Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 4

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” Bobby explained, “we’ve been given some fresh information that does seem a little disturbing. I believe Mr. Atts let it be known that he was intending to make some announcement of special interest in a lecture he was scheduled to give at the Royal Arts but which he never appeared to deliver. The papers seem to have been working it up. ‘Sensation in Art Circles’, the headlines call it. Apparently he told no one what it was all about.”

  Sir Walter looked very smiling, very complacent, folded his hands across his ample stomach and shook his head. Then his smile grew broader, his complacence more marked. Finally, Bobby having waited in patient silence, Sir Walter said slowly:

  “I could make a guess.”

  “Please do,” said Bobby. “It would be most useful.”

  “I didn’t breathe a word to any of our journalistic friends,” Sir Walter continued. “You know. Libel and that sort of thing. Put down to personal enmity perhaps. We are not on the best of terms—Atts and myself,” and this was said with a sudden tiny laugh that fairly startled Bobby, so little in it did there seem of mirth, so much of hate. “Never forgiven me for succeeding where he failed. An old story. What I’m inclined to suggest now—of course, for your ears only—is that he thought he had discovered in some attic or another what he took to be the work of one of the great masters, Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael, anyone. You know. He meant to startle us all by producing it at this mysterious, undelivered lecture. Then at the last moment—after it had been given a cleaning perhaps—he was forced to realise it was only a copy. He couldn’t face it, so he disappeared. That’s my suggestion. He’ll turn up again when he thinks it’s blown over. Loss of memory is what he’ll say. Due to overwork. You know. He may get away with it.”

  “A most interesting suggestion,” Bobby said. “It may very well be the true explanation and I think we shall have to accept it. It’s an awkward situation. We know nothing officially. But the caller I spoke of did make some rather disturbing statements and I’m inclined to think he knew more than he cared to say. Before he left he handed me a picture postcard of Rembrandt’s ‘Girl Peeling Apples’. I don’t know if it was meant for a hint. But it’s why I thought I would like to see the picture again. And then I do remember what an impression it made on me the first time I saw it years ago, greater I think than any other. I don’t know why.”

  “I’ve heard people say that before,” Sir Walter remarked thoughtfully. “Almost like a mystical, a religious experience, one man said. He went into the church soon after. I don’t know if that was a result.” He laughed gently and this time more naturally. “I can’t say it ever had quite that effect on me but it’s certainly a very fine thing and one that does have an unusual effect on many people. All the same, I can’t see how there can be any possible connection. Atts may have disappeared, and can stay disappeared for all I care, but the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ hasn’t, and won’t.”

  “No,” agreed Bobby. “No. I had a chat with the attendant. He told me Mr. Atts had been showing unusual interest in the picture recently.”

  “Yes, he reported it to me,” Sir Walter said. “Early Hyams, that would be—tall thin man? A remarkable man in his way. Entirely uncultivated. Only reads and writes with difficulty but with an intuitive understanding, an instinctive grasp of a picture’s significance that is most remarkable. In some ways I would as soon take his opinion as that of many of our leading art experts—not that that is saying much. He told me once, and I’m sure he meant it, that the figures and the scenes in ‘his’ pictures as he calls them are more real to him than those he comes across every day in ordinary life. It’s the small, homely Dutch interiors are his special favourites. You can’t fall in love with the magnificence of, say, ‘The Night Watch’. You can only admire and venerate. Now with Hogarth’s ‘Shrimp Girl’ you could, I think. I wish we had them both here,” he added, and a note of yearning had now come into his voice, much more pleasant than the undertone of bitter hatred Bobby thought he had detected in Sir Walter’s references to the missing Atts. “When Hyams spoke to me,” he continued, “I told him who Atts was and it was all right, but to keep his eyes open all the same.”

  “I rather gathered the attendant had begun to be half afraid there might be some scheme in progress to steal the picture.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sir Walter said. “I could believe it. Atts is utterly unscrupulous. But we take our precautions. No such attempt would have any chance of succeeding and you can trust Hyams. He would defend his pictures with his life.”

  “Is such an idea at all likely?” Bobby asked incredulously. “Of course, things, pictures have been stolen from museums and art galleries. I know that. But this is a famous painting and Mr. Atts well known as an art critic. What could he possibly do with it if he got it?”

  “Use it to discredit me,” Sir Walter said, and now the laugh he gave had in it neither hate nor mirth and just a faint, only half-conscious nervousness. “He can’t forgive me for my success where he failed in finding the ‘Girl’ . . . He gave up too soon. I went on. An old story. You know. He likes to say he’ll get even. Not so easy. I take no notice. But suppose Atts did succeed somehow in getting away with one of the pictures in my care. He might hire someone. You know. A professional burglar possibly. He could keep it for a week or two and then produce it with a long story of how he had rescued it from the thieves. You know. My negligence. His energy. I have my enemies. I’m too candid, too outspoken at times. I stand aloof from all the current cliques that are the curse of the art world. Atts is hand and glove with them all.” Sir Walter paused. He was very pale now. He was still trembling with the violence of the emotion with which he had spoken these last sentences. He said: “Atts wants my place here and if he could get it by discrediting me, that would be his triumph.”

  “Thank you very much for what you have told me,” Bobby said, getting to his feet. “I don’t think there are any grounds at present on which to take action. But if there are developments—if, for instance, this morning’s caller turns up again—we shall be much better prepared. Background is always important.”

  “So it is,” agreed Sir Walter. “Always. Didn’t you question this man you say came to see you?”

  “I didn’t press him,” Bobby answered. “If he has more to say, as I rather suspect, he’ll probably turn up again. Anyhow, if we want him he can always be sent for. Nothing like too much pressure for making a possible witness shut up tight.”

  “I see,” said Sir Walter, but not very much as if he did. “Well, if you really want to find Atts—I don’t know why you should, for my part I hope he’ll stay missing for good and all—I think I could tell you where to look for a beginning.”

  “Oh,” said Bobby, interested. “Yes. Where?”

  “Paris,” said Sir Walter, grinning maliciously, “And not alone.”

  CHAPTER IV

  THE COPYIST

  FROM SIR WALTER’S private sanctum Bobby chose to take the famous Watercolour Corridor—it boasted among other things what Sir Walter always claimed was by far the most complete Rowlandson collection in existence. This was not the most direct route to the great central stair, but Bobby preferred it because by way of the Long Room he would come again to the smaller room where hung the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, and this he wanted to see again. He had a sort of vague hope that in a second visit he might recover something of that exaltation of the spirit he remembered so well experiencing when he saw it first.

  As was only too frequently the case, the Long Room was deserted except for one solitary figure—that of, presumably, an art student busily engaged copying the younger Teniers’s ‘Milkmaids’, one of his most endearing pictures. Coming nearer Bobby saw at once that though the copy was no more than half completed it had already caught to a remarkable degree the spirit of the original—something that is of the inner life all great paintings possess, as if by opening a door upon the reality that lies behind existence. Involuntarily Bobby paused to admire and at this the y
oung man glanced up and scowled.

  He looked very ill, thin, emaciated to a degree. His features were good, more than good. He should indeed have been as handsome a lad as anyone could wish to see, but now the yellowish, unhealthy-looking skin, wrinkled over the facial bones that seemed to have no flesh upon them, gave a horrid impression that here was only an animated death’s-head peering upwards. The skeleton-like hands, too, that the moment before had been holding brush and palette with such accustomed, firm dexterity were now beginning to tremble. Bobby noticed something else as well. He could see a nervous twitching at the corners of the mouth, and the eyes unnaturally dilated. “Drugs, the young fool,” he said to himself, and in a shrill, high-pitched voice the other snarled:

  “I can’t stand people breathing down my neck.”

  “Sorry,” Bobby apologized. “I couldn’t help seeing what you were doing, and I thought it looked so jolly good I had to stop for a look.” In a lower voice, he added, “Why spoil it all? There’s still time to give it up. But not much.”

  “Damn you,” the boy exclaimed furiously.

  Bobby walked away. Near the doorway he looked back. The young man was again painting, painting furiously, his hands once more firm and strong, his brush strokes made without pause or hesitation. Bobby told himself it had been silly and officious to have said anything to him. A growing, unfortunate habit of authority, he feared. It is not time the drug addict lacks to free himself, but will. A pity, all the same, for to Bobby it seemed as if there had been a touch of genius showing through the copying, genius inspired by that in the original, and now genius being poured away like fresh spring water on the sands of a desert.

  From the Long Room Bobby entered that in which hung the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, and was at once aware of an odd atmosphere of tension for which at first there seemed no cause. There were only three people there, two women and the attendant, Early Hyams. The two women were standing together before the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, but at it they were not looking, only at each other. In the background Hyams was hovering uneasily, as if he knew not what might happen next, but feared it none the less, though so far there had been nothing. For to him it seemed as if there were a strange, strained intensity, in their silent immobility, that those two waiting, watchful women showed, which in a very curious way gave an impression of an imminent outbreak of one sort or another.

  Of the two women, one, the elder, was tall, slim, handsome in a rather aloof way, with features of a purely Greek type. Her plain black well-made coat and skirt suited her admirably and her only ornament Bobby could see was a Greek cameo brooch. She could easily have passed for being still in her early thirties but for a few silvery threads in hair that once had been raven black. The woman facing her, clearly much the younger of the two, was of a more ordinary type, pretty rather than handsome, with large soft eyes of light blue and fair hair just touched with gold. She was wearing a light coat over a gaily patterned frock, and her hat, in accordance with the prevailing fashion, was so small as to be little more than a hair ornament. Bobby felt that even in extreme old age the first of these two would still retain much of her power to impress her personality on any company, while from the other the years as they went by would soon take away most of an attractiveness that owed so much to glamorous youth. He found himself wondering who they were and why they stood thus so silently, so still, before a picture at which they never looked.

  Then the first woman spoke. What she said Bobby could not hear. For answer the other shook her head in a kind of petulant denial, so that what had seemed before to have in it the elements of the tragic transformed itself into a mere display of temper. Abruptly she turned and hurried away, her high-heeled shoes going tap-tap upon the polished parquetry of the flooring. The elder woman made no attempt to follow, did not move indeed. Then she went slowly, with dragging steps, as of one weary to the point of exhaustion, to the nearest bench and sat down, her eyes closed, her body relaxed.

  Bobby went across to where Hyams stood not far away. He had the idea that Hyams was greatly relieved but still afraid. To him Bobby said:

  “Have you any idea who those two ladies are?”

  “Well, sir,” Hyams answered, and he did not appear at all surprised by the question, “I think I’ve seen the one that’s gone with Mr. Atts. I’m not sure that it’s really the same lady but if it is they went away together.” Even as he was speaking he shook his head slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Bobby noticed it, as indeed he had trained himself to notice everything. He was standing with his back to the opening between this room and the Long Room. Hyams was facing it; and when Bobby glanced over his shoulder to see what, if anything, had caused that brief gesture of negation he was just in time to catch a glimpse of the scowling face of the young copyist to whom he had spoken in the Long Room. The lad was turning away in what looked like a rather hurried obedience to a warning conveyed in Hyams’s brief shake of the head. He had on his hat and coat as if he had finished all he wanted to do that day and was now leaving.

  Natural enough, Bobby supposed, that the young man should wish to avoid the stranger who had so quickly guessed his secret and who had so officiously offered him unwanted advice. But why had Hyams made his gesture of refusal, or of warning, since of that incident he could know nothing? And why, if the boy was leaving the Gallery, had he chosen so much longer a way round to the main stair instead of the direct route across the Watercolour Corridor?

  Puzzling, Bobby thought, and it was always true that to every puzzle there is an answer. An unpleasant thought came to him. The young man was certainly a drug addict and therefore on the high road to perdition. Was it possible, was it even conceivable, that Hyams was the source through whom he obtained his supplies? Improbable, he decided, and yet there was something about Hyams that puzzled him. No ordinary man, Sir Walter had said, and in that was certainly speaking no more than the truth. A man living under some sort of strain apparently and so perhaps more likely to take drugs than to peddle them, nor is the number small in these days of those who live under a perpetual sense of strain. Hyams was speaking again. He was saying:

  “I’m sure I’ve never seen the other lady before, at any rate not recently. She’s one to remember.”

  Changing the subject abruptly, Bobby said:

  “There’s a young chap I saw copying one of the pictures in the Long Room, a Teniers. Jolly good, too. It seemed to have caught a little of the spirit of the original, but I thought he looked awfully ill. Do you know who he is?”

  “That would be Mr. Jasmine, I expect,” Hyams answered. “It’s a spot of T.B., he says, but it strikes me as more like not getting enough to eat and living alone with no one to look after him. Now he’s doing copies for a picture dealer. Good money but a pity, Sir Walter says, because of losing his own individual vision. A copy is never an original.”

  “No, it isn’t, is it?” agreed Bobby. “Still, I suppose it may teach you something. He looks to me as if he ought to be in hospital.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hyams agreed. “I took the liberty of telling him so once and he said there were no pictures in hospital.”

  They were interrupted by a clatter of tourists led by a voluble guide, a kind of animated phonograph record apparently. For two or three minutes, not more, the quiet room was drowned in the wave of the commotion they caused. Then they were off and away into the Long Room and Hyams glared after them with a sort of atom-bomb expression, much as if he wished he had one wherewith to annihilate the whole group. He saw that Bobby seemed just a trifle amused by the intensity of annoyance his scowl revealed and he allowed himself a faint, slightly shamefaced grin in response.

  “I know it’s a bit silly,” he said defensively, “but it does seem a shame the way some of them rush past things like these and take in no more of what they mean than a train-load of monkeys would. They wouldn’t ever behave like that in church, and this is a church. Pearls before swine, sir. I’ve heard a woman call the Teniers Mr. Jasmine is copying ‘sweetly pre
tty’. ‘Sweetly pretty’ indeed! I could have killed her.”

  “Oh, well, that would have been going a bit far,” Bobby protested, and Hyams allowed himself another faint smile.

  “Makes my bl-blood boil,” was his final comment as he moved away to get a clearer view into the Long Room and make sure it was now free from the desecrating presence of those innocent, harmless visitors and their loudspeaker of a guide.

  The commotion their passage had caused had had one effect, though: that of rousing the lady in black from the torpor into which she seemed to have sunk. She had opened her handbag and was looking at herself in a small hand mirror she had taken from it. She put it back after tidying her hair, and was clearly preparing to depart. Acting on one of those sudden impulses that occasionally came to him, Bobby went across to her.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I believe the lady who was with you just now was Mrs. Atts.”

  “I am Mrs. Atts,” she answered stiffly. She was on her feet now. “Why?” she asked.

  “I am so sorry,” Bobby apologised. He took another decision and produced his card, his official card this time. He said: “There has been a good deal in the papers the last day or two and this morning we had a visitor at Scotland Yard. He made some rather disturbing statements. I feel they ought to be checked but we can hardly do much without knowing more and without your authority. Do you mind saying if you have any knowledge of Mr. Atts’s present whereabouts?”

  “I am expecting to hear from him at any moment,” she answered; and then with an effort, as though she could no longer keep up a pretence of indifference, she added: “It has never been like this before. Who was it came to see you? What did he say?”