‘Are you a sailing man, Gently? Those are East Coast One-Designs. It’s the start of the Harwich to Ostend race — a friend of mine called Jenkins won it.’
‘You are painting this for him?’
‘Good heavens no! He couldn’t afford it. But he saw that I got the commission, so I’m going to do him a little something. By the way, would you like a portrait?’
‘No thanks. I couldn’t afford it, either.’
‘Not for cash, you silly fellow! I’ll knock you one off for a souvenir…’
He got rid of his palette and brush and wiped his hands on a scrap of stockinet. Then, picking up a pad and some charcoal, he began to sketch with firm, bold strokes.
‘You’ve got a face that asks to be painted… good frontal development… ocular benevolence. You’re a fraud as a detective, you know… mouth gives you away, and so does your nose. How in the world did you come to take it up?’
Gently shrugged. How did he, if it came to that?
‘You might have made a judge, or a priest or something. But not a detective — it’s a sheer waste of human material. Just look at that mouth, and the set of the brows! A doctor, even… but not a policeman.’
The topic was making Gently feel uneasy, so that he was glad when Withers interrupted them with the sherry. About Mallows there was a fearless and unceasing penetration; both his brain and his pencil had a scalpel-like sharpness.
‘You like a dry sherry, do you?’
‘Yes… I prefer it dry.’
‘Good, because I don’t carry much of the other. But this is a Vino del Pasto, Domecq, ’16 — that was the best year for sherry since… oh, ’82.’
Unquestionably they were drinking a fine and delicate sherry. Gently leant against the bench and sniffed and sipped it with appreciation. Mallows, squatting on a window sill, watched him over considered mouthfuls, and every now and then an elvish twinkle came into his eye.
‘So you’ve come back to me, then!’ He was forcing Gently to meet his eye. ‘You’ve taken a sniff at Mr Johnson, and you think that hewon’t do. Personally speaking, I think you’re right… as you may know, I’ve done business with him. He, too, has a mouth with a story… then there’s his nose: that isn’t quite a failure. Yes… I think you’re quite right… you mustn’t let Johnson bias your viewpoint.’
‘Why do you say: “So you’ve come back to me”?’
‘My dear fellow!’ Mallows lofted a shaggy eyebrow at him. ‘In the first place the Palette Group enjoys level pegging with Johnson, and in the second, I was the last person to see Shirley alive. Have a little more sherry — the second glass is often the best.’
Gently grunted but permitted his glass to be taken. It was a sherry he would have drunk with the devil himself. Again the two of them sat silently drinking, Gently by the bench and Mallows in the window.
‘Let me guess, if I can, a few of the things you want to ask me. From the beginning I’ve tried to look at this affair as you would…’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I asked them?’
‘Don’t spoil the fun, you moron! Let’s reverse the roles for the moment — I’m the detective, and you’re the suspect.’
‘All right… if it amuses you.’
‘Drink your sherry and listen to me.
‘To begin with, have you ever been to bed with Shirley Johnson?’
‘What does the suspect reply?’
‘Remember! You’re being me.’
‘Very well. I think I may have been, but I’d better be quiet about it.’
‘That’s good — very good. It’s what I expected all along. Now, your wanting to be quiet about it opens up some possibilities. If I think that she’s been your mistress, then I think I can see a motive. She’s been threatening you, hasn’t she — threatening to shop you to her husband?’
‘I wouldn’t go as far-’
‘Wait a moment — here’s something better!
‘Suppose — just only suppose — that you were infatuated with Shirley Johnson. Now it’s not enough to go to bed with her — she must be solely, wholly your own. She has become a symbol to you, the fiery cross of a desperate faith: she will, you think, transform your existence, she will give a substance to your dreams-’
‘Now you’re laying it on too thick!’
‘Drink your sherry — I say, just suppose. We can suppose a thousand things to see if they fit the given facts. Of course, I’m not going to claim that Shirley could inspire Olympian passions — she wasn’t a beauty, by any means, or brilliant either, or even good. No, she was drearily psychopathic and trying to sublimate her repressions, which, as you no doubt know, is a lot of claptrap and fundamentally impossible.
‘Never mind! Take Shirley for what she was, and no more. In this particular equation it doesn’t matter in the slightest. On the other side we’ll set another unbalanced personality, a man who has never advanced beyond a certain point of adolescence. X — we’ll call him X — probably had an unfortunate childhood, enough to set him dreaming compensatory dreams of greatness; it happens all the time, I know — it’s the standard pattern of adolescence; but now and then one finds a psyche that never gets beyond that phase.
‘He grows up — his body does, and he acquires a surface shell of maturity. There is an annoying world of reality to which, with reluctance, he has to conform. But underneath there remains the fever, the fear-triggered belief in his greatness: he is a statesman, a general, manque — a poet, perhaps — perhaps a painter!
‘One sees him, absorbed, quiet, perhaps friendly-seeming, but behind his shy smile lies a perpetual frost. His best friend, if he can find one, is a representative of his dream-calling, such a one as he feels may understand his smothered genius. And it may be, that as an amateur, he pursues that calling, at the same time imagining the signs of greatness he is exhibiting. He is modest, of course — that is the mask that hides the dream! — but prouder than a peacock if you scratch him unawares.
‘So there’s my man, this X, becoming infatuated with Shirley. In her he sees a conductor between his dream and its realization. She is the symbol and the path; through her, he can rise to his full stature. First with her the dream becomes fact, but after her, with all the world. Oh, I know it’s a common psychological pattern — but here we are dealing with a critical intensity.
‘Now to go back to the other side of the equation, to Shirley Johnson and her peculiar repressions. She wasn’t obsessed by any delusions of grandeur — hers all belonged to quite a different category. She was homosexual, of that I’m certain, but she didn’t happen to possess the courage of her secretions; instead she compelled herself to associate with men — not to bed with them, necessarily, but to dominate and tantalize them.
‘She liked to be the queen in a circle of men. She liked to rule their roost, to have favourites, to settle disputes. She plotted and intrigued between the two jealous factions, while remaining herself securely perched upon the fence.
‘Could our X have possibly chosen a less amenable subject? My dear fellow, our equation was dynamite from the beginning! We may suppose that to start with she smiled upon his advances — flattered them, teased them, brought his dreams to a pitch of madness. Then he began — isn’t it probable? — to propose taking his dreams in earnest. He might want to throw up his job and to have our Shirley run away with him. You can guess her reaction — she would have slapped him down with a bang; she would have used that scathing tongue of hers, scattered his dream house to the winds…
‘Isn’t it an amusing supposition to indulge in over some sherry? By and large it fits the facts — at least, while I’m playing the Superintendent!’
He drank, and Gently drank; it had the air of an unexpressed toast. Mallows turned his glass by the stem to display its exquisite spiral filaments.
‘Lace twist… these are a pair. I’m rather fond of a bit of glass. I picked these up in that shop in Lynton — you know the place? He stung me a fiver.’
‘Am I still playing at being the suspect?’