and she was surprised, but she didn’t ask him where or why, she merely said: “All right, darling, don’t be too late.” She was a nice mother, he was suddenly moved to engulf her in a bear’s hug before he fled, but she was holding a hot iron, so he didn’t do it. She hadn’t even said: “But you haven’t finished your homework!” though he hadn’t. Any other mother would have been all too liable to nag, the way he was skimping his work these days.
He got out his bike and rode into Comerbourne, and let himself into Mrs. Harkness’s front garden by the low iron gate. There was an outside bell for the Armigers, but they didn’t always hear it, you had to walk in at the front door and climb the stairs and tap on the door of their room.
Leslie was sitting over a pile of books at the table, in his shirt-sleeves and a cloud of cigarette smoke. Dominic might not be doing his homework, but Leslie was, with dedicated concentration. He’d come down from Oxford without a degree, having behaved there as his father had fully intended him to behave, tossing his liberal allowance about gaily, playing with zest, painting with passion, cutting an engaging figure socially and working only just enough to keep him out of trouble, and perhaps a little over to appease his tutor after every grieved lecture, purely out of liking for the old boy, and as a concession to his conservative ideas of what universities were for. That left him with a lot of leeway to make up now, when marriage and responsibility had put a sharp end to his prolonged adolescence.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dominic, dismayed. “I’d better not butt in on you if you’re working.”
“No, come in, it’s all right.” Leslie closed his book and pushed the whole pile aside, stretching his cramped shoulders. “I’m glad to have an excuse to stop. There’s nothing new, is there? About Kitty?”
Dominic shook his head. “You haven’t been to see her again, have you?”
“Not yet, it’s no use asking too often, you know, they wouldn’t let me. Is there something else I can help with?”
“Well, there is, as a matter of fact. You’ll probably think it a funny thing to ask, but it’s about this picture of yours. If you wouldn’t mind telling me all that stuff about how somebody tried to get it back, I think it might help me. Because I’ve got a sort of theory, but I don’t know enough about the details to know yet if it makes sense.”
“You think The Joyful Woman may be mixed up in the business?” asked Leslie, studying him curiously through the haze of smoke. The queer thing about the kid was that there was nothing queer about him; tallish, pleasant- looking, reasonably extrovert, healthily certain of himself, taking himself a bit seriously at this stage, but then he’d be odd if he didn’t. You could drop him among his kind in any public school, and he’d fall on his nice large feet and wriggle a place for himself on the spot. You could imagine him keeping well in the swim at whatever he touched, perhaps one notch ahead of average at games and two or three notches ahead at his books, with enough energy left over for a couple of reasonably intelligent hobbies, say climbing at one extreme and amateur theatricals at the other, and perhaps one amiable lunacy like an immoderate passion for fast motorbikes or a weakness for blonde bits on the side. Wonderfully ordinary, and yet here he was taking a proprietorial hold on a murder case, and bringing all his down-to-earth qualities to bear on a situation so unordinary that the result was pure fantasy. For a moment Leslie looked at him and couldn’t believe he had his focus right, the components tended so strongly to fall apart into different dimensions. I suppose, he thought, in this setting we all look a bit out of drawing; it’s only his being so young that makes it more marked in his case.
He sat down with him and told him the whole history of The Joyful Woman over again from the beginning, while Dominic followed with quick questions and hopeful eyes. Jean came in halfway through the story and brought him a mug of chocolate and some biscuits; she had grown up with three young brothers, and was used to feeding boys on principle at frequent intervals.
“So the idea is that this dealer, this Cranmer, had dropped the hint to your father that the thing was valuable.” Warmth and eagerness had come back into Dominic’s eyes, and a calculating gleam; it was working out as he’d thought it might. “But it was Mr. Shelley who came to see you.”
“On my father’s behalf, of course.”
“But why of course? You only know that because he told you so. Look, suppose it happened this way. Cranmer sees some definite possibility in the picture, he knows your father must have thrown it out as worthless, and he knows it may be worth a great deal. He decides it would pay him to keep in with your father, so he telephones the office to warn him. But just by chance he misses him. They put him on to Mr. Shelley, and he tells him what he thinks, that his boss should think again, he’s giving away a small fortune. But instead of passing on the message Mr. Shelley does a bit of quick thinking. He’s sure by then that you and your father are never likely to heal the breach, so you won’t be comparing notes. And he sees a better use to make of this stroke of luck. You sit on it and keep quiet, he says to Cranmer, and you and I can do a deal and share the proceeds between us, never mind Armiger. And he comes to you with that story about your father having thought better of his mean joke, and sent him to offer you the five hundred pounds instead of the picture. You said he had the money in cash. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“Not particularly. My father would think nothing of shuffling that much about in cash. But I agree it makes your version possible. I agree it might have seemed quite an easy way of getting hold of the sign too. But surely if the old boy had been in it for himself he wouldn’t have dared to take it any farther after I turned him down? It was too risky.”
“But if the stake was big enough? You refuse him, so he comes back and steals your father’s letter, which is the only actual proof of ownership. He’s banking on it that you won’t touch your father in any way, having seen how you feel, not to take anything from him, not to see him, not to talk to him, but also surely not to make a public accusation against him over this business. He’s betting you’ll just write it off in disgust, and not do anything about it at all, because of course you’re not going to be told the picture has any value, Cranmer will see to that end of it. Just commonplace rubbish! So you were supposed to think, what’s the point, the joke will be on him, let him have it and much good may it do him! The silly old fool jumped to conclusions just because it leaked out to him that we’d consulted a dealer, and now he’s made himself just about as big an ass as he is a rogue, so let him hang the thing on the wall to remind him how he got too sharp and cut himself.”
Carried away by his own eloquence, Dominic had lapsed into language which he suddenly realised might by conventional standards be thought offensive in the circumstances. Even if you thought about the dead like that you weren’t supposed to say it, and even if Leslie had no reason whatever to love his late father he was supposed to observe certain rules and maintain certain attitudes. And you never know how conventional unconventional people may be just beneath the skin. He paled to the lips, and then flushed bright red to the hair. “I say, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth like this, it’s terrible cheek. I really am sorry! I should have remembered he was your father, and all that, , , “
“That’s all right,” said Leslie with a rueful grin. “I might very well have taken it just like that. I probably should have, if I hadn’t happened to reach my limit just about then. Don’t mind calling my dad names, that’s the last thing he’d have kicked about. One of the better things about him was that he didn’t snivel about his virtue while he pulled off his sharp deals, he just slapped them down gleefully and said in effect: Go on, beat that! Carry on, you’re doing all right.”
