Death of a Ghost (32 page)

‘But, it's so quick,' Campion muttered. ‘Yesterday –'

‘Yesterday he was a genius,' put in the Inspector, ‘and today he's a lunatic. Well, there's not all that amount of difference, is there? Besides, it's not so sudden as you seem to think. I've had his partner, Isadore Levy, down here this morning. Poor little chap, he was worried out of his life. He told us Fustian had been growing more and more peculiar for some time. Apparently he used to drop his affectations in private, but lately he kept them up always. There have been other things, too. Only yesterday he went to a party in a scarlet tartan waistcoat. What could be madder than that?'

Campion glanced over his shoulder at the closed door, and there was something very honest in the expression in his eyes.

‘He was my dearest enemy,' he said gravely, ‘but I wouldn't have wished that for him.'

The Inspector smiled.

‘No, old boy,' he said affectionately. ‘No, I didn't believe you would.'

–

S
OME
days after Max Fustian died in a prison infirmary, and the Crescent was dusty and littered with autumn leaves, Mr Campion went to visit Mrs Lafcadio.

They stood in the great studio and looked at the picture which had been returned from Salmon's and hoisted into position over the fireplace.

It was a cool, dark interior, the figures subdued and the lighting superb. Belle nodded at it, her white bonnet reflecting the light from the gallery windows.

‘Such a nice picture,' she said. ‘He meant it to be the last to be shown. I remember him painting it quite well, in Spain. I always liked it.'

‘What will you do with it?' said Campion. ‘Keep it?'

‘I think so.' The old lady spoke gently. ‘There's been such a lot of trouble through this Show Sunday idea of Johnnie's. Poor Johnnie! His ideas always brought trouble. Next year he and I must have our party alone with Lisa and poor Beatrice.'

Mr Campion hesitated. He was on delicate ground.

‘Did you see the – the other three?' he enquired at last.

‘No,' said Belle. ‘Mr Levy and Mr Pendle and Inspector Oates told me about them and I quite understood. They're still at Salmon's, I suppose.'

She paused, her faded brown eyes troubled and her wrinkled lips pursed up.

‘I heard he was dead,' she said, suddenly.

Campion realized that she was deliberately avoiding Max's name, and did not mention it himself.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘A bad business, Belle. I'm sorry you had to know about it.'

She did not seem to hear him, but went on talking in the same quiet voice.

‘The Inspector hinted that Tommy Dacre was trying to blackmail him, and he lost his temper, saw his chance and killed the poor boy. I didn't think Tommy would have blackmailed anyone, did you? He was so nice as a child.'

Campion shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don't suppose he looked upon it as blackmail,' he said cautiously. ‘As far as we can find out from Rosa-Rosa and – and the confession, Dacre had been paid for the four pictures he had done and had finished his scholarship. He needed money and simply announced that he was going to paint another four pictures at the same price and in the same cottage. That's how it happened. If – if his murderer hadn't had an opportunity to hand at that moment it would never have occurred.'

‘And Claire?' said Belle, her lips working. ‘Poor, clever Claire, how did she offend?'

Campion frowned.

‘Ah, she was a more serious menace to him,' he said. ‘She knew everything, you see. She had been a confidante in the picture-faking and had taken care of Dacre in the cottage. She guessed and let the man see she guessed, probably on that day he came to see you and told us about the Van Pijper. Her nerve seems to have gone to pieces, so when she got a telephone message from him telling her that the police were making dangerous enquiries she did exactly what he hoped she would do, and so she died.'

Belle folded her hands over the little cretonne work-bag she carried, and for a moment she did not speak.

‘Her poor man,' she said at last. ‘Poor Claire's poor man! He's just beginning to take a little interest in his work again. It's actually a little better, I think; just a little, so that's something for him. But oh, Albert, the wickedness – the dreadful wickedness and the waste!'

She turned away from the picture, but before they went out paused before another. The portrait of Lafcadio smiled down at them. ‘The Laughing Cavalier's Big Brother'; again Campion was struck by the resemblance.

There was the same bravura, the same conscious magnificence, the same happy self-confidence.

A thought occurred to him, and he glanced down at Belle, to find her looking up at him.

‘I know what you're thinking,' she observed.

‘No,' he said. ‘I mean, I'm sure you don't.'

‘I do.' Belle was laughing. ‘You're thinking of the seventh picture, the one the Easton Museum bought, aren't you? None of the facts have been published and you're wondering what I'm going to do.'

The young man looked startled. The thought had been in his mind.

Mrs Lafcadio opened her cretonne bag.

‘This is a secret,' she said, and handed him a slip of paper. Campion glanced at it curiously.

It was a receipt for four thousand two hundred pounds, seventeen shillings and ninepence from a very famous artists' charity. The date particularly interested him.

‘This is nearly two years old,' he said, wonderingly. ‘Oh, Belle, you knew!'

Mrs Lafcadio hesitated.

‘I knew Johnnie hadn't painted the crowd round the Cross,' she said. ‘I didn't see the picture until the party, as it happened, because I was in bed until the very morning, and then I was too busy to look at it closely. When I did see it properly it had already been sold, and everyone was chattering and praising it. I didn't realize what had happened. It never occurred to me to doubt the Gallery.'

Mr Campion was still puzzled.

‘Whom did you doubt, then?' he said, not unreasonably.

Mrs Lafcadio glanced up at the Sargent.

‘Johnnie,' she said. ‘My bad old Johnnie. I thought it was a pupil's effort. Johnnie would have laughed so – hoaxing them all like that – all the clever, pompous people.'

‘So you said nothing?'

‘No. I thought perhaps I wouldn't. So I sent every penny I received to a charity, and I made a rule that in future I was to see the pictures before anyone else. Of course, the one this year was genuine, so I thought the last was one of Johnnie's naughtinesses and I tried to forget it.'

‘How did you tell?' enquired Campion curiously.

‘That the seventh picture was not genuine?' Mrs Lafcadio's brown eyes were bright like a bird's.

‘Because of the child on the shoulder of the figure in the foreground. I never understood the technique of painting. I'm no expert. But Johnnie never painted a child on a grownup's shoulder in his life. It was one of his private fetishes. He didn't care even to see it. There's a mention of it in one of his letters to Tanqueray, that dreadful book which everyone said was in such bad taste. He says somewhere:
“Your disgusting habit of painting sentimental, elderly yokels supporting their bulbous and probably insanitary offspring
on
their shoulders repels me. Whenever I see a bloated child carried thus, its head exalted above its father's I want to tear it down and dust that portion of its anatomy, which is always so adequately but unbeautifully covered in your pictures, with the sole of my boot”.
'

‘I see,' said Mr Campion. It seemed the only comment in the face of such irrefutable proof.

‘He wasn't altogether a kindly person,' Belle remarked.

‘Who? Tanqueray?'

‘No – noisy old Lafcadio,' said the painter's wife. ‘But he loved my little John. Poor little John.'

Campion had never heard her mention Linda's father before, and now she did not dwell upon the subject.

‘Never tell about the seventh picture, will you?' she said. ‘After all, what does it matter? Oh, dear life, what do all these pictures really matter?'

Mr Campion promised on his oath.

As they walked up the covered way to the house he looked down at her.

‘Well, is everything all right now?' he asked.

She nodded and sighed.

‘Yes, my dear,' she said. ‘Yes. And thank you. Come and see me sometimes. I shall be lonely without Linda.'

‘Linda?'

‘She and Matt were married at Southampton on Monday. I had a card yesterday,' said Mrs Lafcadio placidly. ‘They found that separate cabins on the boat to Majorca would cost so much more than a special licence, and they're set on painting down there, so they married. It seems very sensible.'

Mr Campion took his leave. Belle came to the door with him and stood on the steps, plump and smiling, her crisp bonnet flickering in the breeze.

When he turned at the corner to look back, she was still standing there, and she waved a little pocket handkerchief to him.

When he was out of sight she came in and closed the door.

She pulled the mat straight with the heel of her buckled shoe and trotted down the hall. At the kitchen door she paused and looked in.

‘Beatrice and Mr Potter are out tonight, so you and I will have something easy, Lisa,' she said.

‘Sì, sì,' said the old woman, without looking round from the stove. ‘Sì, sì.'

Belle closed the door softly, and went up to the drawing-room. The yellow evening sun was streaming in, mellowing the faded Persian rugs and caressing the upholstery of the Voltaire chair.

The old lady went over to the bureau and, taking a small key from a chain round her neck, unlocked a narrow drawer under the writing flap.

It slid open easily, and from its green-lined depths she lifted out a small unframed canvas. She seated herself and propped the little picture up on the desk.

It was a self-portrait of John Lafcadio, painted in the impressionist technique only appreciated in a much later day. It showed the same face which smiled so proudly from Sargent, but there was a great difference.

John Lafcadio's famous beard was here only suggested, and the line of his chin, a little receding, was viciously drawn in. The lips were smiling, their sensuous fullness over-emphasized. The flowing locks were shown a little thin and the high cheekbones caricatured.

The eyes were laughing, or at least one of them laughed. The other was completely hidden in a grotesque wink.

It was cruel and revealing, the face of a man who was, if half genius, also half buffoon.

Belle turned it over. Written across the back in the painter's enormous hand was a single phrase:

‘
Your secret, Belle darling.
'

The old lady returned to the portrait. She touched her lips with her forefinger and pressed it on the painted mouth.

‘Oh, Johnnie,' she said sadly. ‘Such a lot of trouble, my dear. Such a lot of trouble.'

Also available in Vintage Murder Mysteries

‘The queen of crime writing's golden age'
Daily Telegraph

A suspicious death and a haunted family heirloom were not advertised when Dr George Abbershaw and a group of London's brightest young things accepted an invitation to the mansion of Black Dudley.

Skulduggery is most certainly afoot, and the party-goers soon realise that they're trapped in the secluded house.

Amongst them is a stranger who promises to unravel the villainous plots behind their incarceration – but can George and his friends trust the peculiar young man who calls himself Albert Campion?

Also available in Vintage Murder Mysteries