do was to worry over the facts and to try, once more, to evolve something fresh from them.
He pulled out the notebook which he kept for unofficial musings. Finding a clean page with difficulty he began to scribble down the situation. There were four of them in it, beginning with Mixer, though the connection of the fourth suspect was tenuous indeed:
(1) A. J. Mixer. Motive: jealousy. Opportunity: possible.
(2) J. P. Simmonds. Motive: psychopathic. Opportunity: considerable.
(3) M. Cutbush. Motive: psychopathic. Opportunity: good.
(4) R. Hawks. Motive:? Opportunity:?
Note: if Simmonds tells the truth somebody may be trying to frame him.
Note: Hawks’s behaviour towards Simmonds.
Having got that down he lit his pipe and stared at the scribbling. Then he added, as an afterthought:
Does Dawes know something about Hawks?
Over this he brooded for some time, making little marks with his pencil, but finally he drew two lines under it with a sort of conclusive emphasis. Whether Dawes knew something or not, nothing would ever draw it out of him. He might inform on a stranger like Simmonds but he would never shop one of his own ‘subjects’.
And then, what was there to be known about the evil-tempered fisherman? Gently couldn’t begin to guess, it was the thinnest part of his summation. On rational grounds alone Hawks could scarcely be said to come into it. There wasn’t the merest suggestion that he had any connection with Rachel.
And yet…
Gently hovered again over the pencilled name with the (4) beside it. Wasn’t that the direction in which he found himself being drawn? If any single thing was making him hesitate about Simmonds, then it was the look which Hawks gave the artist that morning on the sandhill. A look… against a comfortable fileful of evidence!
He grunted and shoved the book back in his pocket. It was time he put the fisherman out of his mind. There was a more logical outsider to be had in Maurice — and Mixer, he still wasn’t exactly in the clear!
Suppose he had come back and caught Rachel leaving the tent — was it too much to suppose that he’d gone there looking for her?
Gently got to his feet and brushed himself irritably. With a clear case to present he felt more in the dark than ever. The trouble was that he wasn’t content to be a simple chief inspector: he wanted to be the jury too, and probably the appeal court on top. But it wasn’t his business to say whether Simmonds was telling the truth.
Why couldn’t he let it rest there, and leave the artist to take his chance?
The heat made it a penance to be on the beach, and it may have been as a penance that Gently plodded down there. He had no hopes of a sea breeze — Hiverton despised meteorology — and the lapping of the waves was not an invitation for him.
At the net store he passed Dawes, armed today with a telescope. The owner of the Keep Going didn’t acknowledge Gently’s stare. His blue eyes gazed ceaselessly towards the haze-misty horizon, and he seemed quite untroubled by the stark beating of the sun.
Nor were the visitors much troubled by it, judging by their activity. Only a few of them, the elderly ones, sat in the shade of the boats. The usual crowd of youngsters were swimming and playing on the beach, others lay tanning, a few were amusing their children. Near the gap stood an ice cream stall which was doing a steady business. A portable radio was playing under a sunshade lower down.
Had they forgotten about it, then, that earlier scene on the sandhill? One would almost have thought so, strolling among them now. Separated into units they were reasonable people, ashamed, very probably, of their madness of that moment. Nevertheless they had made a mob, these reasonable people. With a scapegoat set before them they had been ready enough for violence. Had they seen in Simmonds something a little too germane, something too much like themselves to be viewed with strict sanity?
But they were reasonable people… now, at all events! They were basking in the sun and congratulating themselves on the weather. If they glanced uneasily at Gently that was only to be expected: they didn’t really want a policeman cluttering up their pleasant beach.
He tramped down to the foreshore where the children were paddling and building castles. A number of them had banded together and were digging quite a sizeable hole. A boy of seven or eight was trying to float his model yacht; it must have been ballasted wrongly because it persisted in turning turtle.
The sea… hadn’t that to do with it, in some incomprehensible way? The sea which Dawes kept watching, as though it held an unutterable secret?
He turned his head to look for the man. Yes, he still stood there. As upright as one of the posts, for all his sixty summers, he remained planted by the hut in his tireless, oblivious vigil.
But what was he looking for in those acres of changeful water? Perhaps he couldn’t have told you himself, though you caught him in the mood. They were a ‘rum lot’, fishermen, they didn’t work like other people. Even here, in their native village, they were a race apart from the others. A fisherman’s wife was a fisherman’s widow. They were a right ‘rum lot’, and nobody understood them.
Except one of themselves… you could be certain of that! Within the clan they would understand each other, better than did the people outside it. Together in work, together in danger, together in that inexpressible communion of the sea… they were more like a band of brothers, a religious order almost: they were the receptacle of secrets past common understanding. And to share them you must belong, to partake of the revelation; after which… wasn’t it possible?… you could murder and get away with it!
Gently shifted his feet in the baking shingle. It was true: one could probably get away with murder. Dawes wouldn’t split on Hawks though he caught him red-handed — it was a fisherman’s murder, so let who would swing for it. The sea washed away all the sins of its children.
Again he looked back at the figure on the sandhill. Was it just an illusion, or was Dawes now watching him? The tilt of the cap seemed a few degrees lower, the head was turned a little from its original eyes-front. Impulsively, Gently began to walk towards the net store. There was no harm in trying even though Esau wouldn’t answer him. Sometimes silence was expressive, sometimes more so than loquacity: it wouldn’t be the first time that Gently had drawn blood from a stone.
But then, half way up the beach, he came to a puzzled halt. Dawes was no longer posted there like a storm- beaten figurehead. The net store was deserted. There was nobody within yards of it. The fisherman had vanished as though the sandhill had swallowed him up.
The disappearance of Dawes had something less than canny about it, because Gently had been watching the man all the way from the foreshore. Only once had he glanced away — when his toe stubbed a pebble — and it was in that fraction of an instant that the phenomenon had taken place. He hurried eagerly up to the store, into which Dawes might have slipped. Had the door been unlocked he would have had bare time to do it. But no, it was bolted and the padlock in position: there was nowhere at all where a man could have hidden himself.
Then a movement caught his eye in the direction of Simmonds’s campsite. As mysteriously as he had vanished, Dawes had quietly reappeared! Half-concealed by one of the tops, he stood with face averted from Gently; in his demeanour there was no sign that anything out of the way had occurred.
Yet he must have moved like a goat… how else could he have covered so much ground? The distance was upwards of a hundred yards and, to keep out of sight, he must have run doubled…
Cautiously, Gently began to approach him, but immediately Esau sank down out of sight. By the time Gently himself arrived at the campsite his quarry was once more a hundred yards away. What was the man’s object? Was he having a game? There hadn’t seemed very much gamesome about Esau. As Gently paused, so too did the fisherman: he became again the sea-staring statue.
Gently compressed his lips and plodded steadily forwards. There was only one way to see what this was all about. If Esau wanted to play games, well, he was going to have his chance. When it came to this sort of game, Gently wasn’t entirely an amateur!
Soon there wasn’t any doubt about Esau’s intentions; he was deliberately leading the detective up the marrams. When Gently hurried, he hurried. When Gently stopped, he stopped. And always, without looking round, he kept at the same approximate distance. Before long Gently found himself grudgingly admiring the fellow. He began to perceive what it was that impressed the other fishermen. Esau was tough and he was clever, but he was something else besides. There was more than the look of a Viking about that active, bearded figure.
