taking the cue, began singing raggedly with the mouth organ. The publican bawled for clean glasses, ignoring a trayful that stood under his nose.
‘She meant a lot to somebody.’
The note had changed to one of pathos.
‘Don’t you ever think? That girl was someone’s daughter, I tell you! How would you like it… put yourself in his place. And her mother — think of that! Her mother… didn’t she have one too?’
His voice broke absurdly in alcoholic grief. Tears ran down his thin cheeks, the corners of his mouth twitched downwards. Yet somehow he escaped being funny, this old man weeping into his beer. He was like a ham actor whose sham sentiments revealed a real tragedy. The long, bitter face seemed a picture traced by ancient suffering.
‘… little sister… brother perhaps. You aren’t to know who she’s left behind. And what do you care, any of you? Not a dashed thing! All you can think about… isn’t it the truth? She’s dead… lay there strangled… and that’s all you can think about!’
He drew a sleeve across his mouth and then gulped down some more beer. For a moment it looked as though the lachrymose vein would continue. But instead, he took a couple of belligerent steps towards the bar.
‘And I ask you again… what are they going to do about it? Where are these blessed policemen who ought to be on the job? Here’s one… just look at him. Holding up the bar! It isn’t his daughter, so what does he care? Holding up the bar, and listening to every mortal word.’
It was useless singing any longer, Hawks had gone too far for that. Swaying slightly on his feet, he was menacing Gently with his empty tankard. Spanton’s mouth organ clattered to the floor. The dart players ceased to throw their darts. Up and down the crowded bar there was a moment of bated, watchful silence.
And then, from Esau’s corner, came the scrape of a table pushed aside. Sparing a glance from the threatening Hawks, Gently saw the big man get to his feet. There was nothing hurried about it. Esau’s movements were slow and gentle. Taking all the time in the world, he settled a sea cap on his white head.
‘Esau… you let me be!’
Hawks’s tone was suddenly apprehensive. He stumbled back a pace and let the tankard fall to his side.
‘You haven’t got no right. Esau, listen… I’m warning you!’
Esau, deaf as the Ailsa Craig, continued his preparations for leaving. He shut his clasp-knife and put it away. He wrapped up his pigtail in a scrap of oilcloth. Pipe and matches went each into a stowage, and finally he drained what was left of his beer.
‘I tell you, Esau!’
Esau patted his pockets.
‘If you lay a hand on me!’
Esau took him by the arm.
There was no fuss about it and not another word. Hawks, the wind quite out of his sails, was walked out like a child. Somebody grabbed the tankard from him, somebody else gave him his cap. The whole business was so quiet that one could scarcely believe it had happened.
‘Phew!’
The publican made a gesture of wiping his brow.
‘I thought there’d be trouble there, Esau or no Esau. That Hawks… he’s a wicked so-and-so, even when he’s cold sober.’
‘They’ll be all right, will they?’
‘Oh yes! You don’t know Esau. You might say he’s the skipper here — they all pay attention to him. And one time him and Hawks were mates on a drifter together.’
At first they wondered how Gently would take it, but he continued to lean, apparently unmoved, at the bar. Eventually Spanton rescued his mouth organ and the dart players cleaned their board. The publican, in a great bustle, filled a great many empty glasses.
If anything, the incident seemed to have cleared the air a little. The exclusive grouping of the company was beginning to relax. Gently, pipe between his teeth, listened amiably to the publican’s chatter; one would have thought his only interest there lay in a pint in congenial company.
‘Then, of course, you never saw her alive.’
Was it Hawks or was it Dawes whose departure had eased the tension?
‘Not that she ever came in here, mind you.’
Or was it just that they’d weighed him up, deciding that probably he wasn’t a trouble maker?
Spanton had succeeded in collecting a crowd round him. He’d got one of the ancients singing ‘The North Sea Fisherman’. After that it was ‘Stormy Weather, Boys’, of which they all knew the chorus: Aaron Wright sang the verses, and it was the unexpurgated version.
Yes, the tension had relaxed — but wasn’t it now, perhaps, too boisterous? From one extreme it had gone to the other, like a fit of malarial fever. Every moment it was growing noisier, more hectic, more reprehensible.
‘How much is on the slate?’
‘Come on, don’t be awkward!’
‘Just take it out of this, will you?’
‘Well, if you say so.’
Had he missed something important by the skin of his teeth?
Outside the long twilight had commenced under a pale sky. Stars prickled overhead, and the coppery west suffused opalescence. Round a shrub in someone’s garden moths tapped and buzzed eagerly, while bats, scarcely audible, pipped as they flickered high above.
At the turn by the council houses he almost ran into a couple of lovers. They were leaning over a bicycle, heads together, very quiet. Then again, by a field gate, another silent couple. Their eyes followed Gently but they didn’t draw apart.
On such a night as this… two evenings ago. Hadn’t the Bel-Air been nearly empty and Mixer, presumably, in Starmouth?
An alien fragrance reached his nostrils as he approached the gates of the Bel-Air. Dawes, another ghost of the twilight, sat solemnly smoking on a hedge bank.
‘You wanted to see me, did you?’
The white head nodded very slightly. After an instant’s hesitation Gently sat down on the bank beside him. It was a pleasant conference seat: the bank was tall with summer grasses.
‘Bob Hawks… I wouldn’t pay much regard to him.’
The voice was like the man, slow, but full of grave decision.
‘He’s had his trouble, Bob has, and sometimes it makes him hasty. But I’ve had a word or two with him. I can answer that he’ll watch his tongue.’
‘What sort of trouble has he had?’
Dawes didn’t appear to hear him. One had the impression that he was unused to being questioned, that wherever he found himself his word was the law. Having made his pronouncement, he sat a long time silent. The smoke proceeded from his mouth with a clock-like regularity.
‘If that’s all you’ve got to say…’
‘Don’t be in a hurry.’
He hadn’t even looked at Gently, just sat there staring at nothing.
‘You were talking to that boy.’
‘Simmonds, you mean — the one with the tent?’
‘I was wondering how much he told you.’
‘Naturally, that’s confidential.’
Another silence, this time more irritating. At the mention of Simmonds Gently’s interest had been sharply roused. But he could see that it was useless to try hurrying the old autocrat. For years, very probably, Dawes had ruled the Hiverton roost.
‘Did he tell you he got a thrashing?’
For answer Gently shrugged.
‘So he didn’t — I thought as much. They don’t like to admit it, these youngsters.’
‘Who gave him the thrashing — you?’
