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.
CHAPTER TEN
No calls had been put through to the hotel during the night, and Gently heard nothing about the slashings until he checked in at Headquarters.
The morning was dull and uncommitted, promising neither sun nor rain; it was a morning when you didn’t much care whether you were stuck in the city or out of it. Stephens he had seen the evening before, and the Inspector was gone again before Gently got up. After the degenerate custom of Elphinstow Road, he had ordered his breakfast to be sent up to his room.
There, among the pillows, he had disembowelled the papers, making them greasy with his buttery fingers; then, feeling irritable and inclined to a headache, he had taken himself off to a tepid shower.
Up here, the Sundays were so intensely sabbatical! In place of traffic one heard the chirping of sparrows under the eaves. And there were huskily crooning pigeons in the elm trees beneath the Castle, and the weird, unanalysable cries of an itinerant news vendor.
While dressing he had looked through his window into a street completely deserted; there wasn’t even a Sunday stroller where a traffic jam had been yesterday. He was tying his tie when he caught sight of the first pedestrian, and then it was a bus conductor on his way to the terminus. As for cars! Well, a couple of them were parked across the way, but there was nothing else in that line except a locked and deserted motor coach.