‘How wonderfully competent of you!’ exclaimed Miss Twitterton. ‘I’m afraid, Lord Peter, you are used to taking girls about.’
‘Moderately so,’ said Wimsey. He did not think it necessary to mention that the last time he had used that mirror it had been to examine the back teeth of a murdered man.
‘Of course,’ said Miss Twitterton, ‘they had to say he was popular with his colleagues. Haven’t you noticed that murdered people are always well dressed and popular?’
‘They have to be,’ said Wimsey. ‘It makes it more mysterious and pathetic. Just as girls who disappear are always bright and home-loving and have no men friends.’
‘Silly, isn’t it?’ said Miss Twitterton, with her mouth full of roast duck and green peas. ‘I should think everybody was only too glad to get rid of Plant — nasty, rude creature. So mean, too, always taking credit for other peopled work. All those poor things in the studio, with all the spirit squashed out of them. I always say, Lord Peter, you can tell if a head of a department’s fitted for his job by noticing the atmosphere of the place as you go into it. Take the copy-room, now. We’re all as cheerful and friendly as you like, though I must say the language that goes on there is something awful, but these writing fellows are like that, and they don’t mean anything by it. But then, Mr Ormerod is a real gentleman — that’s our copy-chief, you know — and he makes them all take an interest in the work, for all they grumble about the cheese-bills and the department-store bilge they have to turn out. But it’s quite different in the studio. A sort of dead-and-alive feeling about it, if you understand what I mean. We girls notice things like that more than some of the high-up people think. Of course, I’m very sensitive to these feelings — almost psychic, I’ve been told.’
Lord Peter said there was nobody like a woman for sizing up character at a glance. Women, he thought, were remarkably intuitive.
‘That’s a fact,’ said Miss Twitterton. ‘I’ve often said, if I could have a few frank words with Mr Crichton, I could tell him a thing or two. There are wheels within wheels beneath the surface of a place like this that these brass-hats have no idea of.’
Lord Peter said he felt sure of it.
‘The way Mr Plant treated people he thought were beneath him,’ went on Miss Twitterton, ‘I’m sure it was enough to make your blood boil. I’m sure, if Mr Ormerod sent me with a message to him, I was glad to get out of the room again. Humiliating, it was, the way he’d speak to you. I don’t care if he’s dead or not; being dead doesn’t make a person’s past behaviour any better, Lord Peter. It wasn’t so much the rude things he said. There’s Mr Birkett, for example; he’s rude enough, but nobody minds him. He’s just like a big, blundering puppy — rather a lamb, really. It was Mr Plant’s nasty sneering way we all hated so. And he was always running people down.’
‘How about this portrait?’ asked Wimsey. ‘Was it like him at all?’
‘It was a lot too like him,’ said Miss Twitterton emphatically. ‘That’s why he hated it so. He didn’t like Crowder, either. But, of course, he knew he could paint, and he made him do it, because he thought he’d be getting a valuable thing cheap. And Crowder couldn’t very well refuse, or Plant would have got him sacked.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought that would have mattered much to a man of Crowder’s ability.’
‘Poor Mr Crowder! I don’t think he’s ever had much luck. Good artists don’t always seem able to sell their pictures. And I know he wanted to get married — otherwise he’d never have taken up this commercial work. He’s told me a good bit about himself. I don’t know why — but I’m one of the people men seem to tell things to.’
Lord Peter filled Miss Twitterton’s glass.
‘Oh, please! No, really! Not a drop more! I’m talking a lot too much as it is. I don’t know what Mr Ormerod will say when I go in to take his letters. I shall be writing down all kinds of funny things. Ooh! I really must be getting back. Just look at the time!’
‘It’s not really late. Have a black coffee — just as a corrective.’ Wimsey smiled. ‘You haven’t been talking at all too much I’ve enjoyed your picture of office life enormously. You have a very vivid way of putting things, you know. I see now why Mr Plant was not altogether a popular character.’
‘Not in the office, anyway — whatever he may have been elsewhere,’ said Miss Twitterton darkly.
‘Oh?’
‘Oh! he was a one,’ said Miss Twitterton. ‘He certainly was a one. Some friends of mine met him one evening up in the West End, and they came back with some nice stories. It was quite a joke in the office — old Plant and his rosebuds, you know. Mr Cowley — he’s the Cowley, you know, who rides in the motor-cycle races — he always said he knew what to think of Mr Plant and his motor-tours. That time Mr Plant pretended he’d gone touring in Wales, Mr Cowley was asking him about the roads, and he didn’t know a thing about them. Because Mr Cowley really had been touring there, and he knew quite well Mr Plant hadn’t been where he said he had; and, as a matter of fact, Mr Cowley knew he’d been staying the whole time in a hotel at Aberystwyth, in very attractive company.’
Miss Twitterton finished her coffee and slapped the cup down defiantly.
‘And now I really must run away, or I shall be most dreadfully late. And thank you ever so much.’
‘Hullo!’ said Inspector Winterbottom, ‘you’ve bought that portrait, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Wimsey. It’s a fine bit of work.’ He gazed thoughtfully at the canvas. ‘Sit down, inspector; I want to tell you a story.’
‘And I want to tell you a story,’ replied the inspector.
‘Let’s have yours first,’ said Wimsey, with an air of flattering eagerness.
‘No, no, my lord. You take precedence. Go ahead.’
He snuggled down with a chuckle into his arm-chair.
‘Well!’ said Wimsey. ‘Mine’s a sort of a fairy-story. And, mind you, I haven’t verified it.’
‘Go ahead, my lord, go ahead.’
‘Once upon a time —’ said Wimsey, sighing.
‘That’s the good old-fashioned way to begin a fairy-story,’ said Inspector Winterbottom.
‘Once upon a time,’ repeated Wimsey, ‘there was a painter. He was a good painter, but the bad fairy of Financial Success had not been asked to his christening — what?’
‘That’s often the way with painters,’ agreed the inspector.
‘So he had to take up a job as a commercial artist, because nobody would buy his pictures and, like so many people in fairy-tales, he wanted to marry a goose-girl.’
‘There’s many people want to do the same,’ said the inspector.
‘The head of his department,’ went on Wimsey, ‘was a man with a mean, sneering soul. He wasn’t even really good at his job, but he had been pushed into authority during the war, when better men went to the Front. Mind you, I’m rather sorry for the man. He suffered from an inferiority complex’ — the inspector snorted — ‘and he thought the only way to keep his end up was to keep other people’s end down. So he became a little tin tyrant and a bully. He took all the credit for the work of the men under his charge, and he sneered and harassed them till they got inferiority complexes even worse than his own.’
‘I’ve known that sort,’ said the inspector, ‘and the marvel to me is how they get away with it.”
‘Just so,’ said Wimsey. ‘Well, I dare say this man would have gone on getting away with it all right, if he hadn’t thought of getting this painter to paint his portrait.’
‘Damn silly thing to do,’ said the inspector. ‘It was only making the painter-fellow conceited with himself.’
‘True. But, you see, this tin tyrant person had a fascinating female in tow, and he wanted the portrait for the lady. He thought that, by making the painter do it, he would get a good portrait at starvation price. But unhappily he’d forgotten that, however much an artist will put up with in the ordinary way, he is bound to be sincere with his art. That’s the one thing a genuin
e artist won’t muck about with.’
‘I dare say,’ said the inspector. ‘I don’t know much about artists.’
‘Well, you can take it from me. So the painter painted the portrait as he saw it, and he put the man’s whole creeping, sneering, paltry soul on the canvas for everybody to see.’
Inspector Winterbottom stared at the portrait, and the portrait sneered back at him.
‘It’s not what you’d call a flattering picture, certainly,’ he admitted.
‘Now, when a painter paints a portrait of anybody,’ went on Wimsey, ‘that person’s face is never the same to him again. It’s like — what shall I say? Well, it’s like the way a gunner, say, looks at a landscape where he happens to be posted. He doesn’t see it as a landscape. He doesn’t see it as a thing of magic beauty, full of sweeping lines and lovely colour. He sees it as so much cover, so many landmarks to aim by, so many gun-emplacements. And when the war is over and he goes back to it, he will still see it as cover and landmarks and gun-emplacements. It isn’t a landscape any more. It’s a war map.’
‘I know that,’ said Inspector Winterbottom. ‘I was a gunner myself.’
‘A painter gets just the same feeling of deadly familiarity with every line of a face he’s once painted,’ pursued Wimsey. ‘And, if it’s a face he hates, he hates it with a new and more irritable hatred. It’s like a defective barrel-organ, everlastingly grinding out the same old maddening tune, and making the same damned awful wrong note every time the barrel goes round.’
‘Lord! how you can talk!’ ejaculated the inspector.
‘That was the way the painter felt about this man’s hateful face. All day and every day he had to see it. He couldn’t get away because he was tied to his job, you see.’
‘He ought to have cut loose,’ said the inspector. ‘It’s no good going on like that, trying to work with uncongenial people.’
‘Well, anyway, he said to himself, he could escape for a bit during his holidays. There was a beautiful little quiet spot he knew on the West Coast, where nobody ever came. He’d been there before and painted it. Oh! by the way, that reminds me — I’ve got another picture to show you.’
He went to a bureau and extracted a small panel in oils from a drawer.
‘I saw that two years ago at a show in Manchester, and I happened to remember the name of the dealer who bought it.’
Inspector Winterbottom gaped at the panel.
‘But that’s East Felpham!’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes. It’s only signed T.C., but the technique is rather unmistakable, don’t you think?’
The inspector knew little about technique, but initials he understood. He looked from the portrait to the panel and back at Lord Peter.
‘The painter —’
‘Crowder?’
‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go on calling him the painter. He packed up his traps on his push-bike carrier, and took his tormented nerves down to this beloved and secret spot for a quiet weekend. He stayed at a quiet little hotel in the neighbourhood, and each morning he cycled off to this lovely little beach to bathe. He never told anybody at the hotel where he went, because it was his place, and he didn’t want other people to find it out.’
Inspector Winterbottom set the panel down on the table, and helped himself to whisky.
‘One morning — it happened to be the Monday morning’ — Wimsey’s voice became slower and more reluctant — ‘he went down as usual. The tide was not yet fully in, but he ran out over the rocks to where he knew there was a deep bathing-pool. He plunged in and swam about, and let the small noise of his jangling troubles be swallowed up in the innumerable laughter of the sea.’
‘Eh?’
‘υµάτωv αvήρiθµov γέλασµα — quotation from the classics. So people say it means the dimpled surface of the waves in the sunlight — but how could Prometheus, bound upon his rock, have seen it? Surely it was the chuckle of the incoming tide among the stones that came up to his ears on the lonely peak where the vulture fretted at his heart I remember arguing about it with old Philpotts in class, and getting rapped over the knuckles for contradicting him. I didn’t know at the time that he was engaged in producing a translation on his own account, or doubtless I should have contradicted him more rudely and been told to take my trousers down. Dear old Philpotts!’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said the inspector.
‘I beg your pardon. Shocking way I have of wandering. The painter — well he swam round the end of the rocks, for the tide was nearly in by that time; and, as he came up from the sea, he saw a man standing on the beach — that beloved beach, remember, which he thought was his own sacred haven of peace. He came wading towards it, cursing the Bank Holiday rabble who must needs swarm about everywhere with their cigarette-packets and their kodaks and their gramophones — and then he saw that it was a face he knew. He knew every hated line in it, on that clear sunny morning. And, early as it was, the heat was coming up over the sea like a haze.’
‘It was a hot weekend,’ said the Inspector.
‘And then the man hailed him, in his smug, mincing voice. “Hullo!” he said, “you here? How did you find my little bathing-place?” And that was too much for the painter. He felt as if his last sanctuary had been invaded. He leapt at the lean throat — it’s rather a stringy one, you may notice, with a prominent Adam’s apple — an irritating throat. The water chuckled round their feet as they swayed to and fro. He felt his thumbs sink into the flesh he had painted. He saw, and laughed to see, the hateful familiarity of the features change and swell into an unrecognisable purple. He watched the sunken eyes bulge out and the thin mouth distort itself as the blackened tongue thrust through it — I am not unnerving you, I hope?’
The inspector laughed.
‘Not a bit. It’s wonderful, the way you describe things. You ought to write a book.’
‘I sing but as the throstle sings,
Amid the branches dwelling,’
replied his lordship negligently, and went on without further comment.
‘The painter throttled him. He flung him back on the sand. He looked at him, and his heart crowed within him. He stretched out his hand, and found a broken bottle, with a good jagged edge. He went to work with a will, stamping and tearing away every trace of the face he knew and loathed. He blotted it out and destroyed it utterly.
‘He sat beside the thing he had made. He began to be frightened. They had staggered back beyond the edge of the water, and there were the marks of his feet on the sand. He had blood on his face and on his bathing-suit, and he had cut his hand with the bottle. But the blessed sea was still coming in. He watched it pass over the bloodstains and the footprints and wipe the story of his madness away. He remembered that this man had gone from his place, leaving no address behind him. He went back, step by step, into the water, and as it came up to his breast, he saw the red stains smoke away like a faint mist in the brown-blueness of the tide. He went — wading and swimming and plunging his face and arms deep in the water, looking back from time to time to see what he had left behind him. I think that when he got back to the point and drew himself out, clean and cool, upon the rocks, he remembered that he ought to have taken the body back with him and let the tide carry it away, but it was too late. He was clean, and could not bear to go back for the thing. Besides, he was late, and they would wonder at the hotel if he was not back in time for breakfast. He ran lightly over the bare rocks and the grass that showed no footprint. He dressed himself, taking care to leave no trace of his presence. He took the car, which would have told a story. He put his bicycle in the back seat, under the rugs, and he went but you know as well as I do where he went.’
Lord Peter got up with an impatient movement, and went over to the picture, rubbing his thumb meditatively over the texture of the painting.
‘You may say, if he hated the face so much, why didn’t he destroy the picture? He couldn’t. It was the best thing he’d ever done. He took a hu
ndred guineas for it. It was cheap at a hundred guineas. But then — think he was afraid to refuse me. My name is rather well known. It was a sort of blackmail, I suppose. But I wanted that picture.’
Inspector Winterbottom laughed again.
‘Did you take any steps, my lord, to find out if Crowder has really been staying at East Felpham?’
‘No.’ Wimsey swung round abruptly. ‘I have taken no steps at all. That’s your business. I have told you the story, and, on my soul, I’d rather have stood by and said nothing.’
‘You needn’t worry.’ The inspector laughed for the third time. ‘It’s a good story, my lord, and you told it well. But you’re right when you say it’s a fairy-story. We’ve found this Italian fellow — Francesco, he called himself, and he’s the man all right.’
‘How do you know? Has he confessed?’
‘Practically. He’s dead. Killed himself. He left a letter to the woman, begging for forgiveness, and saying that when he saw her with Plant he felt murder come into his heart. “I have revenged myself,” he says, “on him who dared to love you.” I suppose he got the wind up when he saw we were after him — I wish these newspapers wouldn’t be always putting these criminals on their guard — so he did away with himself to cheat the gallows. I may say it’s been a disappointment to me.’
‘It must have been,’ said Wimsey. ‘Very unsatisfactory, of course. But I’m glad my story turned out to be only a fairytale after all. You’re not going?’
‘Got to get back to my duty,’ said the inspector, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Very pleased to have met you, my lord. And I mean what I say — you ought to take to literature.’
Wimsey remained after he had gone, still looking at the portrait.
‘ “What is Truth?” he said jesting Pilate. ‘No wonder, since it is so completely unbelievable.… I could prove it … if I liked … but the man had a villainous face, and there are few good painters in the world.’
The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba
IN THE FRONT ROOM of a grim and narrow house in Lambeth a man sat eating kippers and glancing through the Morning Post. He was smallish and spare, with brown hair rather too regularly waved and a strong, brown beard, cut to a point. His double-breasted suit of navy-blue and his socks, tie, and handkerchief, all scrupulously matched, were a trifle more point-device than the best taste approves, and his boots were slightly too bright a brown. He did not look a gentleman, not even a gentleman’s gentleman, yet there was something about his appearance which suggested that he was accustomed to the manner of life in good families. The breakfast-table, which he had set with his own hands, was arrayed with the attention to detail which is exacted of good-class servants. His action, as he walked over to a little side-table and carved himself a plate of ham, was the action of a superior butler; yet he was not old enough to be a retired butler, a footman, perhaps, who had come into a legacy.
Lord Peter Views the Body: A Collection of Mysteries Page 26