The Mysterious Commission (11 page)

He ought to ask that the car be turned round, so that he could make his way back to Detective Superintendent Keybird at once. Or at least he ought to communicate this significant recollection of his to the subordinate officer who was now acting as a sort of escort.

But Charles Honeybath did neither of these things. Quite unaccountably, he sat tight and kept his mouth shut. Yet even so, and at one o’clock in the morning, his bedside telephone reproached him. He could pick it up and dial 999. He had always owned a childish ambition to have some legitimate occasion to do that. He could dial 999, explain himself, and then – no doubt by some complex piece of radio technology – speak to Keybird direct.

It is conceivable that Honeybath was about to stretch out his hand and fulfil this intention when, instead, he fell fast asleep.

Two letters arrived for Honeybath by the first post on the following morning. They had been directed not to his studio (which was the address he provided in
Who’s Who
) but to the flat because both were from familiar acquaintances. But both were about professional matters. They conveyed requests, most agreeably expressed, for the arranging of portrait commissions. The Governors of a famous public school wanted him to paint the retiring Warden, and an equally famous City livery company, the Honourable Guild of Higglers and Tranters, besought him to perform the same service for their Master. It was at once evident to Honeybath that the recent hiccup in the pipeline which had panicked him into accepting the proposal of the wretched Peach had constituted an entirely false alarm. He was still in the swim, after all.

But he ought to fix up the preliminaries for both these jobs right away. It was a well-known point of etiquette that one did this. Like a top consultant physician approached on behalf of an adequately affluent sufferer, you offered to get things moving within the next couple of days.

Yet just what was his position studio-wise? There was that great hole in the floor, and the whole place was in the mess one would expect after tons and tons of earth and rubble have been shovelled around. And the police might be proposing to go on mucking about happily for days or even weeks. He hadn’t so much as gathered whether his own mere presence would be treated as an intrusion. Fortunately the head Higgler and Tranter was a baronet, an Alderman of the City of London, and a number of other things equally august. Dropping his name would probably occasion quite an impact. Hadn’t Honeybath himself, moreover, been to prep school with nobody less than the Prime Minister? Honeybath saw that the inherent modesty of his nature and demeanour had been in danger of letting him down. He’d go straight back to the studio and, if necessary, chuck his weight around a little. For the moment, at least, any sense of being a suspected pensioner and confederate of atrocious criminals blessedly departed from him. So he substituted for his accustomed artistically ample and flowing neckwear a faded old school tie (it was a pity prep schools don’t much go in for old school ties) and sallied out into London. It was a delightful morning and he didn’t take a taxi – although with a further £2,520 virtually on the books he could well have afforded to do so. The exercise of walking put him in mind of the fact that he was running a little short of shoes. He called in at his bootmaker’s and gave instructions that the fashioning of a couple of pairs should be put in hand forthwith.

The front door of the studio stood open, a circumstance no doubt regularized by the presence of a constable standing guard before it. As he approached, two men emerged staggering under what appeared to be a crate or portmanteau constructed out of plate armour. They were followed by another man carrying an outsize camera. Perhaps this was a terminal stage in the purely local investigation.

‘Mr Keybird’s compliments, sir.’ The constable had stepped briskly forward. ‘He’s in the bank, and would be obliged if you could call on him.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Honeybath was resolved to be firm. ‘Presently, then. I must just look into one or two things in the studio first.’

‘And the Assistant Commissioner, sir. “C” Department, of course.’

‘What the deuce is that?’

‘Criminal Investigation, sir.’ The constable had stared at such ignorance. ‘And Commander Berry too, I believe.’

‘And who may Commander Berry be? Salvation Army?’ Honeybath at once rather regretted this witticism, which might have been described as not quite on.

‘National Co-ordinator, Regional Crime Squads, seconded to Home Office, sir.’

Honeybath decided that it would be civil, and indeed politic, to succumb gracefully to all this top brass.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go in at once.’

At least he didn’t find a kind of tribunal of inquisitors. The Assistant Commissioner’s job turned out to be the uttering of expressions of polite if formal concern. He shook hands and went away, rather with the air of a man who has another precisely similar assignment next on his list. The Commander, although he stayed put, remained respectfully standing until it pleased Honeybath to sit down. The Metropolitan Police Office, it seemed, had decided to lay on a red-carpet turn. Only Keybird remained distinguishably his old self.

‘Mr Honeybath,’ the man who co-ordinated things said, ‘we have been very much hoping to vacate your studio by midday, but it now looks as if it won’t be before late afternoon. Can you bear with us so long?’

‘Oh, most certainly. That seems entirely reasonable.’ Honeybath was much relieved. ‘You must have a great deal to see to,’ he added vaguely.

‘Well, of course, we have to try to see to that floor. I’m afraid that permanent repair can’t begin just yet. But something which I trust will be not too inconvenient can certainly be fixed up fairly soon.’

‘That will be excellent.’ Honeybath paused on this, and then ventured on a tentative note of jollity. ‘Just so long as I can’t fall into the cellarage.’

‘Quite so. Mr Keybird is going to arrange something at once. But you are quite right that there is a certain press of technical investigation. This man who called himself Peach, you see. It was only last night that we heard of him as coming to your studio, was it not? And that means a fresh sniff around.’

‘I see.’ Honeybath wasn’t sure that he did quite see. ‘You think he may have left useful traces of his presence?’

‘Most certainly he did. Theoretically speaking, it’s impossible for any man to come and go anywhere without leaving the next best thing to his signature behind him. Only, of course, theory and practice are not always the same thing.’

‘I’d suppose not.’

‘But, in this case, we do quite certainly know of something our wanted man left behind him. And he is our wanted man. I can’t emphasize that too much. And my colleague Mr Keybird agrees with me.’

‘Definitely,’ Keybird said – distinguishably on his dogmatic note. ‘Frankly, there’s nothing else to go on. Or not yet.’

‘I’d have thought’ – Honeybath spoke from an obscure sense that he and his adventures were again being undervalued in this appreciation of the matter – ‘I’d have thought that my Mr X, and Arbuthnot–’

‘Yes, indeed. We shall have to come to all that. But it is certainly Peach we must go after first.’ The co-ordinating character got to his feet. It was plain that he had turned up simply to lend weight to this contention. ‘And I’m off on the job now. It’s most satisfactory that you and Mr Keybird understand each other so well. There’s a great deal in hitting it off in situations like this. But, of course, I do myself hope to see you again.’

With these bland remarks Commander Berry departed, although not without first gravely shaking hands. Honeybath watched him go in silence, and then looked around him. The room was familiar; it was his bank manager’s office. He wondered what had happened to the manager – and indeed to all the branch’s staff and all the branch’s other customers. The robbers had presumably cleared out cash, securities, safe-deposit stuff, everything. There must be the devil of a mess to sort out. But all that was not of the first relevance at the moment. He turned to Keybird.

‘Your colleague said something that puzzled me a good deal. It was something to the effect that Peach had, to your positive knowledge, left something behind him. Of course he left those banknotes. Was the reference to that?’

‘Well, no – although they are certainly important. Keybird paused for a moment, rather as if hesitating before something delicate. ‘You know about the identikit technique, Mr Honeybath?’

‘Fudging up something said to resemble a wanted man, on the basis of people’s descriptions of him? Certainly. I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of them. Tailor’s dummies are a lot more individual and expressive.’

‘I’d hesitate, sir, to deny an element of truth in that.’ Keybird again hesitated after this judicious concession. ‘But here we have a very special factor indeed. What Peach has left behind him is his own likeness inside the head, so to speak, of the most accomplished portrait-painter in England. I hope it isn’t a liberty to express the fact that way.’

If Honeybath was disconcerted it was perhaps because Keybird had here dropped into something very like the idiom of Peach himself. But he also, if rather unaccountably, took alarm at what was coming. For of just what was coming, he hadn’t the slightest doubt.

‘Do you think you could sketch him for us, sir? I’m aware that it is quite something to ask.’

Honeybath wondered how a policeman was aware of this. But the fact was certainly true. There are purposes to which one doesn’t bend one’s art without misgiving. And thief-catching was one of them. It would be like painting something to advertise a detergent or a bed-time drink. He had, it was true, every reason to wish Peach and all his company put well and truly inside. They had exploited him, and in the end (he still felt) they had gratuitously mocked him as well. Even that second payment had been a mockery. But he still didn’t want to draw Peach for the police.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll try.’ A moment’s thought had shown him that he couldn’t really decline. ‘And it won’t be all that hard. In fact, Mr Keybird, I can pretty well promise to sketch him with tolerable fidelity full-face, half-face, in profile, or upside down.’ Honeybath paused for appropriate signs of merriment from Keybird. ‘But it will take me the better part of the day. You may find that odd. But one works towards a likeness, you know, by quite humble trial and error. And when one’s subject is a memory–’

‘Quite so, sir. And could you make a start on it here?’ Having gained his point, Keybird wasn’t for wasting time. ‘The materials are available in your studio?’

‘Of course they are. But it seems to me–’

‘It’s the villain’s Achilles heel, sir. The one thing he didn’t think of. If Peach is known to a single police officer in the kingdom, we’ll establish his identity within twenty-four hours of your playing your part, as one may say.’

‘Wouldn’t the same apply–’

‘He can’t have been disguised to any significant extent? An eye like yours would instantly have been aware of anything like that?’

‘I’m pretty confident it would.’

‘Then we’ve as good as got him. And he’s the key to the whole affair. Peach has a familiar smell, sir. And there’s nothing other than run-of-the-mill about this bank robbery. It doesn’t take us out of our depth.’

‘And perhaps Arbuthnot, and Mr X, and that house, and that board meeting
do
do that?’

For the first time in their acquaintance, Honeybath had the pleasure of seeing Detective Superintendent Keybird halted in his stride. But his response was that of an honest man.

‘Well, sir, yes – in a way. But first things first.’

It was only when Honeybath took a first serious glance at Peach – at Peach, that is, as Peach existed for Honeybath’s inward eye – that a certain element of difficulty in fulfilling his new and odd commission revealed itself. He could see Peach perfectly. Yet Peach, thus viewed, was uncommonly like one of those identikit dummies that Honeybath had made fun of. Peach was (and Honeybath now recalled this as having been his earliest impression) one of nature’s faceless men. He suggested himself as the very type of the obscure little clerk who, just because he sits on a particular stool among innumerable other obscure little clerks in some government or municipal office, can suddenly assume enormous nuisance-value in one’s entirely private affairs.

For a brief space, Honeybath’s first sketch from memory pleased him very much. Then he realized that his satisfaction was a malicious satisfaction, and that what he had produced was a caricature of Peach. It was possible to imagine circumstances in which it would be precisely this that was useful. Accentuation and enhancement were probably what the genuine identikit people at New Scotland Yard went after. If you were drawing a pig in order to assist visiting Martians to be quite positive that their first real pig
was
a pig, you would make your pictured pig just as piggy as you could manage. But this wasn’t Charles Honeybath’s notion of portraiture. That notion was a very serious one. You didn’t get at the essence of a man – his quiddity, whatness, or whatever – through clever travesty. You got at it through and beyond absolute fidelity to what your visual faculty reported to you. Being incapable of violating this rule, he tore up the paper tainted by a personal dislike and started again.

In the issue, he worked all day – and policemen brought him, not once but twice, sandwiches and a half pint of bitter from the neighbouring pub. He worked with as much concentration as if he had been summoned to Number 10 Downing Street to limn his old schoolfellow, or even to Buckingham Palace itself. He had boasted foolishly to Keybird (presumably a complete Philistine) of what he could with practised facility achieve. He sweated this vainglory out of himself now. When Keybird returned to the bank at nine o’clock that night (doubtless from a refection of chops and tomato sauce) Honeybath had two sketches which he could show. Keybird took one glance at them, and instantly made as if to speak. Then he checked himself, and engaged in what appeared to be a steadying walk round Honeybath’s bank manager’s colourless room.