Gently Down the Stream

by Alan Hunter

  ‘What stuck out like a sore thumb was that week on the yacht. It couldn’t be explained – there was no adequate reason for it. Lammas had carefully planned things so that he had a week of grace before inquiries began, yet here he was, openly hanging about, almost making certain that someone took notice of him. You can argue that not many people on the Broads knew him and that he kept well clear of Wrackstead – but against that you’ve got to remember that he hired a Wrackstead boat and gave his own name and address to the boat-yard. Then, at the end of the trip, he phones for his chauffeur! What sort of madness was that, from a long-sighted man like Lammas?

  ‘That’s where I started going wrong. He had me fooled with the telephone call. Instead of accepting it and drawing an inference, I began looking for an accomplice in the family, somebody who could have traced Lammas to Ollby and then tipped off Hicks.

  ‘And I didn’t have to look very far. Both Mrs Lammas and Paul were absent from “Willow Street” at the time of the murder and neither of them had an alibi. What was more, their comings and goings were oddly mixed up with one another’s – especially by the row at the end of them! As for motive, that’s always a tricky business. You and I know, if judges don’t, that nobody’s quite sane when they come to do a murder. Mrs Lammas was the predatory type of woman who never lets go of the people she gets in her power. Paul Lammas had National Service hanging over his head – with his father standing by to kick him well and truly into it! To this you had to add their relation to Hicks. He was a confidential retainer whom either might influence. And when it came to finance, they had that too.

  ‘Hicks, of course, was the perfect tool. We know more about him from Lammas’ statement. He was a spy, a liar and what you might call Mrs Lammas’ creature – Lammas suspected he was something more, but we’ve no proof of that. At all events, he’d been a wedge between them. Lammas hated him and he hated Lammas. I got enough of this out of the early interrogations to convince me that Hicks was a likely man.

  ‘To complete the picture, there was the shadow of a fourth person – I made a certain pass at Mrs Lammas and her reaction suggested I was on the right track. We know now who it was, but then it was just something to be kept in mind. And it was the same with Linda Brent. She wasn’t really impressive as a candidate for the murder of the man she loved, so … I’d just keep her in mind and see what turned up.

  ‘Now the first thing to get at was whether Mrs Lammas or her son knew what Lammas was up to and the second – this was vital – whether they knew where to find him. But I was so much impressed by the oddness of that trip on the yacht that I felt compelled to tackle it before anything else. Unless I could get a reason for it, I felt I should miss the significance of other things which might turn up. And I was right … though it isn’t much comfort to me.

  ‘At the time my investigation of the trip seemed a complete waste of energy. I learned nothing of the motive for it except that it apparently had none. Lammas had behaved exactly as holidaymakers do behave. He had visited the same places, done the same things as the others, and it didn’t seem to have worried him that he might have been recognized. His only departure from routine was when he went up Ollby Dyke – to get murdered! There was nothing else remarkable about the whole itinerary.

  ‘Well, I ought to have seen it. I could kick myself now for not seeing it. Rouse … Tetzner … Saffran and Kipnik – I’d studied all their trials at one time or another. And yet I was still in the dark! Lammas had really nulled the wool over my eyes. And just to keep me well off the trail, I happened on some of the evidence I was looking for relating to Mrs Lammas.

  ‘If only people wouldn’t lie to the police!

  ‘The next morning I was hard at it, proving that Mrs Lammas knew what her husband was trying to do. I had just succeeded in doing that when I heard about Annie Packer.’

  Gently broke off, ostensibly to fill his pipe. But the super was well aware of the reason for that delicately-timed little pause. He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly.

  ‘I suppose I ought to apologize …’

  ‘Admittedly, I was being a fool.’

  ‘You couldn’t have saved Annie Packer.’

  ‘No, even Lammas couldn’t have foreseen …’

  ‘And I should know you better by now!’

  Gently lit his pipe forgivingly. A gesture was all he asked for. He breathed a long stream of smoke into the darkening room and prepared to take up his tale again.

  ‘Anyway – it brought me up with a jolt!

  ‘It needed a fantastic theory to cover it. If Hicks had been the tool he must have been packed off into hiding – they wouldn’t have left him dodging about the neighbourhood. And if someone else had done it, then it could only have been for a blind … but what sort of blind was this, which involved the murder of an innocent person? People don’t kill so lightly, not even people with blood on their hands. There were a dozen ways short of murder to make us think that Hicks was still around – and all of them a good deal less risky.

  ‘Yet murder had been done. Right there, on my very doorstep. And to make it artistically right, somebody had circulated a rumour of Hicks having been seen there before the murder took place.’

  ‘Of course, we know now there was no connection,’ the super interrupted. ‘The rumour was Lammas’ red herring. Packer’s murder was purely fortuitous.’

  Gently nodded.

  ‘We know it now … but we didn’t guess it then. I could see it only as an incredibly cold-blooded manoeuvre. And it seemed to indicate that somebody was getting scared, very scared indeed – a fact which pointed in only one direction.

  ‘But before going into that I had to learn what I could about Annie’s killing. There were several curious points connected with it, not the least being the one you noticed about the origin of that rumour. How could it have been started by a stranger in a place like Upper Wrackstead? Everyone knew everyone, and strangers drew attention. Yet if a stranger hadn’t done it then a native must have done … or else somebody actually had been seen who might have been taken for Hicks.

  ‘You can judge how far I was out of my depth. I actually accepted the latter alternative – at least as a working hypothesis. I was so taken up with the idea of Mrs Lammas and Paul being in on it that I was looking at everything from their angle … you don’t know how hard it is for me to admit that.’

  Dutt cleared his throat sympathetically. He knew how hard it was!

  ‘But to get back to the killing.

  ‘Up to a point, I could reconstruct it. I could understand how Annie slipped out to visit Thatcher, how she was intercepted on the way, how she was shot with a silenced revolver and how her body was disposed of. What I couldn’t understand was the absence of blood-stains. There had to be some, unless she’d been shot where she would fall into the Dyke. But that would have made a splash and there wasn’t any splash – so there had to be some blood … and there wasn’t any blood!

  ‘Looking at it now, I can’t think how I could have been so dense. Certainly, I got part of an answer when I discovered that the wounded head had been bandaged. But the major fact was unexplained – some blood had been shed somewhere – and it was sheer, blind prejudice that stopped me from going to the right spot. You see, I was assuming that Annie’s killer came from outside. He had waited for a victim to emerge, and of course Annie was shot on the bank. Was there ever such a classic example of an investigator preferring a theory to a fact?’

  The super frowned uneasily at his blotter. He’d harboured a theory or two himself in this case.

  ‘I don’t see what else you could have thought at the time,’ he observed cautiously.

  ‘I could have followed that fact up. The answer wasn’t far away. If I’d been on top of the situation just then we might have arrested Lammas twenty-four hours sooner than we did.’

  The super held his peace. It wasn’t entirely displeasing to hear Gently admit himself at fault. At the same time, he couldn’t help feeling that Gently aimed
at impossibly high standards in criminal investigation …

  ‘Then there was the stub of greasepaint liner that I picked up off the rubbish-heap. Naturally, I was too bemused to see the significance of that right away. It seemed to connect somewhere. The Lammases were mixed up with amateur dramatics. But all I could think of was that Paul may have got hold of some of his sister’s greasepaint and doctored himself to pass for Hicks … he could have dropped that stub out of his pocket while he was busy with Annie Packer.

  ‘Anyway, I went after Paul in the best way I could, which was by showing him how near his mother stood to a murder charge. That took me to Marsh, and probably to the truth of what went on on Friday night. Only I didn’t know it was the truth … and it might so easily not have been. At that point I was almost ready to back the Paul-Marsh-Mrs Lammas combination. It seemed too tempting to pass over. We hadn’t got enough proof, and it might take some digging up, but we hadn’t quite exhausted the possibilities – and there’s such a thing as luck.

  ‘And then I was checkmated again. Dutt, here, found us Linda Brent. We picked her up – you know what happened. It seemed past doubt that Linda Brent had guilty knowledge of l’affaire Lammas. And if she had, or even thought she had, then what became of a conspiracy which couldn’t have been hatched till just before the murder? No – it went back further! It must have been plotted before Mrs Lammas discovered what her husband was doing and probably before the trip on the Harrier.

  ‘There was the further factor of Miss Brent being in love with whoever she supposed did it. This seemed to point to Paul, and certainly Paul might have got at Hicks after he had paid his visit to “High Meadows”. But how could Paul have planned what took place on Friday in advance?’

  ‘This Brent woman might have let him know what his old man was up to,’ suggested the super, intrigued.

  ‘Yes – as far as the trip went. But how could she have known that Lammas would go up Ollby Dyke in such a convenient way, setting her off first at Halford Quay?’

  ‘She might have been able to fix it …’

  Gently nodded eagerly.

  ‘That’s where I began to smell the scent again. Because I couldn’t think of one single way in which she or any of the others could have fixed such a thing!’

  He eased back on his chair to give them time to appreciate the proposition. It was clear enough now, when one knew the denouement!

  ‘You’ve got to remember how Lammas was placed. He’d cut his ties with his past, there was nothing there for a motive. It wasn’t his business or his family which could draw him into a secret rendezvous. And if it wasn’t these, what was it? What else could have been used to get him up Ollby Dyke just as he was about to fade away?

  ‘There isn’t an answer, but there is a corollary. If Lammas wasn’t enticed up the dyke, then he must have gone there on his own initiative – and if that was the case, who could have known he was there?

  ‘Mrs Lammas couldn’t. She only knew he had set out towards Wrackstead. Paul couldn’t. He didn’t even know as much as that! And as for Marsh, he only knew what Mrs Lammas told him.

  ‘Lammas was the only one who could have phoned Hicks and told him to come to Ollby Dyke.’

  ‘You’re forgetting Linda Brent,’ the super interrupted. ‘She may have known about Ollby Dyke and tipped Paul off.’

  ‘No.’ Gently shook his head. ‘Paul couldn’t have been tipped off. If he’d known what he was going to do, he’d have fixed the chauffeur before he left. He didn’t need to phone unless his father hadn’t arrived at Ollby, which was not the case.

  ‘I’d got to this stage last night when we brought in Linda Brent. It still wasn’t making sense, in fact I seemed to be back at the beginning again. If nobody else was involved, then Hicks must have killed him for the money … and if Hicks had done that, he was at once the cleverest, stupidest and luckiest criminal I had ever had to do with. In addition to which Linda Brent was violently in love with him!

  ‘It was a round dozen of contradiction. I knew I must be seeing it cock-eyed. And it only seemed to make matters worse when I saw the cap and jacket and heard about the shack in the carrs …

  ‘For instance, why would Hicks leave them there, of all places, when he might have stuffed them in the next ditch? If he’d been hiding there himself it would have been a reason. But you could tell me there were no signs of the shack being inhabited and an intensive manhunt had failed to turn up Hicks … so what was it all about? And as you asked me, if Hicks was around, where was he?

  ‘I did the only thing I could think off. I cooked a charge against Linda Brent. If she were right about what she knew then it ought to worry someone, and a murderer getting worried has been known to put a foot wrong.

  ‘Next, I was interested in the shack. It was too handy for Upper Wrackstead … and it did occur to me that Annie might have been lured aboard a dinghy.’

  Gently broke off a little hoarsely. He wasn’t used to speaking at such length. And his pipe kept going out, with all this persistent monologue.

  ‘Is there any coffee left?’

  The super kindly poured him some. It was cold and tasted of grounds, but it slaked a thirsty throat. Outside some stars were sparkling and the traffic was getting thin. Hansom was deciding to risk a cigar, even though he didn’t come from the Central Office.

  ‘I had a hunch about that shack.’

  Gently’s pipe was going again.

  ‘I felt it would make or break me – I’d got into that state of mind! At first it looked like the latter, though I discovered a couple of things you’d missed. One of them suggested that a dinghy had been kept there, and the other that somebody had been using the place long before last Friday. But that didn’t ring a bell. The dinghy fitted a surmise, the other simply added to the mystery.

  ‘I stood in the shack by the nettles literally wrestling with those facts. I knew there must be a right way of seeing them and that I’d got the wrong way. I thought back over everything I’d done, everything which had come to light – odd little things, like the way Lammas had changed his shirt, or the way the jerrican disappeared from the garage, or the way we only found his and Mrs Lammas’ prints on the gun-drawer. And always there loomed up the incredible folly of that week on the Harrier – against so much careful planning, so much able implementation! And after it the dismissal of Linda Brent to her hideaway and the inexplicable rendezvous at Ollby Quay.

  ‘Just there, my mind seemed to be wandering. It kept reverting back to an interview I’d had with your County Drama Organizer. Every time my ideas seemed to be building up to something my thoughts slipped away to that smiling little man and whatever it was he was trying to tell me.

  ‘Psychology is a curious business. I’m tempted to think that had the solution worked out in my unconscious when I got that hunch about the shack … Anyway, I discovered the local reason why my mind kept slipping – I was looking straight at a strip of paper which had been torn from a carmine greasepaint liner! And then I had it, all in a flash. From then on it was simply a bit of routine. There’s a lot of mystery about a substitute corpse when you don’t know what it is … once you do, the murderer hasn’t got much time ahead of him.’

  Gently broke off again, as though that, for him, was the end of the matter. Routine was routine … no need to go into that. The interest lay in how you got to your man.

  ‘Here, but wait a minute!’

  The super thought otherwise.

  ‘Put the light on, somebody … we don’t have to sit here in the dark!’

  Dutt obediently rose to his feet and a glare of fluorescence flooded the bare office. Gently screwed up his eyes and puffed a disapproving cloud of smoke.

  ‘Did you know he was masquerading as Thatcher, right there on the spot?’

  The stars had been ousted from their oblique wedge of sky.

  ‘He was so damned good at it … I had doubts even then.’

  ‘But you had Thatcher in mind?’

  ‘Of course. Th
e date almost clinched it.’

  ‘Dates? What dates, man?’

  ‘Easter, principally … That was when Lammas put his plan in operation – he gives you the reason: it was then when his Society fixed the date of their conference. Having got that, he went to work. He booked the yacht and rented the bungalow … and started disappearing on mid-week trips. And at Easter Thatcher drifted into Upper Wrackstead Dyke, complete with a frowzy old houseboat and an alibi for being there only occasionally …’

  ‘His widow!’ grunted Hansom, whose memory had been stirred. ‘And he was away Friday evening – we heard that right at the beginning.’

  ‘Yes … we heard it from Annie Packer. There’s an odd twist, if you like.’

  ‘Then you knew it was Thatcher when you borrowed his dydle?’

  The super was going to have it, one way or the other.

  ‘I told you … I wasn’t quite sure. And I had to prove my theory. I suppose I might have grabbed Thatcher on suspicion and established his identity, but there was just a chance it was someone else … I like to prove before I move.’

  ‘I don’t see what proof it was against Thatcher, your finding Hick’s denture in the mud.’

  ‘The denture wasn’t.’ Gently shot a wry glance at Dutt. ‘But the bullets were.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘They might as well have had his signature on them. Only Thatcher knew what I was up to. There wasn’t a soul about when I borrowed his dydle … it had to be Thatcher with the gun.’

  ‘It was an unnecessary risk, Gently!’

  ‘I didn’t know he’d chase after us on the next bus.’

  ‘A fine mess we’d have been in if he’d knocked off the pair of you.’

  ‘No doubt he was thinking the same when he saw us with the denture …’

  The holy of holies was silent for a space. Four tired policemen pursued their thoughts at their respectively salaried levels. Gently wondered if he would smoke again and decided that he wouldn’t. He’d run out of peppermint creams while Lammas was making his statement.