‘Coming to that meeting on Monday!’
He almost made Dolly jump. She had been nursing her beer glass between her knees, causing the contents to rotate. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you can remember about it — even the little things which don’t seem to matter.’
‘There isn’t much to tell, really…’
‘Never mind. Do your best. Let’s have it from the time when the bar opened after tea.’
Dolly nodded and sought inspiration in a sip of beer. ‘Well, I’m not in the bar when it opens, not as a rule. For the first hour it’s quiet enough, just the men off the market. I did slip in for some fags and stop a moment to have a word with them — they were talking about the new winger, the one the City has bought from Newcastle.
‘Then I went back to my bedroom to do a bit of mending — you’d be surprised how I bust the straps off my things! — and out of the window I saw one or two of them arrive — the artist lot, I mean; Mr Mallows and some of the others.
‘It’s easy to pick them out because they’re all carrying pictures, all except Mr Allstanley, who does funny things with wire. And of course, Mr Mallows — he never brings anything. But then, he’s rather different from the rest of them, isn’t he?’
‘Did you see Mrs Johnson?’
‘Yes, I’m going to tell you. She always gets off her bus near Lyons. Stephen Aymas went to meet her — he always does that, then sometimes they have a glass in the bar before the meeting.’
‘Did they do that on Monday?’
‘N-no, I think they went straight down, and it struck me that Mrs Johnson was looking a bit peevish. I watched them across the marketplace, with Stephen chattering away to her; but she hardly said a word to him, and when she did, he seemed put out by it. Something’s upset her, I said to myself, and I remember thinking it might have been her husband. Anyway, poor Stephen was getting the edge of it, and that’s maybe what made him so angry later.
‘Well, I went down into the bar after that — we’d got a darts team coming, and I like to watch a darts match. Now and then there was a knock on the shutter for drinks, but I soon got rid of them and latched up the door again.’
‘Did you catch anything of what was going on down here?’
Dolly stared for an instant at her revolving beer. ‘They were going on about Mr Wimbush, how he’d used the wrong colours. It’s always something like that — they never seem to do anything right! If I painted any pictures I wouldn’t show them to that lot…’
‘Could you hear Mrs Johnson?’
‘Oh yes, she was at it. Though I can’t remember anything she said, not particular. But I thought the same thing — she was upset about something; she sounded spiteful, you know, as though she wanted to take it out of someone.’
‘How many times did they knock for drinks?’
‘Two… three times, I think it was.’
‘And each time you served them you could hear Mrs Johnson?’
‘Yes, I told you… and later on! That was the time when the big row started — half past nine, as near as makes no difference. Me, I was washing up a few of the glasses, and Father was having a Guinness along with Bob Samson. It went off sudden, if you know what I mean. They’d been right quiet just a minute before. Then I heard Stephen Aymas shout something out, angry-like, and before you could say it they were all carrying on.’
‘What was it that Aymas shouted?’
‘That I can’t tell you. I was listening to what father was telling Bob Samson. But later on I heard him bawling that somebody wasn’t genuine, and then that they were a liar and hadn’t ever told the truth.’
‘Who do you think he was referring to?’
‘Why, Mrs Johnson, of course. You could hear her shouting back at him, though naturally, not so loud.’
‘And did you hear what she said?’
‘No, but she sounded more spiteful than ever. You can lay your hand to your heart that she was the one who set it off. Well, then father switched on the wireless and turned it up as high as it would go — Edmundo Ros, it was, and Victor Silvester after that. The boys went on with their darts match, though it was putting them off a bit… they’re a useful lot from the Grapes, they went a long way in the Shield…’
‘Did you hear anything else that was said?’
Dolly shook her head. ‘There wasn’t much chance. And by the time we’d hung the cloth up, they’d managed to cool themselves off a bit. I went down after their glasses. She’d gone by then, had Mrs Johnson. Those that were left were still muttering to each other, but they dried up when they saw me.
‘I asked them what all the fuss was about — like I told you, I know them pretty well; but they shrugged and put me off, said I wouldn’t understand it anyway.’
‘Was Aymas still in the cellar then?’
‘He was leaving just as I was going down.’
‘You couldn’t give me the time, precisely?’
‘Near enough twenty to eleven, I should think.’
Which was almost exactly on cue, if Aymas intended to follow Mrs Johnson — though whether the moment was propitious for offering lifts was a point which a good defence counsel would snatch at. But then, such an offer might not have come into it. The idea of that lift was still hypothetical. And in the meantime a case was slowly tightening around Johnson: they could now show some motive and the appearance of a prior plan.
‘In the morning I’d like you to come along and sign a statement.’
‘To the police station, you mean?’ Dolly looked a little concerned. To have a chat over a beer in the cellar of the George was, apparently, poles apart from the same thing at HQ. Gently grinned at her consternation:
‘I give you my promise not to eat you…’
Still, she looked as though she thought that she might have been mistaken in him.
The bar, when he returned upstairs, had several more customers in it, and the radio over the cigarette display was playing a Grieg dance. A game of darts had begun, played with private sets of darts: it was plain that the sport was taken seriously by the George III patrons.
The publican touched his arm: ‘There’s three of the playmates over there…’
He motioned with his head towards a table near the door, at which was sitting Phillip Watts in the company of two older men. One of them, from Mallows’s description, Gently recognized to be Baxter, and the other, by his smart appearance, he guessed was the bank manager, Farrer. As he studied them Watts looked up, and his eyes encountered Gently’s; after a word to his two companions he rose and signalled to the detective.
‘Can I offer you a drink, sir…?’
Gently went over to them, shaking his head.
‘If I may, sir, I’d like to introduce you… I’ve just been telling them about this afternoon.’
They were, as Gently had supposed, the man from the bank and the poster painter, and it soon transpired that they had a grievance to air. Both their cars had been impounded by the machinations of Stephens; Baxter, who lived far off the bus routes, was particularly biting in his complaints.
‘I assume that the police do have these powers, but all the same, given a modicum of low-grade intelligence…’
He was just as Mallows had limned him, with a small, bony head and greying hair; he spoke in a dry and scratchy manner and wore steel-rimmed glasses over deprecating eyes. The pipe that he ‘whiffed’ at, giving successive little puffs, had a flat round bowl and a spindly stem.
‘I suppose it’s what you’d call routine, Superintendent…?’
Gently found himself taking a little better to Farrer. He was a good-looking man of not more than forty-five, and though his smile was probably professional, he was at least making use of it.
‘You realize that we are obliged to do these things.’
‘Of course, Superintendent. But you can’t expect us to like them.’
‘I could probably arrange some transport for you gentlemen.’
‘No, no, don’t bother. We’ll see it out now.’
He took the opportunity of asking where they had parked their cars on the Monday, though Farrer’s, he knew already, had been on the Haymarket. Baxter’s, it appeared, had been there also, and after a moment or two’s
