Alan Hunter: Gently Does It

‘No,’ said Gently, ‘I don’t know it. Not yet.’

‘But you said-!’

‘I said I was morally certain, my dear, which isn’t quite the same thing.’

She relapsed slowly into her former forlorn posture. ‘Then they’ll still charge him with it,’ she said.

Gently nodded. ‘My moral certainties won’t prevent that. Peter’s still in grave danger and unless I can produce some hard, irreducible facts pointing in another direction, he may find his innocence very difficult to establish. Which is why I’m here this morning.’

‘But I don’t know anything — I can’t help you at all!’

Gently smiled at a point beyond the blue horizon. ‘That is something, my dear, which we will now attempt to discover,’ he said.

The rain had washed out any lurking quaintness there might have been in Queen Street. The raw brick tower of the new brewery seemed rawer, the stale flint-and-brick tower of the old breweries staler, the mouldering plaster-and-lath miserable to disintegration. Gently splashed through puddles formed in hollows of the pavement. He stopped to look at a horse-meat shop. Painted a virulent red, it had crudely drawn upon it the faces of a cat and a dog, with the legend: ‘Buy our dinners here’. Up the middle of Queen Street rode a lonely sodden figure, a bundle of papers covered by a sack in the carrier of his bicycle. Behind him limped a dog, head down, tail down. At the horse-meat shop the dog raised its head and gave a low whine. But it continued to limp after its master.

Today there were only two cars outside the Huysmann house, a police car and Leaming’s red Pashley. The constable on the door saluted smartly. ‘Inspector Hansom is in the sitting-room, sir,’ he said. Gently disrobed himself of his raincoat and left it hung dripping on the hall-stand. A second constable opened the sitting-room door for him. Inside sat Inspector Hansom at a table, smoking a cigar. Beside him sat a uniformed man with a shorthand notebook.

‘Ah!’ cried Hansom, ‘the Yard itself! We’ll have to forget about the third degree after all, Jackson.’

Gently smiled moistly, took out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘Forgive me for being late,’ he said.

Hansom spewed forth cigar-smoke. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, ‘we can accommodate ourselves to Metropolitan hours. Just sit down and make yourself at home. There’ll be tea and biscuits in half an hour.’

Gently lit his pipe and sat down.

‘I suppose you didn’t look in at the office this morning,’ continued Hansom, a glint in his eye.

‘No. Should I have done?’

‘It might be an idea, if you want to keep abreast of this case.’

Gently patted the ash down in his pipe with an experienced finger. ‘You mean the five-pound note you found in a drawer in Peter Huysmann’s caravan, don’t you?’ he enquired thoughtfully.

‘You were at the office then?’ demanded Hansom, a little clashed.

‘No. But I was at the caravan this morning.’

‘Then perhaps you don’t know that it was one of the notes taken from Huysmann’s safe?’

Gently shrugged. ‘Why else would you have taken it away?’

Hansom’s eyes gleamed triumphantly. ‘And how do you propose to explain that one, Chief Inspector Gently?’ he demanded.

Gently patted away at his pipe till the ash was perfectly level, then dusted off his finger on his trousers. ‘I don’t explain anything,’ he said. ‘I’m a policeman. I ask questions.’

‘It’ll take a lot of questions to make this look silly.’

‘I should ask myself,’ proceeded Gently, ‘why Peter left a note there at all, just one. And I should ask myself whether it was likely to be one of those on your list — he had so many others.’ He paused.

‘And is that all you’d ask?’ enquired Hansom with a sneer.

‘And I think,’ added Gently, ‘I’d ask Mrs Huysmann if she knew how it came to be there.’

Hansom sat up straight, his cigar lifting. ‘So you would, would you?’ he said.

‘I think I would. Very nicely, of course, so I didn’t make her feel she was being kicked in the teeth by a size fifteen boot.’

‘Har, har,’ said Hansom, ‘give me time to laugh.’

‘And I should find out that Peter never had but that one note and brought it back with him yesterday in a seething temper and put it in the drawer with express instructions that it wasn’t to be touched. Of course, it’s technically possible that he had his pocket picked of the balance… perhaps that’s why he was so angry.’

Hansom snarled: ‘And you believe that bosh?’

‘I don’t believe anything,’ said Gently mildly. ‘I just ask questions…’

The ash dropped off Hansom’s cigar and fell neatly on to the blotter in front of him. He grabbed it away savagely. ‘See here,’ he snapped, ‘I know you’re dead against us. I know you’d go to any lengths to get young Huysmann off, even though you’re as sure as we are that he did it. Because why? Because you’re the Yard and you think you’ve got to show us we’re a lot of flat-footed yokels. That’s why! That’s why you’re going to upset this case — if you can. But you can’t, Chief Inspector Gently, it’s getting much too one-sided, even for you. By the time we’ve lined this case up there won’t be a jury in the country who’ll give it more than ten minutes — if they give it that!’

Gently leaned back in his chair and blew the smallest and roundest of smoke-rings at the distant ceiling. ‘Inspector Hansom,’ he said, ‘I’d like to make a point.’

‘What’s that?’ snarled Hansom.

‘There is between us, Inspector Hansom, a slight but operative difference in rank. And now, if you will start sending these people in, we’ll try to question them as though we were part of one of the acknowledged civilizations.’

Alan Hunter

Gently Does It

M RS TURNER, THE housekeeper, was a clean, neat, bustling person of fifty-five, dressed for the day in a black tailored suit smelling of stale lavender. She had a large bland face with small mean eyes, and her nose was the merest shade red.

She said: ‘I’m sure there’s nothing more I can tell you what I didn’t say yesterday,’ and sat down with an air of disapproval and injury.

Hansom said: ‘You are Mrs Charles Turner, widow, housekeeper to the deceased. You had the day off yesterday till 5 p. m… where did you spend the day?’

‘I told you all that yesterday.’

‘Please be good enough to answer the question. Where did you spend the day?’

‘I went to see me sister at Earlton…’

‘You were at your sister’s the whole of that time?’ Gently said.

The housekeeper shot him a mean look. ‘Well, most of it, like…’

‘You mean that part of the time you were somewhere else.’

She pursed her lips and jiffled a little. ‘I spent the day with me sister,’ she repeated defensively, adding, ‘you can ask her, if you don’t believe me.’

‘Right. We’ll check on that,’ said Hansom. ‘What time did you arrive back here?’

‘I got in about five to five.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I went into the kitchen to see if the maid had got things ready for tea.’

‘You found the maid in the kitchen?’

‘She was sitting down reading one of them fourpenny novels.’

‘Did she mention anything unusual that had occurred during the afternoon?’

‘She said as how Mr Peter had called and seen his father, and they’d had a dust-up over something, but it didn’t last long.’

Gently said: ‘She could not have heard them quarrelling from the kitchen. Did she say where she was at the time?’

The housekeeper frowned. She didn’t like Gently’s questions. He seemed determined to complicate the most clear-cut issues. ‘I didn’t ask her,’ she replied tartly.