The Mysterious Commission (17 page)

He realized his mind was wandering. He hadn’t been involved in an accident.
They had tried to murder him
. Perhaps the girl felt that a second attempt might follow at any moment. Yes – this must be why she was hurrying him from the scene.

He was conscious of being glad it was happening that way, but he didn’t at all know why. Then in an instant he did know why. Since childhood he had owned an irrational fear of hospitals and nursing homes, and what he chiefly associated street accidents with was the horror of suddenly finding oneself being borne away to such a place in a hideously ululating ambulance. Even if nothing much had happened to you, they snatched you up, hurtled you dangerously through the traffic, decanted you into a casualty ward, and treated you for shock – whatever that might be. He didn’t believe in shock, and from this it logically followed that he didn’t believe in treatment for it either. So it was just as well that this remarkable young woman had taken such decisive action.

The Mini cornered so sharply that Honeybath was bumped against its side, and thus abruptly made aware that his numbed body would soon be aching all over. He was also made aware that his mind wasn’t working very well, and even that something physical seemed to be happening inside his head. Had he, perhaps, suffered a stroke? Was cerebral disaster of some sort a common concomitant of such an accident as he had just suffered? Would he presently develop a blinding headache, and be dead in the morning?

But there hadn’t been an accident.
They had tried to murder him
. As this fact came back to Honeybath he understood that what was building up inside his skull was nothing more sinister than a large and legitimate indignation. And it wasn’t so much the attempt itself as its utterly unaccountable character that outraged him. He had done his job for these people (and thoroughly inexplicable the job, for a start, had been), and they had then merely turfed him out contemptuously, with his money in his pocket. Now – only minutes ago – they had done their best to pound him to a pulp between a lorry and a brick wall.

Perhaps it was simply spite. The bank robbery had failed, and it was conceivable they knew it to have been through his instrumentality that this had happened and that Crumble had been caught. They were simply determined to get their own back. That was it. Or rather it wasn’t – Honeybath’s perturbed mind abruptly contradicted itself – since professional criminals don’t work that way. They don’t go in for vengeance, or if they do so it is only between themselves. They had tried to eliminate him because they knew he was on their track. They must have been trailing him wherever he went. One of them must have been on the train, and tumbled to the significance of his sheaf of maps. Perhaps even the extraordinary coincidence of his encountering Diana Mariner and conversing with her had been a point that had instantly got home. And at Swindon some swift signal had been given–

Charles Honeybath shivered. (Since he was in fact in a state of shock which any ambulance man would have identified instantly, this was natural enough.) Had he bitten off more than he could chew? He had certainly got into deep water – and for the moment, at least, it felt uncommonly icy water as well. And it was sink or swim now. For he wasn’t going back. He wasn’t, for example, going to insist on being taken straight to the nearest police station, where he might contact Keybird and be placed under adequate protection until the whole affair was cleared up. On the contrary, he was going to go straight ahead.

And he had, after all, enjoyed one enormous piece of luck. Had Arbuthnot’s tenancy (or Colonel Bunbury’s tenancy) not expired when it had, and had he rediscovered the place of his late incarceration on his own, he might have plunged in with a stupid hardihood which could have been fatal. As it was, the respectable Admiral Mariner was in front of him and the resourceful and beautiful Diana Mariner was at his side. Imlac House would no longer be a prison. It would be a fresh base for a decisive move against the villains.

This was a comforting thought. Because comforting, it was relaxing. Honeybath felt tension drain out of him. Just for the moment, he need badger his brains no more. He closed his eyes; he shivered again; and, as usual, he fell asleep.

‘And here we are,’ Diana Mariner said.

‘Yes, of course.’ Honeybath jerked this reply out of himself. He wasn’t sure whether it was the girl’s voice or the distant sound of a railway-train that had roused him from some obscurely stupefied condition; both hung momentarily on his ear now. ‘So we are.’

‘Then you recognize the house?’ Miss Mariner seemed gratified that this should be so.

‘Not exactly.’ Honeybath looked vaguely at what appeared to be a modern wing added to the large Georgian mansion. ‘You see, from the garden–’

‘Yes, I see. This is just our family
Lebensraum
at this end. They’ll have been putting the rest in mothballs until there’s another tenant. I say, can you get out?’

‘Certainly I can get out.’ Honeybath made a big effort, and did so. He found that he was quite steady on his feet, but that few joints in his body were much disposed to perform their normal offices without fuss. One painful movement brought him against the side of the Mini with a bump – and the bump produced a muffled clank. He remembered the bizarre circumstance that he had a revolver in his coat-pocket. He wondered whether such weapons ever discharged themselves accidentally. Something of the kind might well have happened when he was struck that glancing blow by the lethal lorry. If one had been a soldier one would understand these things. He had not.

‘And here is Daddy,’ Miss Mariner said. ‘Won’t this be a surprise for him?’

It showed no sign of being anything of the sort. A grey-haired and distinguished-looking man had indeed appeared in a doorway. But it was at once clear that if Miss Mariner chose to decant from her car a dusty, dazed and crumpled stranger, that stranger would instantly be received as a guest, and without flicker, by Miss Mariner’s father.

‘I am so very glad to meet you,’ Admiral Mariner said, and shook hands. His tone was properly formal; he wasn’t in the least suggesting that his words should be taken literally; they were to be construed in some such sense as ‘You seem a perfectly reasonable chap and I don’t at all mind offering you a cup of tea.’ Honeybath approved of this. He felt secure with Admiral Mariner. It was odd that the Admiral should be an ambassador. Presumably it was to some predominantly maritime power.

‘Mr Honeybath is the portrait-painter,’ Miss Mariner said.

‘How very interesting.’ The Admiral’s manner of saying this was highly commendatory; he was acknowledging not only his guest’s known eminence but also the propriety with which his daughter had signalled it by her employment of the definite article. Honeybath was further comforted. He was sensitive to subtleties of this kind. ‘If I may say so,’ the Admiral added, ‘I look out for your work every year.’

‘Thank you very much.’ This further civility clearly referred to the Royal Academy’s annual jamboree at Burlington House. Honeybath received it gratefully.

‘That supermarket fellow who calls himself – what is it? – Lord President of the Council. To my mind, you had him to a T. And – talking of tea – come on in.’

This, to Honeybath’s mind, was highly felicitous. Mariner actually
did
have his work in his head. He had proved it by the lightest of allusions. And then he had added that small, unassuming joke.

‘I’d like some tea very much,’ Honeybath said. ‘I come to you – and wholly through your daughter’s kindness – after rather an unnerving adventure.’ He was keeping his end up. ‘It’s why I need a clothes-brush first.’

‘As you certainly do, my dear sir.’ Mariner allowed himself to be sympathetically amused. ‘But has there been an accident? You’re not hurt? Our GP lives no distance away. Send for him in a moment.’

‘No, no – only a bruise or two.’

‘Mr Honeybath has been pretty lucky,’ Miss Mariner said. ‘They tried to murder him.’

‘What’s that?’ Mere urbanity dropped away from Admiral Mariner. He was instantly alert and formidable. It was evident that he could trust his daughter not to be merely silly. ‘Who are
they
, my dear?’

‘Daddy, I think you ought to prepare yourself for a shock. It looks as if your Colonel Bunbury was not what he appeared to be.’

‘Bunbury?’ Just for a second, Admiral Mariner was at a loss. ‘But, yes – of course. I’ve been doing my best to drive the fellow out of my head. And precisely because I’ve been suspecting there was something damned fishy about him. Mr Honeybath, tea will be ready by the time you’ve had a wash.’

If tea was no great success, the fault wasn’t the Mariners’. There were still only the two of them, so that Honeybath conjectured that the Admiral must be a widower. They both worked hard, and on the principle of refreshment first and serious talk later. But Honeybath found his shivering fits coming back to him, and the clink of a tea-spoon could make him jump. Being upset in this way because of his near shave infuriated him; he had always cherished a myth of himself as inwardly quite a tough character. He still believed it to be true that in a crisis he would stand up and be counted. But at the moment he was behaving like an old wife. It was only when tea gave place to brandy – this through some unobtrusive exercise of tact on the Admiral’s part – that he really found his tongue. And, when he did so, it was with awkward abruptness.

‘Has everything gone?’ he asked. ‘Everything that was in any sense those people’s property, I mean. For example, my portrait.’

‘Your portrait?’ Admiral Mariner was perplexed. ‘They had a portrait of you? How very odd!’

‘Daddy, do think.’ For the first time, Diana hinted impatience with her parent. ‘You
know
Mr Honeybath
paints
portraits. He came to Imlac to paint one. But not, it seems, of Colonel Bunbury. And he’s anxious about it. It was got out of him, I think, by a kind of fraud. He wants to get it back.’

‘It isn’t likely they’ve left anything of the kind behind them.’ Admiral Mariner thought for a moment, and then distinguishably hesitated, as if before a delicate point. ‘Unless, of course – and I haven’t yet got the hang of the thing at all – unless the painting of a portrait was a mere pretext for detaining Mr Honeybath at Imlac, and they simply shoved it aside when it had served its turn. If there’s any possibility of that sort, we had better hunt through the whole house. But it will take some time. If I might just be told–’

‘Yes, of course.’ And Honeybath took a deep breath (followed by a little more brandy) and told his story. He found it hard to organize at first, even although he had a sense of his own mind as clearing rapidly. It isn’t easy to render lucid an account of matters which have to be admitted as in essence inexplicable. But at least he had the advantage of an attentive auditory. The Admiral might well have felt that he was suffering politely a narrative of absurd events his own implication with which was accidental and a matter of mere bad luck. But in fact he listened with what was plainly intense concentration throughout. Honeybath, who was professionally alert to small muscular movements, was conscious of both father and daughter, indeed, several times tautening as if before an expectation of crisis. Neither of them interrupted until he had finished. When he did so, it was to hear from the Admiral something like a long, gentle sigh, and to observe that he was somehow sitting more easily in his chair.

‘You relieve me,’ the Admiral said. ‘A great deal of money has been stolen, and you yourself have been most outrageously treated. But at least nothing really horrible has occurred.’

‘It nearly has,’ Diana Mariner said. ‘There in the railway yard.’

‘Perfectly true.’ Her father nodded soberly. ‘The picture changes at that point. There is something almost engaging – you won’t misunderstand me, Honeybath – about the ingenuity, almost the fantasy, of the main plot. But when the epilogue turns out to be attempted murder we have to take another view of the thing.’

‘I’m not quite clear,’ Honeybath said, ‘about what was the main plot. The proportions of the thing disturb me. Renting this large house of yours for a long period, and putting up that whole sustained charade of the portrait-painting just to get me out of the way: I have an obstinate feeling that it doesn’t make sense.’

‘That’s a most interesting idea. But we have to remember, I think, that half a million pounds is a very large sum of money indeed. It’s a far richer prize than any half million pounds’ worth of jewellery or paintings or anything of the kind. You can’t part with stolen goods without losing heavily – whereas, stolen or unstolen banknotes are worth precisely what they say they are. And there’s another thing. Bunbury’s tenancy ended just after the robbery went through as planned. That’s a strong argument that the whole set-up has been in aid of the bank raid and nothing else. Don’t you agree?’

‘I don’t know that I do. But the police certainly take that view.’ For the first time since the attack on him, Honeybath managed a smile. ‘They just couldn’t be less interested in my poor Mr X.’

‘Well, I differ from them there.’ Mariner, as if sensitive to his guest’s slightest change of mood, produced a quiet chuckle. ‘I find him quite fascinating – although in rather a macabre way. Did you bring away any sketches of him?’

‘None at all. Of course, I made a number – and actually gave him several. He was good enough to say he’d deposit them in the imperial archives.’

‘He studied them – even handled them a good deal?’

‘Oh, certainly. Sat on them too, as a matter of fact.’

‘How very amusing.’ Mariner glanced at his daughter, as if requiring her to be amused also. ‘But there must have been a pathetic side to the thing. Was it your impression that the poor fellow’s mind was hopelessly darkened?’

‘Yes. Short of his being a superb actor, it was definitely that.’

‘He was Napoleon
tout simple
? I mean, he never seemed to have an inkling of being anybody else?’

‘I wouldn’t quite say that.’