The Mysterious Commission (14 page)

When the injured artist had recovered breath it took him only a second to see why it was only for seconds that the apartment had detained the constabulary. It was small, unfurnished, and untenanted. There was a damp, musty smell. A hideous and discoloured paper depended in strips from the walls. Somebody, apparently moved by a spasm of decent aesthetic feeling, must have torn down several residual strips of it, for there was a small heap of the stuff on the middle of the floor. All this was clearly visible, since the departing sergeant had been thoughtful enough to flick a switch which turned on a single naked light in the centre of the ceiling.

There must be a breeze coming from somewhere, because the wallpaper on the floor was stirring gently. Having nothing better to do, Honeybath went over to the single window and endeavoured to peer out. There was little to be seen, however, and he turned back into the room. Where the wallpaper had been he now viewed a black rectangular hole. And Crumble (or Peach) was standing beside this improbable theatrical trapdoor with a revolver in his hand.

‘So it’s you,’ Crumble said (or, rather, snarled – which is proper on such occasions). He pointed the weapon straight at Honeybath’s chest. ‘Get out of my way!’

‘Don’t be silly, Mr Crumble.’ Honeybath – the subliminal Honeybath whom we have so regularly to reckon with – said this quite calmly. ‘You may kill or maim me, no doubt. You may do the same by five of these policemen. And then you’ll be finished, since there will be a dozen left to get on top of you. Fairly literally, I suspect. And you’ll still not be looking too good when you arrive in the dock. It’s behaviour they don’t at all like.’

Crumble – or the wretched little Peach, who had so laboriously got to Lesson Six – stared stupidly at Honeybath. Then he stared, equally stupidly, at the weapon now trembling dangerously in his own hand.

‘It’s another five years,’ he said hoarsely. ‘A distinct charge, and the sentences to run consecutive. Possessing and threatening to use a bloody gun.’

‘You might have thought of that. And it’s no good’ – Honeybath had detected incipient movement on Crumble’s part – ‘thinking to chuck the thing through that window. There are plenty of them out there too.’ There was a moment’s silence. Crumble looked very like Peach – the Peach whom Honeybath had sketched so triumphantly. And an artist is in a very special relationship to anybody or anything that he has thus made his own. Honeybath was in no such relationship with all those charging policemen. ‘Give it to me,’ he said suddenly. And he walked up to Crumble, took the revolver from his unresisting hand, and dropped it into his own coat-pocket. Then he moved to the door, opened it, and called out.

‘Sergeant, Mr Crumble is here with me in this room.’

HONEYBATH INVESTIGATES

The police had handcuffed Crumble. It ought to have appeared – at least to Honeybath’s private knowledge – a reasonable precaution: the man, after all, had been lethally brandishing a revolver only a few minutes before. But the police were unaware of this; and Detective Superintendent Keybird, indeed, had brusquely pooh-poohed the notion that Crumble could conceivably be armed.

In any case, Honeybath found he didn’t like the sight of those ugly metal manacles on Crumble (formerly Peach). There was a dreadful indignity about the thing which the mere fact of the man’s being a crook didn’t somehow palliate in the slightest degree. Then there was the point that it was Honeybath himself who had really caught Crumble. He had done all those dicks’ job for them, perhaps been instrumental in returning several of them other than as corpses to their wives and kiddies, and generally deserved the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery, or whatever it was called. But in all this he found he took no satisfaction at all. He seemed to be quite without the sense of virtue in which any rational citizen would surely, in his situation, be entitled to bask. And he increasingly hated having made that sketch of Peach. It would be exhibited in court when the chap was put on trial, he supposed, and eventually filed away at Scotland Yard in some kind of Rogues’ Gallery.

Then there was the fact that Keybird appeared in not too good a humour. That Crumble, and Crumble alone, had been found in this nasty little house was plainly contrary to his expectations. It was equally clear that the prospect of a magistrate, and then a judge and jury, having to be told of Mr Charles Honeybath’s role in the arrest didn’t please him at all; his underlying feeling was evidently that Honeybath had barged in where he had no business to be, and had embarrassingly complicated what would have been an entirely simple affair. Honeybath, thinking of that revolver (which was still in his pocket), saw the matter somewhat differently, but was unable to say so. All this ended up in his saying, rather abruptly, that he would be obliged if he might now be driven back to his flat. There was a great hunt still going on. But whether or not they found all that stolen money was something about which he found he couldn’t care less.

As first the East End of London and then the Embankment slid past, he wondered whether he could possibly sleep a wink after such a staggering day. But, as it turned out, a blessed oblivion overcame him in the moment that his head touched the pillow. He had a flair for sleep.

He was boiling himself an egg – a shade late in the morning, it was true – when there was a knock on his front door. Since the door was provided with an electric bell in respectable working order, this mode of summons was unnecessary. But even as he reflected on this, Honeybath reflected, too, that it was a familiar knock. He had heard it not long ago. In other words, Keybird was on top of him again. It struck him with sudden force that he hadn’t got clear of the affair simply by requiring to be sent home on the previous night. In whatever criminal proceeding emerged from it he would himself inevitably be a key witness. It was an alarming thought. Moreover what he ought to be turning to at once was the business of fixing up those two new commissions. Further colloquy with the police – unless it was directly in the interest of recovering that portrait – was the last thing he wanted to give time to. So it was in some displeasure that he went to the door and opened it.

Keybird shook hands with him – an expansive gesture which proved to be the issue of a buoyant mood. The man was disgustingly jubilant. But at least it wasn’t simply because he had the wretched Crumble locked up. It was because the proceeds of the bank robbery had been recovered
in toto.

Honeybath received the news with civil expressions of gratification, but inwardly confronted the fact that he didn’t care a damn. He much doubted whether (apart from Keybird and Co., who were going to get the kudos) anybody stood much to benefit by this triumph of the law. He was certainly fairly sure that nobody would have been the worse had no penny ever turned up again. It must be the bank’s business not to let your money or securities be carried off by thieves; the bank would have had to pay up to everybody – with profuse apologies into the bargain; and the actual liability would have spread out and out, like diminishing ripples on the surface of a pool, until it vanished as anything distinguishable at all on the farther verges of the most distant insurance corporations. It wouldn’t have been a bit like the loss of a unique work of art. Of a portrait, for instance.

The stuff had been found in the warehouse, all neatly packed in securely sealed biscuit-tins. It could have been trundled utterly inviolate from one end of England to the other that way. So it was no doubt fortunate that the police had made it as expeditiously as they had. They had to thank their computer for that – and Honeybath’s portrait sketch.

‘And what about the rest of the gang?’ Honeybath asked with engaging eagerness. It had come to him that here was what Keybird might have called his Achilles heel. ‘Are they all rounded up?’

‘Well, no. In fact none of them are. But it’s only a matter of time. We can lean on Crumble a bit, for a start.’

‘Lean on him?’ The term was unfamiliar to Honeybath.

‘Crumble may cough.’

‘Cough? Has the poor fellow caught a cold? He isn’t tubercular?’ Honeybath sounded anxious. ‘He doesn’t strike me as having a very robust constitution.’

‘To hell with his constitution.’ Keybird was looking at Honeybath with the most pronounced policemanly suspicion. ‘And you know perfectly well what I mean. The man’s small fry, I admit. But he remains our only certain link with the thing.’

‘What about Arbuthnot and Mr X – and Sister Agnes, for that matter?’ Here was Honeybath’s principal point of irritation emerging again. ‘Isn’t it about time to go for them bald-headed?’

‘Oh, they’ll be caught up with sooner or later. But they probably aren’t exactly the big fish either.’

‘They hang out in a big way.’

‘That’s true.’ Keybird had one of his rare checks. ‘But I doubt whether the main line goes back to them.’

The main line
, Honeybath thought. Of what used to be the Great Western Railway. He made to speak – and then he too checked himself. He temporized.

‘I don’t follow you,’ he said. ‘And I still think you ought to follow
them
. What do you mean – not the main line?’

‘They may have a showy set-up. But they were acting as no more than a temporary dumping-ground, weren’t they?’

‘A dumping-ground?’

‘For yourself, sir. Just a minor job, you might say, contracted out to them. They mayn’t have known what was really going on.’

‘But Crumble–’

‘There are obscurities, of course. We mustn’t expect to get the entire picture clear at once.’

‘They paid me all that money – and half of it without–’

‘It’s a bit of a puzzle, I agree. But first things first.’

Honeybath had heard this expression before. The mingled acuteness and obtuseness of this high-ranking sleuth was now infuriating him. And this made it the more tiresome that he no longer had a clear conscience in regard to the man. There was that confounded revolver. It was locked up – loaded, he had observed, in all six chambers – within a few feet of where he and Keybird were sitting. Not that he regretted what he had done. It had been a simple compassionate action, and there had been nothing in him that could have avoided it. He knew that it is crimes against property which are most heavily punished by the law, and that Crumble was booked for a long stretch in any case. To get him off an additional whack had been merely humane and sensible.

‘Mr Keybird,’ he asked coldly, ‘–is there anything more that I can do for you? I have several pressing professional engagements in front of me.’ He almost stood up, but decided this would be uncivil. ‘And I suppose my studio can now be returned to me?’

‘Oh, certainly.’ Keybird paused. ‘And you mustn’t think we’re neglecting your odd experience.’ In Honeybath’s now heated imagination Keybird’s manner of saying this was insufferably indulgent and whimsical. ‘We must certainly get those people. And you could, you know, perform another great service for us. You could sketch them too.’

Honeybath might have expected this, and it was surprising that the suggestion took him aback as it did. Here, after all, was the line of immediate inquiry that he was pressing for. And of course he could sketch the villainous Arbuthnot and the unfortunate Mr X. Sister Agnes and the chauffeur and both the menservants too, for that matter. And he would have to do it. He couldn’t decently decline. He didn’t even know why he had a lurking impulse to decline. He was chiefly aware that he wanted his breakfast, that the coffee would have gone cold, and that he’d have to start in on boiling another egg. What was really stirring in his mind – and it was quite something – stirred for the moment only at a level below that of cogitation.

But when Keybird went away, having received a decent assurance that the sketches would be made, Honeybath drank a cup of tepid coffee quite without thinking, forgot about his egg entirely, and gave himself up to a moody perambulation of his sitting-room. He paused once to unlock the drawer in which he had deposited Crumble’s weapon, but refrained from handling the thing when it was once more under his regard. He had a muzzy sense that he mustn’t leave his fingerprints on it, or obliterate Crumble’s fingerprints, although this was obviously a rubbishing notion out of cheap fiction. What was true was that he had come into possession of an extremely sinister object, the uses of which were in a world of which he knew nothing at all. He would leave it where it was until nightfall, and then walk to the Embankment and drop it into the river. In the ooze of Thames as it flowed beneath London’s bridges must lie innumerable weapons which, through the centuries, it had been convenient for their owners to part with unobtrusively. And most of those people would have been guilty of some crime.

Honeybath suddenly saw himself performing this clandestine act. He heard the splash. And he had attracted the attention of a policeman – a policeman who had appeared from nowhere and who must actually have been standing beside him as the revolver fell to the water. He recalled that giving this twist to private fantasy was one of the most annoying tricks of his mind; he couldn’t imagine some mildly culpable course of conduct without its finishing up in a vivid mental image of ingeniously brought-about exposure and disgrace. He locked up the gun again – and as he did so had an even stranger vision of himself as handcuffed to it, much as poor Crumble had been handcuffed to himself.

Determinedly he sat down to the telephone, with the laudable intention of sorting out his bread and butter over the next couple of months. It turned out that the retiring headmaster was preparing for the strains and stresses of approaching idleness by taking a short holiday in Crete, and that the Master of the Higglers and Tranters was only beginning to recover from a severe attack of mumps. The commissions were secure, but Honeybath had time on his hands.

It ought to have been a satisfactory discovery; he had, after all, quite something to recover from himself. He almost rang up BEA or Olympic Airways to inquire about the next flight to Rhodes. Almost unaccountably to himself, he rang up British Rail instead. And it was the departure-time of trains to Swansea that he found himself jotting down.