by Alan Hunter
Gently by the Shore
( Chief Superintendent Gently - 2 )
Alan Hunter
Alan Hunter
Gently by the Shore
CHAPTER ONE
Even the sea which lapped the August beaches of Starmouth looked grey at that hour of the morning. There was something mournful about it — it seemed to be grieving for the thronged crowds of noonday. Northwards it was embraced by the sprawl of the Albion Pier, much destroyed, much reconstructed, south-wards by the elegant iron-work of the Wellesley with its Winter Gardens, while facing it, across the wide promenade, lay the hectic holiday face of the town, a Victorian foundation in evil, dark-red brick with overlays of modern Marine Baroque. And the prevailing note was sadness. The dawn refused to ratify what man called gay. At this solemn hour, when PC Lubbock was observing his regulation speed between pier and pier, the Seaside Of The Midlands looked like a sleeping drunk stretched by the disapproving main.
He stopped, did PC Lubbock: he checked his well-regulated 2mph and conducted a survey of the morning scene. All was quiet, and most was still. On the pale-looking beach below him two or three figures were moving, slow, intent, each with a stick with which he occasionally stirred the marble-cold sand. Beyond them some sandpipers worked along the tide-line, further out some terns, and further still the gulls. Scavengers all were they, men and birds. PC Lubbock marked them with a permitting eye. He had seen them upon their lawful occasions for many a long year now and he gave them a favouring nod as he turned to pursue his jaunt.
But before he could get under way a change took place in the peaceful scene. A movement occurred, quite other than those he had come to expect from the deliberate trade of beach-combing. Towards him came leaping and capering, more animal than human, a strange, chattering figure, a figure that flailed its arms, a figure from whose splaying heels the sand shot up in clouds. PC Lubbock hesitated in his stride. There was something mindless and rather horrible about this bounding creature. Although he recognized it as Nits, a local halfwit, he couldn’t help falling back a pace as it vaulted over the balustrade and dropped crouching at his feet.
‘Well… and what d’you want, m’lad?’ he demanded sternly, fixing his gaze on the halfwit’s protruding green eyes.
They stared at him silently, seeming to strain towards him: the rest of the face sank backwards towards a toothy gape.
‘What is it?’ reiterated the Police Constable, raising his voice a degree.
Nits sucked in his lips as though preparing them for articulation. ‘He… don’t wake up,’ he blurted in his slurring pipe.
‘Eh? Who doesn’t wake up?’ asked the constable.
‘The man… he don’t wake up.’
Nits made an orang-outang-like gesture towards the direction from which he had come. ‘All wet!’ he whimpered, ‘no clothes on… don’t wake up.’
There was a pause while the trained mind arranged this information.
‘You say it’s a man?’ PC Lubbock demanded suspiciously.
‘A man — a man — a man!’ Nits nodded his head with astonishing rapidity.
‘You mean one like me?’
The head bobbed on as though worked by a piston.
With a stately cock of his leg, PC Lubbock stormed the balustrade and descended to the beach below. Through sand and through shingle went his boots, through shells and through seaweed, till he stood at last where the low slack water played old Harry with his spit and polish. And there he saw him, the man who didn’t wake up, the man without clothes, the man who was all wet.
He had stood about five feet ten. He had weighed about 185. His hair had been pale brown, his eyes blue, his eyebrows slanting, his heavy features decidedly un-English. And he had acquired, probably rather late in life, a feature of the keenest police interest: a collection of four stab-wounds in the thorax.
PC Lubbock remarked a high percentage of these details. He glanced sharply at Nits, and sharply at the sea. Then, drawing his whistle with a flourish of professional adroitness, he blew a wailful blast to wake the morning air.
‘There seems,’ said Chief Inspector Gently, Central Office, CID, sagely, ‘to be some as-yet-undiscovered connection between coastal resorts and homicide, Dutt. Have you noticed it?’
Detective Sergeant Dutt nodded dutifully, but without really listening to his senior. It had been hot in the train coming up. It was still hot in the train. Their third-class compartment was a little oven, and its atmosphere wasn’t improved by the haze contributed by Gently’s pipe.
‘You’ve only to go back to the ’twenties,’ continued Gently, with a damaging puff. ‘There were the Crumbles murders — Field and Gray in ’20, and Mahon in ’24. Both classics, Dutt. Especially Mahon.’
‘I was bashing me first beat in ’24,’ said Dutt reminiscently.
‘Then there was Smith and the Brides in the Baths — Blackpool and Herne Bay were two of his spots — and coming the other way there’s the Brighton Trunk Murders and Sidney Fox at Margate, and that other Starmouth business — slaughter in all shapes and sizes, and all of it going on by the sea. There’s a link there somewhere, Dutt, you mark my words. The sea has a bad influence on potential homicides, whether it’s recognized or not.’
‘Dare say you’re right, sir,’ replied Dutt, staring out of the window.
‘When I retire I shall write a monograph on it,’ added Gently. ‘There may be some implications which would help a good defence.’
He sank back into his seat and puffed away in silence. The train clattered on, wearying, somnolent. They were nearing the end of the run, four sun-beating hours of it, and both of them felt jaded and grimy. Outside stretched the marshes of East Northshire, very wide, very flat, their distance broken by nothing except the brick towers of windmills and the white handkerchief sails of yachts. Inside there was Gently’s pipe and the sooty smell of third-class cushions…
‘Well, it won’t be so bad, sir,’ said Dutt, trying to cheer himself up, ‘it can’t be worse than Southend or Margate.’
Gently smiled at a distant cow. ‘It isn’t,’ he said, ‘there’s parts of it one grows to like.’
‘You know the place, sir — you’ve been there before?’
‘When I was ten,’ admitted Gently, ‘and that’s further back than I like to remember.’
He thought about it, nevertheless. He could see himself now as he was then, a thoughtful child with sunburn and freckles, and those damned knickerbockers. A solitary child he had been, a bad mixer. It may have been the knickerbockers that made him antisocial.
‘There isn’t much difference between criminals and policemen,’ he said, surprising Detective Sergeant Dutt.
They pulled in at Starmouth Ranelagh, a gloomy terminus where the smell of fish blended into a neat olfactory cocktail with the smell of soot, steam and engine oil.
‘It hasn’t changed,’ mused Gently, ‘that’s just the smell it used to have.’
He reached down a battered leather suitcase and deposited himself and it upon the platform. Sergeant Dutt followed, carrying a similar case, while in his other hand he clasped the ‘murder bag’ with which a careful Central Office had equipped the expedition. Outside in the station yard the afternoon sun burned down stunningly. There was a taxi rank, and co-passengers clad in summer dresses and open-necked shirts were streaming towards it. Sergeant Dutt looked longingly, but Gently shook his head.
‘It isn’t far,’ he said, ‘they’ve got their headquarters just off the quay.’
‘Don’t know what they’ve gone and packed in the bag,’ said Sergeant Dutt reprovingly, ‘it’s like a ton weight.’
‘Probably a ball and chain for when we make the pinch,’ replied his senior unfeelingly.
/> They left the station and plodded over a lift-bridge which carried the main road into the town. Below them a cloudy muddy-banked stream flowed pacifically, bearing on its bosom tugs with barges and smaller traffic. Further down two torpedo boats were moored at the quays, opposite them a lightship undergoing a refit, and one or two stream-drifters. Above the bridge was the yacht station, its staithe packed three-deep with visiting holiday-craft.
‘It’s a ruddy port!’ exclaimed Sergeant Dutt, dropping his bags gratefully as Gently paused to admire the scene.
‘Of course it’s a port,’ said Gently, ‘where do you think your breakfast bloater hails from, Dutt?’
‘Yus, but I thought it was like Margate — not like flipping Pompey!’
Gently grinned. ‘There’s a Margate side to it too,’ he said. ‘Look, Dutt — a ship-chandler’s. Have you ever seen a ship being chandled?’
‘Can’t say as how I have, sir, come to think of it.’
‘You should,’ said Gently, ‘your education is lacking. It’s the duty of every intelligent citizen to see a ship being chandled, at least once…’
They proceeded across the bridge and down into the sun-baked street leading along the quays. Ahead of them now was the Town Hall, a handsome red-brick building in a style that was purely Dutch. In fact, the whole thing might have been Dutch, thought Gently, there was a strong Continental atmosphere. Coming in, now, through all those marshes with their cattle and windmills and sails… And then again it was full of overtones which kept him in a strange frame of mind. He couldn’t settle himself to the idea of being out on a case. It was having been here so long ago that upset him, perhaps, the having known the place as a child his mind was baulking and refusing to come to grips with what he was doing. It showed itself in his facetiousness, in the way he twitted Dutt.
But it was no good: he was here on business only. Nostalgic memories didn’t mix successfully with homicide, and he just had to shake himself into an alert and receptive state of mind.
‘There’s a cafe over there,’ he said to Dutt, ‘let’s drop in for a cup of tea before we check in.’
‘I was just going to mention it, sir,’ panted the sweating Dutt, ‘only you seemed to be in such a hurry!’
Gently clicked his tongue. ‘I’m not in any hurry,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody as patient as corpses, Dutt, especially when they’ve come out in a rash of stab-wounds…’
Superintendent Symms of the Starmouth Borough Police paced his office with military stride, a tall, spare man with close grey hair and a little clipped moustache. Inspector Copping, his man of parts, was being strong and silent in a corner.
‘And that’s it, gentlemen,’ said the super, in tones as clipped as his moustache, ‘we know nothing — we can find out nothing. We’ve got a corpse, and absolutely nothing else. There were no clothes and hence no laundry marks. You’ve had the prints and they’re not on record. We’ve checked the Missing Persons’ list for months without getting a lead and we’ve shown a slide at all the cinemas in town with no better result. In fact, gentlemen, it’s a sticky sort of business, and I feel I ought to apologize for calling you in at all. But you understand how I’m placed. There are people above me who pretend to believe in miracles.’
Gently nodded gravely. ‘It’s our principal business to carry the can.’
‘And you were specifically asked for, Gently — after that Norchester case of yours Central Office means only one person around here.’
‘It was one of my luckier cases,’ agreed Gently modestly.
‘So you see, it was out of my hands.’ The super paused, both in stride and speech. He was genuinely grieved at having to pass on such a stinker.
‘It’s a job for the file,’ put in Inspector Copping from his corner, ‘there’s just no angle to it. He might have been jettisoned from a ship, or dumped there, or dumped somewhere else and washed up there. He might even have been shoved out of an aircraft and finished up there. There’s no end to the ways he might’ve come — I’ve put in hours thinking up new ones.’
Gently nodded a mandarin nod and stuffed a clumsy hand into his pocket. They had some peppermint creams in that cafe, and he had bought a whole pound.
‘The body was even discovered by a halfwit… so far as we can make out he chivvied it around trying to wake it up.’
Gently made sympathetic noises over a peppermint cream.
‘And then this blasted Lubbock got the seconds on him and tried three methods of artificial respiration.’
‘He’s been reprimanded,’ said the super grimly, ‘there’ll be no more of that sort of thing from Lubbock.’
‘And all the beachcombers for miles jamming around… it was like Bertram Mills’.’
There was a silence, during which the only sound was a sugary chewing from Gently.
‘So you see that calling you in is simply a face-saver,’ went on the super, recommencing to stalk. ‘The lads higher up know there’s no chance, but the thing got too much publicity. They daren’t just sit tight and let it fade away.’
Gently shuffled a foot. ‘Well, as long as you aren’t expecting too much…’
‘We aren’t.’ Inspector Copping laughed with a little conscious bitterness.
Gently laid a peppermint cream on the super’s desk and appeared to study it, as though seeking inspiration. ‘This halfwit who found him
…’ he began vaguely.
‘They call him Nits,’ supplied Copping. ‘He’s cracked all right — ought to be in a home. Real name’s Gibson. Lives with his mother in one of the Grids.’
‘And you checked up on him?’
‘Naturally.’
‘He wouldn’t have been carrying a knife of any sort?’
Inspector Copping hesitated a moment and then plucked something from his pocket and threw it down on the desk in front of Gently. It was a cheap one-bladed penknife, and its one blade was broken. Gently poked it with a stubby finger.
‘Of course there’s no connection…?’
‘None,’ rapped Inspector Copping.
Gently picked it up. ‘I’d like to keep it for the moment, all the same…’ He opened and closed the little blade with a naive curiosity. ‘Did you find out anything else about him?’ he asked. ‘Has he got any friends — does anybody employ him?’
Inspector Copping grunted. ‘He isn’t employable. He hangs around the beach and people give him money, that’s all. He spends it in the cinemas and amusement arcades. Everybody knows him, but nobody wants anything to do with him.’
‘Has he ever given any trouble?’
‘A visitor made a fuss about him once and we pinched him for begging. It took three men to bring him in. He’s stronger than he looks.’
Gently revolved the peppermint cream with care. ‘About the deceased,’ he said, ‘when did he die?’
‘The report says between eleven and twelve p.m. on Tuesday.’
‘When did you find him?’
‘Lubbock saw him at five-ten a.m. on Wednesday.’
‘So he’d only taken five hours to get where he was… it isn’t very long. What was the state of the tide?’
‘Low slack water. If he came in on the tide he must have grounded at about four.’
‘That cuts it down another hour…’ Gently stared at his white sugar tablet with elevated brows. ‘The local currents… the ones just off-shore… what’s their direction?’
Copping glanced at his superior.
‘There’s nothing just off-shore,’ supplied the super, ‘it’s a perfectly safe beach at all states of the tide. There’s a north-south current further out, about half a mile. It accounts for a few damn fools every season.’
‘Do you know the speed of it?’
‘Not precisely. Maybe six or seven knots.’
‘So you give him an hour to get into the current and another hour to come back ashore he might have been put in eighteen miles north.’
‘No.’ The super shook his head. ‘If he was put in from the shore
it couldn’t be more than five or six. The shore starts in westward just north of the town, and six miles up the coast is Summerness, beyond which it recedes very sharply. At Summerness the current would be two miles off-shore.’
‘Two miles…’ mused Gently. ‘He wouldn’t drift out that far in the time. It’d have to be lower down. What’s up there in that direction?’
The super shrugged. ‘It’s a wide sand beach all the way, backed with marram hills and freshwater marshes. There are three villages and a lot of bungalows. A little way out of town there’s the racecourse.’
‘Has there been racing lately?’
‘No. It’s not due till next Tuesday.’
‘I suppose you didn’t do any checking up there?’
‘What’s the use?’ interrupted Inspector Copping. ‘It’s a hundred to one against him having been put in there, and even if he was, what would we be looking for?’
‘Someone might have seen something,’ suggested Gently mildly, ‘there’s never any harm in asking questions.’
Inspector Copping’s heavyish features flushed. ‘The case has had publicity,’ he said, ‘we’ve asked for information both in the cinemas and the press. If anyone knew anything we should have heard by now — we’ve looked into everything that’s come our way.’
‘Please don’t get the impression that we’ve been asleep,’ said the super snappily, ‘we may not be homicide experts, but at least we carry out our police duties with strict care and attention. You have made the suggestion that the body of the deceased was put into the sea somewhere between here and Summerness, but the suggestion rests merely on the fact that there is a north-south current. And the current may have brought it from some point at sea, and then again it may never have been in the current at all. It could even have drifted up from a southerly direction inside the current.’
Gently hunched his shoulders chastenedly and made a chessmove with the peppermint cream. ‘It could even have been dropped off the pier,’ he murmured.
