Gently in Trees

by Alan Hunter

  ‘Under that beech. So like he’d have his headlights facing straight at it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that upset the badgers?’

  Larling shook his head. ‘Not if he was quiet. Lights don’t seem to bother them.’

  The beech was old, a natural curiosity, with four stems rising from a rampart of roots; rainwater lay in a basin between the stems, and the boughs above were strangely intergrown. Around the roots grew anaemic nettles, concealing the mouth of an impregnable tunnel.

  ‘That’s where they are,’ Larling mused. ‘And I reckon that’s where they’ve been for a century. Nobody’s going to dig them out of that. And I’m to ask you not to mention badgers to the press.’

  Gently stared at the tunnel. ‘So who would know they were here?’

  ‘Not nobody should, by rights,’ Larling said. ‘This is W.D. property, and nobody shouldn’t set foot in here. But we know, of course. Between you and me, we’ve been in here sizing up the timber. But we’d never mention that sett to anyone. It’d be as much as our jobs were worth.’

  ‘Then how did Stoll come by the information?’

  Larling looked blank. ‘That’s been puzzling me too. I’ve had a word with one or two of the other men, but Mr Stoll didn’t get it from them. I’m the only one he’s ever approached, and that was a time back, about the deer. I took him up eighty-four, which is a mile from here. There was no mention of Mogi’s Belt or badgers.’

  ‘Would you perhaps get poachers in here, after pheasants?’

  Larling looked doubtful. ‘That’s not very likely. The pheasants don’t breed this way any more. It’s where there’s shoots you find the pheasants.’

  ‘Yet somehow . . . he knew.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Larling agreed. ‘I can only reckon he nosed it out by himself.’

  ‘Except someone else knew too,’ Metfield put in stubbornly. ‘The chummie who followed him in with a gas bottle.’

  Gently took a few steps round the beech and pushed through the saplings and nettles beyond it. A dozen yards brought him to the edge of the belt and to a steep bracken-and-bramble-defended slope. Below it lay shaking bog-land, stippled with common orchids, and what looked like buck-bean; then, a quarter of a mile off, the russet sweep of the brecks, with a lacing of dwarf birches, and a few sad, deformed pines. No track, no passage that way – with or without a hefty gas bottle! The bracken and the brambles flourished undisturbed, and no plunging feet had printed the green mire.

  He turned back into the trees. Metfield and Larling stood where he had left them, near the beech: two figures that seemed to accentuate the secluded loneliness of the spot. About them, the wilderness of underbush and the columns of great trees, so indifferent and abstracted from this temporary restlessness of men. And into that lone place, dimmed by night, the blue caravette had found its way, to settle so certainly in its place, its driver careless of the still spirits round him. Because he was familiar with the location? No. The marked-up plan determined that. If Stoll had reconnoitred the spot previously the marking-up would not have been necessary. Stoll had been briefed, and briefed in detail, by someone who had made a reconnaisance: no further doubt was possible. The killing had been coldly and meticulously planned.

  About to move forward again, he hesitated, catching a movement in his peripheral vision. He kept his head steady but turned his eyes, seeking a focus in the distant underbrush. A leafed twig moved furtively, revealing a faint pallor behind: then it moved again, and the pallor became a face and intent eyes. Involuntarily, Gently turned his head: the leaves sprang back and the face vanished.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted to Metfield and Larling, and jumped down into the dell.

  ‘But what – what—?’ Metfield gaped.

  ‘Our snooper – and this time we’re going to catch him!’

  He raced across the dell and pounded over the brackeny bank. The snooper had been lurking in the direction of the gate, and probably only a short distance inside it. The gate, left closed, now stood ajar. Gently shoved through it and stood panting. The ride stretched straight and empty on the line of the fence, in both directions. Metfield came puffing up beside him, and Larling, running easily.

  ‘Which way now?’ Metfield gasped.

  ‘Quiet!’ Gently snapped. ‘Listen!’

  In a moment they heard it: a quick, stealthy rustling, deep in the section of Douglas pine.

  ‘Spread out!’ Gently commanded.

  They charged into the section, Metfield running left, Larling right. The section, composed of mature timber, was plentifully furnished with the ubiquitous snowberry. Now their quarry had dispensed with caution. They could hear him crashing and plunging ahead of them. By luck or design he was crossing the tree-lines in a diagonal, which kept him concealed behind the shutter of the boles. Twice only Gently glimpsed him, a lithe, flying figure, bounding deer-like through the snowberry. A youngster, certainly; on the tall side; his dark shirt a bottle green.

  ‘Reckon he’s heading for Warren,’ Larling panted. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing – he’s fit!’

  ‘Can’t we head him off?’ Gently gasped.

  ‘No, we can’t. And if he’s got a car, we’ve had him!’

  It was humiliating. Three middle-aged men, slowly running themselves to a standstill: while chummie steamed busily away from them, his sounds growing ever more distant. And nothing to be done! Gently plunged on savagely, his feet dragging in bramble and snowberry. Chummie had reduced them to making motions – they couldn’t catch him, and couldn’t not try.

  ‘There’s Warren – through there!’

  Sharp sunlight ahead, and the glowing green of deciduous leaves. Through his sweat Gently spotted the dark shirt bend low under the boughs of saplings, and vanish. He nerved himself to a last, lumbering sprint. The interval to the sunlight seemed to stretch like elastic. Then he heard the brisk clunk of a car door, followed immediately by the revving of an engine.

  ‘Something small . . . a Mini . . . an Imp!’

  He bullocked his way through whipping twigs of sycamore. And too late again. All he arrived in time for was the comet-tail of red dust, fingering fast down the track.

  ‘Oh the bastard, the bastard!’ Metfield sobbed, tottering out beside Gently. ‘I’ll have the next one for sure, who does that!’

  And he collapsed with dignity, to wipe his sweat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  METFIELD, LIKE SETTERS before him, had booked Gently into the Sun. It was still the best hotel in Latchford, though now enlarged and shyly in-trend. Its pale, aloof, but agreeable face had once met the coaches arriving from London; as they crossed the bridge, after the perils of the heath, they saw first this haven, waiting to welcome them. Well, the bypass had ended all that, while at the same time mysteriously increasing the town traffic. But the Sun had survived this technological alchemy. It remained the place into which the locals booked Gently.

  Over lunch, to which Gently had invited him, Metfield found the Yard man a silent companion. He ate with a stolid, impenetrable composure, and stared out of the window between courses. They took coffee in the lounge, where Gently lit his pipe, and Metfield a modest Panatella; but it was not till the second cup that Gently condescended to unbend.

  Then he regarded the local man with a twinkling, hazel eye.

  ‘Do you think we should contemplate a Third Force?’

  Metfield’s Panatella slipped a notch. ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  Gently blew a ring. ‘The situation is in balance, and a Third Force would be the classic solution. On what we have I don’t fancy Walling, and I’m not convinced that I shall fancy the tribe at Brayling. Which leaves us with our Wild Man of the Woods. Who certainly seemed equipped with local knowledge.’

  ‘But sir!’ Metfield gazed with rounding eyes. ‘Sir, that chummie could still have been just a snooper. But Keynes and the woman are residents here – they’d have local knowledge, if anyone would.’

  Gently shook his head. ‘There’s a simple obj
ection that applies both to them and to Walling. Having that local knowledge was not enough: they had still to impart it to Stoll and to get him to act on it. But neither Walling nor the others were in Stoll’s good books. They couldn’t suddenly cut in with friendly information. Stoll would have suspected something directly – if only that they were trying to get rid of him for the weekend.’

  Metfield gulped unhappily. ‘But they could have planted it – somehow!’

  Gently shaped another ring. ‘I’ve been trying to think how. And always I keep coming back to this: Stoll must have trusted the person who told him. They would necessarily have had quite a long conversation, involving a detailed briefing and the marking of the pamphlet. Stoll knew he could rely on the information he was given, and had no reason to suspect an ulterior motive. So it had to be a familiar acquaintance, and one currently on excellent terms with Stoll.’

  ‘But Keynes or Maryon Britton could have put him up to it, sir. He didn’t need to know what it was about.’

  ‘He would have to have known,’ Gently said. ‘Or perhaps he wouldn’t have kept their names out of it. It’s a possibility, though rather remote as far as Keynes and Britton are concerned. On the other hand it might fit Walling, who probably had a wider spectrum of shared acquaintances. Or – we can postulate a Third Force.’

  Metfield dragged on his cigar dejectedly. ‘Do you have a sus, sir?’

  Gently shrugged. ‘Better call it an area of mild interest. It doesn’t add up to a genuine sus, because at the moment we’re stumped for a motive.’

  ‘But it’s connected with chummie who was keeping an eye on us?’

  ‘There could possibly be a connection. Or possibly I could be following a bum hunch.’ Gently’s eyes twinkled. ‘Which is why I’m putting it up to you.’

  Metfield shook his head and looked in his coffee.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Gently said.

  Metfield breathed deeply. ‘Not without motive, sir. Because that’s what we’ve got here in big handfuls.’ He looked squarely at Gently. ‘So it’s a queer one, sir, and we can’t quite figure how they worked it. But all the rest adds up to Keynes and the lady, and that’s where I’m going to keep my money.’

  Gently nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Then we’d better see if we can prove it.’

  Metfield ground his cigar into an ashtray. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’ll do.’

  They drove out by the same road as earlier, across the brecks and into the forest, but this time passed Warren Ride and continued along the avenue of great trees. The road ran straight and smooth, logged by the regular passing of the rides. A few cars were parked on the grassy verges, but singly, and spaced far apart. At length they came to a left turn, where shaggy fields of arable encroached on the forest; and leaving the trees by degrees, reached the first cottages of West Brayling village.

  ‘This is the back way in,’ Metfield said. ‘Very convenient for the forest. You can slip along here from the Lodge and never go near the village.’

  ‘Who lives in the cottages?’ Gently asked.

  ‘Farmworkers, mostly,’ Metfield said. ‘I’ve had a word with them. One of them remembers a car going by, early Sunday morning.’

  ‘But which, of course, he didn’t see,’ Gently said.

  Metfield twitched a beefy shoulder.

  Now the village was spreading ahead of them, a cluster of red roofs hiding among trees; with the crisp tower and crocketed spire of a medieval church breaking the skyline. But while it was still distant they came abreast of a serpentine red-brick wall, above which reared a single, enormous cedar, and the tops of ornamental shrubs.

  ‘Here we are, sir,’ Metfield muttered. ‘This is what Stoll was leaving in his will.’

  He turned the car through an arched brick gateway, of which the wrought-iron gates stood open. They proceeded along a gravel drive, between trim hedges of copper beech, and came shortly to a sweep at the side of a red-brick Georgian house.

  ‘Like it, sir?’

  Gently grunted and got down from the Wolseley. The house, though not large, had the insouciant graciousness of things Georgian. On each side of a simple, pillared porch ranged four deep sash windows, matched by shallower ones above, and by dormers above those. The roof was of blue glazed pantiles, broken by ornamented chimney-breasts, and the gables were Dutch: semicircular brick screens plumped by lesser segments at the corners. To the rear of the house was a stable-block, overshadowed by oaks and copper beeches. Before it extended a lawn with colourful side-beds, bounded by the serpentine wall and the beech hedging. Doors, windows stood open in the still sunlight. French doors had been fitted to one ground-floor window.

  ‘Yes – you wanted something?’

  A girl had come to the side door, where she stood staring at Gently with hostility. She was aged in her late teens and had a glinting helmet of ash-blonde hair. Her face was finely-featured but narrow, with cheeks thinning below the cheekbone; there was a droop in her small mouth, and a hint of shadow beneath each eye.

  ‘Miss Britton?’ Gently inquired.

  ‘That’s my name,’ she said bleakly. Then her eyes went past him to Metfield in the car. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re another policeman.’

  ‘Chief Superintendent Gently,’ Gently said.

  ‘And of course, you want to talk to Mother.’

  ‘To your mother and yourself,’ Gently said.

  Miss Britton stared at him with passionate blue eyes.

  She went inside, slamming the door. Gently turned to Metfield, who made a face.

  ‘You’ll find her a difficult one, sir,’ he said. ‘She gave me some cheek when I was round here earlier.’

  ‘Do we know who her father was?’

  Metfield shrugged. ‘A reporter I spoke to said he was an actor. Her mother was properly married and all that. The lady was a widow when Stoll took up with her.’

  ‘What happened to the man?’

  ‘Suicide, they say. He took an overdose of pills.’ Metfield looked thoughtful. ‘That kid has a background.’

  ‘So has her mother,’ Gently said.

  Miss Britton reappeared.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Mother will see you. And perhaps you will leave your car in the yard. Out here, it may inconvenience visitors.’

  They followed her in. She took them down a narrow passage, leading to a central hall with an elegant staircase; then through an ivory-painted panelled door into a long, spacious drawing-room. It was furnished expensively. The floor was laid with a Persian carpet of extravagant area. Grouped about it was a Regency suite, comprising a long sofa and eight matching chairs. Two fine cabinets of the same period were set one each side of the elaborate hearth, and contained a collection of Chelsea figures such as one rarely saw outside a large museum. The principal picture was a Wilson, apparently an original, depicting a Thames scene at evening; but there were ten or a dozen contemporary pictures, including a sketch in oils by Constable. Near the door stood a Dutch bureau-bookcase, its shelves dull with original board bindings; and another opposite, at the far end of the room, containing bindings of morocco, calf and vellum. Small Sheraton display-cases alternated with the larger furniture; they exhibited collections of watches and silver-and-enamel trifles; while the deep drop-ceiling had been enriched by a frieze of blue, green, white and black Wedgwood plaques. It was a room the contents of which were worth probably twice the value of the property; and which had not a single human touch, except a brash Melamine coffee-table, strewn with women’s magazines.

  ‘These are the gentlemen.’

  Miss Britton crossed to the sofa and dropped on one end of it, with elaborate unconcern. At the other end sat an older woman, wearing a smartly-cut trouser suit. It didn’t quite become her: perhaps her figure was a little too full; or it might have been that the straw colour failed to complement her auburn-blonde hair. She had a soft-modelled, heart-shaped face with a trace of a snub nose, a pretty, dimpling mouth and large, appealing, warm-brown ey
es. Her complexion was clear and fresh. She was wearing no make-up.

  ‘You are the Chief Superintendent?’

  Gently bowed slightly. ‘Mrs Britton?’

  ‘Well!’ A dimple formed. ‘In my profession we don’t use that title.’

  ‘But you are Mrs Britton?’

  ‘Yes.’ The dimple went slack. Also the eyes, which had begun to soften, became tight again, wary.

  ‘I’m investigating the death of Mr Stoll.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we can take that for granted.’

  ‘In the course of my inquiries I have had a conversation with Oscar Walling.’

  ‘Oscar?’ Her tone was contemptuous.

  ‘He described a visit he made here recently. In view of what he told me, I have to ask you one or two questions.’

  Her eyes stared at him unwinkingly: large, frank, but now hard. Then she composedly folded her hands in her lap: smooth, immaculately manicured hands.

  ‘Do take a seat,’ she said. ‘You may as well be comfortable in your work. I would offer you a drink, too, but no doubt you don’t feel able to accept it.’

  Gently shrugged and took a Regency chair, which neither looked comfortable nor was so. Metfield also sat. Mrs Britton had ignored him: alongside Gently he ranked as supernumerary. Miss Britton ignored both Metfield and Gently. She sat swinging a leg and gazing through the french window.

  ‘So what are these questions, Chief Superintendent?’

  ‘Do you have a burglar-alarm system, Mrs Britton?’

  Mrs Britton checked, her brows lifting slightly. Then she said: ‘I would have thought the Inspector could have told you.’

  Gently silenced Metfield with his hand. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Very well. Of course we have. You can’t know very much about Adrian if you suppose he would have left this stuff unprotected. We have both a closed circuit and a trembler system, connected with the police station at Latchford. When it’s switched on you have only to breathe for it to sound like a general alarm at a fire-station.’

  ‘Mr Stoll seems to have valued these trinkets.’