Alan Hunter - Gently in the Sun

He grunted and tapped his pipe on his heel — twist had never been a favourite smoke with him. From the direction of the village he could see Maurice returning and with Maurice, at all events, he had no doubts about technique.

‘Where have you just been?’

‘Me? Down to the shop!’

‘After what?’

‘Well, if you’re not going to be allowed to…’

Gently clicked his tongue in caustic admonishment.

‘Come, come! Don’t send me bothering the exchange. You’ve just been phoning Lambeth to let them know what’s coming — and you thought it would be safer to do it in the village!’

The fact that he was right gave him a childish pleasure; it compensated his ego for the inroads made by Esau.

In the guest house trouble waited for him, wearing the face of Inspector Dyson. The County man had been talking to Stock and confirming his belief in Gently’s duplicity. Gently fixed him with a drink and led him out on to the lawn. Dyson’s face had reached the peeling stage: he was treating his arms as though they were made of glass.

‘I’m afraid we still don’t understand.’

He found it difficult to come to the point.

‘The super thinks… since you were on the other case. Mightn’t there be a connection which perhaps, as yet…?’

That infernal connection! What in fact did it consist of? Contiguity was the one sure thing they had to go on. The sandhills body was much too old. It predated Simmonds and probably Rachel. Mixer had been a boy… Maurice a child… Hawks and Esau were the ones if they wanted to show connection. Esau, who had shown it to him, and Hawks, who kept getting drunk.

‘Nothing further with missing persons?’

Dyson gloomily shook his head.

‘I’ve been trying round the village — the postman, vicar — people like that. In a place as small as this you’d expect someone to remember. Everyone knows everybody. They couldn’t disappear for a day. My own idea is that it was a visitor, but where do you start looking then?’

‘A lot of visitors come from Norchester.’

‘Yes, but there’s nobody on their records. Then I had half a notion that it was someone from up here, but the super says you checked, and that as far as you know…’

It was true, Gently had seen the manager before lunch. The Bel-Air, like Hiverton, had a clean sheet of missing persons. They had phoned the manager’s predecessor, who lived in retirement: the clean sheet extended to the Bel-Air’s foundation.

‘So we’re left with a day tripper who didn’t come from Norchester — raped and strangled, no doubt, though she might have been poisoned. And as the super points out…’

The parallel was rather striking: only one thing made a difference — that little matter of thirty years!

‘Do you think it’s just possible that we’re after the same man?’

Gently could hardly keep a smile from straying over his face. Dyson was watching him like a cat, trying to surprise his guilty knowledge. For the Central Office man it was a unique experience.

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘In that case, perhaps…?’

‘I’m simply agreeing in principle. I don’t say I know who did it.’

Yet didn’t he, to be honest; wasn’t he as certain as he could be? Hadn’t Esau drawn up the case for him as plainly as in a written statement? It had all happened before, that was the heart of the matter. Rachel’s murder had been the echo of a crime in the sleeping past. Hawks had been a young man then, he’d been tall, athletic, handsome. The bitter sourness of his face was something still to be contracted.

An Adonis, keen on women! And unlike Maurice, with taking qualities. In the wreck of the man one could see what he had been, one could glimpse the bright flame that tragedy had dimmed. And Esau, he knew what had wrought that change. They had been mates together… brothers… fishermen. He had known of the passionate crime which took place in the marrams, but it was a fisherman’s crime and his mouth was closed.

And the years had passed over it, but they hadn’t washed it clean. The secret had raised a barrier between the two men. It tied them together but also it held them apart: they were married, one to the other, in a fearsome, life-long alliance. And it had set its stamp on them according to their natures. Hawks it had made savage, Esau a solitary. Unacknowledged, unshriven, it had worked its deadly ends; one of them had sunk beneath it and the other found a lonely eminence.

Then Rachel had come with her devastating beauty: Rachel, stirring passions which had slept for thirty years. Had Esau seen it happening, seen the madness begin to gather? Had he tried to watch over her and to prevent the second outbreak?

Yes, at the bottom of him Gently knew it: this was the case which Esau had sketched for him. The fisherman had eased his conscience of the burden which lay on it and done it without providing one atom of proof! How could one broach such a matter to the sharp-eyed, rational Dyson?

‘If you say so, of course, then we’re bound to take your word. But it seemed a bit peculiar, you just finding it like that.’

‘I noticed the shape of that clump. You can put down the rest to a suspicious nature.’

‘And there’s positively no link-up?’

‘Nothing one could prove in court.’

‘Still, a lead of any sort…’

Gently sighed and mopped his brow. He couldn’t very well tell Dyson to stop interfering! The man was doing his duty in spite of the heat and a dose of sunburn. A little professional co-operation wasn’t too much to be expected.

‘If anything turns up, I promise you faithfully… at the moment, I could put Simmonds in the dock. I’ve got a hunch, but it may be no more. Just now I’m rather keen to know the identity of those bones.’

Dyson nodded resignedly. ‘Nineteen-thirty’s so long ago.’

‘Nineteen-thirty?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? We’ve had an expert on the shoes.’

Gently had another question but he was prevented from putting it. Maurice came up, sulky faced, with a scribbled note from Dutt.

‘Says to tell you it was urgent — there’s a bloke going to jump off the church tower.’

The note was more explicit. The bloke in question was John Peter Simmonds.

‘ That bloody little fool!’

Gently kept on repeating it: the words seemed to put the situation in a nutshell. Since ten o’clock that morning he’d almost forgotten the artist’s existence; he hadn’t wanted to think about Simmonds at all. He’d found a different angle, one a good deal more intriguing. Now, he knew, he’d let it dominate him, let it thrust Simmonds out of his reckoning.

‘It looks as though you were right.’

‘That bloody little fool!’

‘If you can manage to get him down…’

‘I should have locked him up yesterday!’

It was impossible to drive fast because of the helter-skelter of people. From all directions they were running and scurrying towards the churchyard. Shopkeepers, housewives, visitors, fishermen, they paid no attention to the Wolseley’s blaring horn.

‘That bloody little fool!’

Was it his conscience that kept repeating it? If Dyson had said much to him he’d have jumped down the man’s throat. And really he was blaming Esau; Esau who had laid the spell on him. For several hours now he’d been living in a kind of dream.

He slammed the Wolseley on to the verge about a hundred yards from the church. The crowd spread out ahead of him made it pointless to drive further. One caught sight of the artist directly: he had got out on a ledge below the parapet. His white face made a splodge against the dark grey of the flint and his hands, apparently bleeding, were grasping at the rough, sharp-edged stones.