seven

AROUND FITZROVIA INDIVIDUALS CAME AND WENT. They faded in and out of the raffish throng that eddied around the shabby streets, floating along from pub to pub on waves of unfulfilled hope and indecision. Mavor’s death had caused ripples, but failed artists and alcoholic has-beens were two a penny and the habitués soon forgot about the pallid corpse as it was borne away downstream.

Or would have done had rumours not started to circulate. And the most awful thing was they were swirling around us.

The weather briefly eased. We returned to our usual haunts – the Wheatsheaf, the Caves de France, Chez Victor, the Barcelona – to find ourselves the centre of attention. They all knew we’d found Mavor. I don’t know how, but they did. A miasma of notoriety followed us, almost as if we’d murdered him ourselves.

Rumours were flying around like confetti, thanks largely to Gerald Blackstone. Blackstone was the local paper’s crime reporter, and as such he cultivated the police. At first the story was that ‘the cause of death has not yet been established’, but soon Gerry began to drop massive hints in his reports for the St Pancras Chronicle that the police suspected foul play, and in the various watering holes he frequented he went considerably further.

He said the police had bungled the case from the start. You’d find him after a few beers leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner, with a little cluster of gossips hanging on his every word. There wasn’t a proper forensic examination at first, he claimed. ‘But now there has been. Seems there were burn marks round the mouth and nose that they think were caused by chloroform.’

I remembered the smell in that room again; the smell that was not quite like alcohol.

According to Gerry, someone had first drugged, then suffocated the artist. The post mortem had shown that Mavor’s liver and heart were seriously damaged, but – amazingly – he hadn’t been drinking the night he died.

‘The cops are playing it down for the moment – embarrassing for them. Haven’t you noticed, there’s been hardly a squeak from them since the original news he was dead? But now the family’s started to create a stink, so they’re going to have to smarten up.’

A frisson rippled round the bars as the thwarted geniuses contemplated murder. Insidiously, an atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia developed. To have actually known a murder victim swelled the hangers-on with a sense of sinister importance. Detectives were seen in the Wheatsheaf and the Barcelona. Compulsively the talk went to and fro. Had he really been murdered? Who could have done it? Couldn’t he have sniffed the chloroform himself?

Always the big question was: why should anyone have wanted to murder Titus Mavor? What could have been the motive? Hardly burglary! He hadn’t a penny.

‘What about his paintings?’ Noel Valentine was most aggrieved as if Titus had died on purpose to thwart him. ‘He said I could represent him, but then he slid out of it again.’

‘Broken promises! Verbal diarrhoea, he’d promise anything,’ sneered Marius Smith, who was one of the painters who’d witnessed the Café Royal brawl. ‘But that gives you a motive, eh, Valentine?’

Noel laughed. ‘Stuff that! I wanted him alive, didn’t I. I needed his signature. And his bloody canvases.’

‘He’d have got a big spread in the Statesman, the Spectator,’ said Hugh, ‘not to mention the art journals; there’d have been huge obituaries all over the show. Bad luck, to die at a time like this, when they’ve all been suspended because of the fuel crisis. But the Daily Worker did their bit, at least.’ That was Hugh needling Colin again, because never mind about speaking no ill of the dead, the Communists proclaimed in no uncertain terms their disdain for the renegade painter. Whoever had written it (and we all thought it was Colin) almost implied that Mavor, having preferred the seduction of reactionary bourgeois art to the truths of socialist painting, deserved to come to a sticky end.

And now the ugly truth was slowly sinking in: Titus Mavor had come to a sticky end. And lurking underneath the gossip was always the frisson of fear and doubt and mutual suspicion. For the answer to the question, who would have wanted to murder Mavor, was: almost everyone we knew.

.........

When I answered the door, out of breath as I’d run down three flights of stairs, I found myself face to face with a stranger in a crombie and a trilby hat: the police. He raised his hat. Eerily, he reminded me of Neville Heath; the same neat face, the same dapper toothbrush moustache. ‘Detective Inspector Bannister,’ he said. He stamped his feet to get the snow off, and I led him up to the flat.

‘Shocking weather,’ he said, ‘Can’t believe this freeze can go on much longer – and then again, it seems as if it don’t want ever to end.’

Alan was standing tousled in the kitchen, in pyjama trousers and two sweaters. ‘Who was it?’ he shouted when he heard my footsteps.

‘It’s the police to see us,’ I said brightly. I wasn’t apprehensive; why should I be? I offered him tea or coffee, which he refused. The kitchen was such a mess that I showed him into the stale-smelling, chilly sitting room.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ said the inspector, ‘I’m making enquiries about the death of the artist, Titus Mavor. I believe it was you, sir, who found him and reported the death.’

Alan pushed back his tousled hair. ‘That’s right.’

‘I wonder if you could just go into a little more detail as to exactly what you found. There wasn’t a lot of information in the original report.’

The constable at Tottenham Court Road police station had, I remembered, been a bit casual about it all. The experience of the war, when the finding of corpses was a routine event, must have blunted his sense of urgency; it was the Aftermath effect again.

Alan described Mavor lying on his sofa and the debris surrounding him. He, like me, had noticed the way canvases had been roughly treated. Inspector Bannister ignored that information; he was more interested in Mavor’s appearance, the bottles, the smell.

He also wanted to know why we’d visited Mavor on that Saturday morning. Perhaps it was naïve of me, but this did come as a surprise. I hadn’t expected him to be interested in us. Alan looked blank. He’d probably forgotten what we’d told the other policeman. I certainly had. Finally Alan said hesitantly: ‘He and I – there was some talk of our working together on a film.’

A look of almost salacious interest appeared on Detective Inspector Bannister’s face, as if film making were some dubious activity, somehow not quite nice. ‘A film, sir?’ He put his head on one side.

Alan was happy to enlighten someone he’d all too obviously cast as a philistine. He spattered names and information about, and told Inspector Bannister rather too much, I thought, about Radu, Hugh and Colin. At the name of Gwendolen Grey the policeman smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘House of Shadows; a very … unusual film. My wife greatly enjoyed it.’ He paused. Then: ‘So the deceased was a friend of yours. Would you know, did he have enemies? Anyone who had a grudge against him? Professional rivalries, anything like that? We’ve heard he was a somewhat … controversial character. Colourful, but controversial. As his friend, you might be able to help us there.’

‘He wasn’t a close friend, but I suppose you could say we moved in the same social circles, before the war, but then I lost sight of him again. He wanted to be a war artist, but there was never any chance of that and he rather went to the dogs, I gathered. I’ve – well, we’ve seen him a few times recently again, that’s all. Isn’t that right, Dinah?’

I nodded. I’d been brought up to look on the police as ‘on our side’. My father regarded them as civilian NCOs and other ranks, subordinates, good chaps, if a bit thick. Alan was the same; so far as he was concerned policemen were a kind of public version of the servant class (although of course everything was changing now and the servant class had disappeared, to my mother’s dismay). Yet something about this conversation disturbed me. I had a strong suspicion the detective knew something he wasn’t telling us.

‘He had a bit of a reputation with women, I gather, sir,’ he said. ‘You must have known if he had a lady friend, a fiancée, anything like that – someone who might feel resentful if his behaviour wasn’t up to the mark.’

‘There was a girl called … Fiona, I think,’ I said. ‘We didn’t really know her.’

‘Ah.’ The inspector looked at us. ‘You see, a young woman was seen leaving the house in Mecklenburgh Square the evening before your visit.’

He was looking at me. My face felt hot. Oh God, was I blushing? I didn’t look at Alan, and I knew he was looking anywhere but at me. I managed to shake my head, miming bafflement, swallowing hard.

Alan put in coolly: ‘You said yourself – he had a reputation.’

‘As a bit of a ladies’ man, yes,’ confirmed the inspector. ‘So, it might have been this – Fiona, did you say? Any idea where I’d find her?’

‘We just met her once. We didn’t know her at all,’ said Alan firmly. ‘And I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’m sure she’s perfectly harmless – just one of his models, probably.’

‘I see.’ He stood up. ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’

After he’d gone Alan and I looked at each other. ‘Someone saw you.’

We needed something stronger than coffee. Alan found the remains of a bottle of Algerian wine.

I remembered the shadowy figure who’d passed me in the street. I’d looked back. She – he – was it she? – had looked back too. I’d thought at the time that whoever it was had gone into the house I’d just left, but that seemed unlikely; because that person would have found Titus dead and would – surely – have reported it.

‘We lied to Bannister,’ said Alan. ‘We didn’t say it was you who found Mavor.’

I knew that all too well. ‘If it comes out, it’s going to look suspicious.’

‘Why should it come out?’ Alan spoke belligerently. ‘It’s ridiculous – no one could think you were involved! Anyway, we can’t change our story now.’ That was the problem. We were stuck with a version that was not quite the truth, and certainly not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Was it okay to tell him about Fiona? Was that the right thing to do? I hope he isn’t going to think …’ More guilty feelings!

‘Colman got us into this,’ said Alan savagely.

Stanley was the only other person who knew I’d found Titus. So the one good thing out of all this was that Alan could hardly stop me working for him now. Our secret had bound us together.