Gently With the Painters Read Online Free PDF

filing cabinet. On the whole, it seemed to lack something as a potential riot-raiser. A monotone drawing of about eighteen by twelve, it showed practised execution but no startling originality. There were qualities, however, which had been lost in reproduction. The figure wasn’t striding through rain but through a grove of wire-like stalks. And it was a strangely evil figure, something medieval and witch-like; little breasts, like shrivelled gourds, hung from the wasted and wrinkled chest.
    ‘Urs Graaf … possibly Dürer.’
    Stephens, it appeared, was knowledgeable in art. Both the Super and Hansom viewed the picture with degrees of distaste.
    ‘But that’s the sort of thing she’d paint …!’ Hansom lofted his beefy shoulders. ‘She was dried up somewhere herself, with all her beautiful come-on eyes.’
    ‘Have you seen her other pictures?’
    ‘There’s a room full of them, back at the flat. I saw a pair that hung in her bedroom, but I hadn’t any reason to look at the rest.’
    Oddly, though, the picture seemed to fascinate them, and each one kept his eyes fixed upon it. In the Super’s office there was silence for a minute while they steadily appraised the dead woman’s last conception.
    ‘Their chairman … what had he to say about her painting?’
    ‘Oh … him! Well, he was more sober than the rest. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he mentioned it. It was from him that I managed to get the facts about the meeting.’
    It had lasted three hours, from seven-thirty till ten-thirty . According to Mallows, it had run its usual course. The members, carrying their pictures, had foregathered in the cellar, and, aided by pints from up the stairs, had criticized each other’s work.
    ‘There was a little bit of business – subscriptions, reports, the usual thing. Then they started showing the pictures on an easel they’d fetched along. Mallows, being the chairman , was the first to have a crack, after which all present took a hand in the discussion. When they’d had a bellyful of one picture they set up another, and started crabbing that.’
    ‘Did Mrs Johnson show a picture?’
    ‘No, but she was a leading critic. Apparently she carried a bit of weight about the cellar. They would listen to her even when they were hotted up – because she was the only sheila there, do you think?’
    Then followed the important timetable of the order in which the meeting broke up, though Hansom warned Gently that it wasn’t unanimously subscribed to. Mallows had given him the outline and he had checked it with the various members, but some of them couldn’t remember and others denied its accuracy.
    What appeared was that six members had left the cellar before Mrs Johnson, one of them, Shoreby, as early as ten, in order to catch his last bus to Cheapham. The others hadleft when the proceedings ended, all of them within two or three minutes of each other. Their names were Seymour, Lavery, Farrer, Baxter and Allstanley, but the precise order of their leaving could not be agreed on. Mallows thought that Allstanley was the first to depart, but Allstanley denied it and said that someone went out ahead of him. Lavery admitted that he was one of the first to leave the cellar, but claimed that he had returned to fetch his canvas, which he had forgotten.
    ‘And after those six came Mallows and Mrs Johnson?’
    ‘That’s right. They stood in the doorway chatting for a moment. The cellar at the George III has got a separate door from the pub – it’s on a little side-lane, at the end of the marketplace.’
    ‘Then he saw her depart in the direction of the bus stop?’
    ‘Yeah … that seems to indicate that his car was parked elsewhere.’
    ‘Which makes him the last person to have seen Mrs Johnson alive.’
    ‘Excepting everybody else she might have passed on her way.’
    Along with the reports, that had to be enough for the present. The solemn boom of the City Hall clock had already announced the hour of lunch.