Sid’s weathered features wrinkled into a wink.
‘Well, yew got to remember, ole partna… it was her what give me the half-crown.’
‘Ahem!’ coughed Dutt, ‘don’t you think we ought to take a statement, sir?’
It was dark when Gently sent the Wolseley bumbling down the lane to the cottage, but there were lights enough on the river bank. Besides the glimmer of lamps through houseboat windows there were two or three hurricanes placed at strategic points and in the space so illuminated an animated scene was enacting. As Gently switched off the engine the rollicking music of a concertina could be heard.
‘Looks like they’re having a spree, sir!’ exclaimed Dutt, his cockney eyes brightening.
‘And that bloke can really play a concertina,’ mused Gently as he slammed his door.
Within the circle of light two grotesque figures were hopping and gyrating. Ponderous, massive, yet with a sort of elfin agility, they gave the impression of something non-human, of mindless animals caught in a bewitched pattern.
‘It’s Ted Thatcher and Cheerful Annie doing a hornpipe, sir!’
On the roof of the wherry sat Pedro, Pedro the Fisherman. It was Pedro who was swinging and twirling the concertina. Never a false note trilled and cascaded from his long, tip-flattened forgers, never a pause interrupted the ecstatic rhythm. Like a Pied Piper of Upper Wrackstead he wove his spell and the corpulent couple had to obey him, though sweat trickled down their none-too-clean faces.
‘Go it, Annie! Keep it up, Tedda bor!’
All around the boat-dwellers sat or squatted, clapping in time and shouting encouragement. Some visitors moored along the bank sat on their cabin roofs laughing and applauding. And there was no end to that lilting music. It frolicked on and on with rapturous and infinite variation. The very soul of music seemed to have settled in Pedro’s concertina, seemed to be releasing itself through his runaway fingers.
Gently moved over to the magic circle of lamp-light.
‘Cor… couldn’t we half do with this bloke down at the “Chequers”!’
‘Come an join us!’ panted the dripping Thatcher, catching sight of Gently. ‘Dew I can dance the Starmth Hornpipe, there i’nt no reason why yew shoont!’
But Gently was more interested in the slim figure perched on the wherry’s cabin roof.
For a moment, as he regarded it, the curly hair, angelic eyes and shy smile faded into stolid East Anglian countenance beneath a peaked chauffeur’s cap.
Then he shook his head and turned away.
‘Come on, Dutt, we’d better ring HQ.’
‘Just a moment, sir… it ain’t often you get a basinful of this!’
Gently shrugged and went back to lock the car. As he pushed open the gate of the cottage he nearly ran into a thin, white-haired person who was standing there as motionless as the gate-post.
‘Ah, Mrs Grey! I didn’t see you in the dark.’
She made no reply. By the faint glimmer of light from the lamps he could dimly descry her set, ashen face. There were tears running silently down it.
‘Mrs Grey… but what’s the matter?’
She gave a little broken sob.
‘They say they’ve seen him… my nephew.’
‘Seen him! Seen him where?’
‘Here… going into my cottage. But it i’nt true, Mr Gently. It i’nt true! They’re a lot of good-for-nothings trying to make trouble for me! I woon’t hide him… not though he’s my own sister’s boy!’
She broke down in a fit of sobbing.
In the distance, Gently could see Dutt throwing off his hat and joining in that seductive hornpipe.
CHAPTER NINE
Hicks had been seen, but nobody knew who had seen him. That was the result of lengthy and exhaustive questioning.
About three in the afternoon the rumour began. Mrs Grey had set out to shop in the village at half-past two. Cheerful Annie was having a nap on her bunk. Ted Thatcher was fishing, Pedro gone off strawberry-picking and the rest of the community disposed in their various forms of idleness. And sometime during the half-hour that followed Joe Hicks was seen sneaking up the path to let himself into the cottage. By three o’clock, the knowledge was common property. Only everyone had heard it from somebody else.
By guile and sarcasm, Gently did his level best to break the vicious circle.
‘There’s only thirty-three of you… suppose you stand in a row, each one next to the person who told him!’
They were perfectly willing to try — if they could have remembered who in fact had told him.
‘It can’t be mass hysteria… do some of you know the difference between seeing a thing and being told it?’
But it wasn’t any good. Nobody would own up. Fact or illusion, the image of Joe Hicks creeping into his aunt’s cottage seemed to have drifted into the little community on a passing breeze: everyone knew, nobody had seen.
And Gently had other worries, anyway.
‘The super’s getting jumpy,’ Hansom had told him on the phone. ‘The Coroner’s beefing about his inquest and he’s a pal of the CC’s. The super wants to know if we’re going to make a grab in the next twenty-four hours…’
‘Coroners…!’ exploded Gently with deep feeling, as he hung up the phone.
In the morning things looked brighter. They had a tendency to do so over Mrs Grey’s breakfast-table. Also, Gently noticed once more, the mind had a way of sorting things out while one was asleep… you went to bed with a problem and woke up with a new slant on it. Or a better attitude, which was sometimes as good.
‘We goes into town, sir?’ enquired Dutt, soaking up the last of the bacon-grease with a piece of bread.
‘We goes into town, Dutt.’
‘If you don’t mind, sir, I reckon we might dig something up at the bus-station, the times of them buses being so cohincidental.’
‘You’re dead right, Dutt — that’s your assignment.’
‘Though I got to admit, sir, it beats me what the connection is there.’
Gently reached for the ginger marmalade and dredged up a tidy spoonful.
‘You have to remember that we’ve got two camps at “Willow Street” — pro-Lammas and anti-Lammas.’
‘Yessir. I see that, sir. But what business could Miss Pauline have with this Brent woman?’
‘Well… this Brent woman might be running into trouble once Mrs L. found out about her. And she had found out, if we’re to believe Mr Crow.’
Dutt nodded intelligently and rescued the marmalade.
‘But how would Miss Pauline know where to meet her, sir?’
‘She wouldn’t, would she, unless she knew the whole plot.’
‘Then why don’t we just pick her up and spring it on her sudden, sir?’
‘Because we’ve got nothing to spring, Dutt — not until we can prove she met Linda Brent.’
The sapient Dutt allowed that his senior had got something.
The super was out when Gently reported at HQ and Gently was duly thankful. Hansom’s print men had done a sterling job of work at ‘Willow Street’, but the results were entirely negative. They had acquired good specimens of Lammas’ prints and of Hicks’. It was Lammas’ which were found on the reverse of the drawer that had contained the gun. And Mrs Lammas’, of course… but they were accounted for. For the record Hansom had sweated out a press pic. of Lammas. It wasn’t too good. One got the impression of a dapper, athletic-looking man of middle- stature, expensively dressed, a touch of distinction about a badly caught profile and iron-grey hair.
Gently said: ‘You’ve had nothing in about Hicks?’
Hansom laughed a hard laugh.
