The Studio Crime (2 page)

“That's the one consideration,” assented John, “that has so far kept me guiltless of blood. What do you think, Laurence? How would you dispose of your enemy?”

“I'm afraid I shouldn't dispose of him at all,” said Newtree diffidently, fidgeting with his glasses. “I—I should just keep out of his way if I didn't like him. But I like practically everybody.”

Christmas laughed. The contrast between his friend Newtree's acute impish work as a caricaturist and his gentle diffident attitude to the world in general was a constant source of delight to him. John Christmas was a young man with a gift that amounted to genius for making friends with all sorts of people. He had been born under a happy star. He had his fair share of good looks, the good humour born of perfect health, the free, natural good manners of one who delights in his fellow-creatures and that alert and sympathetic sort of mind to which the meaning of the word “boredom” is unknown. He had sought out Newtree in the first place to buy the original of Newtree's brilliant caricature of his father, Jefferson Christmas, head of the Christmas Stores, that steel and stonework colossus of the West End; and he had soon added him to his large collection of friends. Of all these, Serafine was his oldest and perhaps his dearest. In his early twenties he had frequently asked her to marry him. But her persistent refusal to take him seriously had gradually worn the romantic gilt off their friendship, and now in his thirtieth year their relationship was more like that of favourite nephew and young indulgent aunt than any other. Now, at Newtree's deprecating “I like practically everybody” their eyes met with a twinkle, and John could see that Serafine liked and appreciated Newtree just as he did.

“And you know,” went on Newtree mildly, “you're joking, John. I might say that I'm as incapable of shedding blood as you are yourself.”

I notice,” said Christmas with a smile, “that you don't include Miss Wimpole.”

Laurence blinked in embarrassment and cast an apologetic glance at the formidable Serafine.

“Oh, well,” he stammered quickly. “I don't—I mean, I haven't known Miss Wimpole very—I mean—”

Miss Wimpole gave him a kind smile which added to rather than relieved his embarrassment.

“Mr. Newtree feels quite rightly that he hasn't known me long enough to answer for me,” she said reasonably. “I must tell you, Mr. Newtree, that I don't make murder a habit. I only murder under great provocation.”

“All murders are committed under great provocation.” It was Simon Mordby who, finding the amiable Mrs. Wimpole a bit heavy in hand, had suggested joining the animated trio at the window. He uttered his dictum with the smooth, unanswerable air of his kind of practitioner. He had a good presence, a suave, creamy voice, an ornate house in Maida Vale and a very large practice, consisting almost entirely of well-to-do and little-to-do women. As he spoke he fixed his wide-apart light eyes on Serafine and smiled a smile at once ingratiating and superior.

“And you are mistaken, Newtree, in supposing yourself incapable of committing a murder. We are all potential murderers.”

Mrs. Wimpole closed her eyes like a blissful cat and nodded, as though she found a sad pleasure in this conception of her potentialities. She was a kind, lazy, middle-aged lady with a great deal of time on her hands and no training in any useful way of killing it. The study of psychology was one of her latest hobbies. Serafine, who disliked Dr. Mordby and was tired of being made a subject for amateur psycho-analysis, wished her aunt would go back to astrology or vegetarianism or one of her other more polite and impersonal fads.

“Of course,” pursued Dr. Mordby in his best lecture-room manner, “potentialities differ. Now I should say—” He looked at Serafine with his large head on one side and raised himself gently on his toes, a habit of his when talking on his own subject, “I should say that Miss Wimpole's potentialities as a criminal are ex-treme-ly low.”

Miss Wimpole's aunt opened her eyes with a slight jerk and looked rather disappointed. Serafine smiled politely. She felt, as usual in the presence of Dr. Mordby, that her murderous potentialities were, on the contrary, rather high.

“She doth protest too much,” said the eminent psychologist with a bantering smile. “Your potential murderer does not talk quite so freely about it. He is more likely to have a nervous shrinking from the subject.”

“I say,” said Laurence Newtree deprecatingly, “aren't we all being rather morbid?”

Christmas laughed, and Mordby transferred his wide fixed gaze to Newtree's face, as if he were sadly measuring that gentleman's potentialities by the nervous shrinking evidenced in his voice.

“It's the fog,” said Serafine. “I've noticed that a London fog always turns people's thoughts in a delightfully morbid direction.”

She glanced as she spoke out of the great square-paned window.

“One can imagine that it hides—all sorts of unusual things. It makes the most ordinary things look strange and threatening. At any moment one can expect something sinister to appear...”

She had a clear, flexible voice like an actor's and knew how to give value to her words. Under its spell they all glanced out of the window. And they all saw what she saw—a small patch of whiteness moving through the fog in the quiet courtyard.

Mrs. Wimpole gave a little cry of half-affected alarm and glanced at Dr. Mordby as if for reassurance. He looked out of the window with the same wide, concealing glance with which he looked at his patients, as if he knew a great deal more about the case than there was any need to say. Christmas murmured dreamily:

“It might be a flag of truce from the powers of darkness.”

“Yes,” said Serafine. “But it's not. It's something quite ordinary. It's a man's muffler.”

Even as she spoke they heard the sound of scrunching gravel and a cough.

“Of course,” said Newtree in a puzzled tone, as if these flights of fancy were beyond him, “it's Merewether or Steen—or both of them,” he added, as two dimly-outlined figures moved past the window and the ghost of a genial laugh was heard.

“Steen!” echoed Dr. Mordby, dropping for a moment his mask of god-like wisdom and looking quite humanly interested. “Is that—
the
Steen?”

Yes, I suppose so,” said Laurence mildly. “Sir Marion Steen.”

The surprise on the doctor's face gave way slowly to the look that the mention of Sir Marion's name often brought to the faces of ambitious men—a look far-away yet intent, as if he were doing sums in his head.

“Fancy,” said Mrs. Wimpole dreamily, “I read in the paper the other day that he'd just given five thousand pounds towards pulling down St. Paul's and ten thousand towards rebuilding the bungalows round Stonehenge. Or was it the other way about, Serafine? I can't follow all these modern movements. Anyway, it must be very delightful to have so much money.”

She gave a faintly envious sigh and relapsed into her usual ruminant silence, preserving her youth and beauty as the latest method was, by sitting quite still and smiling and keeping the mind a blank.

“Now we've seen the worst,” said John Christmas jovially, “shall we draw the curtains, Newtree? This fog of yours, Serafine, is worming its way into the room.”

He pulled the cord and the Bokhara hangings swung softly together, lighting up the great untidy studio with their rich warm colours and making a bizarre frame for Serafine's black head and sallow face and tall gaunt figure in its yellow shawl. The fog hung thinly in the room, the finest possible mist, up through which drifted here and there the blue arabesques of cigarette smoke. The great open fire in the brick hearth crackled and blazed valiantly as if to dispel with its bright light and homely associations the mystery, the eeriness of the fog. Newtree's old servant pulled aside the tapestry at the door and announced:

“Sir Marion Steen and Dr. Merewether.”

It was plain to see, from the servant's interested glance at the elder of the two men, which was Sir Marion, the great financier. But it was Dr. Merewether, a local practitioner, a poor man and without distinction in his profession, who better looked the part. One found it hard to believe, at first sight of Sir Marion's gentle, scholarly, rather dreamy face, that he was one of the great commercial figures of his generation. He had started on the road to millionairedom with a small hardware shop in an east coast town; or so rumour had it, and Sir Marion gave smiling countenance to rumour. The shop had become, in the course of not so very many years, a combine; and the small ironmonger had become the director of a dozen companies, a knight, and a millionaire celebrated for his philanthropy. The Steen homes of rest for the impecunious aged were almost as well known as Dr. Barnardo's orphanages, and the tracts of beautiful country snatched by Sir Marion from the threatening jerry-builder and presented to the National Trust now ran into many thousands of acres. In an uncertain and gullible fashion, the mild-mannered little millionaire was also a patron of the arts, and a fairly familiar figure in the studios of Chelsea and St. John's Wood.

Merewether, on the other hand, had the strong, self-reliant face and assured taciturn manner more often associated with worldly success than failure. A tall, lanky figure with a reserved but observant air and a face that kept in repose a melancholy, but not in the least fretful, expression. A faint ironic smile appeared for an instant in his eyes as Simon Mordby, after an effusive greeting of Sir Marion, gave him two fingers and a patronizing nod with a mechanical: “Well, Merewether, well!” and a quickly-turned shoulder. Dr. Mordby had little use for any member of his own profession, and no use at all for those without money or influence.

Turning aside, Dr. Merewether encountered the reflection of his own faint smile in Miss Wimpole's bright, observant eyes and moved towards her.

“How delightful,” he remarked, “to come in out of the fog to the crackle and blaze of a log fire! It is like coming back to life from among the Shades.”

“Ah!” said Serafine, “I see that you properly appreciate our London fogs. We were talking about it before you came in, and the way ordinary things become strange and terrible. Was it you or Sir Marion whose white muffler drifted across the courtyard like a small wandering ghost?”

“It was I,” replied the doctor with his melancholy smile. “I had an experience of the same kind as I came up the road. I could see the outline of a man moving towards me with what seemed to be an extraordinarily elongated narrow head. It was like some dreadful malformation. I almost crossed the road to avoid meeting him. My flesh positively crept. Yet it was nothing but a man—a foreigner probably, but quite an ordinary harmless fellow-mortal wearing a Turkish fez. An unusual sight, but not an alarming one. He asked me the way to Golders Green,” added Merewether pensively.

“Why!” exclaimed Sir Marion, turning from the inspection of a portfolio of etchings, “I met the same man in Greentree Road soon before I caught up with you. And he asked
me
the way to Golders Green!

“I'm sorry he didn't find me explicit enough. But he didn't seem to be very well acquainted with the English language.”

Newtree remarked thoughtfully:

“Some queer friend of Frew's, I shouldn't wonder. Frew has all sorts of queer callers—carpet-dealers and Jew merchants of all kinds. By the way, I've got an invitation to take you all up to his studio later on in the evening to have a look at his collection. He has some of the most wonderful old rugs in the world and all sorts of eastern things. If you'd all care to go...”

He looked diffidently round at his guests, and there was a chorus of polite and pleased assent. Only Mrs. Wimpole, turning upon Laurence a reproachful glance from her beautiful, stupid, light-grey eyes, asked plaintively:

“Is it far?”

“Not very,” said Laurence with a smile. “Just up a flight of stairs. He has the studio above this one. Rather an interesting chap—seems to have travelled pretty well all over the world. He hasn't been here very long, not more than about ten months. He really has the most marvellous collection of—”

With his feeling that Miss Wimpole was the guest of the evening and must at all costs be kept entertained, Laurence began to address himself to her. He broke off as he found that she was not listening, but was looking aside with a curious, intrigued expression on her plain, lively face. Following the direction of her bright glance he saw that it was Dr. Merewether who had attracted her attention.

Dr. Merewether was standing quite still and looking across the studio. His face was profoundly sad. Standing with his elbow resting on the mantelpiece and his fingers running up into his hair he had the look of a man without hope or spirit who sees through the coloured kaleidoscope of life to some dark perpetual vision of despair. His thin lips were pressed together in a grim line and the deep vertical furrow between his brows looked like the fingerprints of a passing daemon.

Serafine and Newtree looked at one another without speaking, but each recognized in the other the same curiosity, the same surprise and sympathy. Then, suddenly alarmed to find that he was gazing silently into the strange lady's eyes, Newtree started, dropped his eyeglasses and with a stammer concluded his sentence:

“—the most marvellous collection of Persian rugs. 
I should especially like you to see—”

Dr. Mordby had manoeuvred Sir Marion into a corner and with long suave periods was doing his practised best to impress that gentleman with the social and scientific importance of Dr. Mordby.

“Lord Shottery is very interested in the scheme. You and I, Sir Marion, realize that the science of psychology is practically an unploughed field. Just surface-scratched at present...”

Sir Marion listened with his fresh, gentle face tilted and a pleased, benevolent smile on his lips. He had never outgrown an ingenuous pleasure in his personage-ship. Flattery could draw inexhaustibly on his good humour, but not, as his flatterers were wont ruefully to discover, on his banking-account.