Gently beat Dutt to the crispest-looking rasher.
‘You haven’t found my poor sister’s boy, sir, not with all your tryin’ — and I don’t reckon you will, now, either.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Mrs Grey. It’s surprising how they turn up.’
‘I know, sir. But don’t it stand to reason? He’s done away with himself, that’s what he’s done, and I say Heaven forgive them what druv him to it!’
And the poor lady went out in a storm of tears.
Gently made a face as he took the mustard.
‘Another theorist, Dutt… and not a bad one at that.’
‘Yessir… we’d look silly if he comes to the surface somewhere.’
‘We’d look sillier still if he had a. 22 bullet in him!’
The sun was beaming down with its customary splendour. Nothing was going to spoil this paragon of Junes. On the wicked and the innocent alike it spread its glamour. Colour seemed a new invention, the air a crystalline liquid. Even Thatcher had a romantic look, scruffing away with a handleless trowel — he might have been some old earth god about his masonic delvings.
‘What’s three half-crowns worth to you?’
Thatcher looked up quickly.
‘We want the use of a dinghy… yours will do, if it doesn’t leak too much.’
‘Ah, but wait yew a minute, bor!’
Nobody made snap deals with Thatcher.
‘Dew yew want it all day that might come a bit more… tha’s what yew might call the Season at this end of June!’
But Gently didn’t want it all day, and the seven and six changed hands. Dutt was allotted the oars, Gently seated himself in the stern and Thatcher shoved them off with professional panache.
The river was shut-in all the way to the dyke and the shack where the jacket had been found. Snaked roots of alder reached out from either bank, screens of reed, bramble and wild currant formed a barrier to the eye. The carrs were a secret place. They warned you off with their stockaded boundaries. To get in there you must be prepared to have the clothes torn off your back, the shoes from your feet, and you must suffer beating, scratching, soaking and an overlay of mud…
‘Not a place one would choose for a man-hunt, Dutt.’
‘No, sir… you takes the words out of me mouth.’
‘But a good place to hide something, other things being equal.’
Gently had the map on his knee and it was necessary equipment. They went past the dyke twice before spotting where it lay. Its mouth was concealed by a floating reed-hover, but even had it not been one would have had difficulty in recognizing the grown-over inlet.
‘Get your head down, sir!’
Gently didn’t need telling. The alder twigs whipped and stung them as Dutt poled in with one oar. In the slip of a dinghy they had to crouch double and every few yards the inch of keel was touching sugarily on the mud. But they weren’t sticking fast — that was the point to be proved! Yard by yard, they were continuing to find clean water ahead. You could get a dinghy up there. Especially if there was only one of you…
The dyke came to an end as indefinitely as it had begun, simply oozing out of existence in mud and rush jungle. Gently scrutinized what could theoretically be called the bank.
‘Of course they didn’t look for this… and of course they didn’t find it!’
He reached over into a mass of mint and meadowsweet and tugged something out. It was a long, straight rod of willow, which had been pushed slantwise into the greasy peat.
‘One should always moor a dinghy.’
He shoved the rod back again.
‘Now let’s see if we can find anything else they didn’t notice!’
If it had been trying in the dinghy, it was doubly trying out of it. After half a dozen steps, one just forgot about dry feet. And there were brambles like saws, and nettles like wasps’ nests, and the moist, enclosed air made perspiration start at the slightest exertion. There was a track of sorts, or at all events a line of least resistance. Along it had recently sploshed a number of police-issue boots but they weren’t responsible for everything. Gently noticed signs of earlier passages. Here there was a snapped twig with leaves which had withered, there a turned- back bramble trying to grow in its original direction.
Not recent at all… those dry leaves weren’t properly developed.
‘Blimey — just give me the Commercial Road!’
Dutt was mopping a streaming face and snatching at the rubbish in his hair.
‘No wonder the charlies round here live in rubber boots — it’s a marvel they ain’t born wiv webbed feet!’
Gently grinned commiseration. ‘Stick it out, Dutt… it’s all experience.’
‘Hi know, sir — and I hopes it’s worth it!’
‘Here’s the shack now… but I wish we’d been here yesterday.’
The shack was as the super had described it. It consisted of three sides framed in rough timber and filled with reeds, while some aged reed-thatch served for a roof. It was built on ground that was a little higher and therefore a little drier than the carrs surrounding it. This feature seemed to have made it rather popular with five score of policeman.
Gently sighed as he cautiously approached it. Yet what was he hoping to find there, after all? Perhaps he was only being fascinated by yet one more fact that didn’t quite fit… wanting to worry at it, to double-check it, to wrest sense out of it somehow. Because there was no doubt that it didn’t fit. It would only have fitted if Hicks had been hiding there. Then one could show how he had slipped out in a dinghy… how he had been secretly provisioned by his aunt… how he had come to kill Cheerful Arnie. It would have been full of possibilities! Only Hicks hadn’t been hiding there. You had only to look at the shack.
Three parts of the floor was raising a lovely bed of nettles and the fourth part wasn’t large enough to have slept a good-sized dog.
Gently stood still, staring at it. He was getting depressed and irritated by this perpetual check-mating. At every turn a contradiction was slapped across his face, a twit given to his intolerable ignorance. Was he going to fall down on this case? Had he run into a plan which was going to circumvent him, in all his wisdom?
A plan… that was the one thing his opponents couldn’t hide. Lammas’ murder hadn’t been a brilliant piece of improvisation, it wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. It looked like that, but it wasn’t. Perhaps that was its weak spot, the flank which he could turn. You looked back to Easter, for instance. So many trails had started there. It was about Easter when Lammas hired the yacht. It was about Easter when he booked the bungalow. It was at Easter when Paul had threatened his mother with exposure. It was about Easter when Lammas began his unexplained mid-week trips. What was the interaction there… who had betrayed which to whom? Paul? Pauline? And the hiring of the yacht itself, what had Lammas been up to with that? Who had he really been expecting to meet when he took the Harrier up Ollby Dyke?
Out of a haze of abstraction Gently suddenly realized that he was looking at something, something very small and apparently out of place. It was a little shred of gold paper. It was caught between a horizontal timber and the reeds behind it. Quickly he bent to examine it more closely.
Torn edges… a wisp of label adhering… the back soiled with a greasy brown substance.
He gazed at it bemusedly for a moment, its significance dawning slowly. Then, in a sudden flash, the full comprehension began to arrive.
‘Dutt!’
He couldn’t quite keep the excitement out of his voice.
‘Dutt — look at this! Come and tell me what you make of it!’
The sergeant came squelching across, a lugubrious expression on his face. There was a thrill in Gently’s voice not to be denied, but the little strip of paper seemed scanty reason for such enthusiasm.
‘Looks like a bit of toffee-paper, sir.’
‘Toffee-paper, my foot!’
‘I seen plenty just like it, sir-’
‘Not like this piece, Dutt!’
