There was no calling Mallows to order even if Gently had wanted to, but the academician had already given him more to chew on than he had expected. What was more, and this was rare with Gently, he felt an affinity with the man; Mallows had charm and more than charm — one felt at home with him in a moment.
‘These are things I’ve done for myself, all the ones you see stored in the racks, and there are one or two early canvases which I didn’t sell at the time. One day, I’m going to build a gallery. I want to see them all set out. Some artists can’t stand their own pictures — avec raison, you’ll say, of some contemporaries.’
‘Wouldn’t you find it a bit… overpowering?’
‘Not a whit. I’ve got the devil’s own ego. Then it’s nice to be able to see the subjects that you’ve got rid of — you won’t have to paint that again, or these, or those. You can’t guess what a satisfactory feeling it gives you.’
‘Don’t you enjoy painting, then?’
‘It’s a bed of thorns, my dear fellow. An artist is the most tormented devil alive. He loathes the sight of a blank canvas and yet he’s always standing in front of one — he sees a vision which gets on his nerves, and somehow then he has to get rid of it. Until that’s done, he can’t live with himself. He’s like a prophet with a gag in his mouth. You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: either you paint for someone, or else you’re not an artist; and that goes for every other art under the sun.’
While he spoke he was pulling out one canvas after another, bewildering Gently by the succession of subjects. Unlike most of his contemporaries Mallows scorned to specialize, and his astonishing talents seemed to embrace the entire cosmos. Landscape, seascape, portraiture, still life, each one had come to be conquered by that luminous, rich brush; crowd scenes, architecture, horses, snowscapes, even historical reconstructions; there seemed nothing that he hadn’t attempted.
‘Do you see what it is I’m trying to do? Good lord, what a period this is for an artist! For years I’ve been telling people where they stand with art, and might as well have shouted it up a chimney. We’ve changed our whole footing, that’s the point of departure. Without noticing it, we’ve crashed through a spiritual sound barrier. There’s a curtain pulled, Gently, across the centuries preceding us, and it’s cut off the old sun to leave us blinded by the new.
‘Do you know what engendered art, and society, and everything else? It was fear, plain fear, nothing bigger or nobler than that. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of all the great Unknown: it drove men to get together, to search for a meaning, to increase their stature.
‘Just as it did our old friend, X! This was his tragedy, historically foreshadowed. A race of X’s were driven together, to glorify themselves and to tame their universe. They insisted that it should be significant and they set up gods who understood it; and then, by pomp and rank and circumstance, they added divinity to man.
‘Which was where art came into the picture — its job was to gild the ersatz lily. It had to inject mere nature with significance, and to exhibit man as larger than life. And that, my dear fellow, it was doing, up and down the painful centuries; until a handful of decades ago, art had no other aim at all.’
‘But now…?’ Gently pressed him hesitantly, painfully conscious of his threadbare ignorance.
‘Ah! There’s the question which vexes the age — the flywheel has dropped off, and the machine has flown to pieces.
‘It happened, as it was bound to, that man came to his senses. It was a long time stirring but it came to a head in the last century. He was in fact growing up, he was throwing away his baubles; he had begun to grasp his universe and himself, and how things worked. So he could do without the gilt, having trampled on the lily. There was scarcely any need for the sublime any longer. The arts, which had always purveyed it, were rapidly stranded high and dry; they had lost their raison d’etre and they were left with the bleak, flat truth.
‘A desperate state of affairs indeed! No wonder it presented a scene of chaos. The tradition of a thousand years was dead, and man was left without a precedent…’
‘And so you got all this… hocus-pocus?’
‘Yes. It was every man for himself. Theories, slogans, cranks and abuse — art became a bedlam of heroes and panic. And now, to cap it, there’s the “New Criticism”, to prove that a couple of blacks make a white.
‘If you are faced with an art which is meaningless, why, you proclaim that art shouldn’t have a meaning…’
At that stage they had returned to the doctrine, and it lasted until Withers called them to lunch; once Mallows had fairly got into the subject he pressed it along like a yacht under full sail.
‘My dear fellow, I can lecture all day…’
Gently’s acknowledging shrug was rueful. But he hadn’t been bored during that enthusiastic monologue, and all the while, round the corner, lurked the prospect of fried chicken…
But this, unhappily, he was destined never to eat; he was called away to the phone before he had even finished his soup. It wasn’t Stephens but Hansom who had made a call so untimely, and there was a mocking ring in the Chief Inspector’s voice.
‘I thought you’d like to hear how the Johnson boyo was doing. You know, he always struck me as a restless sort of character.’
‘How do you mean…?’
‘He’s done a skip act — bolted — skedaddled out of town. He cleared his bank account at eleven, and that’s the last that anyone’s seen of him.’
‘But what about the tail?’
‘Yeah.’ Hansom sounded a little sour. ‘He fell for the oldest gag in the book — Johnson went in at the front door and came out at the back. That’s why it’s taken so long to hear about it. Our dumb-bell stood waiting there over an hour. Then he did a quick tour of Johnson’s flat and office — all that, before he decided to let us know.’
‘You’ve got an alert going?’
‘Yep. Shoot him on sight. And that’s not as funny as you think it is, either. You want to know what the boyo was hoarding in his safe deposit? It was a souvenir Luger, with a belt full of ammo!’
Gently clamped down the receiver and swore, far from gently.
CHAPTER NINE
Johnson’s red MG was parked blatantly in front of the bank, which was a branch in a street only a stone’s throw from his office. A constable stood by it with the self-conscious air of picketed constables. A police car, Hansom’s, was jammed in behind Johnson’s.
‘The Chief Inspector is with the manager, sir.’
Gently nodded and strode on in. Behind their counter with its barricades of varnished mahogany the clerks glanced quickly, deprecatingly towards him.
‘Superintendent Gently…’
‘This way, sir, please.’
A counter flap was lifted for him, and he was led down an aisle of desks.
In the office he found Stephens as well as Hansom. The young Inspector avoided his eye; he had an awkward, apologetic look.
Hansom quickly took Gently aside:
‘This geezer knows more than he’s letting on! There’s only one back way out of here, and it goes through the private hall of the bank house…’
‘What does he say about it?’
‘Says that Johnson was a friend of his.’
The manager was, as Gently had realized, the man he had met in the George III. His smile had now become a little less cordial, but he was still making an effort to keep it in place.
‘So… we meet again, Superintendent!’ He made a wan attempt to sound facetious. ‘I didn’t imagine that it would have been quite so soon…’
Like Stephens, he had an apology in the way he carried himself, but unlike the detective he suffered from no trace of awkwardness. As a senior bank official he understood the airs and graces: he made a slight, ingratiating movement as he felt Gently’s deliberate scrutiny.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me exactly what happened?’
