Last Nocturne (10 page)

Cogan stood amazed. ‘Now that’s what I call
very
nice! If he could paint like this – why didn’t he stick to it? What was he doing messing around with these other things?’

They were looking at an unframed portrait, a conventional study of a child of about eight or nine. An unsmiling little girl with almond eyes and a heavy mass of brown hair, clutching a doll by its arm and apparently dressed in her best for the occasion in polished button boots, a dark stuff frock trimmed with velvet bands, and a string of corals around her neck. It was conventional enough – indistinguishable from any other tasteful, competently painted portrait of a loved, well cared for child, commissioned perhaps by well-to-do parents. Except for the eyes, that is, which gazed out of the frame with a kind of wariness, and gave it some quality which lifted the portrait out of the ordinary. It was so different from anything else they’d been looking at that Lamb again bent for a closer look at it. This time he found no signature. It was also untitled.

Curiously disturbed by it, for no reason he could name, he crossed to the window, leaving Cogan to put it back with the rest. He stood thinking, looking down over the public garden below, around which the crescent curved. The trees were just breaking into fresh leaf. Someone had strung up a net and two young women in shirtwaists and boaters were taking advantage of the early sunshine to play an impromptu game of tennis. It didn’t seem to bother them that the stiff breeze kept carrying their ball away, or that the bumpy grass caused it to bounce in the wrong direction. Their laughter rang out, their pretty faces were flushed. Young, energetic, full of life.

And Theo Benton, twenty-five years old, dead. Destroyed by his own hand.

Lamb always felt queasy in the awesome, unanswerable presence of suicide. What utter despair filled that one moment when a man, or woman, decided to bring it all to an end? In most cases it was all too evident: a woman who threw herself into the Thames because she had nowhere else to turn, worn down by poverty, perhaps pregnant and unmarried, or no longer able to face the attentions of a brutal husband… Men who were unable to find honest work to support their families and had become debt-ridden, drunk, despairing… He always felt that had they waited another hour, another day, another month, the despair might have shifted, while knowing how unlikely it was that the conditions which had caused it would ever have improved.

A flat cart drawn by a patient horse clopped by, laden with wooden boxes. Just as it passed the house a motorcar suddenly appeared and endeavoured to overtake the cart without slackening speed, causing the horse to shy. After a moment of chaos while the driver regained control, a vigorous altercation ensued between both drivers. Lamb craned out over the sill to watch. Would horses ever become as accustomed to London’s streets being increasingly filled with honking motor horns, the clang of trams and whizzing bicycles, as its human inhabitants were being forced to accept – and to petrol fumes, horse manure and the smell of drains into the bargain?

He left the drivers to their quarrel and closed the sash window. Cogan’s surmise had been correct. An accidental fall from a high-set window such as this could only have happened under freakish circumstances – if, say, the victim had been sitting on the sill and overbalanced through the opened window, a circumstance not unknown to have happened to overly house-proud women sitting backwards on the sill to wash the outside of the window. Or if he’d stood on a chair or stool in front of it. But no chair had been found near the window, and the sill was simply too high for him to have leant out and lost his balance. Lamb could think of no circumstance which might have induced him to do either. Theo could only have deliberately launched himself out, one way or another.

‘Are we sure there was no suicide note, Sergeant?’

‘Not unless Constable Smithers missed it amongst all this.’ Cogan indicated the masses of paper strewn on the rough centre table, unlikely as it was that a suicide note would have been hidden amongst them.

‘Be a good chap and go through it again, will you?’

Cogan pulled up a stool to the trestle table in the centre of the room and, after perching a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose, began on what appeared to be mostly rough sketches, torn from notebooks or scribbled on odd pieces of paper – there was even one on the cover of his rent-book, fortunately not the caricature he had drawn of his landlady…that had been made on the back of an eating-house menu card. There was little else of interest. Theo had not lived a life in which bills or correspondence featured very much. There was no money in the room, and when he’d been found, fully dressed down to his boots, in a rubbed and frayed corduroy suit, a soft-collared shirt and tie, only a few coins had been found in his pocket. His rent was paid up, however. How had he supported himself? He was unlikely to have made enough money to live on through his art. If he’d been a pupil assistant to Sickert, he might not even have been paid at all. Had his father, in the end, come round and supported him?

Lamb looked around for a seat while Cogan finished his task but saw only the unappetising bed and a rickety basket chair which seemed in imminent danger of collapse. He leant on his umbrella instead, contemplated Miss Tilly Tremayne once more, and wondered why Benton should have excluded this from the works now hanging in the Pontifex Gallery. Not for the first time, the timing of the suicide struck him as unnatural.

It was setting up resonances in his mind, the death of this young man, and then suddenly, chasing the connection, there it was. The Pontifex Gallery, of course. Benton, exhibiting there, taking his own life, reminding him of the art dealer, Eliot Martagon, late owner of the gallery, who had also taken his life in unexplained circumstances. Coincidence, of course, the only link being the question of motive – why had either man needed to kill himself? Theo by jumping out of the window, and Martagon by blowing his brains out?

Lamb had known Martagon slightly, having met him first in connection with some thefts which had taken place at his gallery some time since, but what he had seen of the man, he had liked. They’d met once or twice afterwards and had had several interesting conversations. He’d formed the opinion of a man eminently sensible and well-balanced, an agreeable and apparently well-liked person and, like the young unfortunate Theo, seemingly one with everything to live for.

‘Nothing here, sir,’ said Cogan at last, slipping the papers into a large envelope and labelling it.

Lamb was looking at the empty brandy bottle still lying on the floor beside the bed, reading its label. ‘I’d have to think twice,’ he remarked thoughtfully, ‘about whether I could afford a fine old cognac like that, myself, and yet here he was, a struggling young artist with scarcely enough money to keep body and soul together, one would think. Committing the sacrilege of drinking it straight from the bottle, what’s more,’ he added, his eyes searching round for a glass, and finding nothing except the stained mugs.

‘I don’t suppose such niceties were much on his mind at the time, sir,’ said Cogan sensibly. ‘Money neither.’

Guy Martagon dined that evening at his club in Pall Mall, and afterwards stayed on, hoping to catch sight of Julian Carrington, who was an old and trusted friend of his father’s and one of the executors of his will. As a retired banker, he had been of great help to Guy in tidying up his father’s financial arrangements, and in particular the vexed question of how – or indeed if – the Pontifex could continue after Eliot’s untimely death. Guy now hoped to gain advice – or at the very least, another point of view – on a more delicate matter which had been uppermost in his mind ever since a meeting some few weeks ago with Ambrose Hardisty, the family solicitor.

Carrington was always in and out of the gallery, but there had been little chance that day of any private and uninterrupted conversation amid all confusion over the suicide of Theo Benton, one of the exhibitors, and discussions as to whether or not the exhibition should be postponed, and if so, for how long. Guy abandoned the attempt for a private word. He was by no means sure that the banker would be able to tell him what he wanted to know, and not wanting to embarrass either of them by arranging a formal meeting if this wasn’t the case, he had decided it might be better to contrive an apparently chance encounter with him at the club.

He knew that Carrington was in the habit of dining alone there several times a week and when he arrived he was told that the gentleman usually dined at a fairly late hour. So, when several acquaintances of Guy’s, already in high spirits, saw him and insisted on his joining them for dinner in a private room, he reluctantly allowed himself to be persuaded, after asking to be informed immediately when Mr Carrington arrived. He was really in no mood for this crowd of so-called gay bachelors, dandies and would-be sophisticates who thought themselves men of the world, whose only aim in life seemed to be to get rid of as much money as they could in the shortest possible time, with pleasure seeking in one form or another as the centre of their existence. But he’d once been on the fringes of this set, had been at school with most of them, and they continued to press him until it would have been boorish to insist on dining alone. When they had finished eating – a noisy affair, accompanied by a good deal more drinking on their part – the suggestion was put forward to repair to a notorious gambling club – and perhaps afterwards…a little diversion, what? Guy declined, as gracefully as he could. They told him he was a damned killjoy. What the devil had he been up to, out there in India, to change him so? He smiled and shrugged and gave non-committal answers. These men, once friends of a sort, now induced in Guy nothing more than a sense of ennui. He saw them depart with relief.

There was no sign of Carrington even then in the dining room, but he was assured that the gentleman might well still turn up within the next hour. They were used to his late arrival. Resigning himself to a further wait, he passed the time pretending to read the newspaper, half dozing in the deep leather chair in the quiet reading room over a glass of port, interrupted only by friends of his father who had not seen him since Eliot had died, offering expressions of sympathy. He finally gave up his vigil when it became apparent that it was going to be futile, suddenly aware that perhaps the problems over the exhibition at the gallery had exhausted Carrington more than they had Guy himself. He was, after all, no longer a young man.

One way and another, he had drunk rather more than was usual with him during the course of the evening, and rather than take a cab, he walked home to clear his head and stretch his legs. It was a beautiful night, the sky dark, and thick with stars. It reminded him of Tibet. Sometimes, lately, he would stop in the middle of what he was doing, wondering where he was, what he was doing here, why he was not back in that heartbreakingly beautiful country, rich in mysteries, with its perilous snow-capped peaks and icy green watercourses tearing along the chasms and gorges, its simple people.

When the conflict with the Boers had broken out, like so many other patriotic young Englishmen, Guy had immediately enlisted in the army and sailed to South Africa to join in the fighting. He had come through unscathed, but the adventure had developed not only a cynical suspicion of his own country’s motives in this South African war but disillusioned him with the army and its stiff protocol. Not inclined to return to England immediately, he had joined a Swedish geographical expedition in the last stages of attempting to map the as yet unknown regions between the Gobi desert and the Tibetan plateau, dedicated to finding the sources of the great rivers of Asia, perhaps the last of the world’s great mysteries. Well, all this had now drawn to a triumphant close. Left behind, he had wondered what he was going to do with himself. And then his father had died, and the decision for his return had been made.

In the simple life, with its unstressful pace, there had been time for thought and reflection, a temporary hiatus in his real life, a preparation for what was to come. But the thought of returning to London and passing his time in vapid and meaningless activities, in a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, was repugnant. He was not, like his father, artistic or even appreciative of art, in the sense that he had no instinctive or acquired knowledge; he was not pressed for money, yet Eliot’s example had shown him it was possible to lead a useful and interesting life without the need for it as an incentive. The thought had entered and lodged in his mind that he might enter Parliament.

But tonight was no time for such thoughts; tonight he was preoccupied with his still unresolved problem. And as he walked the quiet, gas-lit streets, his quick impatient stride matching his preoccupations, his dark face was brooding, his brows drawn together in the concentrated frown that was rapidly becoming habitual. Thoughts rushed through his mind, the ones which always seemed to be there nowadays, mostly about whether he would ever manage to clear up the mystery of his father’s death, which was still confounding him. He had thrown himself into solving the problem as if it were an enemy to be attacked, but it was no nearer resolution.

Arriving at Embury Square, he let himself in with his key, as his father had always done when returning late, in consideration for the servants. As soon as he entered the echoing hall, dimly lit by the one all-night lamp shooting grotesque shadows into the empty darkness above, he noticed a sharper line of light coming from under the drawing room door. It was unheard of for the servants to be so careless as to leave unnecessary lights burning all night. When he opened the door, there was his mother, sitting in a chair, under a single lamp, staring into a dying fire, doing nothing.

She was dressed all in black, as if only recently widowed, but it was of course splendidly elegant black, and relieved by the hard glitter of the diamond choker round her neck and the matching drops in her ears. Her sable-lined evening cloak and her embroidered and beaded evening bag were thrown over a sofa. The lamp silhouetted her haughty profile like a Greek cameo against the black lacquered Japanese screen behind her. She turned as he came in, and he was shocked, as much by her face, drained of colour, as by a droop in her shoulders he had never seen before, the unusual stillness of those expressive hands of hers, now clasped tightly in her lap. But then she automatically drew herself up, a lifetime’s discipline asserting itself against a slovenly posture, pinning on her habitual social smile. Her shoulders straightened, her chin lifted, but the smile was a travesty.