‘How did you know that she was painting?’
‘You could smell it, that’s how. The place used to reek of turpentine and linseed. And you could hear her, too, when she was using a big brush — and there’d be her clutter of things in the sink in the morning.’
Pipe in mouth, Gently strolled to the metal-framed window, which looked down on some mews to the rear of the building. Beneath it, to the ground, stretched a smooth wall of glazed brick: the cream paint on the sill was in part worn and marked. He turned on his heel.
‘She had a door key, of course?’
‘That’s right — she didn’t need to go out through the window.’
‘Did you think that she might have?’
‘Not till a moment ago. But I’m not quite as dumb as I look, old sport.’
Gently nodded indefinitely and puffed once or twice. He had suddenly noticed that Johnson was sweating. For a second or two he seemed on the verge of a fresh question, then he motioned to Stephens, and picked up his hat.
CHAPTER FOUR
A lazy breeze tempered the warm afternoon, and Gently, ignoring the buses, elected to walk back along Viscount Road. He was suddenly in a mood for the early summer weather: it seemed exactly to suit his contemplative frame of mind.
Once more he had embarked on a case that intrigued him. During those last few moments with Johnson, he had felt the surge of the mysterious current. From being a collection of dead facts the case had sprung into vibrant life, he was getting it into his hands, beginning to sense a possible shape. Perhaps never before had he so relished the exercising of his powers. His spell of duty in the metropolis had done that for him, at least. In another way it had been a tall milestone in his career: it had pulled him up, made him see himself, confirmed the talent that was his…
‘Don’t you think, sir, that we can safely rule Johnson out of it?’
He had hardly been aware of Stephens, striding smartly along beside him. The sudden clarity of vision which his mood had induced had been extending itself to the busy world passing about him. This city had always been the home of painters… at last, he thought he had hit on one of the reasons. There was a quality in the light here, a steady, glowing luminosity. Was it due to the dry, continental east wind?
‘I don’t know what your impressions were, sir, but I rather had the feeling that he was on the up-and-up. I admit that he struck me as being a little calculating, but I don’t think that one should be too influenced by that.’
‘What do you mean by being calculating?’
Gently mentally shrugged his shoulders — how these youngsters tried to reduce everything to an immaculate black and white!
‘Well, sir, he was making the best of his case. I think you’ll agree with me about that. He set himself to sound convincing by pretending to have nothing to hide.’
‘And you think that he succeeded?’
‘Quite frankly, sir, I do. He made a number of risky admissions which he might just as well have kept in the bag.’
‘Like his knowledge of the Group meeting?’
‘Yes, sir, particularly that. There was no need for him to have stuck his neck out so far. I realize that in theory it might be put down to cleverness, but in practice, sir, did you ever meet with cleverness of that kind?’
Gently grudgingly admitted it. ‘Only in defence counsels…! When your own neck is at stake, you don’t set puzzles of that kind. All the same, it would have been odd if he hadn’t known about the meeting.’
‘On the balance, sir, I think you must allow it’s in his favour.’
Which was to echo the shrewd Superintendent Walker, of course, not to mention handsome Hansom’s more rhapsodical judgements. Johnson had it in the balance: that was the general conclusion, though Hansom was inclined to give the scales a prejudiced nudge.
‘One can’t always strike a balance…’
Here, again, he was making a discovery — he, in his approach to a case, had never drawn up accounts of this kind. They were a compromise with the truth and he had automatically distrusted them; his way was to assemble the facts and to hold them suspended in his mind, where, by a sort of alchemy, they eventually moved into a pattern.
‘Yes, sir, I agree. But one has to have a shot at it.’
‘It’s a process which is liable to error, Stephens.’
‘But you’ve got to have some method for treating the facts, sir.’
‘If you can see the facts clearly, there’s no need for a method.’
He could see he was puzzling Stephens, and suddenly he smiled at him paternally. He knew that it was no use trying to explain himself to the young man. It would take long years of experience, of persistent trial and error, before Stephens came to accept that detection was an art and not a science. Even Gently, at the top of his tree, had only just begun to see that…
‘We’ll take a look at the exhibition before we return to HQ. It’ll give us something to chat about when we put the painters through it.’
The way to the Castle Gardens, however, took them past the City Hall and its car park, and Gently hadn’t the heart to head his colleague off them again. As usual at that hour, the park was jam-packed with lines of vehicles. An elderly attendant in a navy-blue uniform was doing his best to produce a semblance of order.
‘Superintendent Gently, CID. Are those the dustbins where the police found the body?’
This was also for Stephens’s benefit, since Gently could identify the site from the photographs. There were six of them standing in a well-dragooned row, heavy-quality, galvanized Corporation dustbins; than these it would have been hard to imagine a more innocent sequence of useful ironware. Nothing remained to suggest that a tragedy had been enacted. All traces of blood had been carefully erased. The terrace wall, against which the dustbins were ranged, marked the boundary of HQ’s section of the park.
‘He was a cheeky sort of chummie, sir… when you come to weigh it up!’
Gently nodded his agreement, his eye running round the open space. It was largely contained by the interior angle which was formed by the backs of the City Hall and Police HQ. Opposite to the City Hall were the blind ends and a brick wall, beside which ran a footway joining Chapel Street with St Saviour’s. The last-mentioned street made the fourth side of the square; it faced the car park with a number of small shops, and a lane.
‘It couldn’t have been altogether dark over here.’
Stephens was hard at it studying the angles of the site. Above it all, sanctifying the spot with civic dignity, rose the great tower of the City Hall with its clock face of gilt studs.
‘By half past ten… at this time of the year…’
‘I seem to remember that it was cloudy on Monday.’
‘All the same, there’s three lamps in the street over there, and a small one on the wall where you go out past HQ.’
Stephens paused to eye the police building with a touch of malevolence — this was certainly an unfortunate spot for a murder! There were about twenty yards, if it came to hard figures, which separated the dustbins from the windows of the canteen. But then, even police canteens ran to curtains.
‘Under the circumstances it could scarcely have been premeditated. Nobody but an idiot would plan a murder right here. Having got her here, he must have acted on impulse — he might have been carrying that paper knife in the locker of his car.’
‘Then you think it was bona fide, his offer of a lift?’
‘Well, sir, he might have planned to do it somewhere else. But then finding that it was quiet here, temptation got the better of him. He may have done it in his car — we might be able to find the traces.’
It was plain enough that Stephens was chafing for a bit of action. Unlike Dutt, he wasn’t used to Gently’s seeming-casual ways. The murderer would have had three days in which to clean or not clean his car, but the
