The Bohemian Girl Part 20

'Going someplace for a few years might not be the worst idea - Australia, Canada, the States. Put it behind you. Everybody west of the Mississippi is putting something behind him.'

'I've lost my nerve.'

The rain had turned away from sleet but was still coming down. Denton pulled the hat brim lower and took the few steps along Piccadilly to the arcade and moved into its welcome shelter. What Heseltine had said about the note and the painting didn't seem convincing, but it did suggest one or two possibilities. He had promised Janet he would talk to Geddys, anyway - how long was it since he'd tried and been told Geddys was travelling? Turning into Geddys's shop, he saw Geddys standing there looking more than ever the gnome - some bent, malicious creature standing guard over a cave full of valuable, probably stolen things.

'I was in a while ago,' Denton said. 'I came back, but you seem to have been travelling.' Geddys gave no sign of recognition, but Denton thought that in fact he remembered him. 'About a note that was left with a painting. A Wesselons sketch of a lion.' He wondered if Geddys had been away at all.

'Oh, yes?'

'Mary Thomason.'

'Oh, yes, I recollect.'

'Mr Geddys, you told me that you didn't know where Mary Thomason lived.'

'Naturally.'

'Her landlady says you sometimes saw her home.'

'Did she.'

Denton waited for more. Apparently there was to be none. He said, 'I've reported this to the police since I was here. Have they been to talk to you?'

'Of course not.'

'I could make sure that they do.'

Geddys looked up at him, his neck twisted to one side. He said, 'I don't get what you're about. You've no authority to come in here asking questions.'

'Why did you lie to me?'

'That is offensive.'

'Look, Geddys, it's me or the police. They're a good deal more offensive than I am. Why did you lie to me?'

'Please leave my shop.'

'You saw the young woman home a number of times. Why did you want to hide that from me? What was going on?'

'I'll have a constable called if you don't leave.'

'Was there something between you?' Geddys was ready to make a battle of it, but Denton jumped in. 'She wrote me that she was afraid somebody was going to hurt her. She's disappeared. You lied about how well you knew her. What do you think the police will make of it?'

Geddys licked his lips. 'I don't wish to be involved.'

'But you are involved. You involved yourself by lying to me. What was going on between you?'

Geddys turned away and walked the few steps to the front of the shop. He bent to arrange something in the front window. 'Do the police have to come into this?' His voice was a whisper.

'I don't have to call them specially, if that's what you mean.' Geddys began to examine small objects on a low table. 'She was a very - captivating girl. I became a little - interested in her.' He looked up quickly. 'But nothing happened! I swear it. I'll swear it to the police. Yes, I took her home in a cab several times when the weather was bad. It was a chance to help her. But nothing happened!' He finished moving the things and straightened. 'I'm a coward. Look at me - you think it would be easy to offer yourself to a young woman if you looked like me?' He walked to the shop window again, stood looking out past the paintings and bric-a-brac that were exhibited there. 'That's all there was to it.'

'I doubt it.'

'A man like you wouldn't understand. But I'd never have hurt her, never.'

He was believable, Denton thought. He didn't entirely believe, but he wasn't any longer sure that Geddys was lying, either. An older man, something like infatuation - was some sort of purity possible here? Remembering what Heseltine had suggested, he said, 'Mr Geddys, who else might have looked at the back of the Wesselons?'

'I don't see what that has to do with anything. Because she put the note there? She probably put it there so she wouldn't forget it.'

'But she did forget it.' Or did she? Perhaps Heseltine's theory was not so entirely wrong. 'How many other people worked in the shop when Mary Thomason was here?'

'Only one.'

'Man or woman?'

'A woman.' Geddys put his hands behind his back, stared out at the empty arcade. 'An older woman. She and Mary got along, neither friends nor enemies - you know. But the Wesselons was out here in the shop; Alice had no reason to come out here and handle it.'

'But you did.'

'Well, of course I did! I owned owned it!' He turned his head towards Denton but didn't meet his eyes. 'Please leave. I've nothing more to say.' it!' He turned his head towards Denton but didn't meet his eyes. 'Please leave. I've nothing more to say.'

'Who was going to buy the painting? Somebody was going to buy it and then didn't want it.'

'The Wesselons? I can't tell you that.'

'I think you'd better.'

'I have a responsibility to my clients.'

'Do you want to tell the police about that?'

Geddys whirled on him, his face reddening, his head tilted on the neck, then strode to the back and came out with a large ledger. He opened it on one hand, turned pages with the other, read until he found what he wanted. 'Francis Wenzli put down a guinea on it. He never came for it. I wrote to remind him that the painting was here, and he sent back my note with a scribble on it to the effect that he was no longer interested.' He slammed the book. 'Rude of him.'

'Who's Francis Wenzli?'

Geddys looked at him as if he were simple. 'The painter.'

'You didn't give him back his deposit?'

'He didn't ask for it.' Geddys shrugged. 'I'd lost the sale, after all.'

Denton went over some of it again, but Geddys wanted him gone. The story didn't change. A couple of hard detectives might get more - Denton thought there might be more to ask about the relations.h.i.+p with Mary Thomason - but he wasn't going to get it today. He could come back another time. Or put Guillam on him, ho-ho.

He had missed lunch. The rain was steady now, the wind slacked off; Piccadilly seemed dispirited - the tops of the buses empty, the horses plodding with their heads down, black umbrellas everywhere. He realized he was hungry. His watch told him it would be the low period at the Cafe Royal, but he could at least find something to eat there, and he might, too, find somebody who could tell him who Francis Wenzli was. Not Frank Harris: Harris was one of the nighttime habitues. Oddly, he thought of Gwen John, and not without interest. He set off for the Cafe Royal.

Inside the door of the Domino Room, shaking the rain off his ponderous overcoat, he looked for a familiar face. The room was all but empty, waiters leaning against the backs of chairs, arms folded. A single pair of long legs stuck out from a banquette half-hidden by a gold-and-green pillar - somebody either asleep or telling the world with his posture to go to h.e.l.l.

It was the latter. Denton saw a big, dark hat, the glitter of a gold earring.

'Hullo, sheriff. What the h.e.l.l are you doing here at this hour?' It was Augustus John, Gwen's brother, astonis.h.i.+ngly cheeky for a near-boy of twenty-three. Denton slid into the banquette and said, 'I might ask you the same thing. I like your hat.'

'Bought it off an Aussie I saw in the street.'

'I thought you were in Liverpool.'

'I was. I couldn't stand any more of it, so I took a few days off.' John was sitting low on his spine, arms folded, the wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. His costume - an almost threadbare velvet jacket in olive green, once apparently belonging to a game-keeper, corduroy trousers much bagged from the rain, thick boots - proclaimed the artist. So did the earring, the almost black beard.

'Liverpool isn't London?' Denton said.

'The Liverpudlians believe that only Greece, Rome and dead people in fancy clothes can be proper subjects for art. They're astonished and censorious that I could think the gypsies in the fields or the workers at the docks could interest me. They display the very best taste of the eighteen-fifties.' He sighed heavily and looked over at Denton, who was beginning a negotiation with a waiter about the choucroute garni. John said, 'My sister said she'd seen you. Gwen was rather taken with you. She likes older men.'

'I'm certainly one of those.'

'She said you were looking for a girl.'

'Not what you think.' Denton pa.s.sed over the leather envelope that held the drawing and told the waiter he'd have the chicken pie.

John took the drawing out and looked at it. His head came back as if his eyes were too close to it. 'Right piece of s.h.i.+t, isn't it,' he said.

'Gwen said Burlington House.'

'Oh, yes.'

'You don't recognize her? She was in her first year at the Slade.'

'Might. I used to drop into the drawing cla.s.ses, might have seen her. Dreadful piece of work, this.' He put his head forward and brought the drawing up almost to the brim of his hat. 'The remarques are more interesting.'

'The little drawings in the corners?'

'Not awfully well done, but they're Slade work, which is something. '

'Different hands did the head and the little things?'

'Oh, of course. The girl might have done the remarques, in fact - they look about right for first-year work. But she didn't do the head - that's Academy stuff, somebody immensely pompous and outdated. Bit odd, putting remarques on somebody else's drawing, more so when the drawing's of you. Little mementoes.'

'Of what?'

'Who the h.e.l.l knows? One's a doorway; means nothing to me. The other-' John laughed. 'Christ on a crust, it's Himple!' He laughed again. 'Sir Erasmus Himple, RA - one of the great old t.u.r.ds of Burlington House. The drawing is his Lazarus. It's obvious. I have a friend who insists that it looks like a man preparing to let out a colossal fart. That look of intense stupidity - the open mouth, the rolling eyes - old Himple said it shows Lazarus at the moment of realizing he's alive again. I suppose one could wake with a fart, eh?'

'"His Lazarus"?'

'Himple put a painting of the raising of Lazarus into the last exhibition. Huge thing - took up most of a wall. He described it as his "chef-d'oeuvre" and made much of the fact that his Lazarus is young and his Jesus is a Jew. And indeed, the Christ has a nose like Shylock in a burlesque, but everybody else in the painting is as English as Boadicea, so it looks as if the Jew of Malta has wandered into a palace garden party. Himple is unmatchable - a genus unto himself.'

Denton was turning over the name - Himple. Somebody else had mentioned Himple. Who was it? He was eating chicken pie, bending to look over John's shoulder at the drawing. 'I thought maybe the man in the drawing was screaming.'

'Well, he could be. One's never quite sure with Himple. You know, on closer inspection, I think that Lazarus looks a bit like the woman in the big drawing? And I wonder if she was perhaps the model for Lazarus's sister, who's shown in the painting as tripping over the ground as if she's weightless, one hand extended like a hostess introducing the dustman to the Prince of Wales.'

'I should have a look at the painting.'

'It's worth the trip, if only for the comic effect.'

'But why would Lazarus look like a woman?'

'The girl in the drawing was a model?'

'Now and then, they say.'

'There you are.'

'For Lazarus and and the sister?' the sister?'

'Well, it's like old Himple to want to show a family resemblance. He likes to be authentic, you know - brothers and sisters always look alike, right?' He laughed. 'Like Gwen and me.'

Denton looked more closely at the little drawing. 'And Lazarus is what she'd look like as a man?' He was thinking of the brother who had picked up Mary Thomason's trunk from her lodging house.

John stirred. He found a pencil in a pocket, searched through others until he found a folded piece of cartridge paper, on one side a list of some sort. He smoothed it out on the table and began to draw with quick, sure strokes. To Denton, it was like theatrical magic: one moment, blank paper, the next a face very like Mary Thomason's but male.

'I've cut his hair for him. Or we could have him with a beard, like Lazarus.' He made another sketch just as quickly, and the same young face appeared with a short beard, even the slight scantiness of the youthful hair shown. The economy of line was remarkable, and all at once Denton understood 'the Slade look'. He told John as much, praised his ability.

'I've thought of doing portraits in Trafalgar Square - sixpence a head. I'd make a fortune.'

'Can I keep those?'

John slid the paper over the tablecloth. 'You can tell your grand-children you own an original Augustus John.' He took the paper back and dashed off a signature, shoved it over again.

'You're not lacking in confidence, anyway.'

John laughed. 'Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays.' He sighed. 'I mean to get very drunk and possibly find myself a woman. That sound like a programme that would interest you?'

'Afraid not.'

'I think Gwen wondered if you were attached to anybody just now.'

'I am, actually.'

'Oh.' John slid down on the banquette again. 'It's just as well. Gwen's really interested only in her art. Everything else is "secondary", as she puts it. I wish I had her concentration. You heard I was married?'

'Mmm.'

'Hard on the concentration. Gwen's quite right, actually. She'll wind up a nun of art. I'll wind up a bigamist. Or a trigamist. I can't live without women. Half a dozen of them, if I could afford them. Oddly, having only one is surely more distracting than two or three - they could entertain each other. Isn't that so?'

Denton had ordered coffee. He sipped. 'I was married once. It was distracting, yes.'

'What happened?'

'She killed herself.'

John seemed to ponder this. He put his eyebrows up, then c.o.c.ked his head, frowned. He said, 'I came to London to cheer myself up, and I'm not being cheered. It's time to get drunk.' He wandered away.