Lady Appleby finished her coffee, drew on her gloves, and glanced round the restaurant. ‘John,’ she asked her husband, ‘did you say you needn’t be back at the Yard till three o’clock?’
‘I believe I did.’ Sir John Appleby called for his bill. ‘Was it rash of me? Are you going to take me for an hour’s quick shopping?’
‘Of course not. All men hate shopping. But it means we’ve just time to go to the Da Vinci. There’s a new show.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps all men hate new shows? And with you, Judith, new shows are shopping, as often as not. The number of paintings you’ve bought in the course of the last year–’
‘You know that all my carvings now need paintings as backgrounds.’ Judith Appleby was a sculptress by profession. ‘And at the moment I very much want something abstract, with strong diagonals, and plenty of acid greens.’
‘It’s ridiculous to buy modern paintings virtually as wallpaper.’
‘Nonsense. It’s just what they should be bought for.’
‘And the sort of price you seem prepared–’
‘Very well. We won’t go. No doubt I’ve been spending too much on that sort of thing. I shall go to a cinema.’
‘Come along.’ Appleby dropped a form on the plate before him and rose. ‘But I make one condition. We conduct this matter in a businesslike way. As soon as we’ve paid our shillings–’
‘But, John, there won’t be anything to pay…not to get in, I mean. It’s the private view, and I’ve had a card.’ Judith contrived to present this as a factor of considerable financial significance.
‘Very well. As soon as we are inside I shall send for Mr Da Vinci.
‘His name’s Brown.’
‘I shall send for Mr Brown and address him in this way. “My wife,” I shall say, “requires a good quality picture, about three feet by four, with strong diagonals, and in the new season’s acid greens. Will you be good enough to show us anything you have in stock?”’
‘Brown would find that very offensive. He has no sense of humour – or certainly not of English schoolboy humour. You’d better keep quiet until the bargaining. Then you can come in for all you’re worth.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby fed his wife briskly through a revolving door and joined her on the pavement. ‘Are you sure you’ll find diagonals and things at this particular show?’
‘Pretty sure. It’s an exhibition of painting by–’ Judith checked herself. ‘Hadn’t we better take a taxi? Because of your appointment at three. But I’ll pay.’
They climbed into a taxi in silence. Once settled in it, Appleby favoured his wife with a glance of frank domestic suspicion. ‘What sort of a private view?’ he asked. ‘One of the kind with an opening ceremony and a pretentious speech?’
‘Certainly – a speech by Mervyn Twist. But that will probably be over by the time we get there. We’ll just look round and come away. I don’t expect there will really be anything worth thinking of.’ Judith was soothing.
‘Very well.’ Her husband sank back in the taxi, resigned. ‘Where is this Da Vinci? We don’t seem to be going in the direction of the very grand places of that sort. Here’s Charing Cross Road.’
‘Brown – his real name is Hildebert Braunkopf – hasn’t been going very long. This show’s important to him.’
Again mild suspicion rose in Appleby. ‘Will the painter be hanging round? Will he be some poor devil one feels one must in decency ask to a square meal? Remember the man who took your spoons last summer.’
Judith shook her head. ‘Politic worms.’
‘What’s that you say?’
‘A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. It’s a memorial exhibition. This painter’s dead.’
With a deplorable access of good humour, Appleby felt in his pocket for change. ‘But sometimes there’s a sister who does something herself. Or a sorrowing and inebriated father earning penurious bread as a drawing master in Bootle.’
‘I don’t think there will be anybody of that sort either. It’s a memorial exhibition of the work of Gavin Limbert.’
Appleby sat up with a jerk. ‘Really, Judith, this is too bad.’ Judith Appleby looked at her husband with the largest reasonableness and innocence. ‘I don’t see why we should have to keep away from the poor man’s pictures just because he was murdered.’
‘Found shot. It happened while I was abroad. But I gather it isn’t at all known that he was murdered.’
They had come to a halt, and Appleby gloomily made the harassing calculations necessary before paying a London taxi driver in the year 1951. He peered out as he did so – whereupon an observant constable stepped smartly forward, opened the door, and saluted. An equally observant press photographer snapped this up in a flash. It was a gratifying moment for the small crowd gathered to gape at the undistinguished façade of the Da Vinci, and they now turned to gape at the Applebys instead. Appleby, who would have liked to scowl furiously at his wife, contented himself with scowling furiously at these idlers. This at once gave the impression of his representing the full severity of the law, hotfooted in pursuit of crime. A second constable, for whom the appearance of an Assistant Commissioner constituted an event of decisive professional importance, threw himself happily into the task of further dramatizing the occasion by clearing a path as if for the arrival of an archbishop or a Cabinet minister. From the window of the Da Vinci, which was handsomely draped in very new and very sombre purple velvet, a large stone Buddha surveyed this scene with detached and ironic satisfaction. Judith, who appeared unaware of anything out of the way in their arrival, paused to give this seemingly ancient object a critical glance. ‘Atelier Braunkopf,’ she said. ‘I expect he carves them in the basement, mostly out of old tombstones. Clever little man.’
‘But there’s a label on it saying “Fourth Century”. He should be put in gaol.’
‘He’d say that the statue was warranted only as illustrative of the art of that period, and not as representing it. By the way, if we do buy anything, remember he will want two cheques.’
‘Two cheques?’ Appleby paused with his hand on the door of the Da Vinci. ‘You mean he expects things paid for twice over?’
‘Of course not. Braunkopf just likes two cheques – each for one half of the amount. I can’t think why. Might it be something to do with income tax?’
Appleby breathed rather hard. ‘I think it just conceivable that it might.’
‘Would it make it quite legal if I gave him the one cheque and you gave him the other?’
‘When you are in this mood, my dear, it is useless to talk to you… Was that Gavin Limbert?’
On the inner side of the glass door before them was displayed a photograph of a youth perhaps twenty-three years old. He was untidily dressed in what could be distinguished as very good clothes; he sat on a soapbox amid a litter of painter’s materials; he looked extremely happy and wholesome and innocent. A thoroughly nice public schoolboy, Appleby thought, trying himself out in a role that had taken his fancy, and blessed with a father or an aunt willing to put up four or five hundred a year for the duration of the experiment. It was hard to imagine a sinister or even a shady side to the life of Gavin Limbert. But one never knew… Appleby let his eye travel from the photograph to an announcement displayed beneath it:
GAVIN LIMBERT
MEMORIAL EXHIBITION
OILS
GOUACHES
COLLAGES
TROUVAILLES
‘I know about gouaches and collages,’ he said. ‘But what are trouvailles?’
‘That will be things he picked up on the sea-shore – old bits of cork, and nicely eroded stones.’ Judith was fishing from her bag the card that was to admit them to a view of these interesting objects. ‘A sort of aesthetic beachcombing.’
‘And people will buy them?’ Appleby pushed open the door.
‘Yes. They pay for the artist’s eye… It’s terribly respectable.’
The outer room of the Da Vinci Gallery was certainly making a bold bid to suggest older-established institutions of its own kind off Bond Street. The walls were hung with dim and darkened pictures, bearing labels which for the most part took the form of honest doubts and frank disclaimers. Mr Brown, indeed, had so far improved upon the accepted convention in these matters as to indicate the degree of his establishment’s dubiety over its treasures by a system of multiple question marks. ‘Studio of Rubens?’ Appleby read. ‘Possibly by a pupil of Dirck Hals??’ ‘Formerly attributed to Rembrandt: rejected by Borenius.’ ‘El Greco????’ ‘Perhaps Alessio Baldovinetti: not accepted by Berenson.’ One or two of the pictures were simply labelled ‘?’ or ‘???’ Anyone wishing to linger amid this orgy of scepticism could do so upon settees massively upholstered in red plush.
But Judith Appleby pressed on. ‘Brown’s not hoping to sell this stuff,’ she explained. ‘He’s just borrowed it from some of his pals. It reminds the customers that Gavin Limbert may be an Alessio Baldovinetti one day.’
‘I suspect Alessio did it without going to the trouble of being found mysteriously dead… Look out.’ Appleby drew his wife aside just in time to prevent her being bowled over by a complex object being propelled on wheels from a farther room. ‘Whatever is that?’
‘Television, I think. And I saw a van with newsreel people outside. Glory for Brown.’
‘And for Limbert, I suppose. Shall we really push in? There’s a terrific crush. And I think the beastly opening is still happening.’
Judith nodded. ‘It certainly is. I can hear Mervyn Twist’s voice. Come on.’
She insinuated herself through a narrow gap between two massive women. With rather more difficulty, and with much less enthusiasm, Appleby followed. He frowned as he saw a young man from an evening paper making a quick note of his name, and then took a glance round the crowded room. The only pictures available to his inspection were those along the wall by which he stood, and his position was such that they appeared in a drastic foreshortening. But if their proportions were thus obscured, their general character was plain, and it was evident that Limbert had been an abstract painter. Or, more strictly, it was evident that he had given himself to producing abstract paintings.
For Appleby doubted whether this amiable and unfortunate young man had possessed a temperament very congruous with any convinced turning away from the natural world. Most of the paintings were conscientiously flat and two-dimensional; and where they admitted of a third dimension they did so only in the rarefied spirit of Sixth Form geometry. But lurking in them were things known outside either the studio or the classroom. The pure ellipses could be felt as yearning after the condition of Rugby footballs; and slanting across several of the canvases was a diminishing series of white rectangles from which Appleby was disposed to infer that at one time a principal ambition of young Limbert’s had been winning the under-fifteen hurdles.
Moreover the paintings were obstinately atmospheric. The light which played upon them came from a real world – from one in which sunshine sifts through green boughs or strikes up from clear water. They hinted at a more catholic enjoyment of created things than they were prepared openly to admit. Appleby felt obscurely that here had been a promising young man, although not perhaps a promising young painter. And it was not at all clear why he should be dead – unless, indeed, he had been butchered to make Mr Hildebert Brown or Braunkopf this highly remunerative holiday. Appleby promised himself to send for the officer dealing with the Limbert affair and discover what progress had been made with it.
The gallery was crowded – presumably with persons interested in the progress of the arts. Half of them were seated on several rows of chairs facing the farther wall; a few had been accommodated, after the fashion of a platform party, with rather grander chairs facing the other way; the remainder were standing in a huddle about the room. Appleby, whose business had for long been the observation of human behaviour, saw that while all had the appearance of following Mervyn Twist, a large majority was in fact exclusively concerned with disposing and maintaining the facial muscles in lines suggestive of superior critical discrimination. Some put their faith in raised eyebrows, thereby indicating that while they approved of the speaker’s line as a whole, they were nevertheless obliged, in consequence of their own fuller knowledge, to deprecate aspects of it. Others had perfected a hovering smile, indicative of discreet participation in some hidden significance of the words. Yet others contented themselves with looking extremely wooden, as if conscious that the preserving of a poker-face was the only safe and civil way of receiving observations which their uninhibited judgement would be obliged to greet with ridicule.
Appleby found the spectacle depressing. Gavin Limbert had perhaps been lucky, after all. He had died young and untouched by disillusion – ignorant or careless of the oceans of twaddle and humbug which constitute the main response of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to any form of artistic expression.
But now Mervyn Twist appeared to be approaching his peroration. He was a youngish man, with an indeterminate face suggestive of an under-exposed photographic plate, and a high, screaming voice. If one listened for long enough, Appleby supposed, some semblance of intelligible utterance, some rough approximation to the divine gift of discursive speech, might piece itself together amid these horrible noises. As it was, nothing reached him but a mush of arbitrarily associated words. The heroic era of the first papiers collés…golden sunset of the fruit dish, the bottle and the guitar…his second and third ego wrestling with the demon…magnificent proportions of Teotihuacan…correspondence to a sublime internal necessity… With sudden marked discomfort Appleby realized that he had himself assumed a very wooden expression indeed. He was just wondering what he could possibly substitute instead – self-consciousness is extremely infectious – when Twist suddenly stopped speaking and sat down. There was a polite ripple of applause. Somebody whom it was impossible to see got up and moved a vote of thanks. But nobody paid much attention to this. The company began milling round the pictures.
‘I thought we’d better have one of these.’ Judith had disappeared into the crowd and now returned carrying a catalogue.
‘Was it free?’
‘Free to me. But it means that Braunkopf spotted me and is coming over to be introduced to you. I expect he’ll want to show us round himself.’
Appleby took the catalogue in deepening gloom. The outside bore the inscription: ‘G L: 1928–1951.’ Below this was an engraving of a pair of compasses, with one foot broken off short in the act of describing an incomplete circle. ‘In excellent taste,’ Judith said. ‘And finely allusive. “On earth the broken arc, in heaven the perfect round.” And there’s another nice Braunkopf touch over there where Twist was speaking from.’
It occurred to Appleby that he was coming to find Judith in this particular vein of ironic connoisseurship increasingly baffling. He must be ageing more rapidly than she was. He looked across the room and saw that Twist had been posed before a painting larger than the rest and somewhat different in character. Above this the presiding genius of the Da Vinci had caused to be suspended a palette surrounded by a laurel wreath and enriched with a big black crêpe bow.
‘Dash it all, Judith, the man was alive, you know – and an artist just like yourself. Not ten days ago he was waking up, and cooking his breakfast, and planning the day’s work. Now he has this beastly little dealer, and that emasculated Yahoo Twist, prancing on his grave–’
Judith looked at her husband with interest – as she always did when his responses to a situation were what she called ethical and literary. ‘And the police too,’ she said. ‘Haven’t they been busy putting slices of Limbert under a microscope?’
‘Absolute rubbish. And now we’d better be–’ Appleby broke off short. He had received the momentary – and altogether surprising – impression that a somewhat enlarged replica of the Buddha from the Da Vinci’s window had been transformed into a self-guided missile and was about to make its kill in the pit of his stomach.
‘John – this is Mr Brown, who has organized the exhibition.’
The missile was now bobbing up and down with great rapidity, as if finally thrown off its course by an ingenious electronic device beneath Appleby’s waistcoat. The proprietor of the Da Vinci was making a series of bows. Their elaboration suggested powerfully to Appleby that here was a world in which Judith was coming decidedly to count. Perhaps it had been her name that the young reporter had been noting down, and not his at all.
‘How do you do – yes?’ Mr Braunkopf, who was bland, spherical, and boneless, contrived to put such genuine solicitude into this conventional inquiry that it might well have been taken as referring to Appleby’s bank balance. ‘Lady Appleby is here our very goot freunt. Her advises are always goot advises – no?’ Mr Braunkopf’s eye darted swiftly round his gallery, as if to make quite sure that no even better and sager friend had a preferential claim on his attention. ‘And this is a most puttikler voonderble day – a birthday, Sir John and Lady Abbleby – yes?’
‘A birthday?’ Appleby, who had been working out that Mr Braunkopf must have enjoyed his nativity in the recesses of the continent and come thence to England by way of New York, was a little at sea with this reference, and disposed to wonder if he should say something about happy returns.
‘A leg-end.’ Mr Braunkopf lowered his voice and tapped the topmost of the pile of catalogues he was carrying. ‘The birth of a leg-end, Sir John. Natchly I done few several big art deals my lonk career. But not never before the birth of a leg-end. The Limbert leg-end – that sounds goot, no? And now I have liddle time show you round. No – no inconveniences!’ And Mr Braunkopf raised a soft white hand as if to discount the protestations of his gratified clients. ‘No inconveniences in the worlt. All these very important patrons and art people.’ The hand gestured in a manner that decidedly patronized the patrons indicated. ‘No doubt you much recognize other nobles gentry your goot freunts. The rests is from the continent. Collectors, Kunsthistoriker, directors some the biggest galleries, aircrafts of them come over due this great new leg-end.’ Mr Braunkopf’s face lit up. It was plain that he was a man of imagination as well as commerce. He produced a gold watch. ‘Only now I wait Sir Kenneth, Sir Gerald, Dr Rothenstein. Till then I take you round.’
This particular wait, Appleby suspected, would be a substantial one. But Judith appeared to like Mr Braunkopf, and he was not himself certain that he was prepared to disapprove of him. They therefore began a circuit of the room. It was still extremely crowded. In places like the Da Vinci the private views are by far the most public occasions of the year, and this particular private view held the additional attraction of being implicated with circumstances of some notoriety. Perhaps there would really grow up just such a Limbert legend as the resourceful Braunkopf was striving to create. Today was certainly a good start. Braunkopf had mounted his exhibition with triumphant, if mildly indecent, speed. Gavin Limbert’s funeral baked meats, had there been any, might well have furnished forth the discreet little buffet to which particularly favoured patrons might doubtless repair in an inner room.
Judith was looking at each picture with grave attention. A moment before, she had been much enjoying Mr Braunkopf; now she was entirely unaware of him. He appeared to be far from resenting this. Presumably he knew Judith as a person who sometimes bought pictures, but to whom pictures were never sold. Judith’s husband, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity in this regard, and Mr Braunkopf felt that with him he was breaking new ground. Appleby, on his part, suspected that he would make little of Gavin Limbert’s technique, but might obtain quite a lot of instruction from Braunkopf’s. Artistic fashions change, and for what was displayed on the walls around him Appleby was too old by a full generation. But human nature remains constant, and successful sales talk must exploit the identical weaknesses today that the Serpent first hit upon in the Garden. Appleby knew that he must be offered the very same apple that diverted Eve. Braunkopf could do no more than serve it up with some garnish of his own.
‘It is not so goot.’ The proprietor of the Da Vinci had paused before a picture on a corner of which – whether veraciously or not – one of his assistants had just affixed a small red star. ‘It has the genius, yes. It has the promises, yes.’ Mr Braunkopf looked hastily round about him, as if fearful that his next remark might be overheard by that one of his patrons whose faulty taste had prompted him to choose this particular Limbert for purchase. ‘But the performances, no.’
‘Doesn’t really quite come off,’ Appleby said.
Mr Braunkopf replied only with a meaningful glance, such as passes in public between two persons tacitly cognizant that between them there has been forged a bond of superior understanding. Then he moved on, tapping his catalogue as he did so. ‘Limbert was yunk,’ he murmured discreetly. ‘Limbert was very yunk. And was he Raphael Sanzio, Sir John?’ Mr Braunkopf made a full pause upon this question, as if to give Appleby time to come to a mature decision upon the point. ‘No – Limbert was not Raphael Sanzio.’
‘Not really dazzlingly precocious,’ Appleby hazarded. ‘Except, perhaps, now and then.’
Mr Braunkopf’s eyelids flickered. The effect was of a man betraying despite himself some surprise at a suddenly revealed extreme perceptiveness in another. He paced on past a couple of pictures without inviting any attention to them. Then he paused before a third. With a stubby finger he pointed at one patch of it – an ellipse of pure vermilion. The finger moved across the canvas and paused on a cylindrical form in ultramarine, and from this it passed to an oblong in chrome yellow.
‘Colour,’ Appleby offered.
The flicker presented itself more violently than before. And again Mr Braunkopf looked cautiously about him. ‘Colour,’ he said softly. ‘You are right, Sir John. It was when he gave himself to colour. In these first enthusiasticals’ – and he gestured warily at the crowd now rather languidly circling the gallery – ‘there is not yet recognitions of it. But it is the truth. In colour there is Titian, and there is Gavin Limbert.’ For a moment Mr Braunkopf sank into what seemed a reverent aesthetic trance. And then he roused himself for an afterthought – the afterthought of a careful and fair-minded man. ‘And also there is Renoir – Renoir and our goot Mr Matthew Smith.’
‘And Giorgione?’ Appleby was diffident.
‘Ah – Giorgione.’ Mr Braunkopf frowned thoughtfully, as if here was a new idea, heterodox but perhaps significant – and certainly worthy of the most serious consideration in virtue of the high authority who had thought fit to propound it. Then his concentration relaxed, and his face lit up in recognition of a new intellectual truth. ‘But yes! It is goot, that, Sir John. It is very goot. Giorgione – he too was a colourist.’
Judith had moved away. Perhaps Braunkopf was one of her established protégés of the moment, and she disapproved of making fun of him. But they caught up with her before the large painting which had provided a background for the esoteric eloquence of Mervyn Twist. Twist was still there. Probably he was waiting for a cheque. Possibly he hoped for no more than a drink. Meanwhile he was favouring Judith with a species of technical appendix to his late address. ‘A definite advance, Lady Appleby. A big step forward. A substantial break with everything that he had been doing hitherto.’ Twist paused, evidently dissatisfied with the deplorable lucidity of these remarks. ‘A determined effort to disintegrate reality in the interest of the syncretic principle.’
‘Limbert’s last picture.’ Braunkopf nudged Appleby in the ribs and whispered this information. ‘And his chef-d’oeuvre. What pities, Sir John, if it shall go to America. Few several puttikler important persons want it for the Tate.’
‘Soaring,’ said Twist. ‘One sees the influence of the new transcendentalism, of Paul Klee, of the baroque interior, of aerial photography, of the schizophrenic dream.’
‘But the American galleries are hot on the stink.’ The guardian of the Limbert treasures managed to import much patriotic fervour into this confidence. At the same time he took a covert glance at Appleby’s umbrella – always a good index of a man’s financial standing. ‘An undisclosed sum,’ he murmured. ‘Some big public-spirituous person could buy this chef-d’oeuvre by Limbert for an undisclosed sum to present it to the Tate. It would be in The Times, Sir John. Meritorious services to the worlt of art. Everyone would be pleased – and puttikler the kink and the queen.’
Appleby, although one eminently well-affected towards the Throne, was not particularly drawn to this proposal. Perhaps this picture was really worthy to go to the Tate. He just wouldn’t know. But he saw that it did represent some sort of departure from Limbert’s usual manner; it was more crowded with intricate forms, and at the same time painted in a freer technique, than the others. When a wholly new idea came to an artist and excited him perhaps this was the sort of thing that happened. He glanced back at the pictures he had already seen, with the object of confirming his impression that in this last one Gavin Limbert had indeed been at something new. This action Mr Braunkopf chose to interpret after his own fashion. He took Appleby’s arm with a sudden urgency which it was momentarily impossible to resist. ‘We go back,’ he said. ‘We go back that puttikler rich feast of colour you picked out for yourself, Sir John. Suppose you donate it as birthday present to the Da Vinci’s goot freunt Lady Abbleby, then the Da Vinci show its gratitude to two goot freunts by meeting you at a most surprising low figure.’
They were now back before the picture that had prompted Mr Braunkopf to institute his comparison between the late Gavin Limbert and Titian. Appleby looked at it doubtfully. ‘What’s it called?’ he demanded.
Mr Braunkopf’s eye lit up, and his clutch tightened on Appleby’s arm. This, it seemed, was a stage in the selling of his wares that he was well-accustomed to and knew to be propitious. ‘Seagulls and Fish,’ he said confidently. ‘This rich meal of colour is called Seagulls and Fish. An oil on burlap.’
‘Burlap – what’s that?’ Appleby now sounded positively suspicious.
‘Very hard wearing.’ Mr Braunkopf met him instantly on his own ground. ‘All this wonderful rich indigestible banquet of colour last you a long time. One hundred guineas. And Lady Abbleby would think you gave two, three hundred.’
‘I see.’ Appleby, who had been feeling with some compunction that he ought not for his own entertainment to detain Braunkopf from more likely prey, hardened a little at this suggestion. ‘And the big one – what’s that called?’
‘The chef-d’oeuvre?’ Braunkopf’s eye kindled further. At the same time he hedged, having evidently neglected the crucial matter of nomenclature in this particular instance. ‘It is an abstraction, Sir John – an abstraction in a voonderble new artistic manner.’
‘I think a picture should have a name.’ Appleby appeared to lose interest.
‘But certainly it has a name.’ And Braunkopf smiled reassuringly, while his eye simultaneously sought inspiration from the ceiling. ‘The Fifth Day of Creation. This puttikler voonderble last great picture by Limbert is called that. The Sixth Day of Creation.’
‘I thought you said the Fifth.’
‘Both.’ Braunkopf was firm. ‘The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation. This voonderble picture is an abstraction. And time is an abstraction too.’
‘But not the price?’
‘I beg your pardons?’ Braunkopf looked at Appleby with what was perhaps a first gleam of suspicion.
‘What would it cost – to buy and give to the Tate?’
Braunkopf took a deep breath. He had the air of a man whose faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature, heroically preserved through much disillusion, was about to be justified. ‘We go back,’ he said. ‘This all very fine.’ He waved a dismissive hand at Seagulls and Fish. ‘But nothing but colour, Sir John. No form. And form is the soul of art. We go back to look at this great chef-d’oeuvre where Limbert at last masters form.’
‘I don’t think we do.’
They had taken a couple of paces across the gallery. Braunkopf was startled. ‘What you say, Sir John?’
‘I don’t think we do go back to it. It’s not there.’
This was true. There was still a considerable crowd in the room, but a momentary parting in it allowed them a clear view of the opposite wall. The palette, wreath, and big black bow were still in evidence. But the space beneath them was empty.
Braunkopf gave a howl of rage and darted across the room. Judith, who had just shaken off Mervyn Twist, rejoined her husband. ‘John – whatever have you done to Braunkopf? Driven him mad?’
‘The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation has vanished. And it disturbs him. I had just asked the price. It must be mortifying to have a large painting evaporate when you think you’ve had a nibble after it. But here he comes again.’
‘Gone – stolen!’ A doting parent, who returns home to find his only child absconded with a ruffian, could not have put more pathos into these words than did Mr Hildebert Braunkopf or Brown. ‘Sir John, Lady Abbleby, this chef-d’oeuvre of Limbert has been departed with by thieves!’
‘Are you quite sure?’ Appleby did not seem disposed to any very marked professional curiosity. ‘Perhaps the people at the Tate were so impatient that they just sent along for it?’
‘You make a joking, Sir John.’ Braunkopf was deeply reproachful.
‘And you, Mr Brown, perhaps make a sensation? Limbert is really having a wonderful time. First he gets killed, and then his chief picture disappears at this private view. Get busy with the reporters, my dear sir, in time for the final extra.’
‘It is publicities, yes – this great disaster to art?’ Whether ingenuously or not, Braunkopf appeared to be catching at a suddenly perceived crumb of comfort.
‘It certainly is.’ Appleby’s voice had gone a shade grim. ‘You might suggest to the newspaper people that they headline it as the mystery of the abstracted abstraction… Judith, we’ll be getting along.’