Alan Hunter: Gently by the Shore

The owner of the voice moved ponderously across to Gently’s table. He glowered at Frenchy and nodded towards the door.

‘Get out!’ he rumbled, ‘you know I don’t encourage your sort.’

Frenchy glared back defiantly for a moment, but she waggled off all the same; her parting shot was at Gently, not the gold-toothed one. It was unprintable.

‘ GET OUT!!!’ detonated the big man, and Frenchy got.

His next target was Bonce.

‘How old do you say you are?’

‘Eight-eighteen!’ burbled Bonce.

‘When was that — next Easter? Don’t let me find you in this bar again.’

‘B-But Louey, you never said anything before!’

‘ GET OUT!!!’

Bonce faded like a cock-crowed ghost.

Louey sighed draughtily. He picked up Gently’s empty orange-squash glass and gave it his sad attention. Gently looked also. The hands that held the glass were like two hairy grappling-irons. On one of his crooked fingers Louey wore an out-size solitaire, on another a plain gold ring engraved with a bisected circle.

‘’Night, Louey,’ leered the sporty-looking individual, passing by on his way to the door, ‘watch your company — it ain’t so healthy as it might be!’

Louey rumbled ominously and set down the glass again. ‘Can’t help it,’ he said, turning apologetically to Gently, ‘this time of the year you’re bound to get some riff-raff… the best you can do is to keep kicking it out.’

Gently nodded sympathetically. He found Louey’s gold tooth fascinating.

‘There’s girls like Frenchy… we know some of them, but there’s fresh ones come up every summer. If they don’t solicit you can’t make too much of a fuss.’

Louey permitted himself a searching glance at Gently.

‘And those kids… I suppose it’s asking for trouble to have an arcade next to a bar.’

Gently rose to his feet and felt in his pocket for a coin.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘I haven’t paid for my drink.’

‘Oh, never mind that!’ Louey laughed comfortably, easily, as though he felt Gently to be an equal. ‘Only too pleased to see you in here, Inspector… sorry if anything happened that shouldn’t have done

…’

‘You needn’t worry about that — it was nothing to do with you.’ Gently paused and looked into Louey’s deep-set eyes. They wore a deferential smile, but because of the fleck breaking into one of them the smile had a strangely hard quality, almost a sinisterness.

‘There’s only one thing bothers me,’ mused Gently, picking up his shilling and re-pocketing it.

‘And what is that, Inspector?’

‘The way everyone around here knows me on sight… you, Mr Hooker, amongst the others.’

There was a rowdiness now along the promenade. There were drunks and near-drunks, quarrelsome and loutish roisterers. Alcohol had been added to the heady mixture of humanity about its annual purgation… the beer had begun to sing, and the whisky to argue. And they were largely youngsters, Gently noticed, it was the teenagers who did the shouting and singing. Banded together in threes and fours they swaggered about the Front, stupid with Dutch courage: lords of a pint, princelings of Red Biddy. Did nobody spank their children these days?

A burly figure shouldered across the carriage-way and joined him on the pavement.

‘Have any luck, Dutt?’ inquired Gently with interest.

‘Yes, sir, I did, as a matter of fact.’

‘Well, go on… don’t spoil a good story.’

‘I stood where you told me, sir, and kept an eye on the bookie’s joint at the back. There wasn’t no lights on there, but about quarter of an hour after you went in again the door opens and out hops a bloke in a dark suit.’

‘Oh, he did, did he? I suppose he wasn’t a freakish-looking cove with a parroty face?’

‘No, sir, not this one. I got a good look at him under a street-lamp. He was about middling-size, dark hair, sort of slanty-eyed, and he’d got a long, straight conk. And there was a scar of some sort on his right cheek — knife or razor, I should say, sir.’

‘Hmm,’ mused Gently, ‘interesting. And did you tail him?’

‘Yes, sir — at least, I stuck to him all along the prom going south. But then he goes into the funfair and there was such a ruddy crowd there I didn’t stand a chance. So after a bit I gives it up.’

‘Ah well… we do our best,’ sighed Gently.

‘Do you think there’s a hook-up there, sir — have we got something definite?’

Gently shook his head sombrely. ‘I don’t know, Dutt, and that’s the truth. There’s some racket goes on there, I’m pretty sure, but whether it connects with ours is beyond me for the moment. Anyway, I threw a scare into them… I’ll tip off Copping to keep an eye lifting.’

‘The bloke I was tailing looked a right sort,’ said Dutt sagely.

‘There’s a lot of right sorts in there, Dutt,’ agreed his senior, ‘they’d keep the average policeman happy for weeks.’

Gently was dreaming what seemed to be a circular dream. It began at the stab wounds in the man who wouldn’t wake up, took in all the principal characters at ‘The Feathers’ and wound up again with that stabbed torso. And it continued like that for round after round. Or was it all going on simultaneously? His dream-self found time to wonder this. There seemed to be two of him in the dream: he was both actor and producer. First (if there was a first), came the chest of the corpse, caught in a sort of golden glow, and he noticed with surprise that, although the stab-wounds were present, the pathologist’s carvings were not. Next, his dream-camera lifted to take in Jeff, or rather the top part of Jeff: the rest of him dissolved into the haze which surrounded the corpse. He was shrugging his shoulders and saying something. Gently didn’t know what it was he was saying, but he was acutely aware of the implication. Jeff wasn’t responsible. He might have done it, of course, that was beside the point. But he wasn’t responsible. You couldn’t possibly blame him.

As though to make it more emphatic the camera shifted to Bonce, who was blubbing and stuttering his innocence in the background. They couldn’t help it. Gently fully agreed. They had done it at the behest of some irrevocable Fate, which was curious but in no way blameable. It was just how things were… And then Bonce shrank and his blubbing mouth disappeared. He had become Nits, and Nits had become nothing but two protruding green eyes, painfully straining. Gently knew what he was saying. The halfwit’s words piped clearly in his brain. ‘I’ve been a good boy,’ they echoed, ‘I’ve been a good boy,’ and Gently tried to ruffle his hair good-naturedly, but the head sank away under his hand

…

Then it was Frenchy’s rather knobbly knees trying hard to make themselves look attractive: the camera wouldn’t lift to her face, it just kept focussed on those unfortunate knees. We aren’t bad, they seemed to be pleading (and Gently heard a twang of Frenchy’s croon, though there weren’t any words): you’ll see a lot worse than us on the beach. Of course, you’ve got to make allowances, but it’s the same with everyone… honestly now, we aren’t bad at all… you must admit it. And Gently admitted it. What was the use of struggling? He’d been round before and knew the rules of the game…

So the camera faded across to the parrot-faced man and Artie. They’d got a lot of empty bottles, squash-bottles, and Gently only had to see the bottles to know that he was the one who had emptied them. Not that they were being nasty about it, those two. On the contrary, they seemed to be almost sympathetic, in a sad sort of way. Gently had blotted his copy-book. He’d drunk through all those bottles of squash without paying for them. They knew he couldn’t help it, but all the same… a man of his reputation… Gently felt in his pocket for some money. They shook their heads. It wasn’t just paying for it that counted. It was the fact that he’d done it at all…