Alan Hunter: Gently Down the Stream

The dyke came to an end as indefinitely as it had begun, simply oozing out of existence in mud and rush jungle. Gently scrutinized what could theoretically be called the bank.

‘Of course they didn’t look for this… and of course they didn’t find it!’

He reached over into a mass of mint and meadowsweet and tugged something out. It was a long, straight rod of willow, which had been pushed slantwise into the greasy peat.

‘One should always moor a dinghy.’

He shoved the rod back again.

‘Now let’s see if we can find anything else they didn’t notice!’

If it had been trying in the dinghy, it was doubly trying out of it. After half a dozen steps, one just forgot about dry feet. And there were brambles like saws, and nettles like wasps’ nests, and the moist, enclosed air made perspiration start at the slightest exertion. There was a track of sorts, or at all events a line of least resistance. Along it had recently sploshed a number of police-issue boots but they weren’t responsible for everything. Gently noticed signs of earlier passages. Here there was a snapped twig with leaves which had withered, there a turned-back bramble trying to grow in its original direction.

Not recent at all… those dry leaves weren’t properly developed.

‘Blimey — just give me the Commercial Road!’

Dutt was mopping a streaming face and snatching at the rubbish in his hair.

‘No wonder the charlies round here live in rubber boots — it’s a marvel they ain’t born wiv webbed feet!’

Gently grinned commiseration. ‘Stick it out, Dutt… it’s all experience.’

‘Hi know, sir — and I hopes it’s worth it!’

‘Here’s the shack now… but I wish we’d been here yesterday.’

The shack was as the super had described it. It consisted of three sides framed in rough timber and filled with reeds, while some aged reed-thatch served for a roof. It was built on ground that was a little higher and therefore a little drier than the carrs surrounding it. This feature seemed to have made it rather popular with five score of policeman.

Gently sighed as he cautiously approached it. Yet what was he hoping to find there, after all? Perhaps he was only being fascinated by yet one more fact that didn’t quite fit… wanting to worry at it, to double-check it, to wrest sense out of it somehow. Because there was no doubt that it didn’t fit. It would only have fitted if Hicks had been hiding there. Then one could show how he had slipped out in a dinghy… how he had been secretly provisioned by his aunt… how he had come to kill Cheerful Arnie. It would have been full of possibilities! Only Hicks hadn’t been hiding there. You had only to look at the shack.

Three parts of the floor was raising a lovely bed of nettles and the fourth part wasn’t large enough to have slept a good-sized dog.

Gently stood still, staring at it. He was getting depressed and irritated by this perpetual check-mating. At every turn a contradiction was slapped across his face, a twit given to his intolerable ignorance. Was he going to fall down on this case? Had he run into a plan which was going to circumvent him, in all his wisdom?

A plan… that was the one thing his opponents couldn’t hide. Lammas’ murder hadn’t been a brilliant piece of improvisation, it wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. It looked like that, but it wasn’t. Perhaps that was its weak spot, the flank which he could turn. You looked back to Easter, for instance. So many trails had started there. It was about Easter when Lammas hired the yacht. It was about Easter when he booked the bungalow. It was at Easter when Paul had threatened his mother with exposure. It was about Easter when Lammas began his unexplained mid-week trips. What was the interaction there… who had betrayed which to whom? Paul? Pauline? And the hiring of the yacht itself, what had Lammas been up to with that? Who had he really been expecting to meet when he took the Harrier up Ollby Dyke?

Out of a haze of abstraction Gently suddenly realized that he was looking at something, something very small and apparently out of place. It was a little shred of gold paper. It was caught between a horizontal timber and the reeds behind it. Quickly he bent to examine it more closely.

Torn edges… a wisp of label adhering… the back soiled with a greasy brown substance.

He gazed at it bemusedly for a moment, its significance dawning slowly. Then, in a sudden flash, the full comprehension began to arrive.

‘Dutt!’

He couldn’t quite keep the excitement out of his voice.

‘Dutt — look at this! Come and tell me what you make of it!’

The sergeant came squelching across, a lugubrious expression on his face. There was a thrill in Gently’s voice not to be denied, but the little strip of paper seemed scanty reason for such enthusiasm.

‘Looks like a bit of toffee-paper, sir.’

‘Toffee-paper, my foot!’

‘I seen plenty just like it, sir-’

‘Not like this piece, Dutt!’

Almost as though it were a holy relic he was guiding it into an envelope, hardly allowing himself to touch it, even with the blade of his pocket-knife.

‘Dutt, we’ve as good as got him!’

His voice was trembling with suppressed exultation.

‘It fits like a glove… I must have been mad not to see it before!’

‘But what’s it all about, sir?’

‘… about? You have to ask me?’

‘Well I might be hexceptional dense, sir, but that’s just toffee-paper to me!’

Gently chuckled as he straighted up. His eye had that far-distant look which came at moments when mystery was ceasing to be mystery, when the picture he sought had begun to take shape.

‘Come on… this isn’t enough, Dutt! There should be something more solid. And now we know what we’re looking for, we may know where to find it — even if we aren’t quite certain about the bloke who put it there!’

‘Then we don’t know who it was, sir?’

‘We do, Dutt — and we don’t.’

‘Couldn’t you put it a little plainer, sir?’

‘It’ll be plain enough before long!’

He set off back to the dinghy without vouchsafing another word. Dutt shook his head in sorrow and followed his senior with oozing steps. He wasn’t usually a stupid policeman — what had he missed on this amphibious excursion?

Upper Wrackstead Dyke was a peaceful spot as the dinghy came sculling back to its moorings. The children were at school, the river-dwellers about their business and the sun shining hot on cottage, willows and boats. Only Thatcher was brought to his cabin door by the sound of the approaching oars.

‘Blast, bor!’ he commented. ‘Yew din’t want a boot for long!’

Gently shrugged and cast a speculative eye over the deserted scene. So quiet it was, so still.

‘An look what yew’ve done t’her — she in’t half in a pickle! Yew din’t tell me yew’d be a-jammin’ about in the carrs!’

‘Here’s half a crown for the mess.’

‘Ah, an’ worth evra penna.’

‘What’s that wire-net contraption with handle you’ve got on the cabin roof?’

Thatcher turned about to look. His cabin roof was a depository for all sorts of superannuated junk.

‘Yew mean this here?’

‘Yes — what’s it for?’

‘W’blast, tha’s a dydle, and they use it for dydlin’ out dykes.’

‘You can dredge in the mud with it?’

‘W’yes, tha’s what tha’s for.’

‘I’d like to borrow it… it’s worth another five bob.’

With the dydle securely lashed to the roof-rack, they set out in the Wolseley. Gently was in an effervescent, schoolboy mood. You would almost have thought he was off on a treat.

‘We’re going to Ollby, sir?’

Dutt was a little put out by his senior’s unwillingness to confide in him.