‘She missed an appointment to model?’
Wenzli nodded.
‘But she needed money?’
‘She always wanted money. She was greedy. But innocent. Like a child.’
‘And because she missed one appointment, you knew she was gone?’
Wenzli put his face in his hand. ‘She came every Tuesday and Thursday. She missed both days. Then I thought-I waited until the following week.’
‘It didn’t occur to you that something might have happened to her?’
Wenzli’s head moved back and forth on his hand. He said, in almost a groan, ‘I was glad she was gone — don’t you understand?’
Denton waited. There was nothing more. He found that he believed Wenzli. The man looked abject, worn out. By his admission, or by the infatuation that lay behind it? It was a new slant on Mary Thomason — an innocence that had the power to make a man like Wenzli risk a fall. The same innocence that had apparently infatuated Geddys.
Denton said that he would keep what had been said to himself, and he went out, Wenzli still sitting with his head on his hand, looking at nothing.
‘But it doesn’t hang together, Denton. Why did she run off if she wanted the painting so?’
‘Something more important happened.’
‘I can see her putting the letter in the back of the painting as a warning to him. But that would mean she really expected him to pick the painting up, pay for it and then handle it, or his man handles it, and the letter is found. And then he turns the painting over to her.’
‘Out of guilt, if nothing else. She didn’t mean to end it with the letter, I think. Just to warn him. Then he gives her the painting, and he’s warned, and he’ll behave. There may have been more to it — maybe she was going to deliver the painting to him, make sure he found the letter. But the point is, I don’t think Wenzli was responsible for her disappearance. I believe him.’
‘The type who’d hit a woman but not kill her?’
They were in her favourite Aerated Bread Company shop in Aldgate. She was saying goodbye to her former job; she’d taken the two women who had worked for her to tea and was going on to a dinner at a hotel with the well-to-do men and women who funded the Society.
‘Are they giving you a testimonial?’ he said.
‘If the worst thing people do, Denton, is mean well, I shan’t be too unhappy. What I’ve done for the last ten years didn’t accomplish much, but the Society at least tries. Better to try than not.’
He shrugged. ‘Anyway, Wenzli looks like a dead end. He was really frightened, maybe of himself. Like a man who finds he likes drink — suddenly understands he’s got it in him to destroy himself.’
‘He didn’t call it love? Most men would.’
‘Once she was gone and he’d had a few days to think it over, he knew he was well out of it. I must have come like the ghost at the banquet. He’ll be shaking in his boots for weeks.’
‘But it rounds off Mary Thomason. You know now why she wrote the letter, and you’ve done what you could.’
‘I’d still like to talk to Himple, RA. So far as we know, Mary Thomason is still missing, and Himple knew her.’
‘I still don’t entirely trust Wenzli.’
He shook his head. ‘I believed him. Let’s see what Himple, RA, has to say. I haven’t heard from him — maybe RAs don’t answer letters from mere authors — so let’s see what happens if I simply call on him.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Erasmus Himple, RA, lived in Chelsea, not particularly at that moment an artist’s neighbourhood — but then, as Augustus John might have said, Himple wasn’t particularly an artist. Denton liked Chelsea without wanting to live there, liked to walk its small streets and its embankment, although the place was, he was told, very different from the village of ‘little houses surrounded with roses’ that Stendhal and others had found. One of the art magazines reported that Himple had said that ‘he liked to live where my great namesake, Erasmus, visited, and where great painters have painted’ — presumably Holbein and Turner, if ‘great’ was to be taken literally, perhaps less so Rossetti and Whistler. At any rate, it was to Chelsea that Himple had come, leaving Melbury Road and the farther reaches of Kensington to other RAs.
The house was a fairly small one around the corner from All Saints Church. Denton approached it along the Embankment, pausing to look at the river — he still had thoughts of rowing on it, never seemed to turn them to reality — and the suspension bridge. He tried to picture it without the Embankment, a muddy tidal shore, here and there some steps to the water, but the idea of a distinct village where now this accessible part of London stood wouldn’t come clear. His mind was fuzzed by his book, anyway, now nearly done. There was a familiar sense of the sprint to the finish, already an anticipation of the mental slump after.
He had no eagerness to see Erasmus Himple. It was late on a sombre, cold day, although he was cheered by a flight of duck that came winging down the river to land splashily almost in front of him. The sky was iron overhead, the sun a slightly brassy brightness far down to the west; the bare plane trees rose against it in hard, black silhouette. The air smelled of the river and of soot; his breath steamed in it before drifting and dissipating.
‘Mr Denton to see Mr Himple, if he may,’ he said, handing in his card. He had expected, after the experience with Wenzli, some sort of potted grandeur, the same air of arty nouveau riche-ness, but the house was little more than a double cottage, the middle-aged woman at the door a housekeeper rather than a butler. She had an air of austerity, could have been housekeeper to some Irish priest, dedicated more to preservation of his celibacy than even her own; she wore black, some sort of white headgear like a mob cap, but in lace. She had bristling, hairy eyebrows and a nose almost as formidable as Denton’s own, the nostrils more hirsute than his.
Without looking at the card, she said, ‘Mr Himple is away.’
‘Oh.’ That didn’t surprise him, after what James had said. It did trouble him that Himple had been away so long. ‘Will he be back soon?’
Now she used a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles that hung on a ribbon to read his card. ‘Is this about having your picture painted, Mr Denton?’ She had a deep voice, almost mannish.
‘I wrote a letter. There’s a young woman who seems to have disappeared. I think she was a model for Mr Himple — the painting of Lazarus.’ He stood uncertainly, found he was speaking in jerks. ‘I’ve reported it to the police. I just learned about Mr Himple. Her modelling for him. I thought-’ He didn’t say what he thought.
‘Oh, yes.’ She looked him up and down. It was as well that Atkins had insisted he look like a gentleman that day. ‘Come in, please.’ No hospitality was implied by the tone.
She led him to the back of the house down a central hall, paintings on the walls, not Himple’s own, he thought (they seemed to him ‘older’, whatever that meant), and stood by an open door with her left arm extended as if to say, ‘If you must be here, go in this room.’ Inside was what he took to be her own sitting room, as austere as she, black-and-white engravings on the walls instead of paintings, an open Bible on a shawl-draped table.
She didn’t ask him to take off his overcoat. She told him she was Mrs Evans. When she sat, so did he; the chair was merciless. He told her the well-worn tale of Mary Thomason, abbreviated, trying to keep his voice from falling into the sing-song of a guide detailing some third-rate wonder for the thousandth time. He produced one of the copies of the Mary Thomason drawing. ‘I believe that Mr Himple did this drawing. Do you recognize it?’