‘The Lloyd Conversation Piece? I quite agree – and I’m here merely because Judith brought me. By the way, who are the other people in the picture?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea – and there seems to be nothing to inform us. Let’s have another look at them.’
‘They seem younger than their entertainer, and one might expect some of them to be still alive, and present to see themselves attaining fresh celebrity tonight. But Lady Finch is entirely vague about them.’
‘A charming woman, but not notably well-informed.’ With this bland pronouncement, Pendragon paused before the Conversation Piece. ‘I knew Finch slightly,’ he said, ‘and it’s a good likeness, so far as I remember. As for the others, I’m not sure now that they don’t ring some vague bell. They hang together, as it were.’ He frowned. ‘But not much of a set, I’d say.’
Allowing for Lord Pendragon’s professional caution, Appleby thought, this was a fairly stiff judgement on the late Sir Gabriel and his friends. ‘I’ve just heard,’ he offered experimentally, ‘that they drank champagne in front of the thing once a year.’
‘The devil they did! Some precious anniversary occasion, I don’t doubt.’ Pendragon’s frown had deepened. And suddenly he made a surprising dive at the Conversation Piece, and pretty well rubbed noses with it. ‘Well, I’m damned!’ Lord Pendragon was so unwontedly loud in this exclamation that he attracted the attention of several people standing by. ‘Must have one of Beckett’s boffins look into this.’
Beckett was the name of the Lyle’s Director, and at this moment he came up with Judith Appleby.
‘Judith, my dear, you look ravishing,’ Lord Pendragon said. ‘And how is young Bobby getting on at Balliol? Do tell me.’ It was against Pendragon’s rules to expect a lady to pick up on a conversation in progress, and for some minutes he showed himself amiably conversant with Appleby family affairs. Then he glanced at his watch – with an openness that made the action entirely polite. ‘Oh, great God!’ he murmured. ‘I have to dine with the Honourable Company of Comfiters – and no doubt talk to the chief comfit-maker’s wife. Lucky I’m a shade more tolerant than Hotspur, eh?’ And on this graceful Shakespearian note the retired Secretary of the Cabinet made his way to Lady Finch. The ensuing leave-taking had every appearance of the largest leisure. Its actual duration, Appleby remarked, was fifteen seconds.
When the Applebys got home at midnight – for they had gone to a theatre – there was a young man waiting in the hall. He was from ‘C’ Department, and this was the big moment of his career to date.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the Commander thinks you should be let know at once. Lord Pendragon has been shot dead at a banquet in the City.’
Appleby – without, he hoped, treading on too many subordinate toes – investigated this curious affair himself. It appeared that, on arriving at Comfiters’ Hall, Pendragon had entered a cloakroom, and from there a wash-place which happened to be deserted for the moment. He had been followed by his assailant wholly unobserved, and killed while slipping the ribbon of some decoration or other over his head. The enamel of the august gewgaw – macabrely enough – had been chipped by the bullet as it emerged through his forehead. The murderer must then simply have walked out again. It was one of those crimes the complete simplicity of which detectives find daunting and ominous.
Pendragon was a bachelor. A younger brother, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Cambridge, was properly distressed. He was also extremely insistent that the affair should be cleared up at once. It is not good for an eminent person’s posthumous reputation to be mysteriously murdered. Something shady is inclined to hint itself as in the background of so sensational a demise.
Appleby believed in speed, for he knew that one’s best chance of closing in on a crime effectively lies within the twenty-four hours following its commission. Yet it was a couple of days before he came round to the notion (so bizarre did it seem) that Lady Finch’s Conversation Piece might have a place in the picture.
‘Listen,’ he said to Judith. ‘That damned daub of Mungo Lloyd’s – do you remember how oddly Pendragon behaved before it?’
‘Oddly?’
‘He took what you might call a lunge at it. I believe he suddenly recognised one of those four men depicted along with Finch, and found something startling in the fact. Indeed, he pretty well cried aloud about it. And I suspect his doing so alerted somebody to danger.’
‘It wasn’t that sort of lunge.’
‘Just what do you mean by that, please?’ Appleby was all attention at once. His wife was by profession a sculptor, and her perceptions before any work of art were likely to be acute.
‘Pendragon wasn’t looking at a face. He wasn’t looking at anything that could be called representational at all – not like all those idiotic women at the cherry-stones and the drops of wine on the empty glasses. He was looking at something in the facture. Or the fattura, as our Italianate friend Beckett would say. And as I came up I heard him say something about Beckett. What was it?’
‘That one of Beckett’s boffins must look into the thing.’
‘Good. And with infra-red light, if you ask me. The fattura, you know, is what I’d call the handling.’ Judith paused. ‘So now do you see?’ she asked modestly.
Appleby wasted no time on a reply. He picked up the telephone, called for his car, and returned to the Lyle Gallery.
That afternoon a boffin did his stuff. Indeed, several boffins did their stuff. And the following day took Appleby into a world remote from such specialized delvers beneath the surface of things: into the world, indeed, of high finance. Sundry persons with long memories therein were induced to view the Conversation Piece. They left the Lyle looking grim.
On the third day – and after his brother’s funeral – the Professor from Cambridge turned up again.
‘Well,’ he demanded of Appleby, ‘is somebody going to hang for it?’
‘My dear sir, I need hardly remind a lawyer that in England–’
‘Yes, of course. Say, brought to book.’
‘Frankly, the point is problematical. Everything is clear enough. But its oddity may trouble a jury – particularly as we shall have only circumstantial evidence to offer about who fired that shot.’
‘Explain, please.’
‘Certainly. And, first, I believe your brother did more or less tumble to the identity of the people in the picture – or to that of all but one of them – and had some notion of its audacious significance. But, for the moment, he kept mum.’
‘He’d had a long training in discretion.’
‘Precisely. And now, let’s go back a bit. You recall the Peseta Affair?’
‘Lord, yes. Chaps dealing dubiously in foreign currencies, and some suspicion that they’d obtained information from a confidential source for a corrupt consideration.’
‘Just that. And they had an uncommonly close shave: Finch himself, and three associates called Hammond, Hartley, and Henderson.’
‘Respectable if colourless names.’
‘No doubt. And you can see all of them in the Conversation Piece. They’ve been identified for me half-a-dozen times over.’
‘Did Finch’s wife–’
‘She hasn’t a clue, and never had. Her husband’s affairs were a sealed book to her. Now, about these men. Finch is dead and so is Hartley. Hammond and Henderson are alive. And Henderson, although apparently not invited, was at our curious occasion at the Lyle. I’m afraid it’s the most awkward fact we have about him – so far.’
‘You have left one man in the picture unaccounted for.’
‘Yes, indeed. We’ll call him, for the moment, the Fifth Man. Nobody I’ve been able to bring along has identified him.’
‘I see.’ The Professor considered. ‘If that Conversation Piece represents the outrageous act of impudence I think it does, then we know at least something about the F
ifth Man. He was in on that unscrupulous and successful financial coup.’
‘Obviously. For the painter they call Mungo Lloyd – now dead – was brought in simply to celebrate and commemorate those people’s triumphant dishonesty. No wonder they drank champagne before it every year.’
‘Good God, Appleby – what a crowd!’
‘Ah, yes – but now consider. The Conversation Piece was vainglorious – but in some way it must have been rash as well.’
‘Rash?’
‘Very rash – to have produced the eventual catastrophe it has produced. And there’s the curious fact that, right up to his death, Gwilym Lloyd had some sort of hold over Finch. He obliged Finch to get him no end of profitable commissions around the City. And when Lloyd died Finch went on record – through his guileless wife – as saying that it was a good riddance of a damned nuisance. What do you make of that?’
‘Not much.’ The Professor smiled slowly. ‘Although it leads my mind back to the Fifth Man.’
‘As well it may. And one can think of an obvious reason why he has escaped identification so far. He belongs right outside the group, or clique, or gang – or whatever you care to call it. In fact, he’s the confidential source from whom the vital financial information came – or was bought, as we may safely suppose.’
‘Was any individual actually suspected at the time?’
‘Yes. Antony Hopcroft was.’
There was a long silence in Sir John Appleby’s study. The only sound was the soft clink of ice setting in a glass, since Appleby had provided the Professor with the sort of recruitment which the aftermath of a funeral commonly requires.
‘Good God!’ The Professor barely whispered this. ‘Antony was one of my brother’s closest colleagues – and impeccable.’
‘So one would have supposed. Yet a certain amount of evidence wasn’t lacking. Where any hope of an effective prosecution broke down, however, was in the fact that not the slightest trace of any connection between Finch’s group and Hopcroft could be found.’
‘And yet you suggest that here he was in this foolhardy picture?’ The Professor had suddenly transfixed Appleby with a scholar’s cold intellectual stare. ‘It would certainly be in the picture in another sense – the psychological picture, so to speak – of those arrogant champagne-swilling rascals. But it won’t do. My brother would have recognized Hopcroft’s portrait at once.’ The Professor’s gaze hardened further. ‘Do you suggest that he did, and that he concealed the fact from you?’
‘Nothing of the kind. What your brother did spot in the picture, he spotted because he was something of a connoisseur. The Fifth Man’s head is a piece of over-painting, and is by a hand other than Lloyd’s. The supreme impudence of the picture as it originally was, consisted in its depicting Antony Hopcroft as a member of the group. Lloyd must have understood the significance of this, or he wouldn’t have had that hold over Finch. Later on – and it was after Lloyd’s death – Finch decided the joke was too risky to perpetuate. He could, of course, simply have destroyed the Conversation Piece, but that might have caused awkward questions to be asked. So he had in another painter, and Hopcroft’s head disappeared beneath an imaginary head – that of our Fifth Man.’
‘And this fellow Henderson – the Fourth Man, as we may say?’
‘As I’ve told you, Henderson was present at the party in the Lyle. When he saw your brother spot the faking, and overheard him throw out that suggestion about a boffin, he saw instantly that the whole Peseta Affair might bob up again, this new piece of evidence be adduced, and a successful criminal prosecution achieved. But Beckett, the Director, hadn’t heard the boffin bit, and your brother had at once left the party. Silence him, and nobody would ever have a second thought about the Conversation Piece again.’
‘Do you mean to say–’
‘Excuse me.’ Appleby’s telephone had rung, and he picked up the instrument. ‘Thank you,’ he said unemotionally a minute later, and put it down again. ‘A development, Professor. Henderson was identified slipping out of the Comfiters’ premises, after all. By a commissionaire who had worked for one of his companies.’ Appleby glanced at a calendar. ‘Friday wasn’t Henderson’s lucky day.’
‘Nor was it my brother’s,’ the Professor said sadly.
Death by Water
Sir John Appleby had been worried about Charles Vandervell for some time. But this was probably true of a good many of the philosopher’s friends. Vandervell’s speculations, one of these had wittily remarked, could be conceived as going well or ill according to the sense one was prepared to accord that term. His last book, entitled (mysteriously to the uninstructed) Social Life as a Sign System, had been respectfully received by those who went in for that kind of thing; but it was clear that something had gone badly wrong with his investments. He was what is called a private scholar, for long unattached to any university or other salary-yielding institution, and had for years lived very comfortably indeed on inherited wealth of an unspecified but doubtless wholly respectable sort.
He was not a landed man. His country house, pleasantly situated a few miles from the Cornish coast, owned extensive gardens but was unsupported by any surrounding agricultural activities. The dividends came in, and that was that. Nobody could have thought of it as a particularly vulnerable condition. Some adverse change in the state of the national economy might be expected from time to time to produce a correspondingly adverse effect upon an income such as his. But it would surely require recessions, depressions and slumps of a major order to result in anything like catastrophe.
Vandervell himself was vague about the whole thing. This might have been put down to simple incompetence, since it would certainly have been difficult to imagine a man with less of a head for practical affairs. But there were those who maintained that some feeling of guilt was operative as well. Vandervell was uneasy about living a life of leisure on the labours of others, and was unwilling to face up to considering his mundane affairs at all. He occasionally spoke in an old-fashioned way about his ‘man of business’. Nobody had ever met this personage, or could so much as name him; but it was obvious that he must occupy a key position in the conduct of his client’s monetary affairs. Vandervell himself acknowledged this. ‘Bound to say,’ he had once declared to Appleby, ‘that my financial wizard earns his fees. No hope of keeping my chin above water at all, if I didn’t have him on the job. And even as it is, I can’t be said to be doing too well.’
For some months this last persuasion had been gaining on Vandervell rapidly and throwing him into ever deepening gloom. One reading of this was clearly that the gloom was pathological and irrational – a depressive state generated entirely within the unfortunate man’s own head – and that a mere fantasy of being hard up, quite unrelated to the objective facts of the case, was one distressing symptom of his condition. One does hear every now and then, after all, of quite wealthy people who have stopped the milk and the newspaper out of a firm conviction they can no longer pay for them. There was a point at which Appleby took this view of Vandervell’s state of mind. Vandervell was a fairly prolific writer, and his essays and papers began to suggest that the adverse state of his bank balance (whether real or imagined) was bringing him to a vision of the universe at large as weighted against him and all mankind in an equally disagreeable way. Hitherto his philosophical work had been of a severely intellectual and dispassionate order. Now he produced in rapid succession a paper on Schopenhauer, a paper on von Hartmann, and a long essay called Existentialism and the Metaphysic of Despair. All this didn’t precisely suggest cheerfulness breaking in.
This was the state of the case when Appleby encountered Vandervell’s nephew, Fabian Vandervell, in a picture gallery off Bond Street and took him to his club for lunch.
‘How is your uncle getting along?’ Appleby asked. ‘He doesn’t seem to come much to town nowadays, and it’s a long time since I’ve been down
your way.’
Fabian, who was a painter, also lived in Cornwall – more or less in a colony of artists in a small fishing village called Targan Bay. As his uncle was a bachelor, and he himself his only near relation, it was generally assumed that he would prove to be his uncle’s heir. The prospect was probably important to him, since nobody had ever heard of Fabian’s selling a picture. So Fabian, too, might well be concerned at the manner in which the family fortunes were said to be in a decline.
‘He muddles along,’ Fabian said. ‘And his interests continue to change for the worse, if you ask me. Did you ever hear of a book called Biathanatos?’
‘It rings a faint bell.’
‘It’s by John Donne, and is all about what Donne liked to call “the scandalous disease of headlong dying”. It caused a bit of a scandal, I imagine. Donne was Dean of St Paul’s, you remember, as well as a poet; so he had no business to be fudging up an apology for suicide. Uncle Charles is talking about editing Biathanatos, complete with his own learned commentary on the theme. Morbid notion.’ Fabian paused. ‘Uncommonly nice claret you have here.’
‘I’m delighted you approve of it.’ Appleby noticed that the modest decanter of the wine with which Fabian had been provided was already empty. ‘Do you mean that you are alarmed about your uncle?’
‘Well, he does talk about suicide in a general way, as well. But perhaps there’s no great cause for alarm.’
‘We’ll hope not.’ Appleby decided not to pursue this topic, which it didn’t strike him as his business to discuss. ‘I have it in mind to call in on your uncle, incidentally, in a few weeks’ time, when I go down to visit my sister at Bude. And now I want you to explain to me those pictures we both found ourselves looking at this morning. Puzzling things to one of my generation.’
Fabian Vandervell proved perfectly willing to accept this invitation. He held forth contentedly for the rest of the meal.
Appleby fulfilled his intention a month later, and his first impression was that Charles Vandervell had become rather a lonely man. Pentallon Hall was a substantial dwelling, yet apart from its owner only an elderly manservant called Litter was much in evidence. But at least one gardener must be lurking around, since the extensive grounds which shielded the place from the general surrounding bleakness of the Cornish scene were all in apple-pie order. Vandervell led Appleby over all this with the air of a country gentleman who has nothing in his head except the small concerns which the managing of such a property must generate. But the role wasn’t quite native to the man; and in an indefinable way none of the interests or projects which he paraded appeared quite to be coming off. Vandervell had a theory about bees, but the Pentallon bees were refusing to back it up. In a series of somewhat suburban-looking ponds he bred tropical fish, but even the mild Cornish climate didn’t suit these creatures at all. Nor at the moment did it suit the roses Vandervell was proposing to exhibit at some local flower show later in the season; they were plainly (like so much human hope and aspiration, their owner commented morosely) nipped in the bud. All in all, Charles Vandervell was revealing himself more than ever as a man not booked for much success except, conceivably, within certain rather specialised kingdoms of the mind.
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