‘Do you think so?’ These simple remarks seemed rather beyond Lady Finch. ‘Gabriel always appeared to find it very amusing. And his friends. They had a gathering before it once a year. With champagne. And there was a great deal of laughter.’
‘Dear me! And by his friends you mean, in this connection, the people actually represented with him here in the picture?’
‘Yes. At least, I suppose so.’ Lady Finch glanced vaguely at her handsome gift to the nation. ‘I didn’t really know my husband’s business associates very well. Of course, they were important people. Everybody looked up to them – almost as much as to Gabriel himself.’
‘I am delighted to hear it,’ Appleby said. Lady Finch’s first appearance before society, he was vaguely conjecturing, had perhaps been across the footlights of a music hall. ‘Did you know the artist, Gwilym Lloyd?’
‘I only met him two or three times, during the sittings. They called him Mungo Lloyd, which was some sort of pun. But I thought him very astute. Gabriel did a great deal for him. After the Conversation Piece, I mean. Gabriel got him commissions for portraits all over the City. It was quite the making of Mr Lloyd. He became very good at robes and things. And fur. Aldermen and people have to be painted in fur.’
‘Indeed they do. I think Lloyd died some years before Sir Gabriel. Was Sir Gabriel distressed?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Gabriel’s feelings were always the proper ones. Only, he used to
say
funny things. And I remember that when Mr Lloyd died he said it was a good riddance of a damned nuisance. Wasn’t that strange?’
‘Very,’ Appleby said. And he made his escape with a bow.
It was into the arms of Lord Pendragon, whose dress and glass of tomato juice alike suggested that he was going on to a formal dinner. He was, Appleby imagined, a Trustee of the Lyle, and present on this occasion as a matter of civility.
‘Keeping an eye on security?’ Pendragon asked humorously. It was the year in which Appleby had become Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, so here were two Top People in a huddle. ‘Can’t say I’d mind if somebody made off with the thing right under your nose, my dear fellow.’
‘The Lloyd Conversation Piece? I quite agree – and I’m here merely because Judith brought me. By the way, who are the other people in the picture?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea – and there seems to be nothing to inform us. Let’s have another look at them.’
‘They seem younger than their entertainer, and one might expect some of them to be still alive, and present to see themselves attaining fresh celebrity tonight. But Lady Finch is entirely vague about them.’
‘A charming woman, but not notably well-informed.’ With this bland pronouncement, Pendragon paused before the Conversation Piece. ‘I knew Finch slightly,’ he said, ‘and it’s a good likeness, so far as I remember. As for the others, I’m not sure now that they don’t ring some vague bell. They hang together, as it were.’ He frowned. ‘But not much of a set, I’d say.’
Allowing for Lord Pendragon’s professional caution, Appleby thought, this was a fairly stiff judgement on the late Sir Gabriel and his friends. ‘I’ve just heard,’ he offered experimentally, ‘that they drank champagne in front of the thing once a year.’
‘The devil they did! Some precious anniversary occasion, I don’t doubt.’ Pendragon’s frown had deepened. And suddenly he made a surprising dive at the Conversation Piece, and pretty well rubbed noses with it. ‘Well, I’m damned!’ Lord Pendragon was so unwontedly loud in this exclamation that he attracted the attention of several people standing by. ‘Must have one of Beckett’s boffins look into this.’
Beckett was the name of the Lyle’s Director, and at this moment he came up with Judith Appleby.
‘Judith, my dear, you look ravishing,’ Lord Pendragon said. ‘And how is young Bobby getting on at Balliol? Do tell me.’ It was against Pendragon’s rules to expect a lady to pick up on a conversation in progress, and for some minutes he showed himself amiably conversant with Appleby family affairs. Then he glanced at his watch – with an openness that made the action entirely polite. ‘Oh, great God!’ he murmured. ‘I have to dine with the Honourable Company of Comfiters – and no doubt talk to the chief comfit-maker’s wife. Lucky I’m a shade more tolerant than Hotspur, eh?’ And on this graceful Shakespearian note the retired Secretary of the Cabinet made his way to Lady Finch. The ensuing leave-taking had every appearance of the largest leisure. Its actual duration, Appleby remarked, was fifteen seconds.
When the Applebys got home at midnight – for they had gone to a theatre – there was a young man waiting in the hall. He was from ‘C’ Department, and this was the big moment of his career to date.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the Commander thinks you should be let know at once. Lord Pendragon has been shot dead at a banquet in the City.’
Appleby – without, he hoped, treading on too many subordinate toes – investigated this curious affair himself. It appeared that, on arriving at Comfiters’ Hall, Pendragon had entered a cloakroom, and from there a wash-place which happened to be deserted for the moment. He had been followed by his assailant wholly unobserved, and killed while slipping the ribbon of some decoration or other over his head. The enamel of the august gewgaw – macabrely enough – had been chipped by the bullet as it emerged through his forehead. The murderer must then simply have walked out again. It was one of those crimes the complete simplicity of which detectives find daunting and ominous.
Pendragon was a bachelor. A younger brother, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Cambridge, was properly distressed. He was also extremely insistent that the affair should be cleared up at once. It is not good for an eminent person’s posthumous reputation to be mysteriously murdered. Something shady is inclined to hint itself as in the background of so sensational a demise.
Appleby believed in speed, for he knew that one’s best chance of closing in on a crime effectively lies within the twenty-four hours following its commission. Yet it was a couple of days before he came round to the notion (so bizarre did it seem) that Lady Finch’s Conversation Piece might have a place in the picture.
‘Listen,’ he said to Judith. ‘That damned daub of Mungo Lloyd’s – do you remember how oddly Pendragon behaved before it?’
‘Oddly?’
‘He took what you might call a lunge at it. I believe he suddenly recognised one of those four men depicted along with Finch, and found something startling in the fact. Indeed, he pretty well cried aloud about it. And I suspect his doing so alerted somebody to danger.’
‘It wasn’t that sort of lunge.’
‘Just what do you mean by that, please?’ Appleby was all attention at once. His wife was by profession a sculptor, and her perceptions before any work of art were likely to be acute.
‘Pendragon wasn’t looking at a face. He wasn’t looking at anything that could be called representational at all – not like all those idiotic women at the cherry-stones and the drops of wine on the empty glasses. He was looking at something in the
facture
. Or the
fattura
, as our Italianate friend Beckett would say. And as I came up I heard him
say
something about Beckett. What was it?’
‘That one of Beckett’s boffins must look into the thing.’
‘Good. And with infra-red light, if you ask me. The
fattura
, you know, is what I’d call the handling.’ Judith paused. ‘So
now
do you see?’ she asked modestly.
Appleby wasted no time on a reply. He picked up the telephone, called for his car, and returned to the Lyle Gallery.
That afternoon a boffin did his stuff. Indeed, several boffins did their stuff. And the following day took Appleby into a world remote from such specialized delvers beneath the surface of things: into the world, indeed, of high finance. Sundry persons with long memories therein were induced to view the Conversation Piece. They left the Lyle looking grim.
On the third day – and after his brother’s funeral – the Professor from Cambridge turned up again.
‘Well,’ he demanded of Appleby, ‘is somebody going to hang for it?’
‘My dear sir, I need hardly remind a lawyer that in England–’
‘Yes, of course. Say, brought to book.’
‘Frankly, the point is problematical. Everything is clear enough. But its oddity may trouble a jury – particularly as we shall have only circumstantial evidence to offer about who fired that shot.’
‘Explain, please.’
‘Certainly. And, first, I believe your brother did more or less tumble to the identity of the people in the picture – or to that of all but one of them – and had some notion of its audacious significance. But, for the moment, he kept mum.’
‘He’d had a long training in discretion.’
‘Precisely. And now, let’s go back a bit. You recall the
Peseta
Affair?’
‘Lord, yes. Chaps dealing dubiously in foreign currencies, and some suspicion that they’d obtained information from a confidential source for a corrupt consideration.’
‘Just that. And they had an uncommonly close shave: Finch himself, and three associates called Hammond, Hartley, and Henderson.’
‘Respectable if colourless names.’
‘No doubt. And you can see all of them in the Conversation Piece. They’ve been identified for me half-a-dozen times over.’
‘Did Finch’s wife–’
‘She hasn’t a clue, and never had. Her husband’s affairs were a sealed book to her. Now, about these men. Finch is dead and so is Hartley. Hammond and Henderson are alive. And Henderson, although apparently not invited, was at our curious occasion at the Lyle. I’m afraid it’s the most awkward fact we have about him – so far.’
‘You have left one man in the picture unaccounted for.’
‘Yes, indeed. We’ll call him, for the moment, the Fifth Man. Nobody I’ve been able to bring along has identified
him
.’
‘I see.’ The Professor considered. ‘If that Conversation Piece represents the outrageous act of impudence I think it does, then we know at least something about the Fifth Man. He was in on that unscrupulous and successful financial
coup
.’
‘Obviously. For the painter they call Mungo Lloyd – now dead – was brought in simply to celebrate and commemorate those people’s triumphant dishonesty. No wonder they drank champagne before it every year.’
‘Good God, Appleby – what a crowd!’
‘Ah, yes – but now consider. The Conversation Piece was vainglorious – but in some way it must have been
rash
as well.’
‘Rash?’
‘Very rash – to have produced the eventual catastrophe it
has
produced. And there’s the curious fact that, right up to his death, Gwilym Lloyd had some sort of hold over Finch. He obliged Finch to get him no end of profitable commissions around the City. And when Lloyd died Finch went on record – through his guileless wife – as saying that it was a good riddance of a damned nuisance. What do you make of that?’
‘Not much.’ The Professor smiled slowly. ‘Although it leads my mind back to the Fifth Man.’
‘As well it may. And one can think of an obvious reason why he has escaped identification so far. He belongs right outside the group, or clique, or gang – or whatever you care to call it. In fact, he’s the confidential source from whom the vital financial information came – or was bought, as we may safely suppose.’
‘Was any individual actually suspected at the time?’
‘Yes. Antony Hopcroft was.’
There was a long silence in Sir John Appleby’s study. The only sound was the soft clink of ice setting in a glass, since Appleby had provided the Professor with the sort of recruitment which the aftermath of a funeral commonly requires.
‘Good God!’ The Professor barely whispered this. ‘Antony was one of my brother’s closest colleagues – and impeccable.’
‘So one would have supposed. Yet a certain amount of evidence wasn’t lacking. Where any hope of an effective prosecution broke down, however, was in the fact that not the slightest trace of any connection between Finch’s group and Hopcroft could be found.’
‘And yet you suggest that here he was in this foolhardy picture?’ The Professor had suddenly transfixed Appleby with a scholar’s cold intellectual stare. ‘It would certainly be in the picture in another sense – the psychological picture, so to speak – of those arrogant champagne-swilling rascals. But it won’t do. My brother would have recognized Hopcroft’s portrait at once.’ The Professor’s gaze hardened further. ‘Do you suggest that he did, and that he concealed the fact from you?’
‘Nothing of the kind. What your brother did spot in the picture, he spotted because he was something of a connoisseur. The Fifth Man’s head is a piece of over-painting, and is by a hand other than Lloyd’s. The supreme impudence of the picture as it originally was, consisted in its depicting Antony Hopcroft as a member of the group. Lloyd must have understood the significance of this, or he wouldn’t have had that hold over Finch. Later on – and it was after Lloyd’s death – Finch decided the joke was too risky to perpetuate. He could, of course, simply have destroyed the Conversation Piece, but that might have caused awkward questions to be asked. So he had in another painter, and Hopcroft’s head disappeared beneath an imaginary head – that of our Fifth Man.’
‘And this fellow Henderson – the Fourth Man, as we may say?’
‘As I’ve told you, Henderson was present at the party in the Lyle. When he saw your brother spot the faking, and overheard him throw out that suggestion about a boffin, he saw instantly that the whole
Peseta
Affair might bob up again, this new piece of evidence be adduced, and a successful criminal prosecution achieved. But Beckett, the Director, hadn’t heard the boffin bit, and your brother had at once left the party. Silence him, and nobody would ever have a second thought about the Conversation Piece again.’
‘Do you mean to say–’
‘Excuse me.’ Appleby’s telephone had rung, and he picked up the instrument. ‘Thank you,’ he said unemotionally a minute later, and put it down again. ‘A development, Professor. Henderson was identified slipping out of the Comfiters’ premises, after all. By a commissionaire who had worked for one of his companies.’ Appleby glanced at a calendar. ‘Friday wasn’t Henderson’s lucky day.’