Gently With the Painters (12 page)

‘Art expert my foot …!’ Hansom’s disgust was
scathing
.

‘I’d like a really good man.’

‘Well, you won’t find one here!’

After thinking about it, he referred Gently to a couple of dealers and to the Art School, but neither of these alternatives seemed to promise much on a Saturday. Instead Gently decided he would try his luck unaided – his judgement of pictures was far from professional, but clue in hand, he might ferret out something.

He met a newsboy while crossing the Paddock and stopped to buy a lunchtime paper. It was still the doings of Pagram which overbalanced the front page.

The inference was plain though not explicitly stated – they had recovered Peachfield’s gun, and it was the gun which had killed Fisher. Nothing else would so have telescoped the ‘arduous routine’, and have enabled Peachfield to be charged so promptly on the heels of his arrest. He was an open and shut case. He would never pull another gun …

The Saturday influx of country people had not been limited to farmers, and the Gardens were much more crowded than they had been the day before. Their
pièce de résistance
was certainly missing – it was still locked away in the Super’s office; but the space it left vacant had not been filled, and curiously enough, it exercised a strong
attraction
. Gently noticed again that most of the patrons were women. It suggested an amusing extension of Mallows’s dictum. If art had to be for someone, and that someone was women, then didn’t it follow that women were the principal directors of the course of art …?

A good number of the exhibits were now marked with red stars, and Phillip Watts, in his booth, was being kept busy with inquiries. Gently sifted the jostling viewers for a Palette Group member; after a few minutes’ hunting, he spotted the angular figure of Baxter. He made his way across to him.

‘You’re doing a roaring trade, I see …’

Baxter turned to examine him distastefully through his steel-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a jacket of chalky tweed over a neat, plum-coloured shirt, with dark worsted trousers and impeccable sandals. He gave an impression of being enormously hygienic, as though he had scrubbed himself with carbolic soap.

‘I don’t know if you can refer to this as trade … sensation, I would call it: a cheap sensation.’

‘Anyway, it’s selling pictures.’

I am quite aware of that. But I am not convinced that that is entirely the object of the exhibition.’

Gently grinned to himself – he could imagine Mallows’s reply to that one! – but it was not his present purpose to start an argument with Baxter. If it was possible he wanted to get the poster artist’s cooperation, to use him as a pick-lock to the problem he had before him. And for this it mattered little that Baxter himself might equate with X, since he could equally well serve as a pointer to himself or to another …

‘I’m just a layman, of course … I think I know what I like.’

‘That goes without saying. Only an artist knows better.’

‘But naturally I get puzzled, faced with a lot of different pictures … in a way, they all seem good. You understand what I mean?’

Baxter did, it was plain from his expression, he could see that Gently was a moron; by his opening remark he had betrayed the soul of a shopkeeper. But there was a note of humility in the policeman’s approach, and Baxter forbore absolutely to crush him.

‘It seems to escape the majority that art appreciation requires training. One does not, by a stroke of brilliance, become a connoisseur overnight. One must learn to judge a painting as a surgeon does an appendectomy – not by the health of the patient but by the skill of the operation.’

Gently nodded his head woodenly. ‘I felt there was rather more to it. It’s not enough to like a picture … you have to know why you shouldn’t like it.’

‘Simplifying it, that’s the point. Your emotional reaction must be set aside. Unless you can train yourself to do that, you will be perpetually floundering in a sea of preferences.’

‘So if I like a picture I should reject it?’

‘Yes. It’s the first step in appreciation.’

Gently nodded more profoundly, his head a little on one side. He really was learning something, his expression seemed to say! Baxter, unmoved, took off his glasses and proceeded to polish them on a scrap of leather; it still seemed touch and go whether he would bother with Gently or not.

‘This exhibition here, for instance … I can’t help feeling lost in it.’

‘They are not a difficult collection.’ Baxter replaced his glasses severely.

‘I can’t make up my mind about them … those fish, there, take them …’

‘You mean those planitonal variations which Arthur Wimbush is exhibiting?’

It was a start, however unpromising, and Gently kept Baxter quietly travelling. He quickly learnt, to his mild surprise, that Wimbush was not the crank he had thought him. The reverse, indeed, was true: Wimbush rippled with significance. Each and every one of his fishes was a planitonal triumph. Like the patient, they may have expired, but nothing could fault the appendectomy.

‘You would say, then, that Wimbush possesses a fair degree of talent?’

‘A rare planitonal cognition. I think you would say that.’

‘Isn’t he friendly with Mr Mallows?’

‘On the contrary, they are unsympathetic.’

Gently made a mental cross against the name of Arthur Wimbush.

They passed on to Shoreby, with whom Baxter was more censorious. He pointed out traces of involuntary emotion which were marring that gentleman’s work.

‘With geometrical panels one must preserve discipline; there should be no undercurrent of excitement, either in grouping or brushwork. You can see for yourself how those triangles pulsate, while the parallelogram is tantamount to a slap in the face. Until he is more mature, Shoreby should leave geometry alone.’

‘He lacks talent, perhaps?’

‘I disagree. He lacks control.’

On the other hand, he was notably friendly with Mr Mallows …

In one way Baxter was showing a scrupulous justice: he had sunk his partisan feelings in a desire to educate Gently. Impartially he treated with the concrete and the abstract,
letting nothing of his bias interfere with the lesson. He chided Aymas for the unbridled sensuality of his colour – praised Lavery, in spite of his clumsy-looking splurges; he allowed talent to Farrer, though hampered by bourgeois sentiment, and found planic sensitivity in Allstanley’s wirework. The difficulty lay in getting a comparative judgement from him. All his geese were to be swans for the necessity of the moment. It was Gently’s business as a layman to consider the mechanics of appreciation; the estimation of degrees of talent did not lie within his province.

‘I was looking through the pictures that Mrs Johnson painted …’

Baxter was ‘whiffing’ his stalk-like pipe, making
successions
of quick popping noises.

‘Oh? Then you noticed the subliminal approach, I suppose, and the regressional tendency towards prenatal cognition?’

‘I noticed erotic fantasies in medieval trappings.’

Baxter looked surprised. ‘You could put it like that.’

‘Would you say that
she
had talent?’

Baxter whiffed. ‘She had emotive power. But it was probably entirely posited on a disassociated psyche.’

‘Sexual frustration, to put it bluntly?’

‘Y … es. It’s safe to say so.’

‘And was she the only group member with a
psychopathic
motivation?’

Baxter looked a little startled, but he still kept popping away.

‘I hadn’t thought it before, though of course, you may be right.’

‘Could you give me any suggestions?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Not at the moment. It’s an entirely new conception, and I would need to give it some thought. What put the idea in your head?’

‘Oh, just a general curiosity about painters.’

‘It’s possible that you’ve hit on something – I must really consider the matter.’

Now, instead of drawing him out, he had shut Baxter up. The artist seemed to have nothing more that he wanted to say to Gently. His back leant against a booth, he stood whiffing on and on at his pipe, his eyes far away above the heads of the passing viewers. Gently watched him for a little, equally silent, then he grunted and turned away.

His round with Baxter hadn’t been completely fruitless, nevertheless, since he had got from him a fair idea of how the group members stood with Mallows. There were five who were friends of his, outside the group, and if X was a group member then this quintet was likely to contain him. On a page of his personal notebook he scribbled down these five possibles adding, as was his habit, what seemed most relevant about each of them:

[1] Stephen Aymas. Paints gooey landscapes with some success. Noisy, extroverted. Mallows thinks he will make the grade.

[2] James Farrer, bank manager. Seems a good man at his job. Paints chocolate-boxy flowers. NB Would Mallows think his smile
shy
? NNB Shouldn’t think Aymas smiles much.

[3] Frederick Allstanley. Still to meet him. Sculpts mainly in wire. Elementary schoolteacher (grounds for delusions of grandeur?).

[4] Jack Seymour. Pal of Aymas’s. Paints minutely
worked still lifes. Shy, with shy smile. But only in middle twenties.

[5] Henry Baxter. Pedant. Rather secretive. A
professional
(and successful) poster artist. Another non-smiler (was Mallows truthful about smile?). NB Does Baxter feel frustd. painting posters? NNB Does he paint anything else?

There were small grounds for optimism in this varied group of possibles, unless Allstanley turned out to be the living image of Mallows’s description. By the car test Aymas was the number-one candidate, but Gently felt less and less inclined to value that theory. There had been no need for a car to have been left on the park. It was enough to represent it there to lure Shirley into the darkness. But it had needed a person who was known to have a car, and this seemed to eliminate Seymour, his gratifying shyness notwithstanding.

Over the remaining two names Gently pondered narrowly. Against Farrer, of course, a black mark already stood. With more or less culpability he had assisted Johnson to escape, which, if he were guilty, it was in his interest to do. Unfortunately his qualifications seemed to end there. He was a success in his profession and it fitted him like a glove. He painted badly, it was true, but there was nothing to show that he took painting seriously; the city had an artistic climate and suggested daubing as a hobby.

This left him with Baxter, his non-smiling pedant, whose head was stuffed with jargon and critical theory; a man the complete antithesis of the brilliant and fertile Mallows – if you liked, the born failure, as against the born succeeder! Of him one could readily believe an inner frustration, a delusion of greatness that smouldered in
neglect.
Now
he was merely a poster artist, but some time, when he would, he could burst through that disguise and blaze his name to the high heavens … perhaps, when Shirley Johnson became his worshipping mistress. Yes, one could believe it of the nervously whiffing Baxter: it needed only the conscious smile – and wouldn’t that have been lost on Monday night?

Gently snapped shut his notebook and pushed his way across to the booth. There, temporarily free of inquirers, Watts was adding up some figures on a pad.

‘Are you making plenty of hay?’

‘Yes, sir! This is our best … our best ever. Even Arthur Wimbush … I really think we’re going to sell out …!’

‘Have you sold Mr Baxter’s poster?’

‘Yes, sir. I saw you talking to him …’

‘Doesn’t he paint anything else besides posters?’

‘Oh yes, sir. He paints landscapes too.’

‘Hmn.’ Gently appeared to meditate the point. ‘Has he done anything that might suit a detective’s den?’

‘Well, sir …’ Young Watts was equally thoughtful. ‘He’s done a fine view of the Heath with a prospect of the prison …’

‘Good is he – apart from these posters of his?’

Watts flushed. ‘I don’t think … I couldn’t say, not really. He usually sends several things to the exhibition … I believe they think that he’s best at posters.’

So that was Baxter lined up behind the absentee Johnson, with, in a manner of speaking, Allstanley still to play. But to them one was obliged to add an unlimited number of outsiders, since suspicion could not be confined to the group members alone.

On returning to Headquarters he found, already, a message from Stephens:

‘Couldn’t we have the phone tapped? I’ve seen her using it, I think …’

This conjured up a picture of Stephens lurking among the laurels, and trying to stifle a treacherous sneeze as the gardener passed by him.

Hansom, who had taken the tip about checking on car purchasers, had so far only uncovered a minor
misdemeanour
.

‘A chummie with an expired licence bought a car and drove it home …’

He seemed to take it much to heart that they hadn’t immediately grabbed Johnson.

Gently arranged for Stephens’s relief and then departed again for Glove Street. The manageress, treating him now as a regular, found him a table beside the window. Most of the patrons had evening papers in which they were reading of Pagram’s triumph, but the local titbit, Johnson’s flitting, had been temporarily placed under wraps.

Beyond Glove Street, in St Saviour’s, one heard the weekend exodus in motion, and several patrons were claiming suitcases when they went to pay their bills.