Alan Hunter - Gently to the Summit

He opened the Kincaid file and took out the O.S. map he had added to it. Askham, already reviving from his ordeal, watched it being spread out over the desk. Did he sense that something was decided, that a more searching test was being found for him; burning-cheeked, burning-eyed, the arrogance creeping back into his manner?

‘Show me Trecastles.’ Gently brought him into the act deliberately. Askham leaned forward. He pointed to the place with a finger that didn’t tremble.

‘Not far from Bangor, is it…?’

‘Bangor is just across the bridge.’

‘How far are you from Caernarvon?’

‘Eleven or twelve. I haven’t checked it.’

There it lay in cartographical diagram, palely coloured, the drama’s cockpit; the jaw of Anglesey, the blue serpent of Menai, and the club-footed sector with its ballast of Snowdon. There the flashpoint had occurred, the critical moment of these exchanges. On that spot upon the anvil had fallen the hammer of twenty-two years. And there one must go again, seeking the knowledge of that moment, assembling the actors, producing the play, forcing the drama to re-enact itself: stripping the thousands of possibilities from the one undoubted fact and making it stand there blazing naked: upon the summit waited the truth.

Evans was called to the phone and stood by it eating and chopping out monosyllables. Askham was gazing at Gently fixedly, watching where his eyes strayed on the map. Then, apparently by accident, their eyes came together, meeting and holding in a long caesura, holding till Askham dragged his away and let them sink to the map between them…

‘Wait a minute, man. I’ll jot that down.’

Evans juggled with the pad, the phone and his sandwich.

‘And nowhere else… not in Caernarvon, say? Oh, very good, man… let me know the results.’

He stripped the sheet off the pad.

‘So there’s another thing settled. Fleece stayed each time at the same hotel: it was the St David in Beaumaris.’

‘In Beaumaris?’

‘Under his own name. Here are the dates on this paper.’

‘Show it to Askham.’

Evans flipped the paper to the shrinking young man. Now his fingers trembled all right, he needed two attempts to pick up the sheet.

‘What have you to say about that?’

‘I… nothing! It doesn’t mean…’

‘It means that Fleece paid four visits to Beaumaris.’

‘We didn’t — we’ve never seen the man…’

It was a temptation to jump down his throat and to crush that lie flat, but Gently firmly resisted it. Not here, not yet!

‘Very well, then. That’s all — for this evening, in any case. But don’t go off with the idea that we’re satisfied with you.’

‘I’ve told you everything… the truth!’

‘Now listen carefully to what I’m saying. I want you to report at the police station at Llanberis at nine a.m. on Saturday.’

‘B-but what for?’

‘To assist the police.’

‘I won’t do it. You can’t make me!’

Gently nodded his head steadily. ‘You’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Either I arrest you here and now on a charge of conspiracy, or you report at Llanberis at nine a.m. on Saturday. Which way do you want it?’

Askham didn’t deign to answer. He glowered hate at Gently for a moment, then rose and hurled himself out of the office. They heard his feet patter down the stairs. Evans tipped the door shut behind him.

‘Do you know, man,’ he said pleasantly, ‘I had an idea you’d be coming to Wales…’

It needed a certain amount of staff work and a liaison with the Assistant Commissioner, a person who Gently preferred to avoid at this stage in a case. The A.C. was curious, rightfully curious, and he was the enemy of instinct and hunches; he had a pathetic faith in brute fact and in the validity of close reasoning. He had also a question which he deemed important:

‘Have you identified Kincaid, Gently?’

It was naive, but it required an answer, and then some time-wasting explanation.

‘Let’s get this straight, Gently! You can prove Kincaid is the man?’

Gently provided him with some brute facts and a modest garnish of close reasoning.

‘Then why are you running off to Wales?’

In search of Mrs Kincaid, that was obvious. And taking in, for a jeu d’esprit, a reconstruction on Snowdon. Why was that? Gently was dour; he mumbled something about cigarette-cases. He added also, with engaging casualness, that powers of compulsion might be in request…

The latter were intended for Heslington’s benefit, but in the event they proved unnecessary. After a serious chat on the phone with Gently, Heslington consented to appear at Llanberis. Overton needed no persuading, he sounded glad to be included, while a precautionary inquiry at Mount Street showed that the Askhams had left for Beaumaris. By Friday lunchtime the job was done and Gently and Evans were on the train to Holyhead.

They arrived late in Caernarvon and took a taxi direct to Evans’s diggings. He had comfortable rooms in a terrace house that faced the low, green Anglesey shore. On their way there Gently had noticed that the streets were quite dry, and in the morning he found a Welsh sun bleaching the wide Menai flats. It was more than an omen: it was necessary. They needed the weather on their side.

‘It should be clear at the top, man.’

Evans seemed a new man at breakfast. He had emerged from his London vapours and was wearing a face as bright as the sun. On the way down he’d had a spell of sulks; he’d tried and failed to draw the uncommunicative Gently; but now, with his foot under his native breakfast-table, he’d clearly dismissed the clouds from his nature.

‘What a view, man. What a view to eat by.’

You might have thought he owned the Menai Straits. He sat Gently on the side of the table that faced them and kept giving him glances to be assured of his admiration. And he chaffed his landlady with an arch, sly wickedness. She was a comely forty-two. It was really too bad of him.

He had rung his station and a car arrived for them at half-past eight. It brought with it Sergeant Williams, a youngish detective with a serious face. Evans was now more on his dignity. His mien to Williams was stern. He checked critically on the sergeant’s account of the investigations he had made locally. But there was nothing fresh to learn. Williams had uncovered no trace of Paula Kincaid. She wasn’t a ratepayer, she hadn’t voted, and she wasn’t registered with the National Health Service; if in fact she’d been living in Caernarvon, it could only have been under a different name.

‘Which is what one would have expected.’

Evans’s spirits remained undampened. It was apparent that he was following a different line to Gently, and that his self-confidence was undisturbed by the odd freaks of the latter.

‘We must look for a woman who left the town very suddenly. On Monday evening, or some time after that. She’ll probably have left her things behind her; she’ll just have packed a bag and gone. So it shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s probably people wondering already

…’

Gently puffed his morning pipe without offering any comment. He watched the steaming, gold-green hills that began to appear on their right. He didn’t want to talk, the time for discussion was over; he needed now to preserve the calm, the charged sensitivity of his mood. He was as an artist who had prepared his way and awaited the moment to pick up his brush. Nothing now must be allowed to divert him, to detract from that pregnant and dedicated poise…

They came to Llyn Padarn, looking cold and darkly blue, and then they were running into the countrified main street of Llanberis. It followed the trend of the district. It was narrow, crooked and strangely Victorian. Slate quarries frowned on it from across the llyn and folding mountains loomed ahead of it. And here it was that Kincaid had come in search of his wife, bridging two long decades with a tap on a door; noticing perhaps the new terraces which the quarriers had cut, and feeling once again the old lure of the mountains. Or so he had said, so ran his statement. And the truth was not now so very far off…