They weren’t so very busy, serving lunch at the Bulrush Cafe near 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 wrested 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?
Gently’s head shook slowly at the riotous jungle of the carrs. That was the crucial question which preceded all theory.
Only, it helped to keep that picture firmly in view. Unless it was there one could easily overlook a detail which might be the very one.
The launch slid up to the quay at Eccle and Gently jumped out without waiting for Dutt to make fast. Eccle Bridge was a little yachting community on its own, solitary in the wide marshes. A mile away was the village. Against the bridge clustered a boat-yard, a store, and at some distance a public house. For the rest it was a long, straight reach with good mooring on scrubby raised banks.
Gently poked his way into a boat-shed.
‘Hi, you! Where’s the gaffer?’
He was a tall, pale-eyed man of fifty, with a stoop and the calloused hands of a carpenter.
‘Police… Chief Inspector Gently. Is it right that Sloley’s Harrier moored here yesterday week?’
It was. The tall man had seen it himself. They had come in at about 7 p.m., when the moorings were already crowded, and tied up about halfway down the opposite bank.
‘Did you know who it was?’
‘No… it’s the boats one notices.’
‘You wouldn’t know what they did that evening?’
The tall man simply shrugged.
It was the same at the pub — nobody knew Lammas, or knew if they’d seen him. Neither did they at the store, though they had a small piece of information for him.
‘Of course I never knew Mr Lammas, but we’ve always done business with him. He’s our wholesaler for a lot of lines… a lot of us deal with him round the Broads.’
‘You do, do you? And who’s his representative?’
‘It’s a traveller called Mr Williams.’
‘Did you owe him any money?’
The store proprietor looked hurt.
‘We keep a small account, naturally.’
‘Nobody’s tried to collect it — say first thing last Monday morning?’
But they hadn’t, of course. That wasn’t going to be the answer. Whyever else Lammas had spent his week on the Broads, it wasn’t to square up his odd accounts. At the same time… wouldn’t there be any of his customers who knew him personally? And if so, wasn’t it getting riskier and riskier, that honeymoon trip in the Harrier?
Gently sat like a carved idol beside his colleague all the way up the Thrin to Hockling. Lammas couldn’t have kept that trip secret! Somewhere, sometime, he must have blundered into someone who would recognize him; even, perhaps, his own traveller. And then what had happened? Had they got on to Mrs Lammas? Or did they represent a mysterious extra element which so far hadn’t come into his calculations?
And then once more… who knew better than Lammas the risk he was taking?
He might have spent that week anywhere else in the wide world!
‘Stop here.’
They were passing the village of Petty Hayner.
Dutt fumbled with Old Man Sloley’s list.
‘It ain’t one of the places, sir.’
‘I know it isn’t, but he’d stop for lunch, wouldn’t he?’
And so it went on through the burning afternoon and the endless evening, stopping, checking, throwing out leading questions — and getting nowhere. It was only the Harrier people had seen. It was a chronic complaint with them — they noticed boats, but they didn’t notice people. And, they would always add, if they had seen Lammas they wouldn’t have known him… it was like inquiring for someone from another planet. Was it barely possible he had come through that week unscathed?
‘Well, sir, it’s been a nice little houting!’ observed Dutt as they throbbed back upstream through the white smoke-mist. ‘I never did get round to one of those holidays afloat before, but I reckon I’ve seen it all now, sir.’
Gently bit on the end of a dead pipe and reached automatically for a match.
‘I’ve got an odd feeling, Dutt.’
‘Yessir. That sun was bleeding fierce, sir.’
Gently grinned. ‘I don’t mean sunstroke! The feeling I’ve got is that I’ve learned something about this trip of Lammas’, and I don’t know what the blazes that something is.’
‘You mean as how you can’t see the wood, sir.’
‘Exactly, Dutt — I can’t see the wood.’
He scratched the match, which lit cheerily in the dank vapour curling past them.
‘The further we go, the more it grows on me… but it’s no use harping on it. What’s this place we’re just coming to?’
‘Halford Quay, sir, ’cording to the map.’
‘It isn’t on the list, but we’d better give it a whirl.’
‘You’ll have covered the lot then, sir,’ returned Dutt, with the merest tinge of bitterness.
Halford Quay was a popular spot. There were yachts and cruisers moored two deep all along its not-very-great expanse. At one end it was blocked by the gardens of a brightly-lit hotel, at the other chopped off by the cut-in of a boat-yard. Into this Dutt directed the launch. As they came alongside the staithe an elderly, bearded man in navy cap and sweater ambled across to them.
‘Now don’t yew know this is private properta… or dew yew think yew can buy petrol at this time of night?’
Gently shrugged and tossed him the painter.
‘We shan’t worry you long… and maybe you can tell us what we want to know.’
‘Ah… maybe I can an’ maybe I can’t.’
He weighed up the launch with a professional eye, then cast a shrewd glance at the occupants.
‘Tha’s old Slola’s boat, now, i’nt’t? And I reckon I can guess who yew are without strainin m’self.’
Gently nodded briefly and climbed out on to the staithe.
‘I was wonderin how long yew’d be gettin round here… thought that’d be a rummun dew yew missed me out!’
‘You know why we’re here then?’
‘Blast yes — I can read the paper.’
‘And you’ve something to tell us?’
‘W’either I dew, or else yew don’t hear it.’
Gently considered this ambiguous reply for a moment.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Me! I’m Ole Sid Crow — Ole Sid’ll dew round here.’
‘You work at the yard here?’
‘I dew, when I aren’t idle.’
‘Go on then — what’ve you got to tell us?’
Sid Crow came a little closer, as though afraid that a precious word might go astray.
‘He dropped her here — tha’s what I’ve got to tell yew. Now say I’m a blodda liar an’ don’t know what I’m talkin’ about!’
He did know what he was talking about. He proved that up to the hilt. Of all the interviewees they had tackled on that trip, Sid Crow was the single one who knew Lammas by sight — he had worked at the Yacht Club on Wrackstead Broad and seen Lammas pull in there on his half-decker. And he could describe the clothes Lammas was wearing. And also Linda Brent.
The Harrier, it appeared, had moored at Halford Quay at tea-time on the Friday. The quay had been crowded then as it was now and she had tied up on the public side of the cut-in, right under Sid’s nose. The two occupants had then proceeded to get tea. They had had it in the well, without any attempt at concealment. After tea they had smoked a leisurely cigarette, washed and put away the dishes, and a little later had gone ashore, Lammas carrying two suitcases and Linda Brent her handbag and plastic raincoat. They went in the direction of the bus stop. About ten minutes later Lammas returned alone. Without any hurry he made the yacht ship-shape, checked his petrol and then quanted her over to Sid’s side for a fill-up. And then he had set off upstream; time, about twenty to seven.
‘You’re sure it was to the bus stop they went?’ queried Gently.
‘W’no.’ Sid Crow gave a deprecating twist with his shoulders. ‘But tha’s the way they went and there was a bus just about due.’
‘What bus was that?’
‘There’s one go into Narshter at twenta past six, weekdas.’
‘And what time would it get in at Norchester?’
‘Bout seven — yew’d better ask them what go on it.’
Gently caught Dutt’s eye with a meaningful look in it.
‘There aren’t any other buses round about then?’
‘Nothin more till eight o’clock.’
‘Thank you, Mr Crow. That’s a useful piece of information.’
He paused a moment, puffing blue smoke into the tepid, misty air.
‘Of course, when you heard what had happened to Mr Lammas you mentioned what you had seen to one or two people…?’
Sid Crow was disgusted.
‘I’m old enough t’know when t’keep m’mouth shut — specialla when I knew that parta wa’nt his missus!’
‘Then you didn’t mention it to anyone?’
‘Not the bit about the female.’
‘But the bit about his being here on the Harrier?’
‘W’yes — I told his missus.’
‘You told who?’
‘I told his missus — though mind yew, I woon’t have done dew I ha’nt thought she knew about’t alreada.’
Gently coughed over his sparking pipe. It was quite a few seconds before he got round to his next question…
‘And when did you tell his missus?’
‘Why, that verra same evenin’?’
She had driven up in her car at about a quarter past seven and parked it opposite the quay. Sid, alerted by what he had seen previously, had watched her with interest as she walked along the quay, obviously looking for the departed yacht. When she came to the end of the quay she had beckoned Sid across. She didn’t know he recognized her.
‘I’m looking for Mr Lammas on board the yacht Harrier. Have you seen him by any chance?’
Sid told her he had supplied the Harrier with petrol.
‘His — er — wife, was she on board with him?’
‘No mum. He was alone when he pulled in here.’
‘He was on his way to Wrackstead, I suppose?’
‘He certainla went off in that direction.’
Mrs Lammas had given Sid half a crown, gone back to her car and driven off again directly.
Gently sighed deeply at the end of this narration.
‘And you weren’t going to tell me this if I hadn’t squeezed it out of you?’
Sid’s weathered features wrinkled into a wink.
‘Well, yew got to remember, ole partna… it was her what give me the half-crown.’
‘Ahem!’ coughed Dutt, ‘don’t you think we ought to take a statement, sir?’
It was dark when Gently sent the Wolseley bumbling down the lane to the cottage, but there were lights enough on the river bank. Besides the glimmer of lamps through houseboat windows there were two or three hurricanes placed at strategic points and in the space so illuminated an animated scene was enacting. As Gently switched off the engine the rollicking music of a concertina could be heard.
‘Looks like they’re having a spree, sir!’ exclaimed Dutt, his cockney eyes brightening.
‘And that bloke can really play a concertina,’ mused Gently as he slammed his door.
Within the circle of light two grotesque figures were hopping and gyrating. Ponderous, massive, yet with a sort of elfin agility, they gave the impression of something non-human, of mindless animals caught in a bewitched pattern.
‘It’s Ted Thatcher and Cheerful Annie doing a hornpipe, sir!’
On the roof of the wherry sat Pedro, Pedro the Fisherman. It was Pedro who was swinging and twirling the concertina. Never a false note trilled and cascaded from his long, tip-flattened forgers, never a pause interrupted the ecstatic rhythm. Like a Pied Piper of Upper Wrackstead he wove his spell and the corpulent couple had to obey him, though sweat trickled down their none-too-clean faces.
‘Go it, Annie! Keep it up, Tedda bor!’
All around the boat-dwellers sat or squatted, clapping in time and shouting encouragement. Some visitors moored along the bank sat on their cabin roofs laughing and applauding. And there was no end to that lilting music. It frolicked on and on with rapturous and infinite variation. The very soul of music seemed to have settled in Pedro’s concertina, seemed to be releasing itself through his runaway fingers.
Gently moved over to the magic circle of lamp-light.
‘Cor… couldn’t we half do with this bloke down at the “Chequers”!’
‘Come an join us!’ panted the dripping Thatcher, catching sight of Gently. ‘Dew I can dance the Starmth Hornpipe, there i’nt no reason why yew shoont!’
But Gently was more interested in the slim figure perched on the wherry’s cabin roof.
For a moment, as he regarded it, the curly hair, angelic eyes and shy smile faded into stolid East Anglian countenance beneath a peaked chauffeur’s cap.
Then he shook his head and turned away.
‘Come on, Dutt, we’d better ring HQ.’
‘Just a moment, sir… it ain’t often you get a basinful of this!’
Gently shrugged and went back to lock the car. As he pushed open the gate of the cottage he nearly ran into a thin, white-haired person who was standing there as motionless as the gate-post.
‘Ah, Mrs Grey! I didn’t see you in the dark.’
She made no reply. By the faint glimmer of light from the lamps he could dimly descry her set, ashen face. There were tears running silently down it.
‘Mrs Grey… but what’s the matter?’
She gave a little broken sob.
‘They say they’ve seen him… my nephew.’
‘Seen him! Seen him where?’
‘Here… going into my cottage. But it i’nt true, Mr Gently. It i’nt true! They’re a lot of good-for-nothings trying to make trouble for me! I woon’t hide him… not though he’s my own sister’s boy!’
She broke down in a fit of sobbing.
In the distance, Gently could see Dutt throwing off his hat and joining in that seductive hornpipe.