corner.
‘I could kill him for this! I tell you I’m glad he’s been murdered!’
‘Come now, Mrs Lammas.’
‘He knew it would hurt me… as though I should ever try to find out where he went!’
For a moment it looked as though she would burst into tears. Then she recovered herself and came slowly back to the table.
‘Well, it didn’t get him far. No, it didn’t get him far!’
Gently nodded profoundly and made a sympathetic clicking noise.
‘Something has just occurred to me.’
Mrs Lammas raised her head.
‘Paul… he hated your husband. Wouldn’t he hate anyone who tried to step into his shoes?’
What happened next was so unexpected that Hansom’s jaw dropped open wide, while the Constable’s pencil made a scribble like a seismograph recording.
Mrs Lammas screamed — a loud, blood-chilling scream. And having screamed, she rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
‘Glory O’Rory!’ gabbled Hansom, ‘what the blue blazes was all that about!’
Gently gazed at the slammed door stupidly. ‘I’m not absolutely certain… just at the moment.’
‘But what did you say to her to get a skirl like that?’
‘Oh, something about Paul. I daresay it wasn’t very important.’
Hansom looked at him darkly as he bent to find his cigar stump.
‘All I can say is that you might give us a warning — that’s all! Some of us have got nervous systems that haven’t been chilled off with peppermint!’
Gently chuckled and gave his colleague a light.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They weren’t so very busy, serving lunch at the Bulrush Cafe near the bridge. Later on in the week the novelty of using one’s galley or cooking-locker would have worn off and things would liven up, but on Monday one still had a fund of enthusiasm.
Sitting in the window, you could watch the gay yachting crowd pass and re-pass. They were a heterogenous lot, both sexes and all ages. Now it would be a noisy crowd of teenagers in open wind-cheaters and jazzy tasselled caps, now a family party, the father looking self-conscious with his legs sticking out of shorts. Or a young couple carrying a baby between them and looking very capable. Or vigorous young men in white jerseys and the beginnings of beards. Or a self-intent pair of honeymooners, or noisy children, or pretty girls.
Gently stared at them absently over his cup of coffee. He was aware of a certain irritation with himself. By now he ought to have been getting into the picture of this business — nothing would induce him to call the picture a theory! — there ought to have been a few broad strokes on the canvas indicating the final composition, however imperfect in detail.
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!’
