"I know that," said Inspector Winterbottom. "I was a gunner myself."
"A painter gets just the same feeling of deadly familiarity with every line of a face he's once painted," pursued Wimsey. "And, if it's a face he hates, he hates it with a new and more irritable hatred. It's like a defective barrel-organ, everlastingly grinding out the same old maddening tune, and making the same damned awful wrong note every time the barrel goes round."
"Lord! how you can talk!" ejaculated the inspector.
"That was the way the painter felt about this man's hateful face. All day and every day he had to see it. He couldn't get away because he was tied to his job, you see."
"He ought to have cut loose," said the inspector. "It's no good going on like that, trying to work with uncongenial people."
"Well, anyway, he said to himself, he could escape for a bit during his holidays. There was a beautiful little quiet spot he knew on the West Coast, where nobody ever came. He'd been there before and painted it. Oh! by the way, that reminds me—I've got another picture to show you."
He went to a bureau and extracted a small panel in oils from a drawer.
"I saw that two years ago at a show in Manchester, and I happened to remember the name of the dealer who bought it."
Inspector Winterbottom gaped at the panel.
"But that's East Felpham!" he exclaimed.