The Painted Face Read online

  ‘Wait a minute, sir,’ said Lintott, amused, protesting. ‘What a sudden sort of character you are! Why, you don’t know what you’re about. Haring off as though the clues were laid like a paper trail!’

  He was as vehement, as passionate now, as Carradine. Galvanised from his comfortable chair, passing one strong hand over his thin grey hair, gesticulating with the other, eyes keen. An old hunting dog with the prospect of a new hunt.

  ‘I’ve taken on cases as was only a smell in my nostrils. Cases as Scotland Yard would say, “Give it to Lintott. He’ll ferret it out if there’s something to ferret!” Because I’m patient, sir.’ He balled his hand into a stout fist. ‘And I’m obstinate, sir. I won’t be told.’ He shook his head. ‘Like you, sir. Like you. Well, sit you down again. Bessie’ll fetch us a pot o’ tea. Bessie!’

  Carradine smiled wryly, ‘Do you always offer tea after a confession, Inspector?’

  ‘Only to the hard cases, sir,’ Lintott replied. ‘You’re not married, I take it?’

  ‘Considered an undesirable bachelor, I’m afraid. I broke off — I say this with remorse — two engagements, to two admirable young ladies. My housekeeper has frequently given me her opinion, which is unfavourable.’

  ‘Well, well. Better a broken engagement than an unhappy wedded life. I was fortunate. Thank you, my love,’ as Bessie appeared with a tray on which her best china was tastefully arranged. ‘You might as well go to bed, my dear. Mr Carradine and me will be a while yet.’

  Observing her husband’s hunched shoulders and lowered head, she said maternally, ‘So you’re off again, are you, John?’

  Sheepishly he replied, ‘You know me, my love, when I get a sight of something. I don’t quite figure it yet, but I dare say I shall.’

  Carradine jumped up and held out his hand to her. ‘Thank you for lending him to me this evening, Mrs Lintott. I understand that your time together is precious.’

  ‘Lending?’ said Bessie, not so fluttered by his attentions as to lose her common-sense. ‘I don’t lend him, sir. He’s his own man. Always has been, always will be. Goodnight to you, sir.’

  They were silent for a little while over the teacups. Lintott fingered his mutton-chop whiskers, which grew more luxuriantly than the hair on his head.

  ‘Now, sir,’ he said decisively. ‘Were there other diaries? Did you read them? No? Well, we can come to that later. What about your father’s papers? His diaries, if he kept them? No! I see. You just read the one diary that set you off?’ He pondered, stirring sugar round and round in his cup. ‘Did you notice the date of the train accident?’

  Relieved not to be found wanting in this area as well, Carradine produced a notebook in which a very few facts were recorded.

  ‘This never would have been a Scotland Yard matter, anyway,’ said Lintott two minutes later, taking off his spectacles which he had donned for the purpose of reading. ‘We’d have to go to the proper source for information — which is the police department in Paris. Their system is different to ours, I believe, though I never had the opportunity to find out. But they’ll be bound to have records, as we have. I’d have to go there, and I can’t speak the lingo so I shouldn’t know how to ask a blinking question. Could you spare the time, sir?’

  ‘My time is my own, Inspector.’

  ‘We’d have to look to a number of details afore we started. I haven’t a notion, for one thing. Tickets and times and places where we stop — that’d be your business. You do speak the language more than the odd parlay-voo, don’t you?’

  ‘I am bilingual. Gabrielle taught me. And I have a studio in Paris — we could work from there.’

  ‘Now, you’d find police work on the tedious side, sir, I’m warning you. You’d have to ask a mort of questions for me, and translate every blessed word. We’d have to get details of the crash and the people involved, notices of the inquest, and the general newspaper reports,’ Lintott insisted.

  ‘You can rely on me absolutely in that direction, Inspector.’

  ‘Good. Because once I start I don’t let go, you see. So, to speak plain, I wouldn’t want you letting me down halfway. I’m asking you,’ said Lintott seriously, ‘not to break any engagements with me. Do you get my meaning, sir?’

  This was the third time in three days that Carradine had been brought to reckoning, and he registered the fact.

  ‘You have my word, Inspector, on my honour. Will you take the case?’

  Lintott stared hard and long into the mobile face, and found resolution.

  ‘I’ll take the case,’ he said, and assumed command.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The crossing was rough, but Carradine and Lintott preferred to underline their seamanship by standing on deck. Lintott was secretly delighted by his resilience. He had faced the fact that his stomach might betray him, but apparently it was as long-suffering as his legs, and accepted this latest excursion into the unknown with a stoicism worthy of its owner.

  He held hard to the ship’s rail, felt the spray on his face, tasted salt on his lips, and savoured both salt and venture. Below deck, the ladies sought sympathy, cologne and basins. Children prostrate, and children rampant, added further complications. One small hoyden, escaping from the clutches of her Nanny, ran straight into Carradine’s arms and was secured immediately.

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ cried the nurse, harassed by her charge and the pitch and roll of the ship. ‘Now, come along with me, Miss Flora, and no more nonsense! Else the bogeyman’ll get you!’

  ‘No he won’t, Nanny,’ the child retaliated, from the safety of her rescuer’s arms. ‘There’s no such person. So there!’ And she stuck out her tongue, but so swiftly that it was not noticed.

  Stout and perplexed, the woman said pleadingly, ‘Come along, like a good girl, now.’

  ‘Shan’t!’

  ‘But there’s Master George and Miss Susan sick as cats, and your poor mamma and the baby, to see to!’

  Lintott and Carradine smiled at each other in sympathy, and at the small obstinate face.

  ‘Madam,’ said Carradine, ‘Miss Flora will be quite safe with us, as you have other duties. This gentleman is an Inspector from Scotland Yard, and if you care to show your mistress my card I’m sure she will have no objection. The sea is an enemy to delicate constitutions, but there is no danger, I assure you. This young lady may be better equipped to escape the ravages of seasickness on deck.’

  The Nanny took his card between wet fingers, noted the address with respect, and said, ‘Well, sir, if you’re sure ... we’re in such a pickle down below!’

  ‘Allow me, ma’am, to escort you,’ said Lintott, and staggered chivalrously over the sliding planks.

  Carradine smiled into the washed rose of the child’s face and wrapped his great-coat about her. ‘Have you crossed the Channel before, Miss Flora?’

  ‘Twice a year, sir,’ she shouted, hair and bonnet strings slapping. ‘My Papa works far away, in a very hot place. So we come to England and then go back again. Mamma and the children are always sick, but I never am, and when I grow up I shall be a sailor.’

  ‘Young ladies can’t be sailors, Miss Flora.’

  ‘Then I shall marry a captain and travel with him all over the world,’ she cried with a touch of hauteur, ‘but I don’t know your name, sir.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, madam. Permit me to introduce myself. Nicholas Carradine, at your service. The suddenness of the encounter,’ he added, with the same seductive courtesy he would have shown to a beautiful woman, ‘robbed me of the respect due to every member of your fair sex.’

  She clasped her wet cheeks, shut her eyes and laughed with pleasure.

  ‘May a humble servant ask how many years you have graced this wicked world?’ he continued, at home in a world of his own making.

  ‘Ten! But should a gentleman ask a lady’s age, sir?’ she countered, coquetting.

  ‘Only if he is her devoted slave, madam, and she is gracious enough to answer!’

  She laughed again, en
chanted and enchanting.

  ‘Now turn about, Miss Flora. You are safely wrapped and I shan’t allow you to be washed overboard. If you love the sea you should observe it in all its aspects. This is a boisterous and brave one. Let us enjoy it together.’

  So Lintott found them. Flora pointing, Carradine nodding, both of them shaking off the sudden swills of salt water with shouts of rapturous reproach. As the voyage progressed the weather became kinder, the noise lessened. Later the three of them sat in chairs and Flora fell asleep, sated. Lintott even ventured to light a pipe and drew on it with considerable satisfaction.

  ‘Now, I’ve always thought I had a way with children, sir, being fond of them. But you can beat me hands down, though you are a bachelor gentleman!’

  Carradine brought out his silver case and joined Lintott in a convivial smoke.

  ‘The first time we met, Inspector, you were holding a sleeping child and I liked what I saw. We are both devoted to these little folk, but in different ways. You are an adult with them. A kindly, understanding, protective adult. But when I speak to a child I become a child, and yet a child with adult knowledge.’

  Lintott stared ahead of him, eyes half-closed, and sucked his pipe reflectively.

  ‘Little Miss Flora here, at ten years old, is already dreaming of womanhood. So I court her, but in a way she comprehends. She knows very well that I am not the man who will eventually win her, that the courtship is mere play. But it pleases her, and it pleases me, to play it so.’

  ‘I’ve no talent in that direction,’ Lintott admitted, but without regret. ‘My good wife tells me I came into the world fully grown, with a pair of policeman’s boots on!’ He chuckled. ‘I take it that you have a different way with different ages, sir? And different again with boys, of course.’

  ‘Very different, Inspector. I treat boys as young men, for I believe them to be manly little fellows in humiliating disguise. I felt as passionately when I was seven years old as I now do for any woman who captures my heart. I’m not speaking of the flesh, which is another matter, but of the emotions. When I observe parents frequently mocking at, or sentimentalising over, a boy’s genuine feeling, I resent their attitude as much as he must do. He may be no more than four feet tall, and imprisoned in a sailor suit, but at the centre he is a hero. He would scale walls, fight battles, cut through dark forests, if he could. Indeed, he dreams of doing so — and is returned to his marbles, instead.’

  Interested, Lintott asked, ‘So how do you speak to one of these lovelorn young chaps, then, sir?’

  ‘Of everything but the lady concerned, and he would understand and respect my delicacy.’ Then mindful of his present companion, who might be compared to a child in a strange place, he added, ‘Inspector Lintott, if you look ahead of you you will see the shoreline of one of the most fascinating countries in the world. Look well, for the first sight is always the best — though France seems undoubtedly out of sorts at the moment!’

  This could have been anywhere, yet Lintott experienced a constriction of the throat that astonished him. At my age, too! he thought. I ought to be ashamed of myself. One country’s much like another, except for the lingo.

  But he was impelled to lurch to the rail and stare ahead of him as the ship approached the coast, needing to cherish this alone. And, though Carradine seemed occupied with Flora, he too stood by that rail in spirit and shared the tumult of an elderly man who had never expected to see anything new again. Almost, he comprehended the words that Lintott said shyly under his breath — ‘Lah belle France!’ — and then, briskly over his shoulder, ‘Very misty, sir. Can’t hardly see a thing!’

  Unused to being in such a subordinate position, the Inspector was for the moment passed from person to person, and place to place, like some awkward parcel. Carradine, in his second element, became the complete cosmopolitan. His fluency whisked them through the Customs Office, opened the doors of cabs and trains, set food and drink before them, and hurtled them towards Paris. His demeanour, his tipping — neither under nor overdone — his air of consequence, commanded excellent service. Still, he never forgot he was Lintott’s one link with familiarity and acted as interpreter of all about them to the point of exhaustion.

  I’ll find my feet in a bit, Lintott thought, as Carradine at length rested his head against the antimacassar, lulled by the rushing dark and drumming wheels. It’s like being inside of a new case instead of outside of it. You don’t quite know where you are, but you will, given time. This is a fine how-de-do, though. If I lost him I’d be in a right old mess. I wonder what Bessie’s doing without me?

  He saw that Carradine slept, and observed him closely. His animation gone, the man seemed wholly vulnerable.

  Ah, well, Lintott mused, each man to his own patch. If we were walking St Giles together I’d have to look out for him. Look at him now and what would you say he was? A gentleman that’s suffered a hard knock. An odd customer. But tell him so and he don’t contradict you. Tell him, even, that he’s on the eccentric side — he agrees with you. Now, how can somebody know himself that well and not be able to alter it? Take me, for instance. Bessie says to me, ‘John Joseph Lintott! You’re a regular growler. Get your teeth into a bone and you don’t let go.’ And there’s more than one bone buried here if I know anything.

  Carradine’s eyes opened and softened at the sight of Lintott sitting four-square on the edge of his seat, hands knotted in determination.

  ‘All right, Inspector. Don’t worry, we have plenty of time. This is Paris. I’ll find a porter.’

  ‘I’m not the worrying sort, sir.’

  Holding tight to his Gladstone bag, pulling up the collar of his Inverness cape, Lintott followed his companion into noise and brilliance. Carradine ordered the cabbie to drive slowly so that the city might be seen in passing.

  ‘Being an honest Londoner, you may disagree with me, Inspector. But in my opinion London is a glorious and lovable jumble. Paris is a work of art. I believe it was Emerson who said that England built London for its own use, but France built Paris for the world.’

  ‘Very laid out,’ said Lintott, faithful to his metropolis. ‘A mite on the deliberate side, sir.’

  ‘All art is deliberate.’

  ‘I thought as art was Inspiration, sir.’

  ‘So do a great many people, until they come to lay paint on canvas. Then they find it hard and skilful work like any other.’

  Lintott was seeking to counteract an excitement which embarrassed him. ‘There’s a lot of money about, and that’s a fact, sir.’

  ‘The French, like ourselves, pay lip-service to God and raise an altar to Baal. You can buy anything here, if you have the means to pay for it, Inspector.’

  ‘Money can’t buy what matters,’ Lintott replied earnestly, though he had never been in a position to prove it.

  ‘Few would believe you. This is a very practical nation, with practical deities. Gold, food and love-making. They consider it wiser to enjoy their treasures on earth, rather than postpone them in hope of something more nebulous.’

  ‘I’m surprised you think such a lot of them, if that’s the case, sir,’ said Lintott, secure in his own morality.

  ‘Ah, but they do it with such style, you see,’ said Carradine, and smiled sideways at his companion.

  Lintott breathed on the cab window, and rubbed it with his sleeve, the better to view the ungodly.

  A night’s sleep found them both refreshed. Over a breakfast that seemed lamentably light, Lintott surveyed Carradine’s Paris studio with pleasant astonishment. Its simple cargo of furniture, its easel and dais and tubes of paint, and mingled smells of oil and turpentine, produced an effect of lively untidiness but not of squalor.

  ‘I thought artists liked a regular muddle, sir!’

  ‘Our backgrounds exert more influence than perhaps we comprehend, Inspector. My father was an orderly man. I was reared in an orderly household. A little dust and derangement doesn’t trouble me, but I detest chaos.’

  ‘You d
on’t find it inspiring, sir?’

  ‘Not in the least. You seem preoccupied with Inspiration, Inspector.’ Amused. ‘But inspiration is of the moment. It doesn’t live at my elbow, and its occasional visitations demand an unconscionable amount of hard work!’

  ‘Our professions seem to have more in common than I thought, then!’ Lintott observed. ‘A mort of plodding and sometimes never a thank-you at the end of it.’

  ‘That too,’ said Carradine. He had temporarily forgotten the hollow at his centre, and viewed the canvases with ironic desperation: as one views guests one has invited but does not really care to entertain. ‘Shall we begin?’ Carradine asked, leaving the canvases to fend for themselves.

  Lintott was relieved to discover that the artist chose to dress like a gentleman, even in Paris. Apart from a black velour hat, with a wide brim and a bright band, his attire seemed sober enough. The Inspector had visualised walking the city accompanied by a French beret and a flowing smock.

  The language was beyond Lintott, but he amazed himself by translating tones, gestures and expressions.

  No sharper, and a lot less comfortable than your British bobby, he reflected. Oh, they were smart to the point of foppery. Waxed moustaches, jaunty caps. (I’d have that one up for wearing it at that angle!) Polished and brushed. But bowing and grinning and flinging their arms in the air like a lot of chorus girls. No, give me a solid bobby any day. No flying off the handle.

  He watched Carradine impress them. They began with routine courtesy, inclining heads reverently at Lintott — round whom Nicholas wove a brief legend — and then placing files at his disposal.

  ‘A pity,’ said Carradine, ‘that the case is twenty years old, or we could have taken advantage of France’s unofficial detective force — the concierges, the caretakers. They see everything and forget nothing. Quite invaluable.’