A Family Affair

by Michael Innes

  ‘You mean that the disreputable creature has stolen the thing? Surely the police–’

  ‘Braunkopf hasn’t exactly stolen it. He has simply persuaded the owner to exchange it for the copy – pointing out to him that it is not socially salubrious to become widely known as the possessor of a whole cabinet of indecent paintings and the like.’

  ‘It’s absolutely incredible!’

  ‘Not really. Braunkopf, although caught napping when he handed over all that money, is far from being a stupid man. And he has really taken a leaf out of the other fellow’s book. The owner kept quiet once – when the thing was borrowed, that is – because he didn’t want publicity. So Braunkopf saw that there was a chance he would allow himself to be imposed upon again. After all, the fellow still has a representation of two courtesans curiously employed, and that’s what he chiefly cares about.’

  ‘There’s something thoroughly nasty about this, I must say.’ Professor Sansbury had pulled out a pipe – presumably by way of indicating that he was by no means impatient to get away. ‘I begin to see, Sir John, that you are pretty heavily involved in this matter in a professional way, and perhaps I ought to leave asking questions to you. But I must say I’m curious about the identity of the chap who has this collection of curious pictures. Is it indiscreet to ask his name?’

  ‘He’s a Mr Praxiteles. Braunkopf says he’s a shipowner.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’ Sansbury sounded almost regretful. ‘I suppose you’re going to chase him up?’

  ‘I’m not exactly entitled to do that. But I think it quite likely that I shall take means to make his acquaintance. Meanwhile, Professor, would you mind if I asked you about just one point?’

  ‘Fire away.’ Sansbury had now lit his pipe. ‘The honest truth is, you know, that this is beginning to interest me very much.’

  The smoking-room had emptied itself. There wasn’t even so much as an old gentleman asleep in a corner of it. Only an ancient club servant was going round, emptying ashtrays, straightening chairs and folding newspapers. After dinner a few members would drift in again. But in the main people dined for the purpose of playing bridge afterwards – and that transacted itself in a sepulchral chamber upstairs. One could have continued here in almost perfect privacy till midnight and beyond, discussing the most intimate affairs.

  ‘What I’d like to go back to,’ Appleby said, ‘is the original cock-and-bull story. The nobleman with a lumber-room is said to have started out with a laudable desire to present Nanna and Pippa to the nation. Then – rather inconsequentially – he thought of finding an American buyer through the instrumentality of Braunkopf. But he was determined to remain entirely anonymous–’

  ‘It really was the most awful bosh.’

  ‘I rather agree, and we needn’t suppose that Braunkopf swallowed quite all of it. But what interests me is the supposed intermediary. The confidential person, I mean, who was supposed to be contacting Braunkopf on the noble person’s behalf. It occurs to me that you must have encountered him.’

  ‘Of course I did. He brought the picture to Braunkopf’s place, and remained brooding over it while I examined it. But it must have been after I left that he told Braunkopf the story about the owner wanting to have it back for a few days in order to have it copied.’

  ‘Just how did this expertise work? It seems that you satisfied yourself on the spot. I’d have imagined that perhaps laboratory tests might have been required.’

  ‘There might have been something in that.’ Sansbury now spoke indulgently. ‘Raking light, and so on, might have revealed characteristics of the fattura – the handling, you know – not perceptible to the naked eye and relevant to whether Giulio Romano painted the thing. But nothing of that sort was my business. I looked at it – and just that, you will understand, is my job – and wrote and signed an opinion that it was the original Nanna and Pippa. I suppose I spent about twenty minutes on the commission. Feeling a bit of a fool, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Again because of the subject matter?’

  ‘Well, yes. An elderly man, peeking and peering at what is going on in the damned thing. You must understand that the particular handwriting of the painter in representing some quite small detail of a figure or gesture–’

  ‘I can see that you might feel the situation to be a shade absurd. But I don’t suppose Braunkopf did?’

  ‘Not in the least. He made quite a solemnity of it. Do you know? It seems to me that the perpetrator of the fraud was rather skilful in inventing a nobleman as the picture’s owner. Braunkopf seemed decidedly to “dig” the nobility, as the young people might put it.’

  ‘He had a good deal to say about nobles gentry his goot freunds?’

  ‘Just that. But I expect the fellow you’re particularly interested in is the intermediary.’

  ‘Decidedly so, and I wish I could see him at all clearly. You had no feeling, I suppose, that you’d ever seen him before?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘And you haven’t set eyes on him since?’

  ‘I’m quite sure I haven’t.’

  ‘It would be too much to hope for, I suppose.’ Appleby paused for consideration. ‘As I’ve hinted to you, Professor Sansbury, I am interesting myself in a group or sequence, spread over a considerable period of time, of affairs roughly in the same general area as this one.’

  ‘You whet my curiosity very much, Sir John. Not that I have any business to be curious.’

  ‘I shall be delighted to tell you more about it, some time when you are at leisure.’ Appleby presented this civil evasion promptly. If anything more was to be done today, he had not a great deal of leisure himself. ‘A few of these frauds and impostures must have required something like a gang to carry them out. But it strikes me that the one we are considering could have been a one-man show. We know that this chap who brought the picture to the Da Vinci was not really acting as the agent of a nobleman – nor of any other rightful owner of the thing. So was he any sort of mere emissary or confederate at all? May he not have contrived the entire imposture on his own?’

  ‘Even to the extent of subsequently painting the copy, Sir John? He’d have to be uncommonly versatile. Burglary on the one hand – for I suppose that’s how he did his borrowing – and highly competent painting on the other. And he’d have had to know about this person Praxiteles and his collection.’

  ‘The man I’m looking for knows his way around such matters very well indeed. By the way, would you call the man we’re talking about young or old?’

  ‘Between young and youngish. Probably not much more than thirty. Which would rule him out, as far as Keynes Court goes.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby again reflected that Professor Sansbury was one whom not much got by. ‘If I really am in contact with a single group of frauds, it isn’t your Da Vinci friend who has masterminded the lot. Did he strike you as potentially a mastermind?’

  ‘I can’t think any such idea came into my head.’ Sansbury was amused. ‘As far as I can remember, he said very little.’

  ‘Should you recognize him again?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I imagine so. Unless he were in some way disguised.’

  ‘Should you recognize his mere voice?’

  ‘That’s rather more difficult to say. But probably not.’

  ‘There was nothing peculiar or characteristic about it?’

  ‘Nothing at all. It was an ordinary upper-class English voice.’

  ‘That sounds rather important to me, Professor. In fact, he was a gentleman?’

  ‘He wasn’t anxious to suggest the air of one.’ Sansbury was speaking with care. ‘Now that you mention it, I was struck by that at the time. But it’s hard to express. It was rather as if he was playing a part. A little too many “Sirs” in his talk, and that sort of thing. Wanted to suggest himself as out of a lower social drawer than in fact he was. Funny how sensitive we English are to all that.’

  ‘No doubt. But we seem to have arrived at something, even if i
t’s nothing much. This fellow was performing a mere henchman’s role, and it didn’t come quite naturally to him. And we may suppose that the head of the gang – if there is a gang – had nobody more verisimilar to assign the job to.’

  ‘It reminds me of books I used to read as a boy.’ Sansbury’s amusement had grown. ‘Crooks who were at the same time great social swells. Somebody-or-other the Amateur Something.’

  ‘Raffles, Professor. And Cracksman.’

  8

  Left to himself, Appleby let his mind continue to dwell for a few minutes on Nanna and Pippa, or rather on the problem of which they were the centre. He knew more about this affair than about any of the others, but he still didn’t know very much. It was clearly desirable that he should meet Mr Praxiteles, now the owner of these ladies only in what might be termed the shadow of a shadow. For an erotic painting, one had to assume, must be rather a frustrating object in itself. A mere replica of it must appear yet more remote from the real thing.

  Mr Praxiteles might not be easy to meet. Appleby had a notion that persons of his kidney put in a good deal of their time cruising in the Mediterranean on board rather notably well-appointed private yachts. No doubt they kept an eye on their mercantile interests that way.

  On the other hand Mr Praxiteles, if encountered, might be persuaded to converse. There was something about that quite small fragment of his history now known to Appleby which suggested that his fibre might not be all that tough. He seemed not to have put up much of a show against the unblushing blackmail of Hildebert Braunkopf. For Braunkopf had got away with exactly that. He had threatened Praxiteles with highly inconvenient publicity if he refused to exchange an extremely valuable object for a worthless one. Braunkopf must have known that Praxiteles could be intimidated.

  But meeting Mr Praxiteles – even if he were on terra firma and in England – required a little thinking out. Appleby had no standing in his affair whatever. It was only with Lord Cockayne that he had anything of the kind. Or rather – he was visited by a sudden thought – with Lord Cockayne by invitation, and with Sir Thomas Carrington (the Stubbs man) and Mr Meatyard(the Sir Joshua Reynolds man) by a species of indirect association. When their misfortunes had come the way of Scotland Yard Appleby had, after all, been running the place. He hadn’t, of course, himself seen either of the defrauded gentlemen, or taken any part in investigating their not very pertinaciously preferred complaints. But at least he had heard about them. Some capital could be made out of that.

  Appleby looked at his watch. At a pinch they could not merely find him a room in the club but produce the customary adjuncts of civilized slumber as well. And he could simply ring through to Judith. But first he had better check on whether anything could in fact be done that evening. Carrington was almost certainly a totally rural character, coming up to town once a year for a house dinner or the Eton and Harrow Match. Meatyard, on the other hand, sounded a metropolitan type. He would live surprisingly close to the West End in a surprisingly suburban sort of villa of the more commodious – or indeed imposing – type. Appleby made his way to the telephone directories. There wouldn’t be all that number of Meatyards in London. It was the sort of surname a lawyer would strongly advise you against dropping into a novel or a play.

  But what was a meatyard? Flicking through the pages, Appleby found time to ask himself this question. Had he ever found himself in a meatyard? No. Had he ever heard such a place mentioned? No. It was probably fallacious to equate Mr Meatyard with, say, Mr Cowmeadow or Mr Swineherd. ‘Meatyard’ was a corruption of something highly Anglo-Norman. This Mr Meatyard (the Sir Joshua one) was not in fact a simple citizen who had been practised upon as a consequence of defective education. He was simple because effete. He would prove to be like Lord Cockayne, only very much more so.

  Appleby found his man, and dialled his number.

  ‘I went into it,’ Mr Meatyard said. ‘I went into it thoroughly. I couldn’t have Reynolds. So I saw to it I had him.’

  ‘It’s a superb portrait,’ Appleby said – and reflected that it was a good beginning not to have to tell a fib. The picture dominating the lounge – it was certainly a lounge, for the vision of Mr Meatyard as of Norman blood had not fulfilled itself – was of a comfortable lady in middle life. She was distinguishably dressed for her occasion, but was not in the least swayed by any uneasy consciousness of the fact. She had sat to the greatest of living European painters, and been entirely equal to it.

  ‘I owed it to Martha,’ Mr Meatyard said, with quiet satisfaction. ‘I’d been had for a proper Charlie – eh, Sir John? But give me time, and I do find my way about.’ Mr Meatyard pointed firmly at the portrait of Mrs Meatyard. ‘Would you exchange that for one of their Reynoldses? Just answer me straight.’

  ‘I can’t be certain that I should.’ Appleby smiled. ‘Is that straight enough?’

  ‘I’ll make do with it.’ Mr Meatyard (who, oddly enough, turned out to deal in meat in a very big way) gave Appleby a shrewd look. One wouldn’t have supposed Mr Meatyard at all easily taken in – but then even very capable men can be curiously at a loss in fields remote from their own. ‘I looked into Reynolds, you know. I followed him up at that place down on the Embankment – the one named after the fellow who made money in sugar. Lyle, is it?’

  ‘Tate.’

  ‘That’s right – Tate. Well, I looked at Reynolds there, and in a good many other places as well. It seemed to me he painted invalids mostly. Nasty green tinge in their complexions, wouldn’t you say? I don’t think I’d care to have Martha looking like that.’

  ‘You felt you were well clear of Reynolds?’

  ‘Now you’re having your laugh at me, Sir John. And plenty of other people, back when this happened, looked like having their laugh too. I didn’t like the idea, I don’t mind telling you. Still, I look back to it now in what you might call a kindly way. It’s brought me a lot of pleasure, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Being fooled, Mr Meatyard?’

  ‘No, no. This business of painting and painters. I’d never given it much thought before – although, mark you, we had all the proper things in the house. Everything hand-done – except for etchings and the like, which are no more, you might say, than half-and-half. But then I took to this looking into it – starting with your Reynolds, who I tell you I don’t think much of. But do you know Gainsborough, now? Lived at very much the same time, it seems. I took to Gainsborough. I’ve got a couple by him in the next room. Then Cézanne.’

  ‘Cézanne?’

  ‘Not in Gainsborough’s class, of course, since he comes in a hundred years later. Pricey, all the same. I wouldn’t like to tell you what I had to pay for my Cézanne. I just wouldn’t have signed the cheque, Sir John, except for the feeling he gives me. As if I was inside that canvas, and moving around. You know what I mean? I’ve worked it out it has something to do with how all those flat slabby bits lean this way and that. Orderly, too. Like good bookkeeping, you might say. A pleasure to look at.’ Mr Meatyard paused. ‘Yes,’ he said contentedly. ‘I find I’m very fond of pictures. Would you ever have been in Florence, by any chance?’

  ‘Florence?’ Appleby contrived to be perfectly solemn. ‘Yes, I have been there.’

  ‘There’s a very good golf course.’

  ‘A golf course?’ This time, Appleby was pretty well caught off his guard. ‘What an extraordinary thing!’

  ‘Very creditable it is, considering the climate. But I just don’t take my clubs there now. Too many pictures. Martha and I go round and round the Uffizi. A nice place. Clean toilets, and a very tolerable snack to be had, looking down over the city. But the pictures are the thing. Painted to absolutely top specifications, and more of them than you’d believe.’

  ‘They are certainly very notable.’ Appleby found he was failing to take a proper pleasure in this unexpected sequel to Mr Meatyard’s encounter with the spurious Sir Joshua. That his mild misadventure should have brought into the worthy man’s life hitherto unknown satisfactions in th
e field of aesthetic experience was no doubt a wholly gratifying circumstance. But it didn’t look like being of much use to Appleby in his self-imposed quest. A more forthright approach seemed required. ‘At least,’ Appleby went on, ‘you’ve got wise to a good deal by now. You wouldn’t be taken in after the same fashion again.’

  ‘I’d like them to have another go at me, Sir John. I’d show them a thing or two, mark my words.’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re not likely to single out the same victim twice. But they are in business still – or that’s my guess. And it’s why I’ve called on you. You must admit that, once you’d recovered from your first annoyance at being defrauded by this bogus Sir Joshua–’

  ‘It wasn’t so much that. It was their making a fool of Martha, you know. That, and disappointing her so. Ringing the bell at this great painter’s studio, and nobody there. That was what took me to the police.’

  ‘The impulse did you credit, Mr Meatyard. But then you backed out. Wouldn’t that be a fair way of putting it? I ask because I can see that you’re a fair-minded man.’

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. I saw that we’d have all the papers laughing at us. Martha wouldn’t have liked that.’

  ‘So you minimized the whole affair by naming a totally inaccurate sum as what you’d been cheated of.’

  ‘And just how would you substantiate that, Sir John?’

  ‘My dear sir, it is quite self-evident. An elaborate imposture of that sort isn’t mounted for the sake of peanuts.’

  ‘Well, now, Sir John – that would depend, wouldn’t it? An imposture may be a fraud, or it may be a hoax. And doesn’t this sound more like a hoax – a practical joke – than a fraud? Here is a self-made man – Albert Meatyard, with no education to speak of – believing that he can have Mrs Meatyard’s portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It’s a regular scream, wouldn’t you say? And if they top off their bit of fun by getting twenty pounds out of him for some worthless painting, that’s as great a lark as if they got twenty thousand. And is modest enough to keep them out of gaol, likely enough, if they’re found out. The fellow on the bench – one of your public school and varsity men – is amused by the whole thing.’