Artists in Crime (3 page)

From Lady Alleyn, Danes Lodge, Bossicote, to Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn, Chateau Frontenac, Quebec.

On the 10th of September at ten o’clock in the morning, Agatha Troy opened the door in the eastward wall of her house and stepped out into the garden. It was a sunny morning with a tang of autumn about it, a bland, mellow morning. Somewhere in the garden a fire had been lit, and an aromatic trace of smouldering brushwood threaded the air. There was not a breath of wind.

“Autumn!” muttered Troy. “And back to work again. Damn! I’m getting older.” She paused for a moment to light a cigarette, and then she set off towards the studio, down on the old tennis court. Troy had built this studio when she inherited Tatler’s End House from her father. It was a solid square of decent stone with top lighting, and a single window facing south on a narrow lane. It stood rather lower than the house, and about a minute’s walk away from it. It was screened pleasantly with oaks and lilac bushes. Troy strode down the twisty path between the lilac bushes and pushed open the studio door. From beyond the heavy wooden screen inside the entrance she heard the voices of her class. She was out of patience with her class. “I’ve been too long away,” she thought. She knew so exactly how each of them would look, how their work would take shape, how the studio would smell of oil colour, turpentine, and fixative, how Sonia, the model, would complain of the heat, the draught, the pose, the cold, and the heat again. Katti would stump backwards and forwards before her easel, probably with one shoe squeaking. Ormerin would sigh, Valmai Seacliff would attitudinise, and Garcia, wrestling with clay by the south window, would whistle between his teeth.

“Oh, well,” said Troy, and marched round the screen.

Yes, there it all was, just as she expected, the throne shoved against the left-hand wall, the easels with fresh white canvases, the roaring gas heater, and the class. They had all come down to the studio after breakfast and, with the exception of Garcia and Malmsley, waited for her to pose the model. Malmsley was already at work; the drawings were spread out on a table. He wore, she noticed with displeasure, a sea-green overall. “To go with the beard, I suppose,” thought Troy. Garcia was in the south window, glooming at the clay sketch of Comedy and Tragedy. Sonia, the model, wrapped in a white kimono, stood beside him. Katti Bostock, planted squarely in the centre of the room before a large black canvas, set her enormous palette. The rest of the class, Ormerin, Phillida Lee, Watt Hatchett and Basil Pilgrim, were grouped round Valmai Seacliff.

Troy walked over to Malmsley’s table and looked over his shoulder at the drawings.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the thing I was talking about,” explained Malmsley. His voice was high-pitched and rather querulous. “It’s the third tale in the series. The female has been murdered by her lover’s wife. She’s lying on a wooden bench, impaled on a dagger. The wife jammed the dagger through the bench from underneath, and when the lover pressed her down — you see? The knife is hidden by the drape. It seems a little far-fetched, I must say. Surely it would show. The wretched publisher man insists on having this one.”

“It needn’t show if the drape is suspended a little,” said Troy. “From the back of the bench, for instance. Then as she falls down she would carry the drape with her. Anyway, the probabilities are none of your business. You’re not going a ‘before and after,’ like a strip advertisement, are you?”

“I can’t get the pose,” said Malmsley languidly. “I want to treat it rather elaborately. Deliberately mannered.”

“Well, you can’t go in for the fancy touches until you’ve got the flesh and blood to work from. That pose will do us as well as another, I dare say. I’ll try it. You’d better make a separate drawing as a study.”

“Yes, I suppose I had,” drawled Malmsley. “Thanks most frightfully.”

“Of course,” Valmai Seacliff was saying, “I went down rather well in Italy. The Italians go mad when they see a good blonde. They used to murmur when I passed them in the streets. ‘
Bella
’ and ‘
Bellissima
.’ It was rather fun.”

“Is that Italian?” asked Katti morosely, of her flake-white.

“It means beautiful, darling,” answered Miss Seacliff.

“Oh hell!” said Sonia, the model.

“Well,” said Troy loudly, “I’ll set the pose.”

They all turned to watch her. She stepped on the throne, which was the usual dais on wheels, and began to arrange a seat for the model. She threw a cerise cushion down, and then, from a chest by the wall she got a long blue length of silk. One end of this drape she threw across the cushion and pinned, the other she gathered carefully in her hands, drew round to one side, and then pinned the folds to the floor of the dais.

“Now, Sonia,” she said. “Something like this.”

Keeping away from the drape, Troy knelt and then slid sideways into a twisted recumbent pose on the floor. The right hip was raised, the left took the weight of the pose. The torso was turned upwards from the waist so that both shoulders touched the boards. Sonia, noticing the twist, grimaced disagreeably.

“Get into it,” said Troy, and stood up. “Only you lie across the drape with your head on the cushion. Lie on your left side, first.”

Sonia slid out of the white kimono. She was a most beautiful little creature, long-legged, delicately formed and sharp-breasted. Her black hair was drawn tightly back from the suave forehead. The bony structure of her face was sharply defined, and suggested a Slavonic mask.

“You little devil, you’ve been sunbathing,” said Troy. “Look at those patches.”

“Well, they don’t like nudism at Bournemouth,” said Sonia.

She lay across the drape on her left side, her head on the cerise cushion. Troy pushed her right shoulder over until it touched the floor. The drape was pressed down by the shoulders and broke into uneven blue folds about the body.

“That’s your pose, Malmsley,” said Troy. “Try it from where you are.”

She walked round the studio, eyeing the model.

“It’s pretty good from everywhere,” she said. “Right! Get going, everybody.” She glanced at her watch. “You can hold that for forty minutes, Sonia.”

“It’s a terrible pose, Miss Troy,” grumbled Sonia. “All twisted like this.”

“Nonsense,” said Troy briskly.

The class began to settle itself.

Since each member of Troy’s little community played a part in the tragedy that followed ten days later, it may be well to look a little more closely at them.

Katti Bostock’s work is known to everyone who is at all interested in modern painting. At the time of which I am writing she was painting very solidly and smoothly, using a heavy outline and a simplified method of dealing with form. She painted large figure compositions, usually with artisans as subjects. Her “Foreman Fitter” had been the picture of the year at the Royal Academy, and had set all the die-hards by the ears. Katti herself was a short, stocky, dark-haired individual with an air of having no nonsense about her. She was devoted to Troy in a grumbling sort of way, lived at Tatler’s End House most of the year, but was not actually a member of the class.

Valmai Seacliff was thin, blonde, and very, very pretty. She was the type that certain modern novelists write about with an enthusiasm which they attempt to disguise as satirical detachment. Her parents were well-to-do and her work was clever. You have heard Katti describe Valmai as a nymphomaniac and will be able to draw your own conclusions about the justness of this criticism.

Phillida Lee was eighteen, plump, and naturally gushing. Two years of Slade austerity had not altogether damped her enthusiasms, but when she remembered to shudder, she shuddered.

Watt Hatchett, Troy’s Australian protégé, was a short and extremely swarthy youth, who looked like a dago in an American talking picture. He came from one of the less reputable streets of Sydney and was astoundingly simple, cocksure, egotistical and enthusiastic. He seemed to have no aesthetic perceptions of any description, so that his undoubted talent appeared to be a sort of parasite, flowering astonishingly on an unpromising and stunted stump.

Cedric Malmsley we have noticed already. Nothing further need be said about him at this stage of the narrative.

The Hon. Basil Pilgrim, son of the incredible Primitive Methodist peer, was a pleasant-looking young man of twenty-three, whose work was sincere, able, but still rather tentative. His father, regarding all art schools as hot-beds of vice and depravity, had only consented to Basil becoming a pupil of Troy’s because her parents had been landed gentry of Lord Pilgrim’s acquaintance, and because Troy herself had once painted a picture of a revivalist meeting. Her somewhat ironical treatment of this subject had not struck Lord Pilgrim, who was, in many ways, a remarkably stupid old man.

Francis Ormerin was a slight and delicate-looking Frenchman who worked in charcoal and wash. His drawings of the nude were remarkable for their beauty of line, and for a certain emphatic use of accent. He was a nervous, oversensitive creature, subject to fits of profound depression, due, said Troy, to his digestion.

And lastly Garcia, whose first name — Wolf — was remembered by nobody. Garcia, who preserved on his pale jaws a static ten days’ growth of dark stubble which never developed into a beard, whose clothes consisted of a pair of dirty grey trousers, a limp shirt, and an unspeakable raincoat. Garcia, with his shock of unkempt brown hair, his dark impertinent eyes, his beautiful hands, and his complete unscrupulousness. Two years ago he had presented himself one morning at the door of Troy’s studio in London. He had carried there a self-portrait in clay, wrapped about with wet and dirty cloths. He walked past her into the studio and unwrapped the clay head. Troy and Garcia stood looking at it in silence. Then she asked him his name and what he wanted. He told her—“Garcia”—and he wanted to go on modelling, but had no money. Troy talked about the head, gave him twenty pounds, and never really got rid of him. He used to turn up, sometimes inconveniently, always with something to show her. In everything but clay he was quite inarticulate. It was as if he had been allowed only one medium of expression, but that an abnormally eloquent one. He was dirty, completely devoid of ordinary scruples, interested in nothing but his work. Troy helped him, and by and by people began to talk about his modelling. He began to work in stone. He was asked to exhibit with the New Phoenix Group, was given occasional commissions. He never had any money, and to most people he was entirely without charm, but to some women he was irresistible, and of this he took full advantage.

It was to Garcia that Troy went after she had set the pose. The others shifted their easels about, skirmishing for positions. Troy looked at Garcia’s sketch in clay of the “Comedy and Tragedy” for the new cinema in Westminster. He had stood it on a high stool in the south window. It was modelled on a little wooden platform with four wheels, a substitute he had made for the usual turntable. The two figures rose from a cylindrical base. Comedy was nude, but Tragedy wore an angular robe. Above their heads they held the conventional masks. The general composition suggested flames. The form was greatly simplified. The face of Comedy, beneath the grinning mask, was grave, but upon the face of Tragedy Garcia had pressed a faint smile.

He stood scowling while Troy looked at his work.

“Well,” said Troy, “it’s all right.”

“I thought of—” He stopped short, and with his thumb suggested dragging the drape across the feet of Comedy.

“I wouldn’t,” said Troy. “Break the line up. But I’ve told you I know nothing about this stuff. I’m a painter. Why did you come and plant yourself here, may I ask?”

“Thought you wouldn’t mind.” His voice was muffled and faintly Cockney. “I’ll be clearing out in a fortnight. I wanted somewhere to work.”

“So you said in your extraordinary note. Are you broke?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going in a fortnight?”

“London. I’ve got a room to work in.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere in the East End, I think. It’s an old warehouse. I know a bloke who got them to let me use it. He’s going to let me have the address. I’ll go for a week’s holiday somewhere before I begin work in London. I’ll cast this thing there and then start on the sculping.”

“Who’s going to pay for the stone?”

“They’ll advance me enough for that.”

“I see. It’s coming along very well. Now attend to me, Garcia.” Troy lowered her voice. “While you’re here you’ve got to behave yourself. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. No nonsense with women. You and Sonia seem to be sitting in each other’s pockets. Have you been living together?”

“When you’re hungry,” said Garcia, “you eat.”

“Well, this isn’t a restaurant and you’ll please remember that. You understand? I noticed you making some sort of advance to Seacliff yesterday. That won’t do, either. I won’t have any bogus Bohemianism, or free love, or mere promiscuity at Tatler’s End. It shocks the servants, and it’s messy. All right?”

“O.K.,” said Garcia with a grin.

“The pose has altered,” said Katti Bostock from the middle of the studio.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Watt Hatchett. The others looked coldly at him. His Sydney accent was so broad as to be almost comic. One wondered if he could be doing it on purpose. It was not the custom at Troy’s for new people to speak until they were spoken to. Watt was quite unaware of this and Troy, who hated rows, felt uneasy about him. He was so innocently impossible. She went to Katti’s easel and looked from the bold drawing in black paint to the model. Then she went up to the throne and shoved Sonia’s right shoulder down.

“Keep it on the floor.”

“It’s a swine of a pose, Miss Troy.”

“Well, stick it a bit longer.”

Troy began to go round the work, beginning with Ormerin on the extreme left.

“Bit tied up, isn’t it?” she said after a minute’s silence.

“She is never for one moment still,” complained Ormerin. “The foot moves, the shoulders are in a fidget continually. It is impossible for me to work — impossible.”

“Start again. The pose is right now. Get it down directly. You can do it.”