‘Oh yes. It’s the usual park for the Palette Group members.’
Of those three names, only one could be partly eliminated — Aymas’s; he had left the cellar later than Mrs Johnson. It didn’t put him in the clear, since he might have followed straight after her, but it made him a little less vulnerable than the others.
‘I think you told Inspector Hansom that Allstanley was the first to leave — apart from Shoreby, of course, who went early to catch a bus?’
‘That was what I dug up for him after racking my brains over it. But you know as well as I that such impressions are undependable.’
‘You mean that you want to withdraw it?’
Mallows made a comical face at him. ‘Come off it, my dear fellow, and let’s discuss it like fellow mortals. I’m the chairman of that group, which means that I do a lot of talking. It’s my business to open the proceedings, to keep them civil and to wind them up. And that, I assure you, is not a sinecure — if you think it is, you know little about painters.
‘They’re like a lot of bear-cats thrown together in a pit. I sometimes think that lion tamers have a softer job than I have. As a result, I don’t have much time to tabulate arrivals and departures — when it’s getting to half past ten, I’m busy trying to break them up. I know that Shoreby went for his bus and that Allstanley took his exit promptly; but if he says that someone left ahead of him, well, I wouldn’t like to call him a liar.’
Gently nodded without enthusiasm, his eye on one of the fish pictures. Behind them, in the afternoon sunlight, people moved leisurely against a background of flowers.
‘What can you tell me about this Allstanley?’
‘He’s picked up with wire. Which I think is a pity.’
‘About his character, I mean.’
‘Apart from that, I know nothing against him. He’s just on forty and about my height — a lot of great men are five feet seven. He’s a teacher and lives and works at Walford — that’s a village some seven or eight miles out of town. He used to sculpt in beech before he got the wire bug. He’s been with us now… oh, four or five years.’
‘One of your bear-cats, is he?’
‘Good heavens no. He’s one of the quiet ones. Being a sculptor, perhaps, he feels aloof from the squalid mob.’
‘A married man?’
‘No. He runs a car, as I said. You can’t have it all ways when you’re merely a teacher.’
‘Was he a friend of Mrs Johnson’s?’
‘Ah, now we come to the kernel…! But we all had an eye on that lady, you know. She was a very popular member, a species of uncrowned royalty; and if it comes to that, I’ve taken her out to lunch myself.’
‘But he was a friend, was he?’
‘All right. He was.’
‘Something more than a friend?’
‘No, laddie. Just friendly.’
‘On lunching terms, for instance?’
Mallows winked at him broadly. ‘Even here, it isn’t sinful to take a lady into Lyons.’
It was a gentle rebuke, and Gently acknowledged it with a shrug. Mallows wasn’t going to be edged into tendentious guesses. Instead of trying further, Gently switched to
Baxter and Aymas, listening absently and with few questions as Mallows described them to him.
‘Baxter is fortyish too, a lean fellow with an Adam’s apple. He’s principally a commercial artist and works in the art department of Hallman’s. He whiffs at a silly little pipe and has a wicked tongue when he likes — actually, he’s quite a good man. He’s got a natural flair for poster colour.
‘Aymas is younger than him, and quite a different brand of coffee. An angry young man, you’d probably call him, though you could substitute “ignorant” for “angry”. He looks like, and is, a farm worker who has taught himself to paint. He’s one of my principal bear-cats and I’m perpetually having to sit on him.
‘Baxter is married and has three children, Aymas would like to be thought a Don Juan. He was as thick as anyone with Shirley — she’d got the refinement he admired, you understand. But I doubt if it went any further. Shirley was amused but she wasn’t attracted. As for Aymas, he was satisfied to be thought her favourite — he basked, you might say, in her reflected culture. Incidentally, I left him arguing the toss in the cellar.’
‘That brings me to another thing I wanted to ask you.’
Gently, at long last, had seen enough of the Wimbush fishes. They were curiously bloated and heavy-looking creatures, and though distinguished in detail, still depressingly alike.
‘The meeting itself — can’t you tell me something about that?’
‘Tell you what, my dear fellow?’
‘Wasn’t it noisier than usual?’
Mallows screwed up his mouth. ‘N-no, I wouldn’t have said so. Just the same old fiddles playing the same old tunes.’
‘And what tunes were they?’
Mallows twisted his mouth again; then he peered up at Gently, half questioning, half amused.
‘To kick off with, you’d better have a look at the pictures. They’ll probably tell you as much as I can about it. I’ll just say this… they’re a pretty fair sample. So have a look round, and then tell me what you find.’
This was something which Gently had intended doing in any case, and after a moment’s silence, he fell in with the suggestion. With Mallows bobbing at his elbow he proceeded from stand to stand, answering with monosyllables and grunts the academician’s exclamations.
Overall, it was such a mixture as one would have expected to find there, giving the impression of talent fixed between mediocrity and ability. Here and there a picture stood out as though in promise of better things, but one felt, in those surroundings, that such a picture was a lucky hit. There was nowhere to be seen the confident vitality of an established professional.
Every exhibit, in fact, seemed in the nature of an experiment, and gave no suggestion of powers of reproduction. After a number of failures a fortunate canvas had evolved, but one could sense the inability to command such another. Once a year, there would be one or two to put in the exhibition.
There was, however, a variety in the scope of the experiments, and this prevented the exhibition from being entirely dull. Apart from Wimbush’s fish there were other unusual lines — Shoreby, for instance, painted geometrical panels, and Lavery postcard-size abstracts.
‘That’s Aymas’s rude, raw brush…’
Mallows pointed to a group of three vigorous landscapes. They commanded a certain distinction by their daring use of primaries, but otherwise Gently could see in them little of interest.
‘And yet the fellow has talent, if he ever lets it out. But he won’t while he sticks to understudying Seago… There’s one of Baxter’s posters — a surprising use of purple! — and a Phil Watts interior. He’s the youngster at the desk.’
At the end of the tour Mallows turned to Gently expectantly, his brushed-up eyebrows giving him an owlish appearance.
‘Did you get what I meant, or would you like me to tell you…?’
Gently grinned. ‘I think I got it… aren’t there two schools of thought?’
‘Splendid, splendid!’ Mallows patted him on the shoulder. ‘My opinion of you was never higher, Superintendent. You’ve hit the target first go — we’ve got a split down our middle. It’s tradition versus modernism that rocks the cellar walls.’
‘Aymas, Seymour and that lot…’
‘Precisely. Aymas is their champion.’
‘Wimbush, Lavery and Shoreby-’
‘They’re the shock troopers of the opposition. Numerically, Superintendent, the two factions are about the same, but the reactionaries shout the louder and the opposition is the more biting.’
‘And your job is to hold the balance?’
‘That, alack, is my leading function. On the first Monday of every month I fetch my armour from the cupboard.’
Insensibly they had drawn back towards the booth of Wimbush fishes, which continued the least frequented
