It was a Sunday. Nothing in London opened on a Sunday—nothing in England opened on a Sunday except for the churches, the chapels, and a street market in Petticoat Lane. The theatres were shut, the cinemas were shut. The bookshops would be shut. Collets bookshop in the Charing Cross Road would be shut. Mr. Gibbs, reluctant custodian of the affairs of the late André Skolnik and shop assistant at Collets, might well be at home at 101 Charlotte Street. Even good Communists get a day off.
The good Communist showed no willingness to open the door any wider. His head peeped out and he told Troy that he’d “already told the other young copper everything I could,” in the accents of received pronounciation. His spectacles were held togther with Elastoplast, his clothes were frayed—the shirt shot to pieces at the collar and cuffs, the knees of the green corduroy trousers balding—but the voice and the hauteur were pure Oxbridge. Troy wondered for a moment at which point Mr. Gibbs had given up a life of privilege to fight the good fight. Had the road to Damascus been the Iffley Road or the Cherry Hinton?
“I need to get into the studio,” Troy said.
“Too late. It’s gone. Let.”
“And the contents?”
“What do you mean, contents?”
“His paintings.”
Gibbs slowly pulled back the door.
“See for yourself.”
A long, exasperated gesture, one hand on the door, the other pointing down the corridor to the foot of the stairs, past the piled up, cumulative works of André Skolnik.
“Be my guest. They’re everywhere. I wish they weren’t, but nobody’s laid claim to the estate. The landlord had a willing tenant for the studio . . . so they’re here because they’re here.”
“And his flat?” Troy asked.
“Let,” said Gibbs. “Could be let twice over. After you printed the address in the papers, if we had one young couple banging on the door asking for it, we had a dozen, two dozen, I should think. That’s how you get a flat nowadays. You read the death notices in the papers and you nip in between the undertaker and the furniture van.”
If this was the moment at which Gibbs was going to tell him that the USSR built flats while Britain built castles in the air, Troy wasn’t going to argue with him, but he didn’t much want to hear it, either.
But Gibbs wound up with, “So, I cleared the flat, I cleared the studio.”
“May I come in?”
Gibbs’s natural suspicion of a policeman seemed to be retreating in the hope that Troy might be the solution to his problem.
In the darkness of the corridor, dimly lit by an overhead bulb in a dirty shade, the enormity of the task struck Troy. He was looking for a needle in a haystack. God knows how many of Skolnik’s appalling portraits were lodged here.
Troy looked at the twenty or so facing outwards and said, “Perhaps if I described the one I was looking for?”
“They all look the same to me.”
“This one was on the easel at the time Mr. Skolnik was killed. It was different. It was . . . very green . . . and a bit red.”
“Do you mean his Venus travesty?”
“I do,” said Troy.
“In here,” said Gibbs, leading off into his parlour, where the offending work was propped in front of the fireplace.
Lately, and for that matter throughout his time as a detective, Troy had become accustomed to being the alien presence in private interiors. It had become almost a game he and Jack played—guess the room from the person, or the person from the room. When the game failed it could do so spectacularly, as in the case of both Viktor and Voytek. But he had guessed Mr. Gibbs aright. The sheer shabbiness of 101 Charlotte Street and its inhabitants was thoroughly offset by the sense of order Mr. Gibbs had created. Every wall was lined with bookshelves. Every shelf bore a letter of the alphabet and a subheading. Thousands of works of nonfiction, most with tiny paper slips sticking out as clear indication that they had been read as well as ordered. Far from escaping from the workplace, Mr. Gibbs was in his element.
“I suppose I couldn’t quite believe it. I brought it in to have a good look. Then I got intrigued by the Russian inscription. I taught myself Russian during the war . . . all those long nights in the shelters . . . and it’s been sitting here until I get around to finding out what it is André was quoting.”
“I can save you the trouble,” said Troy. “It’s from Pushkin. Boris Godunov.”
“A bit before my time,” said Gibbs.
Spoken like a man for whom Russia did not exist until the revolution, thought Troy.
“Does it remind you of anyone?” he asked. “Anyone André knew? Anyone who might have modelled for him?”
“Well, we all did that. It was part of the price of knowing André. Somewhere out there there’s one of me waiting to be painted over.”
Gibbs tilted his head a little, as though countering the angle of Venus’s head.
“No,” he said.
The original was golden-haired, the eyes soft and scarcely focussed. This goddess had blonde hair, darker eyebrows, and the eyes were black and hard.
“Do you mind if I take it with me?”
“I was hoping you’d take more than one,” said Gibbs. “I was hoping to sell André’s clothes. Fat chance. In the end, I got threepence off the rag-and-bone man. But he wouldn’t take the paintings. Said he’d call back if he ever needed a new roof for his shed.”
Having no shed, nor any need of a shed, Troy politely declined the offer.
On the doorstep, Gibbs said, “Did you ever find out who shot him?”
“No,” said Troy, and damned himself with a back-tracking, far-too-careless, “But I will.”
Afterwards, walking down towards Oxford Street clutching his cumbersome load, wishing he’d driven over to Skolnik’s, he weighed up his remark, remembered what Onions had told him and what he had told Onions, and realized that he would find out and that the commitment was to himself rather than to anyone else.