A Family Affair (4 page)

‘And, in this case, he did the parting, we must suppose, nearly twenty years ago. It makes, surely, rather a cold trail?’

‘Yes, indeed. But – do you know? – from a professional or technical point of view, a cold trail can be more absorbing than a hot one.’ Appleby took a step forward and tapped the
Parmenides
. ‘I almost remember,’ he said. ‘Is it the forms that Plato is shooting at? Or is it the sensibles? A cold trail, surely. But here you are, Master, sitting up with it.’

‘But not any longer tonight.’ And the Master moved to the door of his library. ‘Shall we meet for breakfast at nine?’

‘But, John,’ Judith Appleby said incredulously, ‘you can’t possibly propose simply to go and
investigate
!’

‘I don’t see why not. Of course, it would have to be with Bobby’s sanction. But he’d have to know, in any case. The idea was that he would take me there.’

‘The young man must have been speaking quite idly. Think of it. You walk in on this unoffending and elderly nobleman–’

‘I’m elderly myself.’

‘Not so elderly as
that
. And you recall to him that, years and years ago, he was made a complete fool of, and that you have turned up at Keynes Court for the purpose of poking around. I think he’d probably set the dogs on you.’

‘That’s what he ought to have done to his bogus royal visitor. But Lord Cockayne won’t
think
of it as all that long ago. The years telescope themselves, you know, in the memory of the old. And the thing will always have rankled with him. He’ll be glad to have the scoundrels caught up with. And I’m rather
like
Holmes, after all. Or is it like Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff? Accustomed to conducting myself respectfully but firmly among my betters. Besides, I must know quite a number of the old gentleman’s cronies. I expect we’ll get along swimmingly.’

‘There’s the pruning.’

‘So there is.’ Appleby appeared much struck by this consideration. ‘But wouldn’t Hoobin be quite good at that?’

‘Let Hoobin loose on the new cordons with the secateurs!’ Lady Appleby’s tone expressed absolute outrage. ‘I shall have to do the whole job myself. How bored you are, John, with country life. Like your wretched Holmes with his bees.’

‘He wasn’t. He doated on them. And I doat on Hoobin.’ Appleby got up from the breakfast table, walked to the window, and gazed out over the garden of Dream Manor. ‘Odd that you should have inherited the place. But I do entirely approve of it.’

‘I’m delighted to hear you say so.’ Judith glanced suspiciously at her husband as he turned back into the room. ‘John, is there something more in this than you’ve told me?’

‘It’s just possible there is.’ Appleby was now quite serious. ‘The affair puts me in mind of one of the accounts I never closed. There were plenty of them, you know. At the Yard there’s a whole filing cabinet full of them.’

‘I don’t believe it. Your career there was almost indecently successful. And now you’ve become very good at pruning fruit trees too.’

‘Really?’ There was honest surprise in Appleby’s voice. ‘Perhaps I’d better not go off on a wild-goose chase, after all. I’ll just tip some old colleague a wink. A retired man does look rather foolish harking back after–’

‘You know very well I’m saying nothing of that kind. I don’t think you ought to duck out of this.’

‘Duck out of it!’ For a moment this tergiversation left Appleby speechless. ‘Explain yourself. Clarify your attitude.’

‘“His helmet now shall be a hive for bees.” Doesn’t some Elizabethan poet say something like that? Why should you hang your helmet on the peg – just because London’s traffic problems and call-girls and casinos proved boring? If there’s something in this that might be
fun
–’

‘I’ll go up to town tomorrow,’ Appleby said.

‘My dear chap, it’s so extremely nice to see you.’ The grey-haired Commissioner with the weary wrinkles round his eyes – he was not, in fact, much younger than Appleby – looked at once warily and with genuine cordiality at his almost legendary visitor. ‘And if you’ve dropped in professionally, so to speak, that’s all the better fun, I’d say.’

‘Fun?’ Appleby appeared to catch some echo in the word. ‘You must tell me at once if I’m just being irresponsible. But you see what has come into my head. This Keynes Court affair was ages ago. But it does fit in with an odd series of reports. Away back at that time, I mean. But what if that sort of thing has been continuing? It was, as I see it, an uncommonly good line. The victim has been made ridiculous – and at the same time the extent of his material loss isn’t all that clear to him. So he keeps mum – or at least he plays the thing down. There’s even a refinement in Cockayne’s case. It’s put to him fairly firmly that publicizing the foible of an august personage–’

‘Her magpie instinct,’ the Commissioner said encouragingly.

‘Just that. Making a fuss about it wouldn’t be the thing. Let’s keep mum, and call it a day.’

‘I doubt whether just the same trick could be played twice. And certainly there’s no record of anything of the kind.’

‘Oh, quite. And the formula – if there was, and is, a formula – is much more generalized. It’s simply the disinterested joke or hoax which, if peered into, would prove not all that disinterested, after all. There was something in it for somebody. You see? Perhaps it’s extravagant to speak of a series. I have only two incidents in my head.’

‘The Carrington Stubbs?’ The Commissioner, who had glanced at a paper, was again encouraging. ‘An awkward family affair, and no apparent damage done. So it was dropped.’

‘That was one of them. I never felt we’d really tied it up. You’ve looked at the file? A decent country squire, with the family’s favourite hunters and gun dogs and whatever over several generations hanging cheek by jowl with deceased Carringtons on the walls. When George Stubbs became fashionable, Sir Thomas Carrington became dimly convinced he owned a Stubbs. And the Royal Academy held some sort of Eighteenth Century show–’

‘And their secretary wrote to Carrington–’ The Commissioner broke off, and chuckled. ‘Only he hadn’t written at all, really, because there had been some sort of hoax–’

‘Just that. But Carrington packed off what he believed to be his Stubbs–’

‘Exactly. And there was an accident – or was it a maniac with a little hatchet? Anyway, the picture had actually been hung, and somehow it was damaged, and Sir Thomas was very angry. So the restorers got going, and in no time they found that under Stubbs there was a jolly little painting of the coronation of Edward the Seventh. And Carrington’s mother had been an amateur painter, and rather an eccentric character as well–’

‘So somebody was felt to have perpetrated a tasteless joke, and it was all hushed up? Appleby paused. ‘But had there been a real Stubbs, and somebody made off with it? Poor Sir Thomas just didn’t want to know. Nor was Mr Meatyard at all anxious that the police should too pertinaciously inquire into his meeting with Sir Joshua Reynolds.’

‘Oh, come, Appleby!’ The Commissioner’s incredulity was not unnatural. ‘I never heard of that one, my dear fellow. And nobody was ever called Meatyard. It’s unbelievable.’

‘Not at all. Mr Meatyard was a manufacturer, and no doubt of limited cultivation. But he had an honourable instinct to acquire only the best. He wanted a portrait of his wife, and it appears that he answered some sort of advertisement. A gentleman called on him, and explained that the most eminent of living portrait painters was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Mr Meatyard had
heard
of Sir Joshua, and at once agreed to be accompanied to his studio. But, in order that all should be fair and square, he was advised by the same obliging gentleman to ring up some eminent firm of picture-dealers in Bond Street and inquire the current market price of Reynolds portraits–’

‘Nonsense!’ The Commissioner threw up his hands. ‘I don’t believe a word of it!’

‘It’s absolutely true. Meatyard was a bit staggered by the answer. But he was a wealthy man, and he set out for Sir Joshua’s studio. Sir Joshua was extremely affable and accommodating. He fixed up about sittings for Mrs Meatyard, and then he showed Mr Meatyard round his current production line. Mr Meatyard left with a red-hot bargain more or less under his arm. A few days later, Mrs Meatyard rang Sir Joshua’s bell. There was, of course, no Sir Joshua. He had, so to speak, returned to the tomb. In a first foolish flush of anger, Mr Meatyard presented himself in this very building. You can look it up, if you want to, in the book. But, in no time, he was soft-pedalling the extent to which he’d been had for a sucker. He’d parted, he said, with a couple of ten-pound notes, and he wanted to take the thing no further. The chronological facts about Sir Joshua Reynolds had been explained to him, and he couldn’t face the prospect of his pals roaring with laughter at him at the golf club. Or perhaps on the bowling green. A hoax again, and with ostensibly only an inconsiderable monetary element. But how much did he really part with? We shall never know.’

‘Couldn’t we find out – and other circumstances of the fraud as well? It ought not really to have been allowed to pass as a practical joke. The worthy man has had a good many years in which to recover from his discomfiture. He might talk about it.’

‘I agree. But what I’m hankering after first, you know, is some hint that the racket is still going on. Not all that frequently. Say once in a quinquennium.’

‘A hoaxer – or criminal – with a fondness for five-year plans?’ The Commissioner nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s a field in which continued success would depend on self-restraint. Too many such japes and we’d be alerted to them, wouldn’t you say? But any of these three affairs we’ve been talking about might well yield enough to let the chap rest quite comfortably on his oars for a few years.’

‘Or several chaps. The Keynes Court show was quite elaborate. A cavalcade or entourage, you might say.’ Rather forgetfully, Appleby had got to his feet and was pacing about the room. He paused at a window and gazed out over the Thames – as he had gazed out over the Thames, through this very window, thousands of times before. The Commissioner watched him benevolently and in silence, but with an expression suggesting that the innocent familiarity pleased him. ‘And there’s another thing about Keynes Court,’ Appleby went on, ‘that makes it much the most informative of these enterprising diversions so far. I mean the way it defines itself in social terms. Lord Cockayne mayn’t have all that between the ears–’

‘Didn’t he have a bit of a career somewhere around the Empire? He can’t be exactly a moron.’

‘Quite so. But what I’m saying is this: even if he
weren’t
at all clever, he wouldn’t be taken in by
social
impostors. The royal personage, that’s to say, and the lady-in-waiting and the equerry or whatever who were tagging after her, must have been impeccably upper class.’

‘I suppose so. Yet it’s astounding what thoroughly low characters–’

‘I know. But not quite in that relation, if you ask me. And, you know, it was rather splendidly
audacious
. Cockayne may by that time have been an established backwoods peer, an aristocratic hayseed, if the expression isn’t a disrespectful one. But he’d held down jobs which would make the indefinable minutiae of that sort of thing completely familiar to him.’

‘Doesn’t that suggest that perhaps it was a hoax?’ The Commissioner sounded almost hopeful. ‘High-spirited frolic by young people belonging to more or less the same world as the Lywards – or whatever the family name is? There’s no
proof
that a really
valuable
object was liberated. Nor is there of any pronounced mercenary motive in either of the other two cases.’

‘That’s partly why I want to find a fourth. And I suppose one ought to look for it in the same general area.’ Appleby suddenly chuckled. ‘In what my old friend Braunkopf calls “the voonderble vorlt of art”.’

‘Braunkopf?’ The Commissioner looked up suddenly. ‘Not a fellow called – let me think – Hildebert Braunkopf?’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby was surprised. ‘The proprietor of a not very distinguished concern he calls the Da Vinci Gallery. Have his professional occasions been bringing him this way again?’

‘Certainly they have – though I’m not clear about the details.’ The Commissioner seemed perplexed. ‘You say he’s a friend of yours – this chap?’

‘Say that he was a
protégé
of Judith’s at one time.’

‘Oh, I see!’ The Commissioner was as a man entirely enlightened.

‘And I must say I got rather fond of him myself. So I hope he hasn’t really been in trouble. Not that it’s unlikely. Braunkopf’s a picture-dealer of the utmost enterprise.’

‘So far as I know, he was feeling very much the aggrieved party.’ The Commissioner frowned. ‘Appleby – do you know? I’ve a vague notion this may be your fourth hoax. Shall we find out?’ The Commissioner’s hand hovered over a switch on his desk. Then he glanced at his watch. ‘Or shall
you
find out? A great shame, your dropping in only at such short notice. Got to lunch with the Minister, the Lord help me.’

‘And I’ve wasted too much of your morning already. Turn me on to one of your chaps.’

‘Yes, I will. Damned nuisance, working lunches. Barbarous phrase, barbarous idea, eh?’

‘I’ll do a working lunch on my own – at my club and with the Braunkopf file. If, that’s to say–’

‘My dear chap!’ The Commissioner was delighted, and he now flicked a switch enthusiastically. ‘We’ve been losing ground steadily since you insisted on having your cards,’ he said humorously. ‘In all except the most trivial technical ways. The Braunkopf file can be located and photocopied for you in three minutes flat.’

‘I’m most grateful.’ Appleby picked up his hat – the bowler hat which it amused his family to remark he kept for expeditions to Town. ‘And perhaps I’ll go along to the Da Vinci as well.’

‘Never been there,’ the Commissioner said, and chuckled. ‘The voonderble vorlt has never been my line.’

At one of the small tables by a window – where nobody could do more than pause beside you for a moment and exchange a few words – Appleby ate steak-and-kidney pie and washed it down with a frugal third of a bottle of claret. Every now and then he resisted the solicitations of a large and enthusiastic waitress who was convinced that he would be better for a little more boiled cabbage. Clubs – or at least this club – had taken to some oddly changed ways. But through the window the spectacle and the muted sounds were unchanged: a glint of steel, a clatter of hoofs as a troop of Horse Guards clattered down the Mall. Appleby, however, was not occupied with the view. The sheaf of papers he had brought away from Scotland Yard absorbed him – so much so, that he almost allowed the exuberant waitress to follow up the steak-and-kidney pie with a dollop of apple-dumpling. Just in time, he raised an arresting hand, and switched the gesture to point at the passing Stilton. Then he returned to his reading.