So, you were left with the conviction that his suggestion was bona fide, and that his X was a serious alternative to the missing Derek Johnson. And the problem remained, where did you begin looking for X? His outward marks a shy smile, and a trail of hopeless paintings. The field seemed to embrace the Palette Group and the whole acquaintance of St John Mallows… unless, by the aid of their pictures, one could winnow out some of the former.
From the hotel kiosk he rang HQ:
‘You wouldn’t have an art expert on the strength, would you?’
‘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.
GUNMAN CHARGED WITH FISHER MURDER
37 More Arrests
Yard Make Clean Sweep Of Criminal ‘Empire’
Frederick Peachfield, 39, alleged to be a building contractor, was this morning formally charged with the murder of Harold (‘Jimmy’) Fisher. While resisting arrest during last night’s raids he shot and seriously wounded a Metropolitan Police Constable.
Mopping-up operations are still going on and 37 more arrests have been made in the East End. In a statement to the press made by a senior Yard officer, it is claimed that the Warehouse Gangs have been virtually wiped out…
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 piece de resistance 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…’