Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

  It seemed to me that Professor Stubbs was going just a little bit fast in building up a story from a few fire-rusted tintacks. I said as much. He snorted at me.

  “Humph,” his glare was really fierce, “I got a good story an’ I’m goin’ to try it out. There’s no reason why I should not try it out before I discard it. It’s the only story I can think o’ which ’ud seem to hang together at all. I got to ha’ somethin’ to start from an’ this idea o’ mine gives me a flyin’ start. After all, if ye work things out ye’ll see that these tacks couldn’t ha’ bin put in the fire longer ago than the day that Ambleside was murdered. If they had bin put there on the day before that, we’d ha’ found two lots o’ ash on ’em, whereas there they were, stickin’ out on the top deck. No, Max, someone was burnin’ somethin’ wi’ tacks in it on the day or night o’ Ambleside’s murder an’ that’s enough to make me wonder in itself. But when ye take these tacks an’ the fact that four paintin’s are missin’ an’ put these facts alongside one another, I think that even the dullest bobby on the beat would say that ye were holdin’ the remains o’ the pictures. It must,” his voice was heavily thoughtful, “have bin a kinda long job burnin’ these pictures even in an Ideal boiler the size o’ this. Ye’d need to chop ’em up an’ burn ’em in pieces an’ ye couldn’t feed the fire too quickly in case ye put it out. At a guess I’d say it ’ud take two or three hours o’ hard concentration an’ I can’t say I’d ha’ liked the job.” He shuddered like an immense mastiff shaking itself. “No, Max. Can ye imagine the feelings o’ the chap, sittin’ down here feedin’ scraps o’ canvas an’ wood into the boiler an’ wonderin’ all the time if the body o’ Ambleside has bin found an’ if the police will be rollin’ round to look at his house.”

  “No,” I reminded him, “the murderer ran no such risks. The gallery was shut up by the last person to leave it, and the door works on an automatic lock which shuts from the outside but which can be opened by a handle on the inside. The murderer knew that, unless the body was found by someone connected with the gallery, and, as Douglas told you, they were all so busy that that was improbable, no one could come in from outside and take a peep behind the drapery over the Max Ernst. You must remember that all the gallery people knew, or thought they knew, what was behind the cloth, and so they had no curiosity. The only person who might have been curious was an outsider, and no outsider could get in to let his curiosity run riot.”

  He nodded like a large and benevolent owl. “Ye’re quite, right, Max,” he said, “I was forgettin’ that. Did ye also find out how many o’ the people connected wi’ the Museum could get in, havin’ keys?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and that’s no good either. Every single person, even Miss Rampion and Douglas, has a key. They’ve all been working very late, trying to get things finished in time and they all had keys to let them go out to get a meal in the evening and then go back if they wanted to, without bringing someone else away from their work to open the door.”

  The old man looked at the pile of tin tacks. They looked rather sordid, oxidised by being in the fire, lying on the shining metal of the draining board.

  “Hell,” he said gloomily, “I don’t suppose there’s much more we can do here this evenin’. Ye’d better put up these tacks in a match-box, if ye can find one, an’ we’ll take them wi’ us. They may,” he sounded rather doubtful, “ha’ some value as evidence.”

  I looked around till I found an empty bottle which had once held mixed spices. I put the tacks into that and put the bottle into my pocket. The old man took out his immense old-fashioned turnip watch.

  “As I thought,” he said gloomily, “we’re missin’ good drinkin’ time. I’m gettin’ hellish thirsty an’ I don’t know about you, but I think it’s gettin’ on for time for a very large drink.”

  He said this with great determination and made off up the stairs. We went to the Six Bells. I hoped that the drink would clear my head. It didn’t. I was still trying to sort things out in my mind when we finished our fourth pint and went out into the King’s Road.

  The Professor proceeded to make me more dazed. He started to look for Douglas Newsome. Finding Douglas entailed something pretty heroic in the way of pub-crawls. I pointed out when the old man started for Douglas’s home address that we would not find him there, at that time in the evening. From every point of view except that of drinking rather more than plenty, we were unlucky. We tried the back bar of the Café Royal, the Swiss, the Intrepid Fox, the Salisbury, the Highlander and the George. In all of these pubs, which I knew Douglas used, we drew blank. We were thinking of going back on our steps and trying the pubs in between the Crown and Angel, the Helvetia, the Two Chairmen, the Dog and Duck and so on, when I thought of the Wheatsheaf. We found him there. By that time I guess I was as drunk as Douglas usually was. It would have been all right if the Professor had been content to let me open the door of a pub and just look in, but not him. He said it was an insult to a publican to look into his pub and not have a drink. So it meant that we had two or three in each.

  We managed to disentangle Douglas from a heated argument he was having with a young man who had more hair under his chin than on top of his head. I still don’t know what they were arguing about and I don’t think either of them knew, but they were plenty heated about it.

  The Wheatsheaf was pretty crowded. Maclaren Ross in a teddy-bear coat and carrying a long black cane was talking to Ruthven Todd who was wearing a shirt which I recognised as belonging to Dylan Thomas. The Professor took up the devil of a lot of room. He put back quite a quantity of Scotch ale and then we pulled Douglas out into the night. The cold air seemed to hit him hard, but we made him understand that we wanted him to take us back to the Museum. He grumbled a bit and said that he thought he had finished with the place for the day, but I pointed out that the Wheatsheaf would be closing in a few minutes, and he agreed to come.

  Inside the Museum it was rather extraordinary. The place felt rather like the inside of a pyramid. We went up the stairs, because the old man mistrusts lifts so much, and entered the library. There the old man sat down at the desk and started to read every single thing he could find about Giorgio de Chirico. I must say I didn’t see where he hoped it was going to get him, but I suppose he justified it to himself on the grounds that all knowledge is valuable.

  Chapter 7

  Serenity of the Scholar

  I MUST say that I didn’t feel any too good as the Bentley roared through the London streets towards Francis Varley’s flat near Gordon Square. It had taken the old man till after three to read all that he could find on the subject of Chirico, and all the time Douglas and I had felt the drink dying in us like the mercury in a thermometer on a frosty day. Douglas had had a half bottle of whisky and a couple of quarts of Tolly hidden in his desk, but these had not lasted very long.

  The only consolation I had was that I was not alone in my misery. If I knew anything about Douglas he would be ten times worse than I was.

  Francis Varley’s flat was the top one of about three in a converted eighteenth century house. We went up the stairs slowly, with the old man grumbling at the number of stairs he had had to climb in recent days. I pointed out that it was his own fault as he would not travel in lifts if he could avoid it. He just growled at me.

  Francis Varley, dressed in a light grey suit and with a dark grey bow tie with tiny white dots, opened the door to us and we went in. The place was beautifully furnished with bookshelves to a height of about four feet round all the walls of the sitting room. Before the window there was a large desk, covered with papers and with pots of ink. On the walls there hung a few carefully chosen drawings, shewing the catholicity of Varley’s taste. There was a Tiepolo and a drawing which looked as though it probably was a Gainsborough, as well as a water-colour of Bloomsbury by Rowlandson, and, coming up to more modern days there was a first-rate early drawing by Millais, and a sketch by Seurat. Then there was a drawing, of the Blue period, by Picasso, a Klee of a little pin-head man
walking a tightrope and a very fine cubist pencil drawing by Juan Gris.

  I always look at people’s books. They interest me. The Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Warburg Institute stood shoulder to shoulder with bound volumes of Cahiers d’Art, Verve and Minotaurem along the large bottom shelves. The other shelves were neatly ranged with the multicoloured paper-backs of French books and the expensive buckram of English and German books on art.

  Varley offered us seats and then coffee. I took it, as I thought it would either kill or cure me, and I didn’t much mind which it did. He offered a china box of Balkan Sobranie, but that I turned down, as I did not think I could stand Turkish tobacco at that hour of the morning in my wretched condition.

  He pulled up the knees of his trousers and sat down himself. I thought he looked mildly amused at the elephantine figure of the old man in his rather delicate surroundings.

  “Harumph,” the Professor snorted, “I hope ye don’t mind me rousin’ ye at this hour o’ the mornin’?”

  “Not the least,” said Varley, looking at his watch. It was after ten, but the old man had obviously made up his mind that a man who lived in surroundings like these, was a man who would sleep late.

  “Ye see,” the old man rumbled on, “I got to find out one or two things about the late Mr. Julian Ambleside, an’ I think ye’re the one man who can gi’mme a proper lead. Ye see we know that ye sometimes received money from him—the coppers ha’ bin lookin’ into his affairs an’ I got the information from ’em. So, if ye don’t think I’m horrid pryin’ I wonder if ye’d mind tellin’ me what he paid ye for?”

  “Not the least,” Varley was imperturbable, “As you may, or may not know, I am by way of being an art expert, though, unfortunately, I have not the personal means to permit of my also being a collector. Naturally in the course of my work I sometimes come across works which, while they are beyond my personal means, are worth considerably more than I am asked for them. On these occasions I have usually purchased such works and have either resold them, or have arranged for a dealer to sell them for me. So far as I can remember, Julian Ambleside did both for me. It all depended upon the work whether he bought it from me, or sold it for me on a commission basis.”

  “Uhhuh,” the Professor nodded, “I can understand that. Now, among the paintin’s which ye ha’ handled, there wouldn’t be any by that Italian feller, Chirico, would there ?”

  For a moment I thought that Varley looked slightly startled, but he recovered his composure and placed the Balkan Sobranie between his lips before he answered.

  “No,” he said, “no paintings by Chirico. I did once sell Ambleside a pencil drawing which I was not enamoured of myself, but I have never had the good fortune to stumble upon a really good Chirico.” He sounded rather regretful. “I wonder, though, my dear sir, why you asked me that question. What do you know about Chirico?”

  This last question might have sounded insulting, as though he was suggesting that a botanist who was also an amateur detective, had no right to presume to a knowledge of modern painting, but he said it so disarmingly, with a charming smile, that nobody could have been offended.

  “Um,” the Professor mumbled, “Um. That’s just it. I’m not sure what I know about Chirico. I just kinda got an idea that there was somethin’ wrong wi’ the Chiricos which Ambleside was handlin’. Am I right?”

  “Well,” Varley was cautious, “I would not go so far as to say that. I would only say that I, as a purely personal feeling, was not quite happy about them. You see, the problem with Chirico lies in his extraordinary collapse, from aesthetic standards, from about 1918 on. Before that date he painted pictures which have, probably, had as great an influence, direct and indirect, as the works of any artist of our time, not excluding Picasso. Well, at some period in the early twenties, at the suggestion of his friends among the Surrealists, Chirico set to work and copied many of his early paintings. The Surrealists hoped that by doing this he would recapture the elusive something which he had lost. In copying these pictures Chirico copied every single detail of them, down to the dates upon which the original was painted. Now I enter upon a more difficult subject, upon which I cannot pretend to know the rights or the wrongs. When Chirico quarrelled with the Surrealists they replied by accusing him of selling these copies, some of them magnificent works in their way, as the originals. I do not know whether there is any truth in this story, and if there is it is a difficult matter to decide upon the moral values implicit in it. For the man would be selling, as his work, works which he had done. The only falsity would lie in the matter of the dates, and as the pictures were avowedly copies they would be genuine in everything but the date. Now, there is the question of the Chiricos which belonged to Julian Ambleside—the one he sold to Emily and the four he still had in his possession. My private opinion of these pictures was that they were not the genuine work of Chirico at all, but were supremely good copies, or if you’d rather, forgeries. But as the pictures had been passed by experts like the learned Doctor I did not feel at liberty to announce my private opinion, but, instead, I resurrected the story of Chirico’s own copies, as I felt that that would be less hurtful to Julian as a dealer and to Cornelius Bellamy as an expert. You may have realised that if the dear Doctor decided that the world was spinning backwards—the world would be spinning backwards. Dr. Bellamy has one serious fault and that is that he is never at fault.”

  He paused and lit another cigarette. The sight of the plump white Balkan Sobranie reminded me of the crank, collected by D. H. Lawrence, who referred to the cigarette as “this tubular white ant which is sapping our civilisation.”

  “Now I come to think of it,” he went on, “I would like to take another look at the Chiricos which were still in Julian’s possession when he was murdered. Unfortunately the picture which Emily bought was so badly damaged by some person unknown,” he smiled wryly, “that I could form no further conclusions from the fragments, which, I believe, are now a part of one of Mr. Carr’s rubbish decorations at the Museum. Do you think, my dear sir, that the constabulary would permit me to view the pictures?”

  “I got no doubt they would,” the old man rumbled, “if they were there to view, but they ain’t. Yer person unknown got into Ambleside’s house an’ kinda incinerated the thunderin’ lot. All that Max, here, an’ I could find when we took a look last night was a lot o’ blinkin’ tacks in the ashes from the boiler.”

  “Oh,” said Varley a trifle blankly, “Oh, I see. I wonder what that means?”

  “If I was sure o’ what it meant,” Professor Stubbs grumbled, “I wouldn’t be here tryin’ to pick yer brains, like a man eatin’ winkles wi’ a pin.”

  “I wonder now,” Varley looked very thoughtful, “I suppose that this means that whoever murdered Julian was also the person who destroyed the pictures. That puts the lid on the learned Doctor’s theory that the Chirico at the Museum was destroyed by an obsessional character. You know the line of talk of the amateur psychologist? Yes. Well, the Doctor is an expert at it and he trolled out the most beautiful line about the picture being a portrait of some man’s soul or psyche—he invented a new name for it—the Dorian Gray complex. There was a lot of stuff about the vandal’s courage in destroying the picture when he might be destroying himself.”

  He looked vastly amused as he thought of the theory propounded by Dr. Bellamy.

  “I wonder now,” he spoke very slowly, “have you been able to trace where Julian got the pictures?”

  “Haven’t got round to that yet,” the Professor was cheerful, “but no doubt we’ll find out. Then, I can take it that yer opinion is that the five pictures by Chirico were, in fact, not genuine at all, but just simple forgeries, eh?”

  “Yes,” said Varley, “but for heaven’s sake don’t quote me. If the dear Doctor knew that I had doubted his opinion as an expert to that extent, he would never speak to me again. For publication you can say that I thought they were Chirico’s own copies. Everyone knows that I had that opinion—I ha
d quite a tiff with dear Emily about it, but we made it up. Naturally, dear Emily did not like to think that her pet Museum might be housing pictures which were not all that they claimed to be.”

  “Could you,” the Professor leaned forward heavily, “ha’ got into the Museum whenever ye wanted to?”

  “Good Lord, yes,” said Varley, “I’ve got a key. We’ve all got keys as we were apt to be working late. Even that amiable lunatic Carr has one. You know,” he leaned forward, “when the body of Julian was unveiled in that manner my first thought was that Carr had got up to mischief. Judging from his wall decorations, I would say that the idea of a dead man on the wall would have appealed to him. I must say that I thought of Carr as the murderer. I suppose you’ve looked into that?”

  “Uhhuh,” the Professor grunted, “I looked into it, an’ my own idea is that we were all meant to think o’ the irresponsible Carr as a likely person to ha’ done the murder. The trouble is that I can never believe in the likely person as the murderer. It’s too dam’ obvious, an’ no one in their senses would do a murder which pointed directly at them.”

  “I dare say not,” said Varley gravely, “but if I was to do a murder I think I would leave it so that it did point to me rather strongly, in the hope that you would think it couldn’t be me after all.”

  “That ’ud be dam’ dangerous,” said the old man, “for I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-lookin’, an’ I’d probably find ye out an’ ha’ ye hanged. But in this case we got the spurious pictures kinda mixed wi’ the murder an’ while Carr might ha’ done the murder, I ha’ me doubts as to whether he’d anythin’ to do wi’ the pictures. He’s a more direct kinda character. If he wanted money badly he’d steal it, an’ wouldn’t go the round about way o’ forgin’ paintin’s to get it. Don’t you agree?”