the lot — perhaps you would like to keep an eye on her?’
Stephens flushed. ‘I was going to suggest it…’
‘Righto, my lad! We’ll find you some transport. But remember that Johnson has got a gun… If he should turn up, just ring us at Headquarters.’
He had Hansom drop him off outside his hotel, where he went straight down to the below-stair dining room. Being Saturday, the place was crowded in spite of the lateness of the hour, and the waitress who served him looked fagged as well as heated.
‘You wouldn’t have a plate of fried chicken, would you?’
In the end, he settled for steak with new potatoes and peas. Cramming the tables round about him were red-faced farmers, those who were attending the weekly cattle market that was held beneath the Castle. Watching them, he wondered how many would stray into the exhibition, which, well found in posters, opened directly off their sale ground. Their wives, perhaps, but what about the menfolk…?
He could imagine their reaction to the Wimbush fishes!
After the steak, with which he had drunk half a pint of bitter, he ordered an apple turnover and custard sauce. The noise and clatter of the farmers, whose Saturday lunch was an institution, had a pleasantly lulling effect in the warm and gravy-scented room. As happened so often, his mind relaxed over a meal. It seemed to loosen the ideas that until then were held rigid. Apparently without assistance they began to sort and adjust themselves, forming patterns and suggestions like the pieces in a kaleidoscope.
There was for instance that sketch of Mallows, which lay photographed on his brain — was it merely an hypothesis or had Mallows taken it from life? Did he know of such a man, and know him to be infatuated with Shirley Johnson, or was there another and secret reason why Mallows had suggested this to him?
For a little he toyed with the idea that X had been a self-portrait, given adjustment, naturally, to obscure the resemblance. But no, such an assumption had to be fundamentally impossible; what assurances did Mallows need for his spreading, triumphant genius?
Aymas fitted the description a good deal better, allowing his angry young mannishness to be a case of inversion. Mallows, Gently was convinced, was capable of applying misdirection, and a misdirection of this kind would be characteristic of him. But was Aymas’s choler an example of inversion — or the sort of inversion required to satisfy X? Though he had seen little of Aymas, Gently was disinclined to think so; his impression had been of an irritable extrovert who suffered from glands rather than from psychopathic troubles.
Who, then, was next in line — Wimbush? Baxter? Farrer? The latter had a smile, though it could scarcely be called a shy one! Or was it one of the members whom he had yet to meet — or somebody else entirely, beyond the orbit of the Palette Group?
From the way that Mallows had drawn the portrait Gently could swear that it had had a definite subject, and this was the point which kept emerging through the various permutations. It had been sketched with such vivacity, such unhesitating strokes, as though Mallows had long since explored what he described. Thus it followed that X was a familiar acquaintance of Mallows’s, or one at least whom he had had good opportunities to observe. Was it his knowledge, then, which had suggested this interpretation of the murder to him, or did he possess some information which more positively indicated X?
If X were indeed a familiar acquaintance, the academician ’s hedginess was explicable. Unless he was positive that X had done it, he would take pains not to give him away. But his suspicions, however founded, were strong enough in one article: he had wanted to deflect Gently’s interest from Johnson, and so had partly shown him his hand. What would have happened if Johnson had been charged? Would Mallows have volunteered information?
Gently tossed off a cup of coffee which had stood until it was nearly cold. Going back again to the beginning, had Mallows some other reason for that hypothesis? As a man he attracted Gently, but that was a bad excuse for passing him over; on another occasion Gently had met an engaging murderer, and nearly made a third on his list of victims. And there was another point which kept reappearing. Mallows was the last person to see her alive. He had tried to make fun of it but it was hard to laugh it away, and a motive of blackmail was more convincing than the most strongly argued psychological theory…
Impatiently, Gently thrust this angle into the background. Somewhere, at some time, you had to trust your instinct about people. About Mallows there was something too sane, too balanced — his reaction to attempts at blackmail would probably have been a public lecture.
So, you were left with the conviction that his suggestion was bona fide, and that his X was a serious alternative to the missing Derek Johnson. And the problem remained, where did you begin looking for X? His outward marks a shy smile, and a trail of hopeless paintings. The field seemed to embrace the Palette Group and the whole acquaintance of St John Mallows… unless, by the aid of their pictures, one could winnow out some of the former.
From the hotel kiosk he rang HQ:
‘You wouldn’t have an art expert on the strength, would you?’
‘Art expert my foot…!’ Hansom’s disgust was scathing.
‘I’d like a really good man.’
‘Well, you won’t find one here!’
After thinking about it, he referred Gently to a couple of dealers and to the Art School, but neither of these alternatives seemed to promise much on a Saturday. Instead Gently decided he would try his luck unaided — his judgement of pictures was far from professional, but clue in hand, he might ferret out something.
He met a newsboy while crossing the Paddock and stopped to buy a lunchtime paper. It was still the doings of Pagram which overbalanced the front page.
GUNMAN CHARGED WITH FISHER MURDER
37 More Arrests
Yard Make Clean Sweep Of Criminal ‘Empire’
Frederick Peachfield, 39, alleged to be a building contractor, was this morning formally charged with the murder of Harold (‘Jimmy’) Fisher. While resisting arrest during last night’s raids he shot and seriously wounded a Metropolitan Police Constable.
Mopping-up operations are still going on and 37 more arrests have been made in the East End. In a statement to the press made by a senior Yard officer, it is claimed that the Warehouse Gangs have been virtually wiped out…
The inference was plain though not explicitly stated — they had recovered Peachfield’s gun, and it was the gun which had killed Fisher. Nothing else would so have telescoped the ‘arduous routine’, and have enabled Peachfield to be charged so promptly on the heels of his arrest. He was an open and shut case. He would never pull another gun…
The Saturday influx of country people had not been limited to farmers, and the Gardens were much more crowded than they had been the day before. Their piece de resistance was certainly missing — it was still locked away in the Super’s office; but the space it left vacant had not been filled, and curiously enough, it exercised a strong attraction. Gently noticed again that most of the patrons were women. It suggested an amusing extension of Mallows’s dictum. If art had to be for someone, and that someone was women, then didn’t it follow that women were the principal directors of the course of art…?
A good number of the exhibits were now marked with red stars, and Phillip Watts, in his booth, was being kept busy with inquiries. Gently sifted the jostling viewers for a Palette Group member; after a few minutes’ hunting, he spotted the angular figure of Baxter. He made his way across to him.
‘You’re doing a roaring trade, I see…’
Baxter turned to examine him distastefully through his steel-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a jacket of chalky tweed over a neat, plum-coloured shirt, with dark worsted trousers and impeccable sandals. He gave an impression of being enormously hygienic, as though he had scrubbed himself with carbolic soap.
‘I don’t know if you can refer to this as trade… sensation, I would call it: a cheap sensation.’
‘Anyway, it’s selling pictures.’
I am quite aware of that. But I am not convinced that that is entirely the object of the exhibition.’
Gently grinned to himself — he could imagine Mallows’s reply to that one! — but it was not his present purpose to start an argument with Baxter. If it was possible he wanted to get the poster artist’s cooperation, to use
