Money from Holme Read Free Page B

staggering realization that he was on to something in a big way. He managed to contrive some sort of appearance of consulting the catalogue for information on the painting before him, and then to hand it back with a muttered word. After that he moved away – as expeditiously as the crowd of gazers and gapers would permit. It was the characteristic of Holme’s right fist, he seemed to remember, that it came rather rapidly from below, and that its impact on your jaw had the effect of lifting you some inches off your feet before dropping you with a brutal absoluteness on your back.
    But he mustn’t now let Holme out of his sight. This fact, coming to him with all the mysteriousness of a categorical imperative, had the effect upon him of that first quiver of the curtain which speaks of the imminent unfolding of some vast and exciting drama. Very definitely, his mind was beginning to work.
    He had retreated – but to a strategic position from which he could command (as he brought his analytical faculties to bear on the situation) the only public exit from the Da Vinci Gallery. He had so retreated when – with a dastardly lack of all advertisement – he was struck a violent blow on the face. The pain was considerable, and filled his eyes with tears. The bewilderment (since Holme must be a dozen paces away) was extreme. And then he heard a voice. It was a woman’s voice, and what it said was, ‘Poisonous little man!’ His eyes cleared; for a moment he saw the plump young woman before him; her gloves were clasped in her right hand; he realized that what he had been subjected to was their application to his person with much the force of a whip.
    A number of people had, inevitably, witnessed this untoward incident. They reacted variously. Some made distressed, shocked and deprecating noises. Others looked away and pretended not to have seen. One or two males placed themselves obtrusively before their womenfolk, as if to protect them from outrage or occlude the spectacle of vulgar violence. But nobody intervened, and within seconds catalogues were being consulted again as if nothing had occurred.
    But, for Mervyn Cheel, something more disastrous than a mere passing public humiliation had occurred. Sebastian Holme had vanished.

 
     
3
    There was no point in rushing from the building. Whether or not Holme had departed in alarm, he would by now be swallowed up in the traffic of London’s West End. At least – Cheel noticed – the woman who had perpetrated the atrocious assault on him seemed to have departed too. The reasonable course would be to retreat into the next room, discreetly screen himself behind his catalogue from any residual curiosity, and think the thing out. Already, indeed, he was thinking. He was thinking that the mystery had a future for him.
    The second room was largely an affair of drawings, sketches, gouaches and watercolours, together with a few early and quite undistinguished experiments with collages and papiers collées . Holme having died young (only he hadn’t ), his total output would have been small anyway – in addition to which a fire or some similar catastrophe had rather more than decimated what there was. The catalogue said something about that, and Cheel must clearly study it with attention. Meanwhile, there were preliminary bearings still to take.
    What came first into his head – oddly, perhaps, but then he did possess a high degree of literary cultivation – was the opinion of Aristotle in his treatise on Tragedy to the effect that Discoveries made by way of Scars (or External Tokens, like Necklaces) are inferior to Discoveries arising from the Incidents Themselves (whatever that might mean). This might be true about trinkets, Cheel thought, but no competent policeman would back the Stagirite in playing down the solid utility of a precisely located and ineradicable bodily sign. That gash on Holme’s hand had certainly needed stitches, and somewhere a medical record of it must exist.