Appleby Talks Again (15 page)

“And the body of the hall?”

“It was nearly filled. Goodness knows who they all were, or why they had tagged along.”

“Quite so.”

“I was in the front row, so I had a lovely view. The portrait was on a large, rather bogus-looking easel behind the big-wigs. It was draped in crimson velvet, and there was an enormous velvet rope and tassel waiting to be pulled. The whole effect was nicely accommodated, I thought, to Jethro Littlefair’s later and most Corinthian style. You could see he was as pleased as Punch at the way they were doing him proud. Beaming behind his great woolly beard.”

“You mean the blessed thing was to be unveiled?”

“Yes. It’s a habit that’s spread quite a lot. Lady Heritage, the generous donor, was to pull the tassel. And after a lot of speechifying about the deceased peer’s services to the universe at large, she did – good and hard. The crimson stuff came away without a hitch, and people began to clap – which is the thing to do at such moments, it seems. Littlefair looked as if he was wondering whether to rise and make a bow. He needn’t have worried. The clapping stopped dead. What was on the easel wasn’t Lord Heritage.”

“I see.” Appleby made no attempt to sound astounded. “But was it a Littlefair?”

“Certainly it was a Littlefair. I knew it quite well – though I was probably the only person there, besides Littlefair himself, who did. It was a big oil which he did ages ago – in fact, when he was still a painter. Really powerful. Mammon.”

“Mammon?”
This time, Appleby was frankly startled.

“Yes. Milton’s Mammon, you might say. The least erected Spirit that fell from Heaven. A lot of the Comfiters on the dais couldn’t get a proper view, and they were completely bewildered by the cries of protest that came from down below. There was some more or less hysterical laughter as well. Littlefair was the first person to budge – but not in a manner at all to his credit. In fact he lost his head, and bolted from the hall, gibbering.”

“And Lady Heritage?”

“She just sat down. It wasn’t nice for her.”

“It was a damnable outrage.”

“Yes.” Judith nodded soberly. “A blackguard’s joke. And bewildering. I mean that it was funny, and yet it wasn’t. I suppose one had violently to repress in oneself a purely wanton glee – and that that’s what made it exhausting, as I said. The chief Comfiter – Heritage’s successor as Master – did quite well. He looked as if he was just escaping apoplexy. But he got up and said the right things – apologising on behalf of the Honourable Company of Comfiters to Lady Heritage and their other guests. He didn’t mention Littlefair, which was natural enough. Then he asked us to remain in our places while he conferred with some of his colleagues. I suppose he had a notion the police might want to question everybody. And your Chugg, as I said, was there in no time. After that, we were told to go away, and vague noises were made about the ceremony taking place on a later occasion. So we went. And all London – or all that sort of London – is gossiping about the thing now.”

Appleby nodded. “I bet it is – and thinking up all sorts of explanations. What’s yours?”

Judith considered. “It was a demonstration – but against whom or what? It might be against Lord Heritage. Any big financier can be screamed about as the modern Mammon, I suppose. But, equally, it might be a demonstration against Littlefair. His Mammon was good
avant-garde
stuff in its day; and his Heritage is no doubt just another dreary official portrait. Heritage, you see, wasn’t a real connoisseur. He was simply another rich man, ministering to his own self-importance by collecting frightfully valuable things. He just wouldn’t know that Littlefair had long since ceased to be much good. So the stroke was quite mordant, if conceived as directed against Littlefair himself. Then again, the thing may scarcely have been conceived in terms of personalities at all. There’s the silly side of the surrealist movement, just as there was of dadaism and futurism. Doing something spectacularly outrageous on the artistic front, just for its own sake.”

“
Un acte gratuit
.” Appleby offered this a trifle vaguely. “What sort of a chap is this Littlefair?”

“Frightfully egocentric and vain. He’ll certainly be convinced that he was the sole intended victim of the plot, and the spectacle of his wounded sensibility will be extremely harrowing. But he’ll recover.”

“Do you think–” Appleby broke off as a telephone bell rang in the room. He walked to his desk, picked up the instrument, and after a few words listened almost in silence. “Thank you, Chugg,” he said eventually. “I’ll come now.” When he had finished the call he turned to his wife. “You were wrong,” he said.

“Wrong?”

“Littlefair won’t have a chance to recover. He’s dead.”

Littlefair’s house was very much that of a successful man. In fact, everything was on the showy side, and Appleby mounted to a large studio on the top floor by staircases so thickly carpeted that the climb felt more fatiguing than it need be. Inspector Chugg, himself brooding and inactive, was watching subordinates who were busily at work photographing the body. Appleby took his own glance at the dead man. Littlefair was dressed in formal morning clothes, but had emphasised his profession by putting on an enormous bottle-green bow tie. His beard had been so beautifully groomed that it seemed a great shame that it was now soaked in blood. Appleby asked the question that always came to him on such occasions. “Wife and kids?”

“A wife somewhere about London. No children. A mistress – name of Julia Parnaby – downstairs now.” Chugg spoke darkly. A career necessarily exposing him to much that was unedifying had never impaired his simple moral feelings. “You wouldn’t think a man could live openly like that and carry on a profession at the level he did.”

Appleby shook his head. “Highly respectable persons will take a lot from an artist. They regard marital infidelity as authenticating the type… Just what happened here?”

“After the fiasco at the Comfiters, Littlefair seems to have come straight home in a taxi. He burst in upon the Parnaby woman and poured out what had happened. She says he was in a great state – but didn’t suggest anything as bad as sheer desperation. Then a fellow called Ozanne arrived. He was Lord Heritage’s brother-in-law, and he had come straight on from Comfiters’ Hall. He thought there was just a chance that the real portrait might still be here in this studio. Finding Littlefair still very upset, he tried to calm him down. But his efforts, according to Miss Parnaby, had just the opposite effect. Littlefair kept on saying he was the victim of a vile persecution. And then it seems that something was said about Littlefair’s wife – who now, as I’ve told you, has a separate establishment.”

Appleby frowned. “Said by whom?”

“Ozanne wasn’t clear. But presently Littlefair was raving against Mrs Littlefair, and saying that she was responsible for the whole thing. Miss Parnaby rather egged him on to this, as one can imagine she would do. Ozanne maintained that this notion was absurd, or at least highly improbable. But that didn’t help.”

“It wouldn’t. When a man’s in the state you describe Littlefair as having got into, rational persuasion is more often than not merely exacerbating. This chap Ozanne should simply have cleared out.”

Chugg nodded. “He did – quite soon. But not before Littlefair had taken himself up to this studio, declaring that the humiliation was too much for his delicate feelings, and that he just couldn’t take it.”

“They simply let him go?”

“It seems so. Ozanne stopped on with Miss Parnaby for a few minutes, and appears vaguely to have suggested calling in a doctor. Then he went away, and the lady put in five minutes having a good cry. After that she came up to the studio, and found Littlefair dead.” Chugg paused. “All the appearances of suicide.”

“I see.” Appleby looked thoughtfully at his subordinate. “And your own mind inclines that way?”

“It’s much too soon to incline it one way or the other.” Chugg sounded reproachful. “Littlefair was shot through the mouth. The revolver, which lay beside him, has his fingerprints – and in what appears to be quite a plausible position. He was found on his back, which may account for an ugly bruise on his head. But it looks as if the medical people aren’t going to be too sure. He may have been stunned first, and then instantaneously shot.”

“Access?”

Chugg pointed to the window. “Fire-escape. It drops straight down a blank wall into a deserted yard. Half London could have been involved – and nobody any the wiser.”

Appleby inspected the studio thoroughly. It certainly didn’t contain the missing portrait of Lord Heritage. On the other hand, there was a good deal of Littlefair’s earlier work. It hadn’t perhaps, in spite of its merit, ever found a very ready market. Or possibly it was part of the painter’s vanity that he had been unwilling to part with some of his best things. And Miss Parnaby, it seemed, vouched for the fact that the “Mammon” had been among these. She had, indeed, seen it in the studio only the week before. Since then, anybody could have slipped up the fire-escape and made off with it. The household appeared to be one entirely negligent in matters of security.

Presently Appleby went downstairs again to interview the lady himself. He was not favourably impressed. Julia Parnaby had unbounded beauty and very sufficient poise. You would have supposed that she was received in the best society every day. But she suggested a hard, calculating and rather empty woman. Appleby felt that he would have had a readier sympathy for a young person more obviously elevated from some humble walk of life. He didn’t think she was one who would do anything very staggering at the prompting, say, of sexual jealousy. But she clearly liked luxury and could have made do, very nicely, with absolute opulence. Simple greed might carry her quite a long way.

Appleby went over the ground Chugg had already covered. Miss Parnaby, who seemed to take it as a tribute to her own somewhat equivocal position that she was being questioned by so high an officer of the Metropolitan Police, answered with well-bred calm. Littlefair’s death might have been a severe blow to her. But she gave no indication of being knocked out by it.

“I believe, Miss Parnaby, that you think it possible that Mrs Littlefair may have been responsible for the trick with the painting?”

“Nothing seems more likely.”

“Why? What sort of woman is she? How would you describe her?”

“Dowdy and queer.” The reply came promptly. “She was jealous of Jethro’s success after he and I found each other.” Julia Parnaby contrived to give to this description of her
liaison
the suggestion of some inescapable decree of fate. “She was just an art student, you know – nothing more.”

Appleby refrained from suggesting that Littlefair had presumably once been just that too. “She remained,” he asked, “interested in her husband’s work, even after the – um – separation?”

“Yes – but only in the vilest way. She maintained that Jethro had ruined himself as a painter; that he had – had prostituted his art.” Understandably perhaps, Miss Parnaby had stumbled slightly over this expression. “She has been quite fanatical about it. To listen to her, you’d think she was mad.”

“You are on speaking terms with the lady? She hasn’t been fanatical about her husband’s career in its more personal aspect?”

“She doesn’t blame
me
, if that’s what you mean. She regards me not as a cause but as a symptom.” And Miss Parnaby looked at Appleby with a hard smile, as if taking satisfaction in utterance of this large candour. “She says that a painter who goes soft at the centre – as she declares Jethro to have done – would quite naturally pick up a person like myself. I didn’t occasion the rot. I’m just a minor consequence. Her bitterness has been against Jethro, not me. She’d have done anything to make a devastating public commentary on what she regarded as his degeneration. That’s why I think it was her at work today.”

“But she wouldn’t follow it up by murder?”

This time, Miss Parnaby seemed really discomposed. “I don’t know what you mean, Sir John.”

“I must tell you, then, that it’s by no means certain that your – that Mr Littlefair took his own life. The appearances suggest it. But they may have been contrived.”

“She wouldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t have killed Jethro.”

“Hasn’t it been said, Miss Parnaby, that hell has no fury like a woman scorned?” Appleby produced this banal quotation – or misquotation – unblushingly.

“He didn’t scorn her. She scorned him.”

“I see.” Appleby wasn’t at all sure that this reply met the point. But he was coming to feel that the unpleasing Miss Parnaby owned a certain clarity of mind. He tried one more question. “You weren’t struck by anything more about Mr Littlefair before he went up to his studio? There was this agitation, and so forth. But was there anything else?”

“Jethro seemed to be trying to remember something – or to work something out. But only with part of his mind.” Miss Parnaby paused, as if feeling that this required better definition. “When you’re doing a crossword, and something very urgent and absorbing interrupts you, you may still go on hunting for a clue – without really knowing that you are. You recognise what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.” Again Appleby was rather impressed.

“Well, it was like that. Jethro was in this terrible state over what had happened at Comfiters’ Hall. In a way, of course, he was putting on a turn about it. All artists are like that.”

“Many are.”

“And, at the same time, it was quite a genuine brainstorm. But his mind was still groping after something – something that would probably have popped up when Jethro calmed down. Does that make sense?”

Appleby reached for his hat. “At least,” he said, “it gives food for thought. Good afternoon.”

When Appleby reached the late Lord Heritage’s mansion, it was to find Lady Heritage drinking tea in the company of a middle-aged man of military appearance, whom she introduced as her brother, Charles Ozanne. Lady Heritage still seemed dazed by her experience that afternoon, and she received the news of Littlefair’s death merely with a helpless gesture and a sigh. But her brother swore softly, and then took a rapid turn across the room as if to compose himself. “I ought to have gone after the fellow,” he said as he came back.