The Mysterious Commission (15 page)

The next thing was a map, and the next thing after that again was quite a lot of maps. First, that was to say, he must treat himself to a bird’s eye view of the entire south of England, and then he must think of himself as to be equipped for a pretty long walking-tour from London towards Swansea. Not that he intended actually to walk. That would take much too long – in addition to which plodding along a permanent way was probably illegal and would certainly be uncomfortable. He must simply travel by train – again and again, if necessary – while keeping his eyes open. He decided that Ordnance Survey maps on the scale of 1:25,000 would be the thing. That was about 2½ inches to one mile. He’d need the devil of a lot of them, and on a fast train he’d have to fish out a fresh one about every five minutes. Moreover his behaviour might seen distinctly odd to any fellow passengers. But at least he’d always know exactly what he was looking at through the window.

Equipping himself in this and certain other ways turned out to afford Charles Honeybath considerable pleasure. Years dropped away from him. He was no longer Honeybath RA. He was once more Honeybath Minor (Honeybath Major had been his elder brother, now with God) and his main ambition in life was one day to become a King’s Scout. He had already obtained, he recalled, his Pathfinder’s Badge. Which was a good start. He had also done rather well in what, during his public-school days, had still been called the OTC. Hadn’t he, in fact, gained his Cert. A? Certainly he had gained his Cert. A. Impressive field officers who had journeyed from the War Office to conduct the examination had specially commended the masterly manoeuvre by which he had outflanked and captured a massively defended Junior Changing Shed. And of course there had been a great deal of map-reading involved as well. He was quite certain he remembered his remarkable performance at that. If he
had
had a war (and the fact that he hadn’t might have been pointed to by a psychologist as the reason for his being particularly pleased that he was carrying a purloined and fully loaded revolver in his pocket now) – if he
had
had a war there could be little doubt that he would have ended up unerringly piloting whole divisions to their goal across the almost featureless wastes of North Africa.

He had been dumped out of that damned car – he now knew – not all that distance from Basingstoke, an uninteresting place associated in his mind only with some foolish joke in a comic opera. But Basingstoke was neither here nor there, since it might be separated from Mr X’s residence (or Mr Basil Arbuthnot’s lair or den) by sixty miles or more. Indeed, that problematical dwelling might lie as far west along the railway as, say, Chipping Sodbury. And what about the other direction? He was almost certain that what he was looking for would not be found east of Didcot, let alone east of Goring or Reading. His Oxford days (and singularly useless they had been) had been largely given over to hurrying up to London to haunt the studios of real live artists and to batter on the doors of the Slade. As it had taken him two years to achieve the entrée there he had come to know the Oxford – Didcot – Paddington stretch uncommonly well. And Castle Arbuthnot just didn’t have the feel of that terrain.

But from Didcot to Chipping Sodbury wasn’t a mere step. It would probably be physically or nervously impossible to keep up a furlong-by-furlong vigilance. He would almost certainly have to have several goes at it. It looked as if British Rail was going to lift quite a lot of money off him. He was so resigned to this that he even briefly considered the advantage of buying some sort of season ticket.

As it turned out, that would have been a mistake.

He thought at first that he was going to have a first-class compartment to himself. This would be enormously advantageous. He could spread out his maps as he pleased, and nobody passing up or down the corridor would be likely much to notice the fact. But of course somebody might push in on him further down the line. Perhaps he ought to have reserved the whole compartment. The First Lord of the Treasury (former schoolfellow of Honeybath Minor) certainly travelled like that – although no doubt with a bodyguard lurking near at hand. Or even simple dukes or marquises, repairing to the seclusion of a country seat. But a private citizen – Honeybath reflected – might only attract undesirable curiosity by so lavish a proceeding. Besides which, the cost would make quite a hole in that still-to-be-earned £2,520.

At the last moment chance provided him with a fellow-passenger, after all. Almost as the train moved out of the station, a young woman tumbled in on him. A very pretty girl, he told himself – and was then surprised at his own momentary impercipience. She wasn’t a very pretty girl; she was that vastly different and much rarer thing, a very beautiful one. In his professional character, he knew perfectly well that it is pointless, or at least hazardous, to declare one woman more beautiful than another: the mysterious attribute can vanish even as you pause to admire; can declare itself suddenly in what you would think to pass by unregardingly. Still, this girl was beautiful. It even occurred to him that she might prove undesirably distracting later on. But until Didcot, at least, he could glance discreetly at her now and then. In fact, he presently discovered, he could sit and stare at her if he wanted to. For she was not the sort of girl who sits idly in a railway carriage, dividing her time between turning over the pages of a rubbishing magazine and glancing – or staring – at you. She was of a studious habit; and, indeed, you quickly saw that her beauty itself was of a somewhat severe and intellectual order. Her travelling impedimenta consisted of two books: a big one and a little one. She had put the big one down on the seat beside her; it had a sombre cover on which was pasted the label of the London Library. The little one was a paperback of the egghead sort, and Honeybath saw that it was called
Keynes and After
. This the young woman had opened near the middle and became absorbed in. So Honeybath was able to observe her. He observed that her skirt came almost to her knees and that her shoes were of a conjoined plainness and elegance not readily to be come by very far from Rome or Milan. (He had to be something of an expert in such matters: feet, like hands, are expensive extras.) Honeybath saw that he was probably in the company of the daughter of a duke, making off for the weekend to the parental home, but only on the basis of having so far broken free of its influence as to pursue rigorous if sadly plebeian studies at the London School of Economics.

These reflections, together with a little more or less covert fiddling with his maps, took our investigator through a pause at Reading and on to Didcot. Throughout this period the girl didn’t look up from her treatise except to check the names of these railway stations. At Reading, indeed, she did accompany this exercise with a glance at Honeybath. It was an impersonal and almost unflatteringly uninterested glance. She might have been checking on him too, and deciding that he was the sort of little man who came to wind the clocks or tune the pianos or carry out minor dental operations without any impertinent suggestion that these might be more readily achieved in his surgery – or in his dental parlour, as the girl’s father would doubtless phrase it.

Honeybath had just arrived at this assessment of himself in the supposed regard of the young woman sitting diagonally to him in the compartment – had arrived at it, naturally, without gratification, even if with no particular resentment – when the young woman looked up once more and gave him a brilliant smile. It wasn’t a smile that seemed occasioned by anything in particular, and it somehow carried the suggestion of being definitely not intended as a prelude to even the most casual conversation. It was almost as if she had realized that her first glance might have occasioned misapprehension and she was now anxious to make a brief amends. If the smile
had
been motivated in any way it had been by that. Honeybath preferred to think that it had been an entirely spontaneous – as it was certainly a merely momentary – thing. He felt as if he had been glancingly well-regarded by a passing goddess.

But now he had to apply himself in earnest to his task. The Swansea train, having turned away disdainfully from the line to Oxford and other obscure cathedral cities, was heading for the estuary of the Severn and the Principality of Wales. The Vale of the White Horse and much more or less open country lay immediately ahead, and most of the railway-stations (being small and helpless ones) had been closed through the zeal of the celebrated Lord Beeching. Wantage Road, Challow Station, Uffington Junction: little, if anything, would prove to be going forward in these former busy haunts of men. And haunts of racehorses, Honeybath recalled, since it was a region given over rather to quadrupedal than to bipedal forms of life. But this uncrowded character made the region, for him, a promising one. He got out his first map.

The proceeding left the young woman incurious. In fact it now became possible to believe that the young woman was rather sleepy; she had closed her succinct exposition of recent economic theory, and was now closing her eyes as well. This wasn’t entirely a gain. It did mean that Honeybath wouldn’t be embarrassed by the consciousness of being observed as indulging in eccentric behaviour. On the other hand it made an absorbed contemplation of beauty into a possibility entirely devoid of offence. So long as the young woman slept he could goggle at her as he pleased. Moreover there is something peculiarly seductive about a sleeping girl. The spectacle releases fancies not conducive to edification. Honeybath realized that he must keep his eye resolutely on the ball.

The ball was whatever dwellings of the more imposing sort presented themselves at only a moderate remove on the left as the train hurtled west. Honeybath quickly came to realize that there weren’t going to be many of them. When the Great Western Railway had first been laid down it had been taken for granted that the line wouldn’t venture into the near vicinity of the territorial nobility or the landed gentry. Later on, people with the money and ambition to build themselves big new houses had naturally kept away from it. More often than not, the really grand places had the Thames between themselves and this all but modern means of vulgar locomotion.

And what exactly was he looking for, anyway? A private park of modest proportions, fairly densely wooded on its northern boundary, but with a gap in the trees through which it ought to be possible to view a mansion the dimensions and exterior appearance of which were almost totally unknown to him. It should be no farther away than would enable a man to decipher, through good binoculars, a small placard exhibited, say, in one of its windows. And before this scene it seemed that, just occasionally, an express train such as this made a brief and grudging pause.

Was he to expect any signs of life? It had been ventured by Detective Superintendent Keybird, in one of his pooh-poohing moods, that the mysterious domicile of Mr X would by now be an empty shell. The whole show had merely been briefly mounted, that was to say, to take Honeybath in. Most of the house would have been empty and untenanted all the time. Just a few rooms would have been rigged up for occupation. Honeybath had vaguely heard of film companies doing something like this: taking over, briefly and on the cheap, some useless and abandoned mansion with the object of using such bits and pieces of it as they required.

Suddenly (and as he briskly substituted one large-scale map for another) he became aware of a circumstance that seemed decidedly to support this hypothesis. He hadn’t thought of it before. Peach-Crumble had been part of the
entourage
to be met with
chez
Arbuthnot. But in almost no time after Honeybath’s own departure from the place Peach-Crumble had been reduced to cowering in a miserable dockside dwelling in the East End of London. That did rather suggest, so to speak, a folding of tents like the Arabs, silently stealing away.

Yet this was really no argument at all. The booty from the bank had been hidden in London. Crumble, as a responsible member of the gang, had simply been despatched to look after it as soon as he no longer had a role as one of Mr X’s attendants or warders. Then again, there had been all those cars, and all those men – after some quite noisy conference – piling into them and driving away. Unless Honeybath had positively dreamed up all that, it blankly contradicted the proposition that the entire charade had been mounted, in the most ephemeral way, for his, Honeybath’s, sole benefit.

And here he was on the verge of a much larger consideration. It might be called, without pretentiousness, his own deepest intuition about the whole affair. Or not exactly an intuition, since it was something for which there existed a thoroughly intellectual basis. What in general is called proportion had been one of the main studies of Honeybath’s life. And the Keybird vision of the thing violated his sense of proportion. As a mere means of securing, for the space of a fortnight, the absence from his studio of an artist of the most modest fame, the imposture in which he had been involved was just too elaborate by half. Contemplate it fairly and squarely, and it simply didn’t stand up. The bank robbery had been only a venture, after all. It might have been wrecked, well or merely immediately before its successful accomplishment, by any sort of mischance or miscalculation. Yet very large sums of money (not even counting that second dollop of his fee) would have had to be staked on it, and it alone, if Keybird’s theory were the valid one. Reflect on this, and you came upon a very surprising conclusion indeed. The Arbuthnot set-up was not an ephemeral, an
ad hoc
affair. It subserved other and larger ends than the single
coup
which had met disaster at the efficient hands of Detective Superintendent Keybird and his 200 constables. What Honeybath RA was himself now hunting down could be nothing but the permanent headquarters of some vast criminal organization.

Rather unexpectedly, and in the middle of nowhere, the train had come to a halt.