Money from Holme Read Online Free PDF Page A

ground, in nine cases out often, because things had ceased to be healthy above it. To be dead was the simplest and most conclusive way of going into hiding that could be conceived. Sebastian Holme had done something so disgraceful that he just had to be dead. Probably he had put himself within reach of the criminal law. And it was up to Cheel to discover just how. It was up to him to unearth the facts, and then to make what he could of his knowledge – always keeping a wary eye, of course, on the criminal law himself.
    The crowd was thinning. It was easier to see the pictures – and also to see the little red labels on them. Those labels represented a small fortune for sharing out between Braunkopf and Holme’s widow. But – unless there was some sort of collusion going forward to which he as yet lacked the clue – the resuscitated Holme himself simply wasn’t in the gravy. For the first time in his life (or death), and contrary to all likelihood and calculation, Sebastian Holme’s productions were bang in the Top Ten. But Sebastian Holme himself was clean out of the deal. There were all those little red labels. But the man whose talents had, so to speak, sucked them onto their respective paintings could only shuffle in, wearing a false beard (or was it, so to speak, somebody else’s beard?), for the purpose of taking a furtive and fearful look at them.
    To Cheel, who was disposed to the persuasion that he himself had frequently been cheated of immortal things by a malign fate, there was something poignant and even solemn in this reflection. He felt for, he felt with Sebastian Holme – thus so near, and yet so far from, affluence. It also occurred to him that here was the nub of the matter. If you were dead you certainly couldn’t make a fortune. It must be doubtful whether you could even command a cheque book. Holme as he was at present mysteriously circumstanced might well be persuaded of the desirability of a little subsidizing an awkwardly knowledgeable old friend such as Cheel had now become. But Holme was quite conceivably in the same financial situation as Cheel himself: having sordidly to think twice about the cracking of a five-pound note.
    This was a discouraging thought – or would have been so but for a powerful start of mind by which it was immediately succeeded. If Holme couldn’t benefit from his success because he was dead, those who were benefiting from it would not be doing so if he were not dead. If Holme were (officially as well as in fact) alive, these pictures would still have been his property, and so they couldn’t have been his wife’s to dispose of. Now that most of the pictures had actually been sold the matter was, no doubt, a little complicated. Still, it seemed unlikely that either Mrs Holme or Hildebert Braunkopf would, at this stage, at all welcome any raising of Holme from the dead. There was surely scope for what might be called negotiation in that .
    Cheel, who might in so many ways have answered to the type of the Prudent Man commended by moral philosophers, paused on this. He was aware of deep waters ahead of him; he well knew that hidden currents might sweep him unawares far off even the most cunningly plotted course. Moreover there was one circumstance – a sufficiently obvious one – which might transmute to the merest cobweb even the most subtle design (to vary the metaphor) that he could think to weave. The revenant Sebastian Holme, after all, had vanished. He might have vanished for good.
    It would be idle to claim that a dead man was alive, it would be useless to engineer the most brilliant coup turning upon this, if you couldn’t, in a crisis, lay your hands on him. A moment’s reflection, however, suggested to Cheel that he need have no serious misgiving on this score. For Holme, hazardously disguised behind that black beard, had been unable to resist an impulse to attend his own exhibition on the very most dangerous occasion he could have chosen. He must even