The Mysterious Commission Read Free Page A

well.’

 
     
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    At this point Charles Honeybath glanced rather desperately round his studio. He might have been Mr Sherlock Holmes (to whom he was addicted) hoping to secure the commonsensical if not wholly percipient counsel of his friend Dr Watson. It was upon just such unlikely missions as Mr Peach’s, indeed, that enigmatical plenipotentiaries had been prone to present themselves in Baker Street. Perhaps Mr X wasn’t a mere President or Prime Minister. Perhaps he was a Crowned Head, and Honeybath would end up with a pair of diamond cufflinks, the gift of Mr X’s second cousin once removed, a Very Gracious Lady. It would be The Case of the Mysterious Commission .
    Honeybath pulled himself together. He even pushed his own sherry-glass unobtrusively away from him. One obviously needed a clear head. Might not Watson have hinted that they were in the presence of a practical joke? Malicious rivals of Honeybath’s – and he laboured, after all, in a crowded vineyard – had got together over their own bottle of wine, and there had been a wager that he could be despatched on a fool’s errand. But where on earth had they got hold of a creature like Peach? Perhaps Peach was an out-of-work actor. And here he was, hired to practise upon the innocence of an out-of-work portrait-painter.
    These reflections – which at least showed that, at a pinch, Honeybath might prove an adversary of a wariness to be reckoned with – now suggested to him the uses of a protective irony.
    ‘Am I to be conducted into your nameless client’s presence,’ he asked, ‘at the end of a blindfolded journey in a hansom cab?’
    ‘Something of the kind would be a prerequisite, Mr Honeybath.’ Peach, recovering his more cultivated manner, enunciated this with the utmost coolness. ‘But only after an earnest of the seriousness of our intention. Guineas are a shade awkward when it comes to spot cash. But we can say one thousand pounds down.’ With a dexterity suggesting a well-rehearsed effect, Peach produced a bulky wallet from a capacious pocket. He opened it and extracted, one by one, several highly compacted bundles of what were plainly ten-pound notes. These he laid on a table in front of him. ‘Shall we count them over?’ he asked blandly.
    ‘I think not,’ Honeybath said austerely. But he was a good deal shaken. This astonishing display seemed at once to knock the practical-joke or hoax theory out of court. He had only to sweep the notes into a drawer and they did become precisely the earnest Peach had spoken of. He had only to carry them the few yards to his bank next door and they would be recoverable by Peach only at his own, Honeybath’s, pleasure. If the banknotes were forgeries (and anything seemed possible in this untoward situation), the teller would probably be sufficiently surprised at receiving so large a sum in this form to scrutinize them with sufficient care to discover the fact. He wouldn’t, on the other hand, be astounded, or even venture to ask an old-established customer questions. Honeybath knew that a good many commercial transactions were conducted on just such a cash basis, and that it was not a bank’s business to take any initiative in exploring whether some tax-dodging manoeuvre was involved. So now he temporized.
    ‘Do I understand,’ he asked, ‘that this portrait would not be painted here in my studio?’
    ‘It would not. I hope I have made it clear that a high degree of privacy is required.’
    ‘But there’s nobody here except myself. I live elsewhere, and at present I am not employing an assistant of any sort. Your client, if any slight strangeness in him makes it undesirable to attract curiosity, could come and go without the least danger of anything of the kind.’
    ‘It must be a condition, I fear, that the sittings take place in his private residence.’
    ‘And that I don’t even know where that is?’ Not unnaturally, Honeybath found it hard to accept that anything so melodramatic