“You mean it’s for one of those tape-recorder affairs?”
“Of course it is, Minister. And Cantelupe went out, then and there, and bought one. It was, in fact, the large parcel he was seen bringing into this room. It’s standing just behind you.”
The Minister swung round. “And the fellow you were telling me about, who sounds as if he was out of Happy Families–”
“Mr Butt the butler? Precisely. But what he heard through the door was not the voice of an actual woman, but the voice of a woman recorded on this.” Appleby tapped the cigar-box once more and then handed it to one of his colleagues. “I think, Minister, you’ll find what it has to say rather striking.”
There was silence for a few moments while the inspector manipulated the machine. Then a girl’s voice – low, clear, slightly tremulous but desperately controlled – filled the room. Only the Minister was hearing it for the first time. Yet within seconds all four men were equally tense and rigid. Two or three times the voice broke off and then began again. Eventually there was a click and it stopped for good.
“So that’s it.” The Minister had produced a handkerchief and unobtrusively dabbed at his forehead. “Well, no wonder that butler found his employer discomposed. Here was this girl for whom he’d started up an infatuation – kidnapped, treated or at least threatened God knows how, and constrained to make this appeal. I suppose this damned ribbon arrived along with a letter saying just what information Cantelupe must give away if she was to be released. It’s as diabolical as anything I ever heard. And we’ve no notion where she is?”
“Play it again.” Appleby spoke grimly to the inspector. “And, just short of two minutes, listen particularly hard.”
They listened. “It might be somebody tuning a fiddle,” one of the inspectors said. “Two or three strings plucked, quite softly, in rapid succession. But it seems unlikely.”
“More probably a technical fault in the machine.” The second inspector spoke for the first time. “There’s another – a sort of irregular click – a bit later on.”
Appleby was gazing sombrely out of the window. But now he swung round quickly. “Play it again,” he repeated.
And yet again they listened.
“Find an atlas,” Appleby said. “And take that telephone – will you? – and call up the Southern Electricity Board.”
Nearly an hour later, as the police car slowed to turn off A40, the Minister broke a long silence. “Cantelupe’s a bit older than I thought. He was just tipped into the Kaiser’s war.”
Appleby nodded. “I know. I looked him up. A very modest martial career. Signals.” Appleby took his pipe from his mouth and stared at it, frowning. “We’re going to find that girl, if we have any luck. But it occurs to me we may find Cantelupe as well.”
“I’ll be much obliged to you if we do.” Unconvincingly, the Minister reproduced his old jocular form. “What sort of a place is this that you’ve been mysteriously inspired to make for?”
“Taw? Formless sort of place, I gather. A good many large villas scattered all round a golf course. But the house we’re interested in is older – early seventeenth century, and quite a showplace at one time. Taken over by a local authority some years ago and used as offices. Now it’s in the hands of a rather vaguely described private firm. I hope we’ll make their acquaintance. But first – it’s suddenly occurred to me – we should try the hotel. Golfers’ place too.”
“We may find Cantelupe in the bar, quietly polishing a niblick?”
Appleby was unperturbed by this sarcasm. “I think it’s just possible we may hear of him.”
And Appleby was right.
For the hotel manager recognised a photograph of Cantelupe at once. “He arrived some days ago,” he said. “Odd fellow. Absent-minded. Hasn’t even signed our register yet. Irregular that, I’m afraid. Arrived without any luggage, but seemed to pick things up later. Plenty of money.”
“Golfer?” Appleby asked.
“Not remotely interested. And that’s another odd thing. We hardly get anything but. It seems to puzzle the chap himself, too. I’ve sometimes thought he simply wanders about wondering why one earth he came here.”
“I see.” Appleby’s voice betrayed no trace of excitement. “He’ll be in to lunch?”
“Sure to be. Or wait – no. Possibly not. He’s gone off with some friends – the first people he’s spoken to since he came. There was a chap in last night, who seemed to be looking at him rather curiously. And I saw the same fellow go up and speak to him this morning, just beyond the clubhouse. Then three or four other men appeared – rather suddenly, I thought. Golfers, I suppose. They surrounded our queer fish of a guest, and all went off together.”
“Did they, indeed? Then I think you can certainly count him out for lunch. Or anything else.” Appleby turned to the Minister. “I somehow don’t think our friend Diamond will have paid much attention to the little bit about Cambridge. Not after his pals’ interesting find here last night.”
The Minister nodded. “Well,” he said, “we’re finding something too. But do you really think they could just walk off with Cantelupe in broad daylight?”
“Yes. In his confused state they could probably get away with it. Come along. I rather feel we haven’t a great deal of time.”
They drove for only ten minutes, and then the car came to a halt. Appleby jumped out. “A convenient hill,” he said, and handed a pair of binoculars to the Minister. “There’s Taw Manor, straight below us. Admirable Jacobean scroll-work. Attracts lovers of architecture from all over the place. As a matter of fact, you can see quite a number of them arriving now.”
The Minister focused the glasses, and gave an exclamation. “You mean in that motor-coach moving up the drive?”
“Yes. The South London Architectural and Archaeological Society out on a jaunt. They rang up our interesting friends down there, I understand, and asked if they might just stroll round the place and admire the facade.”
“Well, I’m damned!”
“I hope it’s others, Minister, who are that. Look – they’re getting out.” Appleby chuckled. “An entirely male society, you notice. Elderly looking, some of them. And even infirm. But, if they straightened up, I somehow think most of them would be round about six feet. Spreading out, you notice. The fellows wandering round to the back are no doubt attracted by the original Elizabethan stables… Ah!” A shrill whistle had sounded below. And by every available door and window the members of the South London Architectural and Archaeological Society were pouring into Taw Manor. “Chancy,” Appleby said. “But if these two were to be got out alive, it needed a dodge like that.”
That evening the Minister – he was quite a junior Minister, after all – took Appleby to dine with someone important.
“And the noble and learned professor,” the important person said, “–will he be any good again?”
Appleby nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s thought that, when Lord Cantelupe realises the girl has come to no final harm through his folly, his condition will clear up and he’ll be returnable to his lab.”
“In future, he’d better stick to it.
Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
That’s Latin for ‘Back-room boys should stay put’.”
“So it is, sir.”
“Diamond?”
“He was the brains of the whole thing. But it was his last ambitious essay in crime. He had gone down early that morning, and was in Taw when we raided it. He tried to escape from an upper window, and broke his neck.”
“Excellent. And now would you mind, Sir John, telling our young friend here” – and the important person glanced at the Minister, who passed a nervous hand over his smoothly brushed grey hair – “just how you did it? Was it with mirrors?”
“Only in the initial phase, sir. A mirror entered into that. But the later stage was acoustic, not visual. When one turns on fluorescent, as distinct from ordinary, electric light, one often gets a little sequence of faint musical notes. The microphone the girl was being forced to talk into happened to pick up just that.”
“So you knew that much about the place where they were holding her. Did it help much?”
“It wouldn’t have, if she wasn’t a resourceful girl. They gave her a hand microphone, you see. And she managed, as she held it, to tap out on it, with her nail,
T–A–W
in morse. It came through to us as a faint intermittent click that we almost took for no more than a flaw in the recording. But it was the chance of getting it through that made Miss Page submit to what was demanded of her.”
“She’d better have a medal – and be found an unmarried and eligible employer. Are you married, Sir John?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A pity. So all you had to do–”
“Was to find where, in Taw, any fluorescent lighting was in operation. Apart from the hotel and the clubhouse, Taw Manor was the only place. It had been put in when the house was turned over to offices.”
There was a short silence. “And Cantelupe?” the important person asked.
“There, of course, is the point of interest in the affair. That morse message got through to him too. He’d been in the Signals, long ago. But it got through, so to speak, only to his unconscious mind. When he cracked up and lost his memory – as he very soon did – he obeyed the signal he received, and went straight off to Taw. But he had no notion why. He hardly could have – since he had no notion who he was, either. When he was spotted by Diamond’s folk last night, they decided that their best course was to collar him. I don’t know that it was very sensible. But his disappearance had made hay of their original plan, and I’d say they were rather floundering.”
The important person nodded. “You didn’t find it catching, Sir John.” He paused, having plainly found the phrase upon which the episode should close. “If our young friend will cease detaining the decanter, you and I might venture on a second glass of port.”
Mr Hildebert Braunkopf, proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery, was in despair. “Three pictures, my goot Sir John Appleby – three most puttikler voonderble pictures stolen in the deeps of the night! Three
chef-d’oeuvre
masterpieces of this very sad great painter Robin Pacello. What losses, Sir John, dogostrophes for the worlt of art.”
“No doubt.” Appleby glanced round the little exhibition. There were certainly three gaping frames. “I suppose this Robin Pacello is dead? I seem to remember that posthumous exhibitions are your particular line.”
Braunkopf nodded – but with the air of one modestly disclaiming some enthusiastic tribute to the beauty of his conduct. “It is the widows, Sir John – the widows and chiltrens and unmarried mummies of these young so sad dead painters. Always I think of them, Sir John, when I arrange these most puttikler reputable well-known memorial exhibitings – yes?”
“Quite so.” Appleby had walked up to one of the empty frames. “Unglazed, I see. And the fellow has simply taken a razor and cut the canvas from its stretcher. The others are the same?”
“Just the same. Three precisely similitudinous irreplaceable losses to our voonderble modern art.” Mr Braunkopf’s deep aesthetic dejection lightened for a moment. “But at least we have the frames, Sir John – no?”
“You have the frames because, when cut out, the canvases could be rolled and carried away unobtrusively.” Appleby took another prowl round the gallery. “Were these the most valuable Pacellos?”
“Valuable, Sir John?” Mr Braunkopf appeared pained by the raw commercialism of this. “All these great Pacellos is non-valuable – absolutely non-valuable and beyond price.” Mr Braunkopf paused. “Thirty guineas,” he added.
“You were asking thirty guineas for each? This young Pacello has hardly been heard of.” Appleby had taken one of the empty frames from the wall. “What would you have accepted?”
“Ten.” Mr Braunkopf spoke without hesitation. He seemed to feel that the moment for some professional frankness had come.
“And what would the thief hope to get? Five?”
Mr Braunkopf shook his head. “I don’t see the possibles, Sir John, of his getting anything at all.”
“That would be my guess, too.” Appleby frowned. “And yet you have two or three quite good things in the next room.”
“Yes indeeds, Sir John. Kokoschka, Chagall, one small Matisse. And this thief takes three mere nonesenses this young quite dead Pacello.” Frankness was growing on Mr Braunkopf. “It does not make senses – yes?”
“No more it does. And the burglary, though not a skilled job, took a good deal of resolution.” Appleby had already investigated this aspect of the matter. “Just get down the other two frames, will you? And then take the stretchers out of all three.”
There was very little paint on any of the strips of canvas that had been masked by two of the frames. But with the third it was different. Pacello had for some reason decided a little to contract the area of his picture-space, and he had achieved this by inserting a half-inch slip between frame and canvas. The thief had thus been obliged to leave behind him a narrow rim of paint. A very speculative reconstruction suggested some sort of seascape, and at the bottom a close inspection revealed a fragmentary inscription in dark red pigment:
ogne ’54.
The catalogue, when consulted, provided somewhat enigmatic information. The painting had been entitled
The Exile
. Appleby appealed to the Da Vinci’s proprietor. But Mr Braunkopf’s memory was reprehensibly vague. It was only after some thought that he recalled the exile to have been a woman.
“What sort of woman, Mr Braunkopf? Young or old? And why do you think Pacello was interested in her?”
“Not yunk, Sir John, and not very old neithers. But fenestrated. That was what interested Pacello.”
“Fenestrated?” This was clearly a more than common flight of Braunkopf’s English.
“Yes, Sir John. Fenestrated and boffled.”
“I see.” Light had come to Appleby. Pacello’s subject had seemed frustrated and baffled. It was a reasonable appearance for an exile to bear. Seeing at least a tenuous line of investigation before him, Appleby departed, leaving Mr Braunkopf in his rifled halls.
Pacello had been a lonely young painter, without interested relatives or intimate friends. Nobody except the ingeniously predatory owner of the Da Vinci – who could in this case scarcely have been solicitous for widow, wife, or unmarried mother – had descended upon his remains. And although the instruments of his art had vanished, probably as being quite as saleable as his canvases, a considerable quantity of junk had simply been pitched into an attic next to the studio in which he had painted.