Gently Down the Stream (16 page)

Gently came to a full stop in his restless pacing.

They hadn’t found any letters … but Paul had been out on his motorcycle yesterday!

‘Stay here – I’ll be back in a moment.’

He went striding out of the bungalow.

Next door a family party had just returned from the beach. They were a middle-aged couple with three young children and they were spreading out towels and costumes, and shaking the sand out of their shoes.

‘Just a minute! I’d like a word with you.’

They all looked round at him.

‘I’m a police officer making certain investigations … you may be able to help me.’

After some moments of suspicion, they were almost over-helpful. No detail was so trifling, but one or other of them could add it to the tally. Yes, they could remember Miss Brent arriving at the bungalow on the Friday. It was just after little Ernie had cut his foot on a piece of glass, by deduction just after 8 p.m. and he
ought to have been in bed … oh yes, she was quite alone and carrying two cases, she was, and wearing one of those posh dresses and etc., etc.

‘She hasn’t left the bungalow since she came?’

No, of that they were certain. They had palled-up at once. She hadn’t any side, though she did speak la-di-da. They had even had meals together and gone shopping in the village … the kids were quite attached to her, she’d put some plaster on little Ernie’s foot and bought them all ice-creams.

‘She wouldn’t have had any visitors?’

No, she’d always seemed rather lonely.

‘Yesterday evening, for example?’

It was quite impossible, since they had all gone to a travelling film show in the village hall together.

‘One more question … it’s about the mail. Does the post office deliver up here?’

It did. It came in the mornings. Every morning they had a letter from their daughter Marge, who they’d left at home.

‘And Miss Brent has had letters?’

Miss Brent had had none. She had looked out for the postman, but no letter had ever arrived.

Gently left them to shake out their sandals.

Had the luck of good detectives forsaken him?

On the other side of the sand-hills the children’s cries and booming combers sounded mocking beneath the sun.

There was sadness in the mien of Superintendent Walker, a brooding, angry sadness born of hunches that
hadn’t paid off. This was the second time it had happened and it was damaging to his morale. On the first occasion Gently had been unofficial, which had been a sort of excuse for disregarding him. But on this occasion he had come with full credentials and there was no excuse of any kind. Success, success alone, would have justified the strong man of the City Police in shoving Gently aside. And success, alas, had not come his way in any measurable degree. After a day of hard marsh-frisking, cordons and road-blocks, he was still a Hicks-less super. He had even begun to despair of ever laying hands on that elusive customer. And for this he had said harsh words, for this he had ridden the high-horse, for this he had risked the rap on the knuckles he would undoubtedly get from a Gently-fancying Chief Constable.

‘Come in!’

It was Hansom, looking apprehensive at the rasping tone of the summons.

‘He’ll be in in a moment … just parking his car.’

‘Is the Brent woman with him?’

‘Nope … they carted her off to the Northshire and Norchester.’

The super drummed viciously on his desk-top.

‘Well, he nearly let
her
slip through his fingers, didn’t he!’

But there was no latent triumph in Gently’s face as he and Dutt came into the office. Rather it was an absent-minded expression … he hadn’t been saying a word during the drive into town.

‘Sit down – make yourself at home!’

The super’s sarcasm was intended to warn and give notice.

‘You know what luck I’ve had – I don’t need to tell you. There’s just one small item that my ham-fisted methods have brought to light, and which wouldn’t have turned up in any other way – that’s it, on the chair.’

He pointed to a dark garment and a peaked cap of similar colour. Gently picked them up. The garment was obviously a chauffeur’s jacket, cut in navy-blue serge, and it had some rubbed-out staining on the left shoulder and back. There were also a few spots on the left side of the cap, similarly rubbed out.

‘Where did you find these?’ Gently’s voice betrayed his interest.

The super made an ironic gesture. ‘Where does everything pop up? They were in a derelict shack in the carrs, about half a mile above Upper Wrackstead.’

‘On which side of the river?’

‘On the side opposite from you.’

Gently pulled out his map.

‘I’d like the exact position.’

The super showed him impatiently. Hadn’t he already investigated it?

‘There aren’t any prints, if that’s what you’re thinking about.’

‘What’s this line running up here?’

‘It’s a dyke from the river.’

‘There’d be room to take a boat up?’

‘There might, if it was small enough.’

‘What about access to the road?’

‘It’s like you see – about quarter of a mile from this by-road between Wrackstead and Coleshill. It’s a rough passage through the carrs, but you can get there all right.’

‘And this shack – it isn’t recent?’

‘Not by fifty years it isn’t. I’m told they grazed cattle there before the carrs grew up … that’s when it was probably built.’

‘Didn’t look like he’d been camping there?’

‘No.’ The super frowned. ‘There’s only one sign that he’d been there, and that’s the jacket and the cap.’

Gently nodded from a thoughtful distance. He folded his map and put it away.

‘Well … that’s my minor contribution! Now perhaps we can get to yours. You’ll have talked to this Brent woman – what’s she got to commit suicide about?’

‘She thinks she knows who did it—’

‘Oh does she, by the living thunder!’

‘I said she
thinks
she knows … I’m not at all certain that she does. She wasn’t around at the time and nobody seems to have got in touch with her.’

‘Never mind! Who’s her tip?’

Gently shrugged. ‘She isn’t giving us one. She was able to infer we hadn’t made an arrest … I’m afraid she’s going to be strictly uncooperative.’

The super said something naughty. ‘She’ll damn well change her mind about that! But just thinking she knows who did it … that’s no reason to turn on the gas.’

‘She thinks she’s implicated … and she’s in love with whoever it is.’

‘You mean in love with the chauffeur?’

‘Not necessarily. Paul Lammas fills the bill.’

The super stared shrewdly for a moment and then ruffled some report sheets which lay on his desk.

‘I’ve been reading a copy of the statements you took this afternoon. I don’t have to ask you what you’ve got from Paul Lammas. And I’ve been thinking, Gently. I’ve been thinking a lot!’

Gently inclined his head deferentially.

‘To begin with, we agree that the chauffeur was only the trigger-puller on this job – I’m talking about Lammas’ murder now. He may not even have pulled the trigger, but whether he did or not, there’s somebody else behind him. Check?’

‘Check.’ Gently looked as though he might say something else, but he prevented himself. He’d better not rub it in!

‘In the second place, we agree that whoever is behind the chauffeur may have succeeded in getting him out of the country – probably to some place from which he can’t be extradited back again. Check?’

Gently hesitated. ‘I’m not quite so struck with that theory as I was this morning.’

‘How do you mean?’ The super eyed him nastily.

‘It’s just a hunch … but I’ve a feeling he may be right under our noses.’

‘You’ve got a lead?’

‘No, nothing you can really call one.’

‘Then damn it, man, stop trying to complicate the issue any further!’ The super was really annoyed. ‘I’ve spent all day coming round to your idea and now you want to slide out of it.’ 

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘And it’s the only one that fits the facts. If he hasn’t skipped, where the blasted hell is he?’

Gently’s shoulders hunched. ‘I don’t quite know.’

‘And nor do I – and nor do five score policemen who’ve been raking the marshes for him. If it was Hicks who killed Annie Packer he’d be in a cell by now – but he isn’t, and it wasn’t! Do I have to go on my knees?’

Gently shrugged again and said nothing.

‘Very well – we agree on that one. Hicks is where we’ll never get him. That leaves us to deal with whoever was making use of him – and whoever did kill Annie Packer. Now by your own results we’ve narrowed it down to three, Marsh, Paul and Mrs Lammas, and what we’ve got to decide is whether we should charge one, two or all three of them. They were all on the spot. They all had good reasons! Perhaps you can tell me if you’ve got any favourites among those three.’

Gently shook his head. ‘It works out pretty even. We can deduce that Linda Brent thinks it’s Paul, but against that it was Mrs Lammas who was inquiring where her husband would be and her prints were on the gun-drawer. On the other hand this Marsh would seem to have the strongest motive and looking forward to Annie Packer, he’s the only one with sufficient physical strength to have handled the body as it must have been handled. No … I haven’t any favourites. On the evidence, I wouldn’t dare have.’

‘Then we know where we are.’ The super’s jaw jutted decisively. ‘We shall charge all three with
conspiracy to murder and to my way of thinking that’s just about the truth.’

‘But it won’t stand up.’

‘Why won’t it stand up?’

‘Because you haven’t got Hicks … a good defence will simply romp home. They can hang it on him in just the way it’s been planned. If you can’t get Hicks you’ll never get a verdict.’

‘They may rat on each other – it’s been known before today.’

‘But you can’t bank on that.’

‘And there’s bound to be some other evidence!’

‘I’d like to see it before making a charge.’

The super didn’t snarl, although he looked as though he would have liked to. But he knew sense when he heard it and this, he knew, was sense. So he contented himself with putting a band-saw edge into the tone of his next remark.

‘Then if we never get Hicks, what in the thirty-seven blue moons of Gehenna are we something-well going to do?’

Gently produced a peppermint cream from somewhere and began chewing it with insubordinate slowness.

‘I haven’t got a solution … I only know I’m not happy with the facts. Of course there’s some routine-work we haven’t covered yet, like the outgoings from Mrs Lammas’ banking accounts, and what Marsh’s servants know about his movements last night. I’m not expecting too much from either source. For the rest I just don’t know. I’ve got a hunch that there’s a penny due to drop.’

‘But what are you going to
do
, man?’ exploded the super, not at the moment a great backer of hunches.

‘I’m going to charge Linda Brent … can I borrow your phone?’

The super watched him malevolently as he dialled a number. There had been times before when Gently had made the great man want to tear his close-cropped hair …

‘This is Chief Inspector Gently, Central Office, CID. I’ve a statement for you … give me a machine, will you? This evening Linda Brent, etc., wanted by the Police for questioning in connection with the murder of James William Lammas, was taken into custody and charged with conspiring to defraud while an employee of Lammas Wholesalers Ltd.’

‘You’ll never make it stick, Gently!’ rapped the super as the phone was replaced.

Gently supplied himself with another peppermint cream.

‘I don’t really mind if I don’t,’ he replied wearily.

M
OVE IN LAMMAS case – Gently Charges Linda Brent. It was bannered beautifully across the morning paper which lay by Gently’s cup of tea.

Outside, the river-dwellers were stirring about their business. Pedro was off fruit-picking again, Thatcher was digging for worms, the slattern was getting off to school her own and Cheerful Annie’s offspring.

‘I see you’re findin’ out things, sir,’ sniffed Mrs Grey as she set down the breakfast bacon. She had always a tear to command since the rumour about her nephew being seen had got about.

‘We do our best, Mrs Grey.’

Gently beat Dutt to the crispest-looking rasher.

‘You haven’t found my poor sister’s boy, sir, not with all your tryin’ – and I don’t reckon you will, now, either.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mrs Grey. It’s surprising how they turn up.’

‘I know, sir. But don’t it stand to reason? He’s done away with himself, that’s what he’s done, and I say Heaven forgive them what druv him to it!’

And the poor lady went out in a storm of tears.

Gently made a face as he took the mustard.

‘Another theorist, Dutt … and not a bad one at that.’

‘Yessir … we’d look silly if he comes to the surface somewhere.’

‘We’d look sillier still if he had a .22 bullet in him!’

The sun was beaming down with its customary splendour. Nothing was going to spoil this paragon of Junes. On the wicked and the innocent alike it spread its glamour. Colour seemed a new invention, the air a crystalline liquid. Even Thatcher had a romantic look, scruffing away with a handleless trowel – he might have been some old earth god about his masonic delvings.

‘What’s three half-crowns worth to you?’

Thatcher looked up quickly.

‘We want the use of a dinghy … yours will do, if it doesn’t leak too much.’

‘Ah, but wait yew a minute, bor!’

Nobody made snap deals with Thatcher.

‘Dew yew want it all day that might come a bit more … tha’s what yew might call the Season at this end of June!’

But Gently didn’t want it all day, and the seven and six changed hands. Dutt was allotted the oars, Gently seated himself in the stern and Thatcher shoved them off with professional panache.

The river was shut-in all the way to the dyke and the shack where the jacket had been found. Snaked roots of alder reached out from either bank, screens of reed, bramble and wild currant formed a barrier to the eye.
The carrs were a secret place. They warned you off with their stockaded boundaries. To get in there you must be prepared to have the clothes torn off your back, the shoes from your feet, and you must suffer beating, scratching, soaking and an overlay of mud …

‘Not a place one would choose for a man-hunt, Dutt.’

‘No, sir … you takes the words out of me mouth.’

‘But a good place to hide something, other things being equal.’

Gently had the map on his knee and it was necessary equipment. They went past the dyke twice before spotting where it lay. Its mouth was concealed by a floating reed-hover, but even had it not been one would have had difficulty in recognizing the grown-over inlet.

‘Get your head down, sir!’

Gently didn’t need telling. The alder twigs whipped and stung them as Dutt poled in with one oar. In the slip of a dinghy they had to crouch double and every few yards the inch of keel was touching sugarily on the mud. But they weren’t sticking fast – that was the point to be proved! Yard by yard, they were continuing to find clean water ahead. You could get a dinghy up there. Especially if there was only one of you …

The dyke came to an end as indefinitely as it had begun, simply oozing out of existence in mud and rush jungle. Gently scrutinized what could theoretically be called the bank.

‘Of course they didn’t look for this … and of course they didn’t find it!’

He reached over into a mass of mint and meadowsweet and tugged something out. It was a long, straight
rod of willow, which had been pushed slantwise into the greasy peat.

‘One should always moor a dinghy.’

He shoved the rod back again.

‘Now let’s see if we can find anything else they didn’t notice!’

If it had been trying in the dinghy, it was doubly trying out of it. After half a dozen steps, one just forgot about dry feet. And there were brambles like saws, and nettles like wasps’ nests, and the moist, enclosed air made perspiration start at the slightest exertion. There was a track of sorts, or at all events a line of least resistance. Along it had recently sploshed a number of police-issue boots but they weren’t responsible for everything. Gently noticed signs of earlier passages. Here there was a snapped twig with leaves which had withered, there a turned-back bramble trying to grow in its original direction.

Not recent at all … those dry leaves weren’t properly developed.

‘Blimey – just give me the Commercial Road!’

Dutt was mopping a streaming face and snatching at the rubbish in his hair.

‘No wonder the charlies round here live in rubber boots – it’s a marvel they ain’t born wiv webbed feet!’

Gently grinned commiseration. ‘Stick it out, Dutt … it’s all experience.’

‘Hi know, sir – and I hopes it’s worth it!’

‘Here’s the shack now … but I wish we’d been here yesterday.’

The shack was as the super had described it. It
consisted of three sides framed in rough timber and filled with reeds, while some aged reed-thatch served for a roof. It was built on ground that was a little higher and therefore a little drier than the carrs surrounding it. This feature seemed to have made it rather popular with five score of policeman.

Gently sighed as he cautiously approached it. Yet what was he hoping to find there, after all? Perhaps he was only being fascinated by yet one more fact that didn’t quite fit … wanting to worry at it, to double-check it, to wrest sense out of it somehow. Because there was no doubt that it didn’t fit. It would only have fitted if Hicks had been hiding there.
Then
one could show how he had slipped out in a dinghy … how he had been secretly provisioned by his aunt … how he had come to kill Cheerful Arnie. It would have been full of possibilities! Only Hicks hadn’t been hiding there. You had only to look at the shack.

Three parts of the floor was raising a lovely bed of nettles and the fourth part wasn’t large enough to have slept a good-sized dog.

Gently stood still, staring at it. He was getting depressed and irritated by this perpetual check-mating. At every turn a contradiction was slapped across his face, a twit given to his intolerable ignorance. Was he going to fall down on this case? Had he run into a plan which was going to circumvent him, in all his wisdom?

A plan … that was the one thing his opponents couldn’t hide. Lammas’ murder hadn’t been a brilliant piece of improvisation, it wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. It looked like that, but it wasn’t. Perhaps that
was its weak spot, the flank which he could turn. You looked back to Easter, for instance. So many trails had started there. It was about Easter when Lammas hired the yacht. It was about Easter when he booked the bungalow. It was at Easter when Paul had threatened his mother with exposure. It was about Easter when Lammas began his unexplained mid-week trips. What was the interaction there … who had betrayed which to whom? Paul? Pauline? And the hiring of the yacht itself, what had Lammas been up to with that? Who had he really been expecting to meet when he took the
Harrier
up Ollby Dyke?

Out of a haze of abstraction Gently suddenly realized that he was looking at something, something very small and apparently out of place. It was a little shred of gold paper. It was caught between a horizontal timber and the reeds behind it. Quickly he bent to examine it more closely.

Torn edges … a wisp of label adhering … the back soiled with a greasy brown substance.

He gazed at it bemusedly for a moment, its significance dawning slowly. Then, in a sudden flash, the full comprehension began to arrive.

‘
Dutt!
’

He couldn’t quite keep the excitement out of his voice.

‘Dutt – look at this! Come and tell me what you make of it!’

The sergeant came squelching across, a lugubrious expression on his face. There was a thrill in Gently’s voice not to be denied, but the little strip of paper seemed scanty reason for such enthusiasm.

‘Looks like a bit of toffee-paper, sir.’

‘Toffee-paper, my foot!’

‘I seen plenty just like it, sir—’

‘Not like this piece, Dutt!’

Almost as though it were a holy relic he was guiding it into an envelope, hardly allowing himself to touch it, even with the blade of his pocket-knife.

‘Dutt, we’ve as good as got him!’

His voice was trembling with suppressed exultation.

‘It fits like a glove … I must have been mad not to see it before!’

‘But what’s it all about, sir?’

‘…
about?
You have to ask me?’

‘Well I might be hexceptional dense, sir, but that’s just toffee-paper to
me
!’

Gently chuckled as he straighted up. His eye had that far-distant look which came at moments when mystery was ceasing to be mystery, when the picture he sought had begun to take shape.

‘Come on … this isn’t enough, Dutt! There should be something more solid. And now we know what we’re looking for, we may know where to find it – even if we aren’t quite certain about the bloke who put it there!’

‘Then we don’t know who it was, sir?’

‘We do, Dutt – and we don’t.’

‘Couldn’t you put it a little plainer, sir?’

‘It’ll be plain enough before long!’

He set off back to the dinghy without vouchsafing another word. Dutt shook his head in sorrow and followed his senior with oozing steps. He wasn’t usually
a stupid policeman – what had he missed on this amphibious excursion?

Upper Wrackstead Dyke was a peaceful spot as the dinghy came sculling back to its moorings. The children were at school, the river-dwellers about their business and the sun shining hot on cottage, willows and boats. Only Thatcher was brought to his cabin door by the sound of the approaching oars.

‘Blast, bor!’ he commented. ‘
Yew
din’t want a boot for long!’

Gently shrugged and cast a speculative eye over the deserted scene. So quiet it was, so still.

‘An look what yew’ve done t’her – she in’t half in a pickle! Yew din’t tell me yew’d be a-jammin’ about in the carrs!’

‘Here’s half a crown for the mess.’

‘Ah, an’ worth evra penna.’

‘What’s that wire-net contraption with handle you’ve got on the cabin roof?’

Thatcher turned about to look. His cabin roof was a depository for all sorts of superannuated junk.

‘Yew mean this here?’

‘Yes – what’s it for?’

‘W’blast, tha’s a dydle, and they use it for dydlin’ out dykes.’

‘You can dredge in the mud with it?’

‘W’yes, tha’s what tha’s for.’

‘I’d like to borrow it … it’s worth another five bob.’

With the dydle securely lashed to the roof-rack, they set out in the Wolseley. Gently was in an effervescent,
schoolboy mood. You would almost have thought he was off on a treat.

‘We’re going to Ollby, sir?’

Dutt was a little put out by his senior’s unwillingness to confide in him.

‘Yes, Dutt – Ollby ho!’

‘You reckon we’ll find something, sir?’

‘I reckon we stand a chance, Dutt … a very good chance!’

Dutt jiffled a little. How like Gently it was, this irritating mysteriousness when he thought he had the scent!

‘Might I ask what we’ll be looking for, sir?’

Gently grinned into his driving-mirror.

‘Let me put it to you, Dutt … I like to benefit by your Cockney common sense! Suppose you’d just popped off Lammas and you were going ahead with the cremation programme. Would you, or wouldn’t you be in a bit of a hurry?’

‘I’d be in a hurry, sir … too flipping true I would!’

‘And being in this hurry, suppose you discovered something on Lammas which, if even a trace of it were found, would give the game away – and which might not burn satisfactorily. What would you do with it?’

Dutt hesitated cautiously.

‘Somethink which might be missed, sir?’

‘No – quite the contrary – somethink which would never be missed.’

‘Then I’d sling it overboard, sir, always provided it would sink nicely.’

Gently nodded complacently.

‘That’s just how I argued.’

‘But what is this somethink, sir?’

‘Ah … that remains to be seen!’

Nothing had changed at Ollby Quay, except that the wreck was missing and the smell of burning grown stale. Now that the wreck was gone the charred trees seemed a little unreal and ashamed of themselves. They presented such a woeful contrast to the smiling reed-and-alder bounded pool with its rampant lilies, its white-flowered plants and its domestic water-hens.

‘What a place to commit murder!’

Gently brooded over it pensively a moment as he unbuttoned his jacket.

‘You’d think people would have more sense … it’s only a failure who would kill! Here, give me the net. I’ve always fancied my chances with one.’

Dutt willingly surrendered the dydle, which, with its generous twelve feet of handle, was no sinecure.

‘We may have to get a boat up here – it depends on what sort of sling the fellow had.’

Gently considered the spot where the yacht had lain, then dipped in at the far side of the dyke on which the quay fronted. The water didn’t run deep, but there was some exquisitely resistance-less mud beneath it. Some business it was going to be, finding anything in that lot …

He trawled off a netful and drew it laboriously to the bank.

‘Roll your sleeves up, Dutt – you’re in this too!’ Together they went through it, getting muddied to the elbows. It had a peculiarly viscous quality, that mud; you
knew you’d been amongst it. And the sum total of the catch was a number of fresh-water mussel shells …

Gently tried again. One really couldn’t expect impossible luck! He trawled along the dyke carefully and systematically, trying to cover the whole area of the dyke adjacent to where the yacht had been. And slowly the grey-drying pile on the bank grew larger, and Dutt and himself muddier, and the collection of mussel shells more representative. There wasn’t even an old tin to diversify the proceedings. Not even some broken glass.