the fellow of the murder weapon; the same triangular sliver of stainless steel, stamped with the name of the Sheffield cutler. It had been driven hard into the frame of the picture, deliberately cutting through the artist’s name. The canvas of this one had escaped a hacking but the force of the blow had wrenched the frame from its brackets.

  ‘Do you remember if you touched the knife?’

  ‘I … yes, I may have done. I honestly don’t know. I was too upset.’

  ‘Why did you touch it?’

  ‘I don’t know if I did or not! I’d read about the other one, and felt certain that this was the same.’

  Hansom murmured to Gently:

  ‘Do you want my theory? Chummie’s got it in for Farrer for helping Johnson to get away. That’s why he got the knife instead of having his picture slashed … let’s show it to him and watch his face. I’ll bet he doesn’t grin this time!’

  Carefully, Gently disengaged the picture, turning it to the light to examine the knife. There were apparently no prints on the polished metal, and apart from some hack marks, the knife looked new.

  ‘Did any picture of that knife get published?’

  ‘Yeah – or of one just like it. The local carried it, and so did the Echo.’

  So that anybody, besides the murderer, might have committed this outrage.

  ‘What happened to you after I saw you yesterday?’

  Baxter had calmed himself now and had cleaned and put on his glasses. It was surprising what a difference those round lenses made to him; at once, from being a harassed owl, he began to be his contemptuous self.

  ‘I really don’t see what that has to do with it.’

  ‘Never mind! I’d like you to answer the question.’

  ‘Very well – I had my tea, and then I drove out to Floatham. I made a sketch of the mill there for a poster I have commissioned.’

  ‘What time did you go to tea?’

  ‘At six, or soon after.’

  ‘When the exhibition closed, in fact?’

  ‘I am not trying to conceal it.’

  ‘And that, of course, would be when you borrowed the key from Watts?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Baxter sniffed. ‘Your deduction is keen, Superintendent.’

  ‘So it seems that you had the key from around six p.m. yesterday evening?’

  ‘I did. And I have no worthwhile alibi to offer you.’

  ‘You finished your sketch and then went home?’

  ‘To my cottage at Dunton. Where I live by myself.’

  ‘And that is the only key?’

  ‘It’s the only one we have, though I dare say you’ll find some others if you inquire at the Castle.’

  Abruptly Gently left them and stalked out of the Gardens. Across the Avenue they were still hosing pens and forking up the soiled straw. He picked on the driver of the lorry:

  ‘When did you get here this morning?’

  They began
at seven, he was told, but they had seen nobody in the Gardens.

  ‘When did that Singer park there?’ This they hadn’t precisely noticed, but a consensus of their opinion was that it hadn’t been there for long. One of the sweepers had seen Baxter come out. They couldn’t recall any suspicious noises. A number of people had gone by, mostly transport workers, but the only wheeled traffic had been bicycles and a truck.

  He returned to the Gardens to find Hansom at work on Baxter – a classic example of bludgeon versus rapier. If anything the artist seemed to be enjoying the contest, and small head tilted, chose his stinging ripostes deliberately.

  ‘You will notice, I trust, that my own picture has suffered …?’

  Gently ignored him, drawing the Inspector aside. ‘We’ll have to treat this as serious though it may be only a hoax – some person with a grudge, who likes to make things spectacular! I’m afraid we’ll have to rope in a lot of people. It’s going to be a day of old-fashioned routine …’

  ‘Do you think it could be Johnson?’

  ‘No. That doesn’t make sense. If there’s any link at all, it’s in the exception made of Farrer.’

  ‘Yeah – that’s my impression. Chummie doesn’t like Farrer.’

  ‘We’ll look him over first, after you’ve set the wheels turning.’

  Farrer was a family man; he had a teenage son and daughter. It was the latter, clad in a dressing gown, who admitted the policeman into the bank house. Here there was an air of Sunday mornings, of relaxation and petty carelessness. One smelt some bacon being fried and saw, on a table, last night’s cups. They were taken into the lounge, the curtains of which had to be hastily drawn, while the chairs pushed together in a semicircle suggested that the family had been watching TV.

  ‘I’ll just see if Daddy is out of the bathroom …’

  The girl went out quickly, clutching her dressing gown together. A minute or two later her brother peered in, found a paperback western and retired without speaking.

  ‘It must be nice to manage a bank!’ Hansom prowled round the room, allotting price tags to the contents. He was particularly struck by the TV and by the voluptuous Persian carpet. It was a room without taste, however, and overcrowded with oppressive furniture; the walls were hung with some insipid watercolours and the light bowl was of mottled glass.