Alan Hunter - Gently Down the Stream

‘Hell!’ exclaimed Hansom. ‘When did I start being a suspect?’

Mrs Lammas didn’t appear immediately, which suggested certain things to the sagacious Inspector Hansom. Gently merely shrugged and got up to wander round the room. It was a room worth wandering around. If ever taste and expense had combined to create the ideal room to overlook a broad, this was that room. In size it was about thirty feet by fifteen. Along the south side ran a range of deep windows opening on to the wide, thatch-sheltered veranda. The colour scheme was pale yellow and green; yellow, reeded wallpaper, a carpet of restrained turquoise and furniture in straw-coloured wood upholstered in flowered turquoise silk. And it was glorious furniture. In it the genius of Scandinavia had been tempered with a Sheratonian delicacy, a feminine exquisiteness. It made Gently feel quite dangerous as he picked his way through it. On the walls were a few original pictures, a pair of Seagos, an Arnesby Brown, a Peter Scott and a group of six watercolours of Broadland birds by Roland Green. And from any point in the room one turned to the long vista of the sun-flashed broad with its low, reed-and-carr fledged shores, its lily-nestling islets, its geometry of dream-moved sails…

Also, thought Gently, there were pike in that broad… and tench and bream and roach and perch…

He shook his head sadly and put a light to his stone-cold pipe.

There were heavy steps climbing up to the veranda. It was Dutt coming back from his horticultural assignment.

‘Well, Dutt… how are crimes down there?’

Dutt smiled all over his cockney face and held up what appeared to be a toffee-tin.

‘I got the goods, sir — just take a butcher’s into this!’

Proudly he opened the tin and displayed the contents. It contained some greasy rag, a small wire-handled brush, a bottle of Rangoon oil and three spent. 22 shells.

‘Fahnd it in the garage, I did — just sitting on the bench, as large as flipping life!’

‘We know, Dutt. He used to clean it there.’

‘Know sir, do we?’ Dutt was a trifle dashed. ‘But this here’s the proof, sir — the shover must have known about his nib’s pop-gun!’

‘So does everyone else, Dutt. Don’t tell me the gardener didn’t know.’

‘Well, now you mention it! But I don’t think he had anythink to do with the job.’

‘He’s got an alibi?’

‘Yessir. He’s the local sexton, sir. They buried an old girl called Micklewright on the Friday and natural-like, sir, they went and drank her health afterwards. He ain’t sure wevver he got back Friday night or Saturday morning, but if it ain’t the one then it must be the other.’

‘That sounds a fairish sort of alibi, Dutt.’

‘What I thought, sir.’

‘And what about that jerrican?’

‘Yessir. It come from the garage all right. The gardener says as how he used it to keep his weed-killer in and right upset he was ’cause someone had knocked it off.’

‘Weed-killer, eh? There’s something a bit macabre about this gardener! I suppose he didn’t tell you when he first noticed the jerrican was missing?’

‘No, sir. I asked him that particular. But this is the rum thing, sir — he swears blind it’d gone some time before Friday. He thought the shover had swiped it, but the shover said he hadn’t. Then he tackles Mr Paul, who’s always in and out wiv his motorbike.’

‘And Mr Paul gave him a rude answer?’

‘Very rude, sir… shocking.’

Gently clicked his tongue. ‘It would be interesting to know just when that jerrican disappeared.’

‘Looks like it wasn’t an off-the-cuff murder,’ sniffed Hansom.

‘But who would know in advance that they’d have a chance of burning the body in the yacht? How did they know that Lammas was going to take the yacht up Ollby Dyke and that he’d be alone?’

‘Well they did, didn’t they?’ retorted Hansom irrefutably. ‘He couldn’t have been so darned smart, after all.’

‘Unless, of course…’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless it was Lammas himself who took the jerrican away.’

Hansom stared at him incredulously for a moment, then he broke out into sarcastic laughter.

‘Har, har — very funny! I know a couple of dozen types who’d lay on a cremation for themselves — especially when they were just going to be knocked off!’

‘No — wait a bit… that’s not the point. You’re looking at it from the wrong angle. There are other things one can do with petrol besides using it to cremate bodies.’

‘Such things as?’

‘Well… such things as running petrol engines, for example.’

‘Petrol engines! He could get his tank filled every mile or two on the Broads.’

‘I know he could… on the Broads.’

The master-brain of Hansom worked slowly, but exceedingly well. He had the point in three seconds, starting from scratch.

‘Yeah…! Now I’m with you! Boy oh boy, that’s a fancy idea if you like! And he’d got the right sort of boat for the job — she wasn’t big, but she’d got the depth for sea-going. And he’d dropped the femme. And the weather was set fair… we’re on to something, I tell you! This is the real Mackay!’

‘Of course, he would need a motive of some sort…’

‘Smuggling!’ yipped Hansom. ‘What do you say to that?’

‘Smuggling what… out of the United Kingdom?’

‘What can you smuggle… gold! That’s the answer. And that’s why he cashed in — to buy himself a shipment!’

Gently smiled and shook his head, but the enraptured Hansom wasn’t easy to shake free from an idea.

‘It explains the whole shoot — why he hung around here and everything! You’ve only got to take it from the beginning and work through. He wanted more money — eight thousand wasn’t enough to disappear on — so he arranges to run some gold — it won’t come till the Friday — he cruises around till then, packs the girl off to the hideaway and goes up the Dyke to rendezvous with his gold!’

‘What about the chauffeur…?’

‘He must have been on to it.’

‘You couldn’t make him the gold-merchant, just to tidy the loose ends?’

Hansom snorted indignantly and bit the end off a cigar.

‘All right, Mr Cleverdick… let’s hear your version?’

‘I haven’t got a version… I was just noting a fact.’

Hansom lit the cigar bitterly and blew smoke all around himself. The real trouble with Gently, he thought, was his entire lack of forensic imagination…

Dutt coughed confidentially. ‘’Nother fact, sir, if you don’t mind

… on account of we had a warrant I takes the liberty of ascending to the shover’s quarters, which are above the garage.’

‘Any luck, Dutt? Any letters?’

‘Nothink, sir. Just two from his aunt. And a lot of old football coupons which never won tuppence.’

A cloud drifted over the sun as Mrs Lammas entered. It was as though nature had conspired to put a dramatic point on the event. She paused in the doorway, delicately sniffing the alien smell of Hansom’s cigar. Her cool gaze ran disapprovingly over the moved furniture and the policemen rising to their feet. Then it fell on the table and the automatic which lay there. And she swept forward with a sort of withering grandeur.

‘Before we go any further, inspector, I should like to know by what right you have entered my husband’s bedroom and removed that gun from the place where it was kept!’

Gently shrugged expressionlessly. ‘We’ve entered nobody’s bedroom, ma’am… except the chauffeur’s over the garage.’

‘What nonsense, man! Do you take me for a fool? That gun was kept locked in a drawer beside my husband’s bed. I have just been to examine it. It is unlocked and empty. If you didn’t fetch the gun, then how did it get here?’