The Mysterious Commission (20 page)

‘I’m not interested in what’d you’d say. Clear out, son – see?’

It had been as easy as that, Honeybath told himself. He was alone in the next room. The weedy youth had departed to his trip-wires – which were presumably to constitute some booby-trap when the night’s work really got going. Why were the self-denominated Mariners and the small bunch of thugs they appeared to keep in this house going to be robbed or raided or massacred or whatever it was? Honeybath hadn’t a clue. And then – suddenly – he
had
a clue. It was because the Mariners were entertaining (or had kidnapped) Charles Honeybath RA. Arbuthnot and Co. (who so clearly constituted the rival gang) knew that this coup had brought about some crisis. And to this crisis they proposed, within the next twenty minutes, to produce a violent and devastating response.

But what did Arbuthnot know that the bogus Admiral must by now have extracted from Honeybath? Could it be the tie-up with Peach-Crumble and the bank raid? Could it be the mere existence and location of the Arbuthnot headquarters at Imlac House? Could it be another mere existence: the mere existence of Mr X? This last was the best guess, Honeybath told himself. But it still wasn’t quite good enough.

The lunacy of Mr X.
Not his existence, but his
lunacy
. That was it. He had already
seen
that that was it, but in a dark and cloudy fashion. The point was clear to him now. Because the Mariners knew that Mr X was hopelessly
non compos mentis
the Arbuthnots had lost a trick. They were about to play their next card.

Honeybath turned on the light and switched off his torch. He had no time for groping around; anything that was to be discovered must be discovered now. Moreover he was gaining in confidence. Irrationally perhaps, he saw himself as a kind of third force – or even as what the learned would call a
tertius gaudens
, meaning a chap who nips in and does both contending sides down. It was no doubt a sober possibility that the contending sides would combine together for long enough to do
him
down. But he would take a gamble on that.

If the hall had been bleak, this room was bleaker. It might have been described as a cross between an office and a laboratory. The illumination he had switched on came from long tubes sited near the ceiling and so disposed as to cast a cold shadowless glare. There were desks and benches, and a great many chests and cupboards all of which proved to be locked. The safe looked very aggressively safe, and of course it was locked too. So much for his notion that, within the fortress, there would be no internal security.

The whole place, moreover, was depressingly tidy, swept, and ungarnished. No exotic cigarette-stubs in ashtrays, no revelatory photographs on walls. Everything put away. Or everything except a single litter of books and papers on a small table in a corner. He moved over to this. It didn’t take him long to recognize something. In fact he found himself looking at one of his own sketches of Mr X. It was in part dusted over with a fine grey powder.

Charles Honeybath (seasoned private investigator) hadn’t a moment’s doubt about the significance of this. It didn’t even surprise him. He remembered how Peach had jumped at the fact that there would be preparatory sketches of Mr X, and had made sure that Mr X would be let handle them and retain them. Mr X
had
so done, before firmly sitting on the things as a preliminary to depositing them in the imperial archives. They must have the poor old chap’s fingerprints all over them. And these fingerprints somebody had been industriously recovering.

What did surprise Honeybath was the two fat volumes that lay open on the desk. They were like outsize family photograph albums. They
were
photograph albums, and both were open upon a face Honeybath knew well. It was a face that had changed a good deal since either of these photographs was taken. The Mr X here commemorated was a much younger man. What presumably hadn’t changed were his fingerprints. And there they – or rather his thumb-prints were: a pair to each photograph, and very neatly done. A professional job, in fact. So here was a different kind of archive: not imperial, but criminological. They must have just this sort of thing filed away by the thousand in that place at New Scotland Yard. It seemed crooks kept such records too.

But that wasn’t all. Each of the photographs appeared on the left-hand side of an opening. On the right-hand side was a closely typed dossier. Honeybath knew at a glance that it could be nothing but that. Unfortunately there was little more to be learnt from it. Both dossiers were in some sort of code. But not entirely. Each concluded with what appeared to be a hastily scribbled pencil annotation. Under the first he read:

Old B. Oct. 1956

and under the second:

Pensioned Valparaiso Jan. 1957.

Cautiously – first in the one album and then in the other – Honeybath turned over a page or two. At every opening, the same general appearance. Rogues and their histories. As the sergeant in that rural police station would have said: Well, well, well. He turned back to his familiar acquaintance.
Pensioned Valparaiso Jan. 1957
seemed self-explanatory, more or less. No doubt you got honourably rid of an unwanted confederate in that considerate way. But what about
Old B. Oct. 1956?
An explanation started up in Honeybath’s mind like a creation.
Old B
. stood for
Old Bailey
. In that month of that year one of Her Majesty’s Judges had dealt faithfully with Mr X – that much younger Mr X – in that dreaded citadel of the criminal law.

But it didn’t make sense
. A crook whose career closed on such a note one autumnal day in 1956 would be in no position to depart for South America on a winter day three months later. Honeybath considered this enigma – the two photographs, the two sets of thumbprints – resolutely at leisure. He had ceased to be bothered by the fact that twenty minutes is a brief space of time, and that now the final grains must pretty well be trickling through the glass.

It was only when he had solved the mystery – or at least glimpsed the large splendid outline of it – that he glanced at his watch.

What he had to do now was simply to get out. He hadn’t found his portrait. But he felt his mission to be accomplished, all the same. And somewhere in this house the false Sinon had opened a door. And through a door by which many men might presently enter it ought to be possible for one man first to depart. Puzzle find the door, Honeybath said to himself – and walked back into the hall. It was in darkness. There wasn’t even the weedy youth’s silly little red lamp. Nevertheless Honeybath knew – having achieved some mysterious hyperacuity of sense – that the hall was full of men. Arbuthnot and Co. had arrived. All possibility of easy escape was over. Honeybath fished out the revolver – obscurely wondering whether it was at all legal, or even moral, to sell his life dearly. And then, suddenly, the hall was brilliantly illuminated.

‘Mr Honeybath, this has been most injudicious behaviour on your part,’ Detective Superintendent Keybird said.

‘Ah, Mr Keybird, good morning to you.’ Honeybath, who justly felt that his behaviour, whether injudicious or not, had been marked by at least some small measure of intrepidity, found himself indisposed to accept any note of censure. Of course one might have assumed that, in the situation in which he had landed himself, the unexpected arrival of the police in a big way would be wholly grateful to him. Hadn’t he, no time ago, been wondering how to make that 999 call? There would have been nothing wholly out of the way in his now receiving Keybird and his legions with tears of joy.

But in fact – such is the mysterious obliquity and perversity of the human heart – Honeybath’s predominant feeling was one of irritation. He had been doing very well. He had been (he fondly supposed) well ahead of the police – a whole street ahead, indeed, just as if he had been M. Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey. But now here the police were, positively queering his pitch. It was extremely tiresome. He felt a sudden disposition to take the efficient Keybird on, as it were, the flank.

‘May I ask,’ he said blandly, ‘whether you have yet found my portrait?’

‘Found your portrait? No, I have not. But I have found you, Mr Honeybath. And I hope you’ll consider that something to be going on with.’

‘I’d rather you’d found the portrait, I confess. And I suppose you’ve cleaned up Imlac by now. Are you sure your men had a good rummage there?’

‘Imlac?’ The blank incomprehension with which Detective Superintendent Keybird repeated this word reflected an unwonted lack of wariness on his part.

‘Imlac House. I take it you did begin there?’

‘Mr Honeybath, I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Dear me!’ It didn’t escape Honeybath that he was behaving very badly. Sinon, in however distant a part of this nameless house he had been setting his booby traps, must by now be aware that there had arrived, so to speak, a Trojan Horse from quite the wrong stable. He would be changing sides again: alerting the three men whom he had spoken of as upstairs, and probably contriving to alert the Mariners as well. All these people might make a successful bolt for it while this Keybird comedy was going on. Or they might even launch some large-scale attack. But Honeybath disregarded these plain facts. The police, after all, were so numerously represented at this climactic scene that they could presumably look after themselves. ‘Dear me!’ he repeated. ‘Then I can’t understand quite why you should be here at all. It can’t simply be that you’ve been following me around?’

‘Do you imagine we
wouldn’t
be following you around? You surely can’t suppose, Mr Honeybath, that you’re as yet all that in the clear? Come, come, sir!’

It was Honeybath’s turn to be disconcerted. There was a short silence during which he became aware that the police posse was thinning out. Upon the instructions of some subordinate commander, he supposed, they were discreetly exploring the house. The curtain might go up – although on the Lord knew what – at any moment.

‘Do I understand,’ Honeybath asked, ‘that you have been having me shadowed as a suspected person?’

‘Under observation, sir, certainly. A routine proceeding in affairs of this sort.’

‘A lot of good it did when they tried to murder me in that station yard.’

‘Yes, sir. But it wasn’t exactly protection we understood ourselves to be laying on. So our man was taken a little by surprise, I’m free to admit. But he did get the number of that Mini car. The subsequent inquiries took some time. I didn’t myself get down until midnight. But these men were posted by that time.’

‘And what were you waiting for then?’ It amused Honeybath to reflect that throughout his late adventure within there had been platoons of policemen lurking without. ‘A search warrant?’

‘Mr Honeybath, one party had attempted to murder you. Hard upon that, and most irregularly, another party had whisked you away, nobody knew where. And when we
did
get to know where, we found an uncommonly odd set-up. This place passes as a gentleman’s residence. It turns out to be a damned fortress.’

‘Quite right, Mr Keybird. It’s my own word for it. A fortress. Please go on.’

‘We have had your safety to consider. I decided against precipitate action – and seem to have been justified in the event.’

‘In fact, you waited until somebody more or less opened a door for you? Puzzling, that must have seemed.’ Honeybath was now enjoying himself. ‘A young fellow called Sinon, that was. Or I call him Sinon – you remember he turns up in the
Aeneid
. He’s somewhere around now, arranging what he calls trip-wires. Or he may have dropped that, and be thinking up something else. There are only three other people here in the house, by the way – that, and an elderly man and a girl in a kind of annex. But Arbuthnot’s lot will be arriving at any moment now to storm the place. It was for them that young Sinon opened the door. No doubt you can arrange to receive them in some suitable manner. Or arrange for some of your people to do so. If you take my advice, my dear Keybird, you’ll address your own mind to something else.’

‘To something else?’ It was now agreeably evident that Detective Superintendent Keybird had been reduced to a state of stupefaction.

‘Yes – because I’m sure that you want now to clear the whole matter up. You’re a busy man, I know, and like to be done with things. Would you say that you have the major criminal trials of the last twenty years fairly well in your head?’

‘Yes, I have.’ Keybird’s formerly alarming eyes were now fixed upon Honeybath in a kind of stony respect. ‘Will you explain yourself, please?’

‘By all means. But just cast your mind back for a moment to the 1950s. If possible, to October 1956. Would there have been any particularly notable criminal trial then?’

‘Of course there was. William Mangrove, who carried out the biggest bullion robbery ever known in England.’

‘Ah! Well, my dear chap, I think I may say that your William Mangrove is my Mr X.’

‘Absolute nonsense!’ If Keybird was outraged, he was startled as well. ‘Mangrove–’

‘
William
Mangrove. One always has to remember the brother – who founded, you’ll recall, what may be termed the Chile branch of the family.’

‘What the dickens do you know about those people?’

‘Just take it that I’ve been investigating. Of course – although I don’t myself actually see it that way – Mr X may be the brother from Valparaiso. It’s always tricky with identical twins, wouldn’t you agree? Fortunately, we have those fingerprints.’

‘We have
what
?’

‘Just another instance of the Honeybath service, my dear Keybird. Please step this way.’

But at this point it must be chronicled, if with reluctance, that Charles Honeybath (eminent portrait painter turned amateur sleuth) had had his day – or, rather, his night. By the time Keybird had glanced at the two photographs and asked half a dozen questions he was again very much in command of the proceedings. And of this the first token was the immediate plunging of the house into darkness and silence.