‘But I must be off myself. My little business with you will keep until you’re less occupied, my dear Braunkopf.’ Binchy had stood up and was nodding cheerfully. ‘Particularly as there’s a lady waiting. I’ll send her in. And now I’ll get back to my lavatory windows and tooth-mugs, Cheel. So long.’
With this parting shot, Binchy walked from the room. There was a moment’s murmur of talk outside it, presumably with the waiting lady. And then the waiting lady entered. It was Hedda Holme.
‘My goot Mrs Holme, please take place!’
Braunkopf had risen to receive his new visitor, and was bowing in a most Duveen-like way over her hand. His manner, in fact, carried all the respectful deference proper towards one who might still be described with approximate accuracy as a recently bereaved widow.
‘I think,’ Braunkopf went on, ‘you know the man Cheel?’
‘Sure. I know Mr Cheel.’ Hedda was making her way to a chair while preserving an elaborate care to present only the front part of her person to Braunkopf’s other visitor. This semi-public allusion to an entirely private and intimate matter struck Cheel as in very bad taste.
‘The man Cheel,’ Braunkopf pursued, ‘is suffering from a delusion. That, at least, is the charitables. He claims that your sadly departed husband is alive.’
‘Sebastian’s dead,’ Hedda said.
‘Exackly. Sebastian Holme is dead. Pinched in the bud. Dumped to rest in foreign soil that is forever Englant, no? But Cheel believes otherwise. It seems a case for medical persistence.’
‘Isn’t it time,’ Cheel asked, ‘that we dropped this nonsense? If we’re all going to get our cut – and I take it that is what this foolery is about – it’s high time we had a little straight talk.’
But at this Braunkopf and Hedda only looked at each other sadly.
‘Locoed – huh?’ Hedda said.
‘Either he is mad, Mrs Holme, or he is a knave. And if he is a knave, he has met his Paddington, yes?’
Oddly enough, it was this last fantastic abuse of the Queen’s English that finally triggered off righteous anger in the breast of Mervyn Cheel.
‘Now, look,’ he said. ‘if anybody is meeting his Waterloo in this affair, it’s you two. I’ve done nothing – nothing, do you hear? – except place on the market as paintings by Sebastian Holme paintings that are in fact by Sebastian Holme. Whereas what shady tricks you’ve been up to the police will pretty quickly find out.’ He turned to Hedda. ‘Didn’t you put up a damned lie to the effect that you believed Braunkopf and myself to have all those Wamba pictures stowed away? It was Braunkopf and yourself, all the time. The beastly things were never destroyed, despite your idiotic husband’s swearing they were. That ghastly Wutherspoon has one or two of them – but you two have all the rest. And you’ve been making a fool of me.’
Cheel paused, panting. Braunkopf and Hedda again did no more than exchange commiserating glances. And Cheel pulled himself up. Whatever the true facts of the case, he had to acknowledge that in his last remarks he had been threshing about wildly. It was almost certain that, of the Wamba pictures, only Wutherspoon’s couple had really been rescued.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ve
got
Sebastian Holme. What’s more, I’ve got him
under my thumb
.’ Cheel made a vicious gesture on the table in front of him. ‘Sebastian emptied his dead brother Gregory’s –
‘His
dead
brother Gregory! Vot ravings, no?’ Braunkopf gave an expressive wave of his hands.
‘He emptied his dead brother Gregory’s bank account on the strength of forged cheques. I can have your blasted Sebastian put inside for a long term tomorrow’
‘Sebastian is dead,’ Hedda Holme said.
‘Dead,’ Braunkopf echoed. ‘And dead men is not punishable.’ He recollected himself. ‘Exceptings,’ he added piously, ‘by Divine Improvidence.’
‘Have some sense!’ Cheel’s irritation before the obstinate stupidity of these people mounted within him. ‘I know very well that you don’t
want
him alive. I know that his survival is highly inconvenient to you. It reopens the whole question of what was sold in the Da Vinci here as coming from Mrs Holme’s estate as her husband’s legatee. But we can fix that. We have a pretty tough hold on him: something like five years in gaol.’
‘Sebastian Holme is dead,’ Braunkopf said.
‘Dead.’ This time the echo came from Hedda.
And it pulled Cheel up. He saw – all too belatedly – that he had to take a fresh measure of the situation. Actually, these people knew as well as he did that Sebastian Holme was alive. For what the point was worth, they probably knew too that Gregory Holme was dead.
‘The forging of cheques and the forging of paintings,’ Braunkopf said, ‘is all von, Cheel. And you have forged the paintings of this prestidigious great dead artist Holme. There is the evidences of Dr Quinn. There is the evidences of the goot Binchy. Who goes to gaol?’
‘In a sense, we’ll keep him dead.’ Cheel was urgent again. ‘There’s no difficulty about that. As soon as he shows signs of wanting to come
publicly
alive, we simply put the screw on him. But there’s plenty more painting in him yet. Not Wamba paintings. That’s finished. We couldn’t market supposed replicas of the whole lot, if you two had only been straight with me’ – Cheel ventured on a note of robust reproach – ‘we needn’t have got into that jam. But why not new paintings? In moderation, you know. It would be unwise to flood the market. Paintings that will simply turn up here and there during the next few years. The provenance may be a bit tricky. But between us we can manage it.’
Again Braunkopf and Hedda glanced at each other. Was it possible, Cheel asked himself, that a flicker of doubt, of cupidity, was already flickering in their eyes? He hoped so.
‘So there you are,’ he said. ‘It will all be plain sailing, believe me.’
‘Supposings, my goot Cheel, this misfortunate dead painter were not so.’ Braunkopf spoke with the air of one idly interested in beguiling tedium with intellectual speculation. ‘Supposings you could take his sorrowing viddow to a blissful reunitings now. And supposings this puttikler authentink genius produced more voonderble contributings the great vorlt of art.’ For a moment Braunkopf appeared tempted to linger on this elevated and familiar note. Instead, he descended to a more practical viewpoint. ‘It cannot go on for perpetuities. How you arrange the pay-off, yes?’
It was possibly the brutality, the gangsterdom, lurking in this expression that struck a long suppressed chord in the civilized breast of Mervyn Cheel. For the moment, at least, a new voice spoke in him. And it was the voice of one who hated Sebastian Holme the superb painter, who hated Sebastian Holme the successful lover, very much.
‘How?’ he repeated with a sudden snarl. ‘Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake. Poison him with ratsbane. Chuck him into a canal. We’ll take our choice.’
There was a shocked silence. Cheel himself, although not so weak as to be shocked on his own behalf, did wonder whether his tone had been wholly judicious. After all, they were only small-time crooks – Braunkopf and Hedda Holme. They were incapable of bringing anything like his own boldness and breadth of view to the ultimate facts of the situation. Not that he had himself quite seen the truth until this moment.
The time would come when Sebastian Holme would have to go
.
‘Mrs Holme,’ Braunkopf murmured, ‘vot happiness that your husband was a perisher at the hand of heffalumps, crocodiles, savages, and not left to the mercifuls this eminent critic Cheel!’
The perverse folly of this remark was so evident that Cheel wondered whether to waste time denouncing it. He was still wondering, when an unexpected diversion occurred. The door of Braunkopf’s sanctum opened, and the detestable Wutherspoon entered the room.
‘Darling!’ Wutherspoon cried – and folded Hedda Holme in a tender embrace. ‘They told me you were here, my angel. So I hurried to you with feet as fleet as my desire. One of the poets.’
‘Wuggie, you honey!’ Hedda Holme said.
From Wutherspoon, transformed into a lover, it could scarcely be said – with another poet – that the loathsome mask had fallen. His figure hadn’t exactly filled out. Indeed, it occurred to Cheel that he ought to be carrying not a neatly rolled umbrella but a scythe and hour-glass. His complexion was as yellow as ever. His features retained the atrabilious cast so congruous with the misogynistic apophthegms which had formerly been current on his lips. But Cheel, thinking back to Burlington House, remembered a detectable disposition on the part of the female called Debby to make eyes at Wutherspoon – and this even (as Cheel now knew) when Debby’s thoughts must have been much engaged with somebody else. It must be supposed, then, that Wutherspoon – or Wuggles or (now) Wuggie – was not without power of sexual attraction, revolting as this thought was. And what had happened recently seemed clear enough. Not content with substantially mitigating his penury by the sale of ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ and whatever was the other Sebastian Holme he had dishonestly smuggled out of Wamba, Wutherspoon was proposing to cash in on Holme in a big way. He had, in fact, made successful addresses to Holme’s supposed widow – on whose behalf Braunkopf had sold a couple of dozen Holmes only a few months ago. Here, in Braunkopf’s office, the happy couple were shamelessly engaging in amorous transport now.
‘Hedda, darling!’ Wutherspoon was saying. ‘The party’s off. So we can have a lovely lunch together – just you and me.’
‘Oh, Wuggie!’ Hedda received this news with rapture. ‘Isn’t that just swell? But why is the party off?’
‘It’s Debby. She had bad news about her governess. The old lady’s chest, it seems. Debby has decided to take her to Jamaica at once. A nice, quiet hotel at Montego Bay.’
‘What do you know! Isn’t Debby
kind
? But what about Duffy?’
‘Duffy? He’s arranging to do something for the old headmaster of his private school. That’s what he does whenever Debby goes off with her governess… Good God!’ Wutherspoon’s glance had so far strayed from his charmer as to take in the fact that ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ appeared to have reproduced itself by a species of fission. ‘What the hell is the meaning of that?’
‘It is regrettables, Mr Wutherspoon.’ Braunkopf pointed at Cheel. ‘You know this infected criminal, yes?’
‘I’m damned if I do. But, yes – his name’s Mervie. Some sort of hanger-on of old Duffy’s. Had dinner with him once. The scoundrel welshed on it.’
‘That is expectedness, Mr Wutherspoon. And we have just infected him in forgery. He forges Sebastian Holmes.’
‘And says that Sebastian is still alive. Darling, wouldn’t that be just awful?’ Hedda looked fondly at her beloved. ‘It would mean, honey, that we couldn’t get married.’
‘What outrageous rubbish!’ Wutherspoon grasped his umbrella in a manner that reminded Cheel unpleasantly of the ferocious Rumbelow with his cane. His expression was of calculated cunning. ‘I myself saw Sebastian Holme killed, as a matter of fact. Of course, your brother-in-law Gregory’s alive, isn’t he?’
‘Sure, honey.’
‘Braunkopf – that’s right?’
‘Puffikt correk, Mr Wutherspoon. Mr Gregory Holme was great assistance Da Vinci Gallery arranging voonderble memorial exhibition his late brother Sebastian.’
‘Could Gregory have been impersonating Sebastian, do you think?’
‘It is possibles. But I think this Cheel has been making the inventions all on his own.’ Braunkopf turned to Cheel. ‘You thought you could tear the wool from our eyes, no?’
‘Call the police,’ Wutherspoon said.
So far, Cheel had failed to utter since the detestable Wutherspoon had entered the room. He was equally outraged and bewildered – and in some danger, indeed, of weakly deciding that the situation was too much for him. But at the mention of the police – grotesque bluff though this could only be – he abruptly found his tongue.
‘Isn’t it time,’ he said, ‘that you all dropped this nonsensical charade? We’re all in it, you know. Apparently Wutherspoon is in it now. And I don’t mind saying at once that I refuse to take that as meaning that I myself get a smaller cut.’
‘A smaller cut!’ Hedda Holme laughed robustly. ‘A larger clip on the ear is what’s coming to you, Cheel.’
‘But look.’ Cheel ignored this vulgar abuse. ‘I’ll put my card on the table. I’ll put my
trump
card on
that
table.’ He pointed to the massive medieval object that lent an air of such dignity and substance to Braunkopf’s inner retreat, ‘I’ll fetch Sebastian Holme here now. And with anybody who finds his being alive a trifle inconvenient – well, he and I will consider doing a deal on the spot. Agreed?’
‘Sebastian’s dead,’ Hedda said.
‘Dead,’ Braunkopf and Wutherspoon said together.
‘The man who’s alive,’ Hedda said, ‘is his brother Gregory.’
‘His brother Gregory’s alive,’ Wutherspoon and Braunkopf said.
It is often the strongest intellects that are overcome by spasms of intellectual doubt. Cheel has a spasm of it now. For a fearful moment, that is to say, he found himself almost believing the wicked lie thus unanimously put to him. Was it, after all, so inconceivable? The bearded man he had encountered in the Da Vinci Gallery
ought
to have been Gregory Holme. So was he? Had he, for some fiendish and impenetrable reason, pretended to be Sebastian pretending to be himself? Had he carried out this imposture so thoroughly that he had even gashed his hand where he, Cheel, had once gashed Sebastian’s? Could Sebastian and Gregory be painters of equal skill, like Jan van Eyck and his mysterious brother Hubert?
With such fantastic speculations did Mervyn Cheel for some moments hither and thither divide the swift mind. But he knew, of course, that all this was nonsense. And as soon as he had firmly told himself this, a far more plausible – yet almost equally disastrous – reading of the situation sprang into his mind.
Sebastian Holme had been suborned
. The criminal gang that Cheel now realized himself to be up against had somehow got at him.
And they had persuaded him to resume his false identity as Gregory
. This was the explanation of the imbecile chorus – or seemingly imbecile chorus – to which he had been listening. And the object of the criminals was clear. They were going to have him, Cheel, in for forgery. And then they were going to exploit the still living Sebastian for their own ends.