Gently With the Painters csg-7

by Alan Hunter

  As far as Gently was concerned that was the very last straw, and it was no use reminding himself that he had expected it. For an instant, looking at Stephens, he felt all of his fifty-two years: he felt himself pensioned off, to make room for these brisk newcomers.

  ‘The Johnson case…?’

  ‘You’ve been reading about it, have you?’

  ‘I did chance to see something…’

  ‘Then you’ve got an idea of the set-up. From what I can make out the local police are in a tizzie. They’ve already stampeded themselves into doing something silly. You know about the picture? The damn fools have gone and impounded it, and from what I can hear they haven’t a notion as to why they’ve done it. Now, of course, they want us to carry it, in the old, familiar fashion. I immediately thought of Stephens, who has got a cool enough head on his shoulders.’

  Gently leant himself against the desk, feeling the need of its support. Of course, it had to be Stephens — wasn’t it as plain as anything could be? Gently was Jimmy Fisher’s man, the racketeer’s manes were still unplacated. While he was stuck with Lucky Jim there couldn’t be any trips into the country…

  ‘Three months ago I’d have sent you, Gently.’

  Had the AC divined his disappointment?

  ‘As it is I dare say they’ll expect you to go, which will probably make it tougher for Stephens here. But they’ll have to learn to get on without our celebrities — obviously, you weren’t going to remain a CI for ever. So, if you’ll just give Stephens a little off-the-record briefing, we’ll leave you in peace with the unlamented James Fisher.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded…’

  The words stuck in his throat, but somehow he felt that he had to get them out.

  ‘The way things are going… Pagram can probably manage. Though I don’t want to stand in anyone’s way…’

  The AC looked at him in mild surprise, his spectacles dangling from his hand. Hadn’t it really occurred to him that Gently might want the case, that he was loathing every moment of his office-bound routine?

  ‘Well, in that case, Gently, what can I say?’

  He shot a glance at Stephens, who was standing by impassively.

  ‘I quite agree that the Fisher business is falling into place, and if you’re agreeable, you’re the very man for the other. Am I to understand that you’d like to have the case?’

  As though he needed to ask it! Gently nodded dumbly.

  ‘In that case it’s yours — oh, and you’d better take Stephens with you. I know that Dutt is your regular man, but I think that Stephens will be of more use to you.’

  It was a judgement of Solomon, and Gently was in no mood to question it. Neither, it seemed, was Stephens, who swallowed but said not a word. The AC handed them a folder containing a copy of the report, then dismissed them with a perfunctory ‘Good night’ which still contained a note of surprise in it.

  Closeted with Gently in his office, Stephens became apologetic. He had an uncomfortable feeling that he had made a gaffe and created a bad impression with Gently.

  ‘I can’t say how glad I am that you’ve taken it. I was dreading having to go there, treading in your footsteps…’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘It’s a relief, I can tell you. I expect you know that I’ve only had two cases out of town…’

  In the end, Gently found himself quite liking this young man. He had a proper sense of his own inadequacies and an even properer respect for his elders and betters. An engaging young man — one who would probably go far! Gently began to feel an almost avuncular regard for him.

  ‘At Liverpool Street, then?’

  It was past eight o’clock. In his satisfaction, Gently had not forgotten to phone Mrs Jarvis.

  ‘No — come to my place. We’ll drive down for a change.’

  ‘It’s Finchley, isn’t it — Elphinstow Road?’

  It wouldn’t have surprised Gently even if Stephens had known the number.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After his office — bound routine of the last few months Gently was possessed of a guilty feeling, as though he were off on a secret spree. As he was shaving he made ridiculous faces in the mirror, and several times he caught himself grinning idiotically at nothing. A shadow had been lifted, the shadow of new responsibilities. Once more he was off on his own cherished authority. Like a virtuoso, who, for a time, has been obliged to assist the orchestra, he was released again to his independent rhapsodies.

  ‘And some they whistled, and some they sang.’

  The most nonsensical of things kept running through his mind. At breakfast he astounded Mrs Jarvis by reciting a verse from a ballad, though why it should seem so apposite he couldn’t have explained, even to himself.

  ‘Are you going to be away for long, Superintendent?’

  She regarded him, he noticed, with a blend of reproval and concern. Stephens, who arrived early, had brought an enormous suitcase with him. His face shone as though he had scrubbed it and he had recently clipped his small, downy moustache.

  ‘I’ve been thinking the case over…’

  Gently gave him a cup of tea. In the morning papers, he had been glad to see, there had been no recurrence of the ‘calling the Yard’ theme. Their space had been largely given to the exhibition and to the mysterious picture. Handsome Hansom had had his photograph taken along with the Lord Mayor and Charles St John Mallows.

  By half past eight the Riley was outside and their luggage deposited in the boot. Mrs Jarvis had made a packet of sandwiches from last night’s neglected joint, and this, with a couple of thermoses, she gave into the care of Stephens.

  ‘Just see that the Superintendent eats something…’

  She stood at her gate to watch them departing. It was a brilliant morning with a few scanty clouds, and the early traffic had not yet become troublesome.

  ‘I thought you’d expect me to do a little work on it, sir. I’ve made a few notes of points which occurred to me. Of course, it’s too early to be certain of anything…’

  Nevertheless, Stephens had already propounded a theory to himself.

  ‘If we rule out the husband — and the local police seem to have done it — then I’d say, sir, that we ought to look out for signs of blackmail. There’s this St John Mallows — she might have had her hooks into him, and he must have been near the spot at the time she was murdered.’

  ‘What do you think she had on him?’ The youngster’s zeal amused Gently.

  ‘Well, sir, they might have been intimate together.’

  ‘But St John Mallows isn’t married.’

  ‘No, but she is, sir. Then there might have been perversity, or something of that kind.’

  Had it all seemed so easy when Gently was a young Inspector? Looking back, he couldn’t remember ever having been very sure of himself. But that, possibly, was just the difficulty which Stephens was trying to counter; he was rushing at the case and searching feverishly for a pattern in it.

  ‘That’s something which we shall have to bear in mind, of course.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I could almost swear — if we can once rule out the husband!’

  ‘At the same time… by the way, here’s Tally-ho Corner. I suppose you never read up the Rouse case, did you?’

  It was as he had thought — Stephens was desperately unsure of himself. He welcomed the opportunity to switch the conversation elsewhere. The Rouse case, fortunately, was one that he had swotted up, and he talked about it readily as they made their way through Barnet and Hatfield.

  ‘If he’d kept out of the witness-box, sir — that was his undoing. They’d never have hanged him on the evidence alone.’

  ‘I imagine that the prosecution were banking on that. Knowing Rouse, they were pretty certain that he would take the stand.’

  ‘Do you think so, sir? Was it a legitimate gamble?’

  At Newmarket, where they stopped for coffee, Stephens insisted on receiving and paying the bill. He was smoking a pipe which, Gently noti
ced, was a sandblast much like his own in pattern. It was nearly new, with an unscratched mouthpiece. He couldn’t remember whether he had seen Stephens smoking a pipe before or not.

  ‘Like to try some of mine?’

  He pushed across his tin of navy-cut. Stephens accepted a couple of slices and maladroitly stuffed his pipe with them. From the awkward manner he had of holding his pipe while he was smoking, Gently deducted that this was the young detective’s first essay in the art…

  By noon they were in the outskirts of the old provincial capital, familiar to Gently if not to his protege. It possessed a fine approach along a wide and tree-lined carriageway, on either side of which stood attractive houses in well-kept grounds.

  ‘Aren’t the Northshire people rather difficult to get on with? Someone was telling me in the canteen…’

  Gently smiled at the keep of the Norman castle, now lifting distantly above the rooftops.

  ‘Don’t pay attention to all you hear! You’ll find them much the same as the rest.’

  ‘But you’re the expert on these parts-’

  ‘You’ll be one too, before we’ve finished the case.’

  And Stephens, biting on his pipe, tried to look as though he believed he would.

  At Police HQ, Superintendent Walker was waiting for them. Gently introduced Stephens to him and there followed the usual bout of shaking hands. A constable was dispatched to summon Chief Inspector Hansom, who, two minutes later, appeared still eating a ham sandwich.

  ‘I thought they’d have sent someone else, now that you’d reached the giddy heights!’

  Gently shrugged, finding a seat for himself beside Walker’s desk. Between himself and Hansom there had ever been an armed neutrality; they were antipathetic towards each other, and yet, oddly enough, exerted a mutual fascination.

  ‘You’ve had Hansom’s report, Gently… where would you like him to begin?’

  It was very nearly lunchtime, and the Super was eager to get to their business. Hansom, eating largely to get rid of the sandwich, had dumped himself clumsily at the other end of the desk. There wasn’t a chair for Stephens and so he was obliged to remain standing; he stationed himself behind Gently, where he kept uncomfortably shifting his feet.

  ‘I’d better begin at the beginning, which was about six a.m. on Tuesday. Sergeant Walters, who was on the desk, saw this old fool, Coles, hanging around. He’d been out there for half an hour, just loitering about and doing nothing; every time Walters went to the window he turned his back, or fiddled with a shoelace…’

  Gently knew the type referred to and had given them a private cognomen: they were the ‘angry old men’, of whom every town could show some examples. Seedy, shabby and without any friends, they haunted the market places and busiest streets; they wore an expression of angry surprise, as though perpetually indignant at their age and poverty. And always, if anyone caught their eye, they furiously frowned and turned away…

  ‘Walters went out and accosted the old idiot, wanting to know why he was hanging about there. He says it took him a good ten minutes to get anything intelligible out of the fellow. In the end he said, he supposed that Walters knew all about her — Walters said “Who?” — and this article said: “The sick lady”!

  ‘He’d found Shirley Johnson with a knife sticking out of her shoulderblades, and that was the nearest he could get to describing her!’

  So Walters had followed the old man into the car park, which, ironically enough, adjoined Headquarters as well as the City Hall; and there, behind the dustbins in which the ancient had come to forage, he found that very sick lady lying stiff in the morning dew.

  ‘When you’re ready, if you like, I’ll take you round and show you the spot, but you’ll see how we found her in these photographs here. There wasn’t a lot of blood owing to the knife being left in, but we found one or two splashes leading from a spot about ten yards away.

  ‘He simply stabbed her, I imagine, and then lugged her over to the dustbins. As you see here, he chucked her handbag and coat down beside her. She wasn’t tampered with or mussed up and there were twenty pounds in her bag — likewise her driving licence, so we had no trouble in tracing her.’

  Gently nodded, accepting the proffered bunch of glossy prints. They were interestingly gruesome, but not notably informative. The bins were standing by a terrace wall which flanked the large and much-used park, and though by day they offered little concealment, they would be effective enough after dark. The body had been carelessly dumped behind them. It had fallen on its face and had the right arm twisted beneath it. The thin handle of the paper knife protruded from below the left shoulderblade, and on it, in close up, one could read the inscription: ‘Pearson Cutlers, Sheffield, Eng.’ Only a small stain had appeared on the light-coloured dress.

  ‘Did you find any prints?’

  Gently handed the pictures to Stephens. The young man examined them with a painstaking thoroughness.

  ‘Only hers, on the handbag. Chummie must have been wearing gloves. The handle hadn’t been wiped, it just didn’t have anything on it. There were some contusions on the throat which the Doc says were made before death, so it looks as though he were taking care that she didn’t scream when she got the knife. Anyway, nobody heard her scream, and there would have been enough people about. According to the Doc she was killed between ten p.m. and midnight.’

  ‘What time did she leave this artists’ meeting?’

  ‘Some time after ten-thirty, say twenty to eleven. She stayed talking outside with Mallows and maybe some of the others, then went off alone in the direction of her bus stop.’

  ‘That’s the one beside the car park?’

  ‘Yes, the City Hall stop. It can’t be more than a couple of hundred yards from the George III. You go up a flight of steps and then along the front of the City Hall, then turn left into St Saviour’s, and there’s the stop, nearly under the clock-tower. The bus she went after was an eighty-eight, which leaves that stop at ten to eleven.’

  ‘But she didn’t catch it, of course.’

  ‘Yeah — so we narrow things down to ten minutes.’

  ‘Were there no witnesses in the car park?’

  ‘Two we’ve got, and they didn’t see a sausage.’

  The Super put in: ‘It just missed the theatre turn-out. It’s the patrons of the Playhouse who mostly use that park of an evening. Only half an hour earlier and the place would have been crowded, but they’ve all got away by twenty to eleven.’

  ‘What about people using the bus stop?’

  Hansom extended a pair of none-too-clean hands.

  ‘How do you make them come forward, that’s what I’d like to know! We’ve appealed in the press a couple of times, but all it brought us was an old tabby with a complaint about a conductor. By her account there were six or seven other people waiting, but that’s the beginning and end of her information.’

  Gently nodded and drew some patterns on the desk with his finger. This murderer had either been lucky, or else very clever. He had committed his crime in the most improbable of places, and yet, by chance or plan, seemed to have got completely away with it.

  ‘The buildings bordering the park — was nothing seen or heard from them?’

  ‘Police HQ, I suppose you mean…! Well, we didn’t, so there you are. From the back here, I daresay, we could have watched from a score of windows — we could have done, but we didn’t. We don’t expect chummies down there!’

  ‘You’ve got to remember that it was dark,’ added the Super. ‘The car park isn’t lit and the nearest lights are in St Saviour’s. To see anything going on you’d need to put a searchlight on it, and naturally, we don’t spend our nights inspecting the car park with a searchlight.’

  ‘What about the other buildings?’

  ‘In effect there’s only the City Hall. The fourth side of the park is bounded by blind ends and derelict property. We questioned the nightwatchman from the City Hall, but it appears that he was doing his pools in the basement.’r />
  Gently was conscious of Stephens leaning forward from behind him. He turned his head. ‘You’ve got a question, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, sir — if I may! Perhaps the Chief Inspector can tell me… I was wondering how chummie got the woman into the car park — that is to say, when she was waiting for her bus?’

  It wasn’t a question as much as an answer. Put like that, it immediately offered the solution. Gently nodded his satisfaction at his lieutenant’s acuteness, and from the corner of his eye he noticed the youngster colouring up.

  ‘Of course…!’ Hansom could tell a hawk from a harnser. ‘He was offering her a lift, that’s as plain as my eye. He was someone who knew she was going to catch that bus home, and what’s more, he was someone who was known to Shirley Johnson.’

  ‘And had his car on the car park.’

  ‘Too true… her husband! He was sculling around in his car all the evening. He says he was on a pub crawl out by Halford Ferry and Lordham, but it’s a fact that we can’t check his movements after half past nine.’

  ‘It might equally well have been someone else…’

  ‘Don’t you believe it — Derek Johnson hated her guts. He’s the dead spit of Neville Heath, eyes, curls and everything. I could smell him for our man the moment I set eyes on him, it was only this other business that put me off him for a bit.’

  Gently shrugged indifferently, knowing Hansom’s enthusiasms from of old. It needed only the appearance of progress to set him in full cry. But Stephens’s suggestion, though it narrowed the field a little further, didn’t point to Derek Johnson or to any other individual.

  ‘Do you know where the Palette Group members parked their cars?’

  Stephens had taken the question off Gently’s lips.

  ‘They’re a poverty-stricken bunch, I shouldn’t think they’d got any cars.’

  ‘Not the chairman, St John Mallows?’

  ‘Oh, him. He’s got a Daimler.’

  ‘And did you find out where he parked it?’

  ‘Huh…! Hansom made a contemptuous motion of his head.

  A moment later, however, he climbed off his high horse. He was far from being dense when he gave himself time to think.