‘Sir — come here a minute!’
Dutt was beckoning to him from the doorway.
‘According to the bloke what keeps the pub, that fisherman has just gone into the church.’
‘Fisherman? Which one is that?’
‘The big bloke — Dawes, I think they call him.’
‘Dawes! Has he gone up into the tower?’
‘I reckon so, sir. He isn’t inside.’
Esau… gone up into the tower! Gently stared at the sergeant in amazement. What was the Sea-King doing up there, that silent, unpredictable man of mystery?
‘Hadn’t I better fetch him down, sir?’
‘Yes… but watch your step in the belfry. If he gives you any trouble I’ll send Mears to lend a hand.’
Just then the crowd gave a shout and made him turn in apprehension, but the artist still crouched on the ledge, still clung to his last few moments of life. It was something else that was happening up there! — The slats of the window were being driven outwards. Through the disintegrating wood came a jabbing sea boot, thrusting, splintering, and smashing at the framework.
‘It’s Esau… he’s going to get him!’
Was it physical, that surge of hope? There was a roar in their throats like the roar of a football crowd, unconscious, compulsive, a single, primitive voice. The Sea-King would do something — he was more than mere humanity! He could grapple with the impossible, he could wrest it to a conclusion.
Through the fragments came the fisherman with majestic unconcern. He might have been drawing himself through a hedge, so little concern did he seem to attach to it. Having got through the window he reached up for the ledge, and having grasped that, rose easily on to it. As a feat of strength it was fantastic, it could have baffled a trained gymnast: yet the white-bearded giant made it seem a matter of course. With a quiet word to Simmonds he went up and over the parapet, then, taking the artist by his armpits, he drew him firmly on to the roof.
Pandemonium broke loose! It was the only word to describe it. Gently himself was babbling something, he could never remember what. The uproar was so deafening that one never noticed the fire engine — its crew must have thought that they had stumbled into bedlam. Some were running into the church, some embracing each other: even the reporters were shaking hands and dancing about just like the rest. Above the tumult the sudden tolling of the bell sounded quite in order — it had to clang three times before Gently realized…
But, after all, he needn’t have worried. Nothing, it appeared was to spoil that moment. The bell had deafened poor Dutt — he was deaf for a week — but it had done nothing else except to stir up dust. Gently arrived just in time to see the trap door opening. He helped to bring the collapsing artist down the rickety ladder. Esau, always Esau, was slowly piling the stones in a heap; he wouldn’t even look at Gently, wouldn’t answer a word that was put to him.
‘Nothing but shock, is it?’
Dyson had forced the Wolseley through to the gate. From porch to road it might well have been a wedding — everyone was trying to pat Simmonds on the back.
‘The shock — but that’s enough!’
Simmonds was only partly conscious. His feet were dragging after him and he needed support on both sides.
‘To the Police House, then?’
‘Yes — and get a doctor to him. Take Mears along with you. His wife’ll know what to do.’
The crowd hadn’t time to take it in before the artist was whisked away. The reporters, too, were rather at a loss. But then they remembered Esau — Esau, who had worked the miracle. Could it be that he’d escaped in the excitement surrounding Simmonds?
No, Esau was there — at least, for their cameras. Gently could have told them not to expect more than that. The Sea-King came out of the church with his admirers crowding about him… at a distance, a little distance: he had the divinity that hedges kings.
‘Dawes is the name, isn’t it?’
‘Were you born in the village?’
Did they really think he was going to answer their pitiful stock of questions? He paid no more regard to them than to the fluttering black flies — perhaps a little less, because the flies told him something.
‘There’s a storm coming up.’
To himself he murmured it. They were the only words that Gently had heard pass his lips that day. A storm was coming up! — he turned his steps towards the beach. The reporters, still to learn wisdom, hurried after him in a pack.
But the drama wasn’t quite finished under that lowering, blind-eyed tower. By the gate was standing Hawks with a look of murder on his face. He waited till Esau drew level, then he spat, full at the other: all the hate in his warped being was concentrated in the action. Esau’s arm swept in a gesture, as though he brushed away an insect. Hawks went rolling in the dust. There was no more to it than that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
For a long time Gently stood still beside the spot where Hawks had fallen. The fisherman had scrambled to his feet and gone off after the others. A good few of the crowd still remained there, talking, and the vicar was turning some small boys out of the churchyard. Dutt had accompanied Simmonds — he still felt responsible for him, and Mears, who had returned the ladder, was now pedalling off on his cycle.
It was over — it was calming down; things were getting back to normal. Why, then, did he have this feeling that in reality they had just begun? Something had clicked as he saw Hawks go sprawling in the road, a premonition, an unconscious warning, you could call it what you liked. A climax was being reached: he couldn’t get any closer to it. A climax of a tragic nature, coming up like the storm, Yet what, excepting imagination, was suggesting this present catastrophe? What harm could come to the Sea-King, with his rout of subjects about him?
He stood a long time, vaccillating! His instinct was to follow Esau. His whole being seemed to pulse with a blind necessity for it. Against that there was feeble reason and some questions he had for the vicar: Dyson, no doubt, had asked the wrong ones, or he hadn’t known what to ask.
It was the vicar who finally settled him, coming over to Gently voluntarily. Would the inspector step across the road for a glass of home-made lemonade? Gently, went, though with grave misgivings. He couldn’t conquer his foreboding so easily. But there were no rational grounds for it and the vicar was on the spot… what else could he do but seize time by the forelock?
The vicar was a widower who lived with his youngest daughter. She was a plain-faced but smiling girl of two- or three-and-twenty. The vicarage was a large one and bore affinities to the Bel-Air; it was sparsely furnished with old, worn furniture, and yet, all the same, had an air of negligent comfort.
‘A terrible, terrible business, Inspector.’
The vicar had taken him into what was obviously his den. A roll-top desk occupied a space by the window and the other three walls were lined with bookshelves. The books themselves were cheerfully dilapidated. Quite a number of them were innocent of backstrips and covers. The desk was littered with papers, some of them weighted with lumps of amber. Above the desk, in a frame of maple wood, hung a photograph of a college eight.
‘That poor young man! What in the world constrained him to do it? Upon my word, it was a mercy that Skipper Dawes…’
Gently shrugged and looked for an ashtray in which to scrape out his pipe. Had the vicar called him in to see what he could pump from him? Soon the daughter re-appeared carrying the lemonade on a tray. While he poured it the vicar continued his musings and exclamations.
‘In your business, Inspector…’
‘We don’t see a lot of suicide.’
‘But to a certain extent you must be innured to these things. I understand that the young man…’
‘He is a material witness.’
