Alan Hunter - Gently Down the Stream

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.