‘Nearer one, I should think. He hadn’t got much to say for himself.’
The bar-tender was called back to serve a customer. Gently plodded onwards through the sausage. As he ate he fitted into place in his picture each new fact and dash of colour. Fisher, jealous of Leaming. Fisher, wanting to be Susan’s lover. Susan, hinting at something between Fisher and Gretchen. ‘He lives for women, that bloke… after our Elsie till I choked him off… Fisher never got a look in there… don’t cut much ice while Leaming’s around…’ And Leaming had said, ‘There’s a streak of brutality in the man…’
The doorbell tinkled, and Gently looked up from his plate. It was Fisher himself who entered. Not noticing Gently, he swaggered over to the counter and ordered a cup of tea and some rolls, then stood there waiting while they were got for him. The bar-tender glanced at Gently, who winked back broadly.
Turning, Fisher saw Gently. He stopped stock-still. Gently nodded to him affably. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, indicating the chair vacated by the bar-tender. ‘I’ve thought up one or two more things I should like to ask you.’
Alan Hunter
Gently Does It
CHAPTER SEVEN
A WHITE, EXPANSIVE April sun, low-tilted in its morning skies, looked down upon the rain-washed streets. In Chapel Field and the Castle Gardens birds were singing, thrushes, chaffinches, blackbirds, and on the steep southern and westerly slopes of the Castle Hill the daffodils looked down, proudly, consciously, like women dressed to go out.
Early traffic swirled up Princes Street and round Castle Paddock; the fast London train rumbled over the river bridge at Truss Hythe, swept out into the lush water-meadows of the Yar; passing over, as it did so, a stubborn little up-stream-making tug with a tow of five steel barges, on each of which was painted the name: Huysmann.
Onward puffed the little tug, bold as a fox-terrier, full of aggression and self-assurance, and onward crept the barges, phlegmatic, slow, till the cavalcade was in hailing distance of Railway Bridge. Then the little tug slowed down, trod water as it were, allowing the foremost barges to catch up with it. A man jumped out of the tug. He ran down the barges, jumping from one to another, till finally, coming to the last one, he loosed the sagging cable and cast her free. A shout ahead set the little tug puffing off on her interrupted journey, while the slipped barge, with the way left on her, was steered to a dilapidated-looking quay on the south bank.
Altogether, it was a smart and well-executed manoeuvre, thought Gently, watching it as he leaned over Railway Bridge. It was worth getting up early just to see it.
He crossed the bridge to watch the tug and its barges pass through the other side. A door in the rear of the tug’s wheelhouse was open. Through it Gently observed a lanky figure wearing a peaked seaman’s hat, a leather jacket and blue serge trousers tucked into Wellington boots. As he watched, the lanky man spun his wheel to the right. There was a tramp steamer on its way down.
Gently anticipated the warning hooter and got off the bridge. He stood by the railings to see the bridge rise, rolling ponderously, and moved further over to get a good view of the vessel as it surged by below. It was a bluff- bowed, clumsy, box-built ship, with a lofty fo’c’sle descending suddenly to deck level. The bridge and cabins aft were neat and newly painted, and the washing that hung on a line suggested that the captain had his family on board. The engines pounded submergedly as the steel cosmos slid through. There followed the bubbling and frothing under her stern. She was the Zjytze of Amsterdam.
Grumblingly the bridge rolled back into place and Gently, after a moment’s pause, strolled over to the little glass box where the bridge-keeper sat. ‘When did she come up?’ he asked.
The bridge-keeper peered at him. ‘Friday morning,’ he said.
‘What was she carrying?’
‘Timber.’
‘Where did she lie?’
The bridge-keeper nodded upstream to where the tug with its train of barges was edging in towards the quays. ‘Up there at Huysmann’s.’
‘Is she a regular?’
‘Off and on. She’s been coming here since the war, and before that there used to be another one, but they say she was sunk in a raid. It’s the same skipper, though.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘It’s a queer sort of name, something like Hooksy.’
‘Thanks.’
Gently gave the departing vessel a last look and hurried away down Queen Street. A police car was outside the Huysmann house and Gently noticed, in a side-glance, that Leaming’s car was parked inside the timber-yard. Constable Letts was on the door. ‘Hansom inside?’ asked Gently. ‘Yes, sir. Been here for some time, sir.’ Gently pushed in.
Hansom was in the hall, talking to a sergeant.
He said: ‘Why, here he is, all bright and early.’
Gently said: ‘There’s a ship just left Huysmann’s quays, the Zjytze of Amsterdam. Did you know about it?’
Hansom extended his large hands. ‘A little bird told me about it last night.’
‘And you’ve checked her?’
‘That’s sort of my job around here.’
‘Well?’
Hansom took a medium-sized breath. ‘They’re football fans,’ he said, ‘like everyone else round here, only more so.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They went to London to see the Gunners.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yeah — one big happy family. The Skipper and Ma Hoochzjy, the son who’s mate, the son who isn’t mate, the son who’s cook, three able-bodied cousins and a grandson who’s cabin boy. They lit out for town at ten o’clock on Saturday, and got back on the 11.53 last night. They spent the night at the Sunningdale Hotel in Tavistock Place — I checked it — and went to Kew yesterday to give the tulips a once-over. They think our English tulips are vonndervul.’
‘Did you check the vessel?’
Hansom gave a snort. ‘Why do you think they’ve got customs at Starmouth?’
Gently shook his head in slow, mandarin nods. ‘I don’t want to have Peter Huysmann arrested, but as one policeman to another…’
‘Good Lord!’ gaped Hansom.
‘… I think you’d better have the Zjytze checked before she clears Starmouth.’
Hansom was already doubling to the phone. ‘I’ll send some men out to Rusham!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ll have to wait there for the swing-bridge.’ And he dialled viciously.
‘Of course, he may be somewhere else entirely,’ added Gently, ‘he may even have grown a beard…’
They were sawing oak in the timber-yard. The smell of it, sweet with a sharpness and heaviness, carried into the street and even into the house, while the high-pitched whine of the saws, labouring at the hard, close grain, might be heard during intervals in the traffic as far as Railway Bridge. At the quays they were already busy with the barges. Two rattling derricks hoisted out bundles of rough-sawn planks and swung them to growing piles outside the machine sheds, where shouting men were stacking them. Close by an overhead conveyor trundled sawn-out stuff to a lorry. Pandemonium reigned in the great machine sheds. There were ranked the circular saws, buzzing at rest, shrieking with rage as they met the timber, whining viciously as they settled down to tear through it; the fiendish, screaming band-saws, temperamental and deadly; the soft, shuddering planers, cruel with suppressed power; and over all the sweet wholesome smell of sawn oak, of oak sawdust, of oak stacked in neat, separated
