‘Didn’t it occur to either of you to get a divorce?’
‘Too true it did — it occurred to me.’
‘You suggested it to her?’
‘I offered to give her the grounds for it. Only Shirley wasn’t the type to let a husband off the hook.’
From his chair near a filing cabinet Stephens was trying to catch his senior’s eye. In his urgent, jiffling impatience he reminded Gently of a schoolboy.
‘Inspector Stephens has something to ask you.’
Stephens was actually clearing his throat! Johnson, breathing out smoke like a grampus, half turned to appraise this threat on his flank.
‘Fire away.’
‘It’s about the Palette Group… I suppose you never attended a meeting?’
‘Di-dah-di-dah!’ Johnson grimaced his contempt. ‘Do I look the sort of bloke who would hold hands with that lot?’
‘I was wondering if you were acquainted with any of the members.’
‘As it happens I am, though only in the way of business. My bank manager fancies himself as an artist, and I sold a piece of property for their chairman, St John Mallows.’
‘A piece of property! When would that have been?’
‘Does it matter, or something? I sold it in January.’
Stephens’s dark eyes were gleaming and he had edged his chair forward. His next question was rapped out in Superintendental style:
‘Did your wife introduce him to you?’
‘Did she firkin! He came through the bank. He asked Farrer to recommend him an agent, and Farrer put him on to me.’
‘The property — it was valuable?’
‘A couple of cottages out Herling way. The rents didn’t cover the outgoings on them, and my commission on the sale only just squared the advertising.’
‘Did your wife ever mention St John Mallows to you?’
‘I thought I’d made it plain that we didn’t exchange small talk.’
‘Now about her estate, sir. Was it around what you expected?’
‘Yes — the proceeds from her papa’s house, plus a hundred or so which she’d saved from her allowance.’
It was all rather discouraging, and Stephens couldn’t help looking crestfallen. To make it worse, Johnson was watching him with a sort of quizzical amusement. To cover his embarrassment the young Inspector pulled out his pipe; but even this chanced to be unemptied, and he was reduced to sucking it cold.
‘And those are the only members of the Group with whom you are personally acquainted…?’
Johnson returned his attention to the other side of the room.
‘I said so, didn’t I? Actually, they belong to the same golf club
… I may have seen some of the others, but I’ve never met them to talk to.’
‘So you can’t tell us anything about your wife’s relations with them?’
‘Not a sausage, old sport. She might have gone to bed with the lot of them.’
Gently folded the map and stowed it in one of his pockets.
‘Are you busy this afternoon?… I’d like to see over your wife’s belongings.’
Johnson drove them there himself in his snarling red MG — a car that fascinated Gently, fresh from his somewhat passe Riley. It was a luscious piece of machinery, sharp with response and explosive power. Johnson, driving it with his fingertips, moved up through the traffic with a surgeon-like precision. Surely, now that one was a Super, and on the Metropolitan scale…?
The flat was situated in Baker’s Court, a short cul-de-sac off Viscount Road. As Hansom had told them, it was an area of office blocks, and the flat itself surmounted the branch of an insurance firm. Cars were parked in relays on all sides of the court, and office workers kept up a perpetual coming and going. Through a dozen or more of the wide-open windows one could hear the clicking and tinkle of hard-worked typewriters.
‘The beauty of this place is that it’s quiet at night…’
Having squeezed in his car, Johnson conducted them across the court. Beside a blue-painted door was a framed card which bore his name, while on the door, with tips elevated, was screwed a chromium-plated horseshoe.
‘Another relic of the Service?’
‘Roger!.. Got to keep the gremlins out.’
In the act of unlocking the door, he paused to finger the token of luck. At the top of the stairway inside they passed a Spitfire, poised on a pedestal, and this also he managed to touch, though with a sudden, furtive motion.
All in all Gently found the flat disappointing, though why it would have been difficult for him to say. He had not been expecting to make any grand discovery, coming three days late in the footsteps of Hansom. The victim’s belongings had already been checked. A few bits of correspondence had been collected and read. There was a gloomy neatness in the rooms she had occupied, as though everything there had been pondered and put away.
‘Where did she used to do her painting?’
The pictures he soon grew tired of examining. They were monotones from beginning to end, all vaguely allegorical and in some way distasteful. A number of them were on phallic themes, and one or two were plainly sexual fantasies. Her behaviour towards Johnson may have suggested frigidity, but there had been no fetters on her flights of imagination.
‘She used to paint here in the bedroom, cocker.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought the light would have been very suitable.’
‘It didn’t matter a damn — she used to paint at night. I’ve seen the light under her door as late as two or three in the morning.’
‘How did you know that she was painting?’
‘You could smell it, that’s how. The place used to reek of turpentine and linseed. And you could hear her, too, when she was using a big brush — and there’d be her clutter of things in the sink in the morning.’
Pipe in mouth, Gently strolled to the metal-framed window, which looked down on some mews to the rear of the building. Beneath it, to the ground, stretched a smooth wall of glazed brick: the cream paint on the sill was in part worn and marked. He turned on his heel.
‘She had a door key, of course?’
‘That’s right — she didn’t need to go out through the window.’
‘Did you think that she might have?’
‘Not till a moment ago. But I’m not quite as dumb as I look, old sport.’
Gently nodded indefinitely and puffed once or twice. He had suddenly noticed that Johnson was sweating. For a second or two he seemed on the verge of a fresh question, then he motioned to Stephens, and picked up his hat.
CHAPTER FOUR
A lazy breeze tempered the warm afternoon, and Gently, ignoring the buses, elected to walk back along Viscount Road. He was suddenly in a mood for the early summer weather: it seemed exactly to suit his contemplative frame of mind.
Once more he had embarked on a case that intrigued him. During those last few moments with Johnson, he had felt the surge of the mysterious current. From being a collection of dead facts the case had sprung into vibrant life, he was getting it into his hands, beginning to sense a possible shape. Perhaps never before had he so relished the exercising of his powers. His spell of duty in the metropolis had done that for him, at least. In another way it had been a tall milestone in his career: it had pulled him up, made him see himself, confirmed the talent that was his…
‘Don’t you think, sir, that we can safely rule Johnson out of it?’
He had hardly been aware of Stephens, striding smartly along beside him. The sudden clarity of vision which his mood had induced had been extending itself to the busy world passing about him. This city had always been the home of painters… at last, he thought he had hit on one of the reasons. There was a quality in the light here, a steady, glowing luminosity. Was it due to the dry, continental east wind?