Gently Down the Stream

by Alan Hunter

‘He’d have no reason, would he? You were only going to Sea Weston.’

  ‘The suggestion is ridiculous! What can you possibly have in mind?’

  ‘And then he got back first – that doesn’t look as though he were following you, does it?’

  Mrs Lammas rose from her seat and drew herself up to her full stature in front of him.

  ‘Inspector Gently, you will kindly tell me what you are insinuating or I shall refuse to answer another question!’

  Gently shrugged and surveyed her Lilliputian indignation sadly.

  ‘It’s simple, ma’am … there was too much promiscuous driving going on.’

  She sat down again. It was impossible to read her thoughts from her face. Like the features of a little statuette, they remained set and entirely devoid of expression.

  ‘In effect, you are accusing us of telling lies?’

  ‘Of being less than frank.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother to pick your words! It amounts to exactly the same. Where did we go, then?’

  ‘I’m hoping you will tell me.’

  ‘I have told you – but you don’t seem to be satisfied. If you expect a different tale you must give me time to concoct one.’

  ‘The simple truth will do, ma’am.’

  ‘Not, it would appear, for a policeman.’

  An impasse seemed to have been reached and the intelligent Hansom jiffled and breathed stern smoke through his powerful nostrils. If only Gently knew when it was time to turn some heat on! But he remembered a former pointed glance of the chief inspector’s.

  ‘You see, ma’am, in a business like this we’ve got to have proof that people were where they say they were.’

  ‘I am fully aware of that fact, Inspector Hansom.’

  ‘And neither you nor Mr Paul have given us any.’

  ‘For which we are much to be blamed. Have you any further comment?’

  Hansom’s eyes gleamed, but he struggled manfully against the instinct to bite off heads.

  ‘We shall make stringent inquiries, ma’am.’

  ‘I trust you will, in view of the exorbitant rates I pay.’

  ‘We shall get the truth in the long run. It’s in your own interest to make a clean breast now.’

  ‘Your advice is kind, if not, perhaps, asked for.’

  ‘It’s not advice – I’m warning you!’ bawled Hansom, goaded beyond discretion, ‘this is a homicide inquiry – not a variation on Twenty Questions!’

  Mrs Lammas turned cuttingly to Gently.

  ‘Is this man strictly necessary to you, or is he here merely because of some ridiculous regulation?’

  She wasn’t going to alter her story. They went over it point by point, with special reference to Gently’s large-scale map. It clicked home everywhere, like the movement of a Swiss watch. She had gone out. She had gone to Sea Weston. She had parked the car on a piece of waste ground. She had walked along the evening beach, where the tide had left the sand firm and smooth. And she had driven home again, to arrive just ahead of Paul. No, she hadn’t spoken to anyone. She did not patronize the cafe or ice-cream bar at Sea Weston. Whether anyone who knew her had noticed her she could not say. Presumably the police would elicit that in the course of Inspector Hansom’s stringent inquiries.

  ‘And the disagreement you were alleged to have had with your son when you got home?’

  ‘Entirely mythical, inspector. My servants are Welsh, you know, and inclined to use their imaginations.’

  ‘They talked about it as though they were in no doubt.’

  Mrs Lammas’ tinkle of laughter was restored to office.

  ‘You are too English, inspector … you don’t understand Welsh people! Do you know what I honestly think is at the bottom of it?’

  ‘I’d be glad to know.’

  ‘Paul was giving an animated impression of a woman driver hogging the middle of the road. He raised his voice, of course. They must have heard it and assumed the rest.’

  ‘They say it was going on for over an hour. Until your daughter came in, in fact.’

  ‘They mean they were talking about it for over an hour, if I know anything about my own servants.’

  Gently hunched his shoulders and stared at his pad full of scribbles.

  ‘Leaving that, what happened to the photograph of your husband which used to stand on the bureau there?’

  She looked sharply where he indicated and hesitated.

  ‘I really couldn’t say … unless he chanced to take it with him.’

  ‘You agree that there was such a photograph?’

  ‘Naturally! He was an inmate of the house. One was obliged to suffer certain evidences of it.’

  ‘There would be other photographs … you have some you could show me?’

  ‘I have one or two in my albums, though I should warn you that none of them are very recent.’

  ‘All the same, I should be obliged to see them.’

  Mrs Lammas rose and went over to a dainty little cabinet, from which she took four expensively bound snapshot albums. She brought them over to the table and laid them in front of Gently.

  ‘This green one is the earliest; it was bought at Torquay. It should have quite a number of him.’

  She flicked over a few of the pages. Then an expression of perplexity came into her eyes.

  ‘Oh – but someone’s taken them all out!’

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘Look – here, and here … and here! There are only the mounts left. This is really going too far! I didn’t particularly want them, but they were my property!’

  She threw the green volume aside and picked up another. The anger growing in her countenance indicated what she found there.

  ‘The absolute pig! These were not his to make away with. And I was on some of them – there were several with myself and Paul—!’

  ‘You must remember that he was planning to disappear.’

  ‘But this is criminal! Taking my photographs – they can never be replaced!’

  ‘There’ll be the negatives … what about them?’

  She was back at the cabinet in a moment, rifling in a cardboard box and tossing film-wallets on to the carpet. But Lammas had apparently been thorough. She stamped on the floor with her tiny foot and hurled the box into a corner.

  ‘I could kill him for this! I tell you I’m glad he’s been murdered!’

  ‘Come now, Mrs Lammas.’

  ‘He knew it would hurt me … as though I should ever try to find out where he went!’

  For a moment it looked as though she would burst into tears. Then she recovered herself and came slowly back to the table.

  ‘Well, it didn’t get him far. No, it didn’t get him far!’

  Gently nodded profoundly and made a sympathetic clicking noise.

  ‘Something has just occurred to me.’

  Mrs Lammas raised her head.

  ‘Paul … he hated your husband. Wouldn’t he hate anyone who tried to step into his shoes?’

  What happened next was so unexpected that Hansom’s jaw dropped open wide, while the Constable’s pencil made a scribble like a seismograph recording.

  Mrs Lammas screamed – a loud, blood-chilling scream. And having screamed, she rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  ‘Glory O’Rory!’ gabbled Hansom, ‘what the blue blazes was all that about!’

  Gently gazed at the slammed door stupidly. ‘I’m not absolutely certain … just at the moment.’

  ‘But what did you say to her to get a skirl like that?’

  ‘Oh, something about Paul. I daresay it wasn’t very important.’

  Hansom looked at him darkly as he bent to find his cigar stump.

  ‘All I can say is that you might give us a warning – that’s all! Some of us have got nervous systems that haven’t been chilled off with peppermint!’

  Gently chuckled and gave his colleague a light.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY WEREN’T SO very busy, serving lunch at the Bulrush Café nea
r the bridge. Later on in the week the novelty of using one’s galley or cooking-locker would have worn off and things would liven up, but on Monday one still had a fund of enthusiasm.

  Sitting in the window, you could watch the gay yachting crowd pass and re-pass. They were a heterogenous lot, both sexes and all ages. Now it would be a noisy crowd of teenagers in open wind-cheaters and jazzy tasselled caps, now a family party, the father looking self-conscious with his legs sticking out of shorts. Or a young couple carrying a baby between them and looking very capable. Or vigorous young men in white jerseys and the beginnings of beards. Or a self-intent pair of honeymooners, or noisy children, or pretty girls.

  Gently stared at them absently over his cup of coffee. He was aware of a certain irritation with himself. By now he ought to have been getting into the picture of this business – nothing would induce him to call the picture a theory! – there ought to have been a few broad strokes on the canvas indicating the final composition, however imperfect in detail.

  But those strokes wouldn’t come. Or rather, there were too many of them and they all looked slightly false.

  Hansom, for instance, had run off half a dozen theories already, equally tenable … and equally unconvincing.

  Yet there was a picture there behind it all. The bits and pieces he was digging up each fitted into a pattern of some sort, if only he could grasp what it was.

  ‘There’s that week on the yacht!’ he grumbled for the fifth time, ‘no man in his senses would have done a thing like that, unless.’

  ‘Unless he had a damned good reason, sir,’ added Dutt, trying to be helpful.

  ‘Precisely! A damned good reason. And what good reason could he have?’

  ‘Well, sir, like Inspector Hansom says …’

  ‘Inspector Hansom is an ass, Dutt.’

  ‘Yessir. My hopinion too, sir.’

  ‘Hire yachts aren’t allowed below Hightown Bridge at Starmouth. Lammas could never have got out to sea.’

  ‘No sir. Though it was your idea about the jerrican, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.’

  ‘Well I was wrong, Dutt … he took it for some other damned silly reason! Or else the chauffeur took it, or somebody planted it. But there weren’t any sea-trips in mind, not in anybody’s mind. That’s something we can get into our thick heads!’

  He felt better after this outburst. Perhaps it was the handsome Hansom who was getting on his nerves.

  ‘Of course, Hansom’s all right in his way …’

  He finished his coffee and sat looking at the cup. On the balance, it has to be the chauffeur. There was nobody else with their neck showing quite as much. You could discount the woman. There were reasons why she might be lying low. But the chauffeur!

  If they got his prints off the inside of that drawer there wouldn’t be any doubts left. Hansom was sending his print man down straight away and there was a Constable left guarding the bedroom against any more polishers … innocent or guilty. There would be plenty of Hicks’ prints in the garage. They could get them off tools, off doors, off the cars. And they could get Lammas’ prints from the bedroom and from the office.

  But supposing Hicks was wearing his gauntlets when he slipped that gun out of the drawer? And why wasn’t the drawer locked … for it certainly hadn’t been forced?

  A tiny will-o-the-wisp lit up seductively in the corner of Gently’s mind. That scream of Mrs Lammas’ when he prodded her with the suggestion of another man! She wouldn’t have been the first woman to fall for her chauffeur. Or was it the other way round – was it Hicks who had fallen for her and been made a tool of to square accounts with a defecting husband? Or an unwanted husband?

  For a moment he let the idea dwell and expand in his brain.

  It meant that Mrs Lammas knew her husband was on the yacht – to say the least. It also meant that she had caused him to get rid of Linda Brent before the end of the trip and had then lured him into the fastness of Ollby Dyke. Well … that wasn’t impossible!

  After that, it all fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle.

  She slipped Hicks the gun and told him to stand by. She had driven down to the turn and ascertained that the Harrier had arrived. Then she phoned up from the call-box and Hicks had done the job for her, while a suspicious Paul lurked watching … perhaps had seen a rewarding embrace before the infatuated chauffeur was paid off and sent into hiding.

  And the firing of the yacht, where did that fit in? If it was going to look like an accident, why arrange things so that Hicks took the blame?

  That must have been Paul too! He had given a further twist to the plot. Ignorant that Hicks was cast for the fall-guy, he had visited the scene of the crime and, appalled at the obviousness of it, he had tried to cover up by creating a holocaust – almost erasing the identity of the victim in the process, which had been no part of his mother’s plan.

  Yes, they would certainly have plenty to talk over in that terrific hour before Pauline got back.

  Triumphantly, Gently considered his coffee-cup solution in all its sweet reasonability. Then his inborn suspicion of a beguiling theory flooded back and swept it away.

  He signalled to the waitress.

  ‘Come on, Dutt, get rid of that coffee!’

  ‘We going into tahn, sir?’

  ‘Not us. We’re getting that launch again.’

  ‘But there’s the office, sir … ought to give it a butcher’s.’

  ‘Don’t argue, Dutt. Hansom will see it doesn’t run away. I want to know why Lammas spent that week on the Harrier, and I’m going to know it, if it means taking the Broads apart in six-inch sections!’

  Dutt gulped his coffee resignedly.

  Experience had taught him not to get between Gently and a hunch.

  They had got a list from Old Man Sloley of all the yards where the Harrier had been seen on her tragic last cruise. Put together on a map, it looked distressingly like the average week’s trip down the North River and its tributaries.

  First Lammas seemed to have gone straight down to Eccle Bridge, the customary Ultima Thule of one-week yachtsmen. Then he had worked back upstream, exploring the Thrin to Hockling Broad and the Awl to Stackham Staithe. By the Friday night, if all had gone well, he would have been in a position to make an easy run to Sloley’s Yard on the following morning.

  Ten thousand yachtsmen did exactly the same between Easter and Michaelmas. What was he up to, if it hadn’t been simply a pleasure cruise?

  ‘Eccle Bridge – we’ll go just where he went.’

  Gently settled himself in the launch while Dutt took the helm. Rushm’quick cast off for them, a little disgruntled because he was being left out this time.

  And then they were on their way … setting out exactly as the Harrier had set out nine days ago. In Gently’s mind’s eye the scrubby and much-used launch became a trim little auxiliary yacht, the hot afternoon turned to cool, mist-rising evening and the uncompromising figure of Dutt transmuted to a sophisticated beauty with straight black hair, a heart-shaped face and appealing eyes.

  What had been in his mind that evening, as he throbbed across the pulk into the river? What did he see ahead of him past the slender mast and wire shrouds, over the symmetrical cabin-top, across the incurving decks with the quant laid one side and the mop the other?

  ‘Never mind the speed limit … we’ve got to get a move on if we’re to do the trip before dark.’

  Dutt advanced the throttle-lever in its quadrant and they surged forward with a sudden thrust of power. There were irate shouts from the more law-abiding users of the river, but Gently seemed deaf to what was going on about him.

  You had to go back further than that Friday evening. You had to go back twenty years or more, to an expensive hotel in Torquay of the thirties, when England was still an inviolable island and the Spanish Civil War a remote and somewhat perplexing incident. To that hotel had gone a beautiful young widow and her Welsh maid, a rich young widow, a young widow whose handsome officer-husband had been cruelly w
rested from her a few weeks previously; not gloriously, not heroically, but as the result of a miserable scourge taken while carrying out useless routine duties in a coaling-station at the ends of the earth. Had she not a right to be bitter, that one? Had she not a right to complain at the cynical dispositions of a criminal providence? She had played the game by the rules and this had been her reward. She had asked only the common privileges of life and they had been snatched away with taunting laughter. Yes … she had grounds for bitterness, that beautiful and rich young widow!

  But then there had been the other one, this confident businessman in his thirties, just beginning to enjoy his expanding circumstances. Wasn’t it time he took a wife now, with his struggles all behind him? He could afford a wife, just as he could afford his new sports car. He had income and prospects, a handsome face, a trim figure … he was the sort of man that women put on a special voice for. But he would want a striking wife, just as he wanted a striking car. Soon he would be a councillor, one day probably mayor of his important provincial city – it helped, then, to have a wife who caught people’s eye, who could hold her own with a duchess, or steal the picture from visiting royalty.

  ‘Through the broad, sir?’ enquired Dutt, nodding towards the Little Entrance.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Dutt. As though he would parade right under his wife’s nose!’

  The launch continued to race downstream.

  … And they had met, these two, the rich young widow and the pushing young businessman; they had met and decided that each had what the other wanted. She wanted another husband from life – a secure one this time, no being dragged away for sacrifice on the altar of Colonialism! And he wanted a superb specimen of the female, an outstanding woman – better still if well-bred, best of all if rich as well!

  Wouldn’t it be easy to imagine they were in love? Wouldn’t it be easy to be reckless, when there were so many advantages in the match?

  Only of course they weren’t in love … that was something they had to discover later. In twenty-odd years. In two decades of slow division. Beginning – with what subtle modification of attitude did it begin? – in those hopeful, optimistic days of the early thirties; and ending when a disillusioned businessman, now no longer young, set out on a pleasure cruise with his secretary and all his realizable assets, heading for … what?