Landed Gently csg-4 Read online

  ‘Well, there’s this business of Mrs Page, you know… It gives him a fair size in motives.’

  ‘It’s something they’re making too much of,’ broke in the ponytailed girl quickly. ‘Half of us never noticed it, that’s how much it showed. Les did, of course. He’s got that sort of mind. And I won’t say I was completely blind to everything going on. But Jimmy there, silly little fool-’

  ‘Aw coom now, Anne!’ interjected Wheeler, blushing.

  ‘He never noticed it, and never would’ve done if he hadn’t heard one of Les’s cracks. But of course Jimmy had to be the one to let it slip, and now they’re working overtime on the stupid idea that Hugh killed Bill out of jealousy!’

  ‘Boot I didn’t knaw!’ protested the unhappy Wheeler.

  ‘Well, you should have known, Jimmy, that’s all I can say, and if they hang Hugh it will have been all your fault!’

  Poor Wheeler hung his head. He was obviously much taken with the piquant little blonde, and much impressed with the heinousness of his blunder. It was Peacock who half-heartedly came to the youngster’s aid

  …

  ‘Give oop getting at t’lad, will you, Anne? Thaws ferrety coppers’d get blood out of stawn, let alawn human being-gs.’

  Gently grinned at him. ‘Present company excepted?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say that till I’d seen thee gaw about it!’

  Gently took another puff or two without venturing to put a question. There was no possible doubt that the weavers were behind Johnson — not merely as one of themselves, but because they were convinced of his innocence. Surely, then, they would have thought of alternatives to Johnson… and surely one or another of them would have observed something that might point elsewhere?

  ‘You’re positive that nobody else had a quarrel with Earle?’

  ‘Nawbody that we knaw — you might look a little higher oop.’

  ‘Lord Somerhayes, you mean?’

  ‘I mean it wasn’t one of us — I say nowt apart from that.’

  ‘Someone must have broken in and done it!’ exclaimed the pony-haired girl. ‘There’s just nobody in the house would dream of hurting Bill. I say the police didn’t look properly when they first came yesterday. If they’d really made a job of it they’d have found where someone broke in, and then all this unpleasantness need never have happened.’

  ‘A very tempting theory, my dear,’ said Brass, who had just come in. ‘If I were you I’d go and break a window, and then we’ll cart the inspector off to look at it.’

  ‘Oh, Les, I’m being serious!’ The little blonde sounded aggrieved. ‘You’re always making fun — and there’s poor Hugh in there!’

  Brass patted her shoulder matily. ‘Cheer up — they won’t hang Hugh. And descending from the sublime for a moment, what happened to that hank of purple you should have dyed for me before Christmas? I’ve just been hunting through the shop for it, and I’ve a shrewd suspicion it wasn’t done.’

  It was, the blonde girl protested, and she gave a minute description of where it had been left. Brass paused to light a cigarette. Around him, the weavers wore expressions of affectionate respect. To them, at all events, Brass was a giant in office, and feeling conscious of their adultation he shot one of his cynical glances at Gently.

  ‘Want to take a gander at the workshop?’

  Gently shrugged. ‘Is it heated, by any chance?’

  ‘Heated my foot!’ Brass laughed aloud. ‘This is art, my son, pure and unadulterated. Come and have a look, and don’t be such a bloody bourgeois!’

  Gently grinned and followed the artist out of the snug common room, albeit with some regrets.

  ‘Did you get anything out of ’em?’ exclaimed Brass, as he plunged into a frigid corridor.

  ‘Can’t say I did… except that there was nothing to get.’

  ‘You’d have been lucky anyway, with Hugh going through the boiler. We’re a clannish lot of bastards, you know. “Nemo me impune lacessit” is our motto.’

  ‘Do you think Hugh did it?’

  ‘Me? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. When you get a bunch of misfits together like our tapissiers, murder is liable to be the least of your problems. Why — are you joining the wagon on poor old Hugh?’

  ‘No… not yet. But I was wondering if you were.’

  ‘You can count me out, sonny. What gave you the impression?’

  ‘It was something you said that made Wheeler wake up to the Mrs Page angle. What you say carries weight here, and it just occurred to me that you may have had some doubts.’

  ‘Not about Hugh biffing the young heathen, you cunning old so-and-so! He’s too old and too disillusioned about women to run amok with truncheons. But hold your breath for a moment. We’re approaching the sacred shrine. In the usual way we make visitors leave their shoes outside the door.’

  They had come out into a building that bore all the marks of having been built as a coach-house. The walls at one side had several wide doorways, now bricked up, and the beams overhead suggested that a loft-roof had been removed. A great deal of glass had been let into the roof, in addition to long, steel-framed windows in the walls, and a double row of multiple neons flickered into brilliance as Brass brushed down the switches. There were seven looms in the shop. Six of them, placed in double rows, were flat, and had pedals, rather like so many grand pianos. The seventh stood at the far end and was of a completely different pattern, standing upright, and braced to the wall and the nearby beams. All of them were covered with dust-sheets.

  ‘Voila!’ Brass struck a pose humorously reminiscent of a gentleman in an eighteenth-century engraving. ‘Napoleon visited the Gobelins — why shouldn’t a chief inspector of the Yard visit the holy place of Merely?’

  Gently shrugged agreeably and allowed himself to be ushered to the first of the machines.

  ‘This is Hugh’s outfit.’ Brass threw back the dust-sheet. ‘That’s off his own cartoon — you can see the original sitting there under the web.’

  Gravely Gently examined the unfinished tapestry, part of which was taken up on a roller. It was obviously the piece on which Johnson had been working when Earle had first made his appearance — a majestic but subdued composition depicting the great Snowdon cone pressing through wispy cloud, with Crib Goch and the Lliwedd Cliffs flanking it. Brass poked the warp open with a sensitive finger, and beneath it Gently saw the original watercolour drawing from which the Welshman was weaving.

  ‘In more straightforward work we sketch the design on the warp, but Taffy is an artist and won’t put up with such newfangled techniques. He interprets his cartoon like the great men of old.’

  ‘The others work from your cartoons?’

  ‘Yes — Hugh and I are the only artists here. And a damn good job too, or we should never make things pay. In these hard welfare times it’s absolutely essential to produce a lot and produce it quick. I learned that from Lurcat at Aubusson. I’ve adopted his coarse warp method, and developed a cartoon vernacular that cuts out intermediary tones and gets its effects with twenty-four standard colours… In addition I use a high degree of stylization and simplification in the units of design, which makes for simple weaving and also uses the coarse warp to the best advantage. As a result of these techniques we are very much a commercial proposition. We produce striking and original tapestry — modesty in a bourgeois failing — in a comparatively short time and at a comparatively low price, while the use of pure tones makes our work about as fade-proof as it comes. I don’t say that the commercial possibilities weren’t part of the attraction, for Earle’ — Brass shook his head sadly — ‘we’ve already sounded the American market, and it looks like being a big thing. My trip over there in the autumn was going to be largely a business trip.’

  They moved to the next machine, which was Peacock’s. A tapestry was in progress on it very different to Johnson’s sombre design. This one was splendid and blazing with breathtaking primaries; it was bold and simple and executed in a sort of facile short-hand.
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  ‘See what I mean? This sort of thing takes only a week or two. That way of handling flowers and foliage cuts out all the fiddling intermediary work… Peacock can weave one of those nasturtiums in an hour, and at a short distance it gives the same effect as one laboriously copied with a hundred or so tones. Not quite, of course — but then, it isn’t meant to. The design calls for stylization, as you can see…’

  Hands in pockets, Gently followed him round. Loom after loom was unveiled, and the work examined and dwelt upon. One could not be bored with Brass. His perpetual zest conquered the marble atmosphere, the reek of dyed wool and the overtone of tragedy that haunted the workshop. One could understand the reverence of his little company, the wistful homage of Somerhayes. Here in truth was a creator, a builder, a dynamic original of a man. His self-confidence was infectious. One felt that no obstacle could impede him. He dreamed his dreams, projected his plans, and wrestled his intent out of a reluctant world. His very name sounded a challenge in the galleries of polite and bred-out Feverells, lost and execrated Lords of Somerhayes. To what other altar could the last of a failing line take his worship, where else sacrifice the diminished booty of his race?

  ‘And this other loom… I suppose that’s what it is?’

  Brass clapped him on the back. ‘Now you’re going to see the work of the maestro. I’m a damned snob, Gently — let’s face facts. I learned my trade at Aubusson, but I’m a Gobelins man at heart. At Gobelins they’ve done high-warp weaving since the beginning of tapestry, and sheer, snivelling, miserable snobbery has driven me to fit a high-warp loom here for my own personal use.’

  ‘It’s a superior method?’ hazarded Gently.

  ‘Not on your life — just slower and more back-aching. But all through the centuries the Gobelins factory was turning out class tapestry on high-warps, and a sort of legend has grown round this type of loom. So when Brass sets up, blast his feeble-mindedness, he has to have a high-warp to satisfy his ego…’

  Energetically the artist whipped off the dust-sheet. The high-warp loom, simple, massive, was provided for a far larger web than the horizontal machines with their treadles. And such a web was spread across it, awesome in its complexity, an irregular third of it woven in and beginning to be taken up on the lower roller. Here was obviously something different from anything they had seen before. The weaving was so infinitely fine and close, the colours so subtly graduated, that one had to look at it closely to establish that it was a shuttle and not a brush that had achieved such effects.

  ‘Recognize it?’

  Brass was quizzing Gently in his sardonic way.

  ‘There’s something vaguely familiar…’

  ‘It’s Rubens’ Rape, my son, done in the best Gobelins style. I made the cartoon a year ago, and that’s how far I’ve got, working off and on.’

  ‘You mean that’s taken you a year?’

  ‘With my other jobs — designing, dyeing, overlooking and what have you.’

  ‘And when will it be finished?’

  ‘In eighteen months, perhaps… It makes you think, doesn’t it? On an economic basis I should have to ask at least a couple of thou for it, and that’s mere sweated labour.’

  They stood together silently looking at it, glorious but monstrous in its witness of unbelievable effort. Only a Brass could have set his hand to such a crushing burden of labour, only a man galvanized with prodigious and unquenchable self-confidence! ‘And do you think it’s worth it?’

  ‘Of course not, you bloody bourgeois.’

  ‘At the best, it’s only a copy…’

  ‘You don’t know the worst, sonny. In twenty years four hundred of the tints I’m using there will have faded or darkened. I give that piece ten years after I take it down.’

  ‘Then what’s the object in doing it?’

  Brass shrugged his shoulders. ‘Christ, a man has got his ego. There’s nobody else in this country can do a job like that, probably nobody else in the world. How do you think I prove I’m boss around here?’

  Gently shook his head. ‘It’s as good a way as any… I daresay Somerhayes is duly impressed.’

  ‘Somerhayes!’ Brass chuckled. ‘Didn’t he call you to a session last night? I could see it coming off from the moment he clapped eyes on you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Why, you’re his natural soul-mate. Our lordship just yearns for some Tiresias or Christ-type to pour out his sorrows to. I’m no bloody good — he knows I’d laugh my head off. But you, well you’re born to it, with that father-confessor look of yours. How far am I wrong? Go on — you tell me.’

  Gently put a match to his pipe, which was as cold as the prevailing climate. ‘And you fancy him?’ he said. ‘You fancy him for a suspect?’

  Brass was pulled up in a moment. His expression changed completely. ‘Enough!’ he replied severely. ‘Enough, Mr Chief Inspector. I’m still eating his salt, and I’m not prepared to discuss business. The most I’d say about his lordship is that he’s as barmy as a coot… Now if you’ll just come through here, I’ll show you how a craftsman dyes his wool.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Gently left Brass amongst his vats and turned his steps towards the north-east wing again. The omnipresent chill seemed to be eating into his bones, and he yearned to straddle before a really scorching fire. A grave of a house. Had it ever been warmed? Would the crater of Etna suffice to make habitable its dead and frozen beauty? Even its brilliant architect had admitted the futility of trying to live in it, had tucked the inhabitants away in possible but inconvenient annexes…

  Coming back to the great hall, he hesitated, and then mounted the marble stairs and pushed his way through the portal into the saloon. Here, if Johnson was to be believed, an argument had taken place… but arguments, alas, rarely left visible traces. The carpet was down, certainly, and given a particular set of circumstances, some marks here near the door might have told a suggestive story. But the circumstances did not obtain. Numerous feet had passed through the door since early Christmas morning. And in real life at all events, people did not drop initialled handkerchieves at convenient spots, or otherwise make easy the lives of half-frozen policemen…

  He shook his head and moved to go firewards once more, but as he turned he became aware of a figure that had suddenly and silently materialized in the portal behind him. It was Mrs Page. Her face was blanched and her eyes staring horribly. And as they stood facing each other she gave a queer little moan, and began slowly to slide down the side of the marble doorway.

  ‘I’m all right… Just give me a minute.’

  Gently had caught her before she fell, and now she lay a dead weight in his arms, the lids fluttering convulsively over her closed eyes.

  ‘I came to find you… It’s stupid… I didn’t expect to see you there.’

  The breath was coming quickly, turning to vapour in the nipping air.

  ‘You see, Henry says you’re the one… you’re the one it’s going to be…’

  Gently made a move to carry her to a convenient chair, but she clutched his arm violently, and by a tremendous effort managed to brace her limp body. Her eyes flickered open, the pupils large and wild. Something like a ghastly smile twitched at her lips.

  ‘I’ll be all right… really.’

  ‘Shall I call your maid, Mrs Page?’

  ‘No… just hang on… This is really too silly.’

  ‘Can I get you something — some brandy, perhaps?’

  She signalled a feeble negative. ‘I’ve got some… back in my wing.’

  For perhaps a minute she continued quite still, struggling to regain control of herself. Then a degree of strength seemed to surge back into her limbs, and she gently released herself from the arms that supported her.

  ‘Help me back to the wing, will you?… I think I can manage to walk.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should sit down for a little?’

  ‘No… help me back to my wing.’

  She was inflexibly determined, so he
tucked her arm under his and guided her slowly through the dreary labyrinth to the north-west wing. Here, in a small, very-feminine room, a fire was burning and a sniffling maid going round the ornaments with a feather-duster. Mrs Page allowed herself to be seated in a chair by the fire.

  ‘All right, Dorothy… you may leave the dusting now.’

  ‘I hadn’t really finished ’em, mum-’

  ‘Never mind. That will do for this morning.’

  The maid disappeared, still sniffling, and Gently located a brandy-decanter in a cabinet in the corner of the room. He poured a stiff glassful. Mrs Page drank it eagerly.

  ‘You must forgive me for making such an exhibition, Inspector… Honestly, I don’t do these things as a rule.’

  Gently hunched an ulstered shoulder. ‘You said you were looking for me?’

  She nodded without meeting his eyes. ‘Yes, I was… I’ve been talking to my cousin. And then, seeing you there like that-’ She gave an involuntary shudder. ‘It just seemed as though you must know it all anyway — I can’t help it — it seemed uncanny.’

  Gently found himself a chair to his liking and reversed it so that he could lean on the back. The brandy had brought colour back into Mrs Page’s cheeks, but not quite the composure to her manner.

  ‘And your cousin was saying about me…’

  ‘Oh — he says you’ll be the one who’ll understand this affair… He doesn’t think Sir Daynes has enough imagination.’

  ‘Do you know what he meant?’

  ‘No… except that he said he’d given you a background.’

  ‘He’s given me a background of some sort!’ Gently brooded over his chair-back. ‘My imagination must be getting rusty… it isn’t jumping to things like it used to. And he advised you to come clean?’

  ‘He… You know about it, then?’

  Gently shook his head. ‘I can’t help intelligent guessing.’

  ‘He advised me… I would have to have told someone… He advised me to come to you.’