The Mysterious Commission (18 page)

‘Ah!’ Admiral Mariner might have been a mental specialist absorbed in the particulars of a case, so sharply did this exclamation escape him. ‘He had lucid periods?’

‘No, I don’t think they could be called that. It was just that he seemed to have other, and much more fragmentary, fantasies. He seemed to believe that he had once been in gaol.’

‘I don’t know that that one sounds too unlikely,’ Miss Mariner said crisply. ‘Not considering the company he appears to have been keeping. A gang of criminals swarming all over Imlac! I keep on finding it hard to believe.’

‘The alternative, my dear Miss Mariner, is to believe me very much dottier than the Napoleonic Mr X.’ Honeybath told himself that he must have recovered his customary poise in order to make possible this good-humoured remark. ‘And I’m bound to say I’ve had moments when I’ve wondered about myself.’

‘As we all sometimes do.’ It was presumably the ambassadorial Mariner who offered this tactful comment.

‘I take it that Mr X’s mental incapacity is immediately apparent? He isn’t the kind of person who would be believed by a jury, or anything of that kind?’

‘Most decidedly not.’

‘It’s really a most perplexing affair. Presently I must tell you whatever I know about Bunbury – if Bunbury is really his name, which is something we must now be disposed to doubt.’ Mariner glanced at his watch. ‘But dear me! I see that it is almost dinner time. You will, of course, dine with us, Honeybath? Indeed, it is plain that you must consent to stay the night at Imlac. Do not think me impertinent if I say that you are already rather plainly in need of bed.’

‘I really feel–’

‘Diana will simply not take a refusal from you, my dear sir. We’ll dine, talk briefly of other things, and in the morning sally into the house.’ Mariner made a vaguely expansive gesture. ‘If your portrait has been abandoned anywhere, we shall find it. And then we must consider the next step. I think it involves your acquaintance in those higher reaches of the metropolitan police. But we shall see.’

This programme fulfilled itself (or at least the first part of it did). There was nothing overbearing about Diana Mariner’s father. (Admirals can run on an overbearing ticket, but not ambassadors.) Yet he was a man who seemed quite naturally to get his own way. He was also so shrewd a character that Honeybath wondered how he could have been taken in by Arbuthnot-Bunbury as a tenant. Neither about this nor about anything else, however, did he wonder consistently or for long. Telling his own alarming story had exhausted the small store of regained energy brandy had built up, and he did very much want to get to bed. He was abominably aching all over. It was a condition, reason told him, which would get worse rather than better on the following day. But mere animal instinct prompted him to crawl away and rest in the interim.

The Mariners appeared to have carved themselves out a sort of maisonette in this part of the house. It was unassuming but surprisingly roomy, and adequate services were laid on. A respectable elderly female produced a respectable dinner, and the Admiral played his part by opening a bottle of claret which was distinctly on the notable side of merely sound. He also put up just the right amount of unexacting conversation on general topics. Honeybath judged this giving a rest to mystery, murder and criminality a properly civilized thing. When, thus soothed, he went to bed (in borrowed pyjamas) he expected to fall asleep at once.

He only drowsed. Two or three times, and as if from rather far away, he heard a passing train. He wondered how his present bedroom lay in relation to his place of incarceration only a few days before. Probably the whole bulk of the main house interposed between him and the park and railway-line. The familiar church or stable bell sounded, and he was surprised that it was only eleven o’clock; in his hazy state he supposed himself to have reached the small hours. The bed was comfortable – an important point in his battered state – and he now resigned himself to a more or less sleepless night. An inspection of his person with the aid of a couple of looking-glasses (an unfamiliar exercise, since he had no narcissistic impulses) had suggested to him already that he had perhaps been exaggerating his injuries. He was a trifle soft, after all. And he now discovered that there were various ways in which the slight moving of a limb beneath the bedclothes could afford him an ease which brought a sensation of almost positive pleasure.

Then – and quite suddenly – his body, thus variously relaxed, agonizingly stiffened. For a moment the sensation was of a hideously pervasive cramp. Had some vital nerve centre within himself, weakened by that dreadful blow, now abruptly given way? Was he going to be paralysed for the remainder of his days? Would he ever be able to paint again?

Cautiously, he tried out the several attachments to his person: left leg, right leg, left arm, and then – crucially – right arm. Everything remained in working order. He realized that the only happening had been inside his head. And he became aware of just what that happening had been.

But it couldn’t, of course, be. His attention had wandered. Or memory – very short-term memory indeed – was playing a malicious prank on him.
Of course
he had heard –

He lay quite still in the darkness of his strange room, and the long minutes drained away. There was nothing to do but wait, and he refrained even from turning on the bedside lamp and looking at his watch. He was visited by the strange fancy of having been submerged in a comfortably hot bath the level of which was now very slowly sinking, so that he was being progressively exposed to a bleakly chill air. Certainly his body was growing cold. He felt the wintry grip of what he was afraid must be fear; felt it in his most vital parts.

Midnight struck – and now there could be no doubt of it. The ninth stroke had been precisely like its fellows. And so it had been an hour earlier. Neither sense nor memory had betrayed him.

But his own wits had. Confused by that hideous blow, he had let himself be monstrously imposed upon.
This was not Imlac House.

THE TWINS

Charles Honeybath faced it coldly – coldly in the sense that he still felt that nasty chill, but coldly also as being now capable of dispassionate and objective appraisal. He told himself that at least he seemed to be through with funk. For the second time within three weeks he was in a monstrous and inexplicable situation. And the challenge to his intelligence of these reduplicated inexplicabilities had suddenly become so imperative that being scared had somehow revealed itself as a waste of time. He heard himself (to his own surprise) laugh aloud in the darkness. He put out a hand and turned on the light.

He nipped out of bed. He did this, for the moment, without any sense that he was a bag of bruises. He tiptoed swiftly and silently to the door of the room. There was a key in the lock. He turned it, and went back to bed. At least he couldn’t be surprised by assassins now. Unless, of course, they set the whole place on fire, or something like that.

He knew why he had been taken to the real Imlac. It had been to paint the portrait of an elderly lunatic. That had been a
genuine
reason. He felt sure of this. The commission hadn’t been an arbitrarily chosen means of getting and keeping him out of the way, as in some Sherlock Holmes story he’d once read. It had been at the heart of the matter – whatever the matter was. Honeybath wasn’t quite clear why he felt so certain of this. But he did feel certain of it. Of course the commission
had
resulted in his being absent from his studio for a fortnight; and it was undeniable that it was that absence which had made the bank robbery feasible. But the bank robbery had been a sideline: a subsidiary operation suddenly glimpsed in the course of planning something quite different. Perhaps the bank robbery represented Peach more or less out on his own; it had just been an inspiration that had come to him when securing Honeybath’s services for the portrait of Mr X. He might have got an OK from his bosses and then contacted a suitable gang of safe-busters or whatever they were called.

So shove the bank robbery out of your head, Honeybath enjoined himself at this stage. You were taken to Imlac to paint that weird old man. And you have been brought
here
– which isn’t Imlac at all – as a totally unaccountable sequel. It’s your job to make sense of it.

These people, the Mariners, have told you an outrageous pack of lies. Including, no doubt, the statement that their name is Mariner. It isn’t. Peach’s name has proved not to be Peach, Arbuthnot’s is assuredly not Arbuthnot or Bunbury either, and nobody has pretended that Mr X has X as a bizarre but authentic surname. Presumably Keybird is Keybird, and I possess a birth certificate confirming that I am Honeybath. But any certainty of nomenclature stops just there.

I know – he repeated to himself – why I was taken to Imlac House. Or at least I can identify what a philosopher would term a proximate cause. But why have I been lured
here?
Unless they propose to murder and bury me on the spot, it looks to have been a pretty expensive operation. Here is another large house – although not necessarily so large as Imlac – in the ownership, or at least the tenancy of this bogus Admiral of the Fleet. They are treating it as expendable merely in the interest of their little confabulation with me. I can’t leave this place without
knowing
that it isn’t Imlac. But it can’t be far from Imlac. As soon as I get free, I’m bound to go back to the police, and within hours they’ll have identified this house and investigated it. And whatever the Mariners are about certainly won’t stand up to
that.
So they’ll have beaten it – just as by this time Arbuthnot and his crowd will almost certainly have beaten it from the real Imlac. So what have the Mariners been after?

On the train he had been foolishly communicative with the girl, so that she had rapidly been able to place him in the context of something she knew a great deal about. She would have been able to telephone her father (if he was her father) while away all that time on the pretext of hunting for her Mini; she would have done that, and so put him in the picture against their arrival half an hour later at this house. But, meanwhile, her having contacted Honeybath had been observed – and the attempt to murder him had been the prompt sequel.

What hove into view – Honeybath suddenly understood – was
two rival criminal organizations
. He could think of just nothing else that so much as began to provide an intelligible framework for the sequence of events in which he had been implicated.

He rested for a moment on this startling hypothesis. It gave his present situation an uncommonly unhealthy look. He decidedly hadn’t got himself mixed up with small-time crooks. Rather he might be described as between the fell incensed points of mighty opposites. And if the one lot had been perfectly prepared to flatten him out against a brick wall, it wasn’t to be supposed that the other would be backward in thinking up some answering pleasantry if it in the least suited their convenience.

Honeybath paused on this discouraging reflection to listen intently. They had got him off to bed, and might by now be supposing that he was fast asleep. It was true that he had locked what appeared to be the only entrance to the room. But might it not run to a trapdoor, or something of that kind? What about the bed’s being so constructed that, at the touch of a distant lever, it would vanish through the floor? What about a deadly snake crawling down a bell-rope? It was true there didn’t seem to be a bell-rope – but in a large way the possibility held, all the same. For the point was – and he saw this with immense clarity – that they had now got what they wanted from him. Indefinably but beyond cavil – this was just a sudden retrospective revelation – his teatime colloquy with the Mariners had concluded on a note of something like relaxation and ease. They had, those two, as it were, coaxed the cat out of the bag.

So just what had he told them that they hadn’t known? They had of course pretended that he had been the bearer of staggering revelation all along the line. Mariner’s audacity in representing his abode to be Imlac House, and himself as having let it to a tenant whose criminal courses were utterly unsuspected by him, made this plain sailing. Yet there had been, so to speak, ever so many hidden rocks; and it simply amazed Honeybath now that he had not in one way or another tumbled to the fact that he was being submitted to a gross and ramshackle deception.

What,
not
known to them, had they been going after?

The fullest information about Mr X
. Surely that was it! Honeybath paused on this. He had the mystery, he told himself, by the tip of its tail – but it would elude him if he didn’t make one further grab. Very well. That was wrong. Mariner
hadn’t
gone after what might be called the full portrait of Mr X. There were things which it would have been natural to ask which he hadn’t asked. It was almost as if he had forgotten that he was supposed to know nothing about the mysterious invalid at all. And what he
had
wanted was something like precise particulars of that invalidism itself. Just what was the degree – it might be styled the reliable degree – of Mr X’s imbecility? It was when Mariner gained a fairly definitive answer on that one that his attention had relaxed, and Honeybath had been politely packed off to bed.

He was in bed now – and it wasn’t the right place for him. The time was well past one o’clock. But he ought to be up and doing, all the same.

This was a curious persuasion, and perhaps there can be no wholly convincing explanation of it. The fact that he had worked out at least part of the puzzle, had a little pushed back the frontier of mystification, possibly acted upon him as an intellectual irritant. The remaining parts of the enigma he was now going to take by the throat. And he would begin by extracting any information he could from this offensively spurious house. The enterprise might be dangerous. But he possessed, if it came to a pinch, a weapon much more accurately lethal than a reversing lorry. The wretched Peach’s revolver was still in his coat-pocket, and the coat was flung over a chair close to his bed.