Money from Holme by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

lobsters here. They can bring me my tournedos now.’ Cheel raised his wineglass amiably and chinked it against the tumbler containing his hostess’ orange juice. He remembered the corpulent man in the Da Vinci. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
    Mrs Holme quite failed to respond to this civility.
    ‘I’ve been swindled,’ she said. ‘And I’ve a hunch you’re in on it.’ She looked at Cheel balefully but (he thought) a shade uncertainly. Perhaps she was coming to some glimmering perception of her own fatuity. ‘Braunkopf and you have gotten all those African paintings – the ones there’s this phoney story about – and you’re going to unload them quietly and slowly on the market.’
    ‘I see,’ Cheel said. He found himself speaking almost respectfully. It was a nice thought, after all – so nice that he couldn’t do other than mourn its baselessness. ‘You think the show the catalogue speaks about in this Wamba Palace Hotel never took place at all?’
    ‘It took place, all right. There was a printed catalogue of that one too. I possess a copy of it.’
    ‘Well then – there you are.’ This time, Cheel spoke almost absently. For, with Hedda Holme’s last remark, something had started up in his mind like a creation. As yet, like all great imaginative constructions at their moment of birth, the thing was unformed and shadowy. But it was there . Cheel took a long draught of claret. ‘And so what?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t believe for a moment that they were destroyed.’ Mrs Holme bit viciously into the plainly nauseous fluff of a starch reduced roll. ‘Certainly not all of them. Probably not any of them. Somebody just walked off with them in the confusion. Or perhaps bought them up at a dollar a piece.’
    ‘It’s an interesting notion.’ Cheel found that he wanted to laugh rudely. He did so. ‘Has it occurred to you that if they were saved, and were bought up at a dollar a piece, you yourself wouldn’t preserve the slightest title or interest in them?’
    ‘A sale like that would be a fraud, a racket.’
    ‘My good woman, masterpieces have changed hands before now for no more than the price of–’ Cheel was about to add ‘a square meal’ but changed this, on second thoughts, to ‘a packet of cigarettes.’ ‘And such a deal,’ he went on, ‘would be perfectly valid, if freely entered into. Even if some of your husband’s paintings turned up after having simply disappeared, you wouldn’t find it easy to break in on any subsequent transaction and establish a claim to them. Ask your lawyer – your attorney, I should say.’
    ‘I don’t believe it. It wouldn’t be just.’
    ‘Well, the situation simply isn’t going to arise, so we shall never know, If you had any sense, you’d be content with what you’ve got. If you own all that stuff over the road – and I suppose you do – then you’re damned lucky. Your husband might have made a will, leaving it all elsewhere. He might have divorced you, which would have been pretty rational.’ Cheel thought of adding: ‘Or he might have drowned you in your bath, which would have been more rational still.’ Fear of a further vulgar physical assault, however, restrained him. ‘Perhaps just a morsel of Stilton,’ he said instead. ‘And a drop of brandy with the coffee.’
     
    The meal wore pleasantly to its close. What Cheel asked for, that is to say, was set before him. He ceased much to bother his head about Mrs Holme. Temporarily, at least – and he hoped for good – her bolt was shot. It had been a bolt sufficiently blindly directed in the first place, and she was obviously a person of low intelligence. It was true that there remained a certain element of the enigmatic about her. The terms in which she addressed him had been almost uniformly offensive – and this had, of course, displeased one of Cheel’s breeding and sensibilities very much. On the other hand, she had come clean with this entirely satisfactory repast. No doubt there had