thought Farrer was able to confirm this.
‘Do either of you remember where Allstanley put his?’
Farrer pulled himself up short, but Baxter was not so discreet:
‘Allstanley comes from Walford — he’d have to come in along St Saviour’s.’ And he whiffed with his pipe stuck out at a defiant angle.
But when it came to the meeting itself there was a conspiracy of silence. A curious sort of uncomfortableness seemed to descend on all three of them. It was as though they felt ashamed of the scene which had taken place, and had tacitly agreed to forget all about it.
‘I think I ought to tell you that this is important! I am already aware that Aymas quarrelled with the deceased…’
Farrer admitted that the two of them had disagreed about a picture, but at the same time insinuated that it could hardly be called a quarrel.
‘Yet they were shouting at each other?’
‘Aymas’s voice is naturally loud.’
‘Didn’t he call the deceased a liar?’
‘He’s called me one, too, before now.’
Baxter flatly observed that Aymas was ‘naturally choleric ’, but permitted nothing else to escape past his pipe. As for Watts, he could take a tip from his elders and betters; he simply chimed in assentingly to whatever the others said…
The encounter was broken up by the appearance of Stephens, who had apparently come out looking for his errant senior. The young Inspector had a gleam of excitement in his eye, and it was easy to divine that he was fraught with red-hot information.
‘Could you come back to Headquarters, sir?’
Gently grunted and rose, nodding his conge to the three painters. Since it was too much to expect that Stephens could keep his news till they had returned, Gently took care to steer him the least-frequented way thither.
‘What’s it about — did you find something in one of the cars?’
‘Yes, sir, that is to say, no sir. But I’ve found something else! You remember that there was a chummie called Aymas, sir?’
‘Aymas!’ Gently couldn’t keep the interest out of his voice.
‘Yes, sir, Aymas. One of those who had a car. Well, he hasn’t got it now, sir — he sold it to a firm of breakers. And he sold it on the Tuesday morning, right bang after the murder!’
Gently gave a soft whistle. ‘Have you managed to get hold of it?’
‘That’s the devil of it, sir. The breakers have gone and broken it up. But I’ve got a man over there, and they’re trying to identify the parts, and in the meantime I’ve taken the liberty of pulling in Aymas for questioning.’
And there was another trifling matter, one which Stephens had almost forgotten. He remembered it only as he was whisking up the steps to HQ:
‘Oh, and someone rang you, sir — a person by the name of Butters. He wouldn’t state his business to me, and he wants you to ring him back.’
CHAPTER SIX
Inspector Hansom, the Lion of Police HQ, had departed to his home shortly after six p.m. He had left a note, however, with the sergeant at the desk, and this was handed to Gently as he passed through with Stephens.
‘I thought you’d like to have the low-down on Butters, who rang a couple of times while you were out this afternoon. They’re an old county family, used to have the stuff in pots, and they still carry quite a bit of pull about the place. Butters himself is a pal of Sir Daynes Broke. Naturally, we’d be obliged if you soft-pedalled with him.’
Gently grinned to himself as he folded the note away in his wallet. Sir Daynes, the county Chief Constable, was also a pal of his own. It was probably as a result of this common denominator that Butters had insisted on speaking to Gently — rejecting, perhaps ungraciously, the respectful overtures of Hansom. But what had Butters got to do with the demise of Shirley Johnson?
Aymas was sitting alone in the charge room, looking ready to eat a dragon, and he sprang passionately to his feet as Gently peered round the door.
‘What the hell do you think all this is about-!’ His powerful frame shook with anger and defiance.
Gently shrugged and closed the door again: there was an excellent treatment for angry young men. It consisted of protracting their stay in the charge room, and during a long experience, Gently had rarely known it to fail.
‘Good… let’s go into Hansom’s office. It’s time we discussed the details together.’
Stephens was reluctant, but deferred to his senior. His hands were soiled with black grease and he had an oil smudge on his nose.
‘You drew a blank on the rest of them, did you?’
‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. Though Baxter’s brakes aren’t up to standard…’
‘Where did Allstanley say he parked on that night?’
‘Behind the taxi rank, sir, on the island near the marketplace.’
‘Any verification?’
‘Yes, sir, the taxi drivers. He often parks there and it gets in their way.’
So that closed the account of the group members who owned cars, leaving Aymas standing out as the only likely customer. His car had been near the spot if not actually standing on it, and the nearest way to it from the bus stop led directly across the car park.
‘It raises one or two problems, though…’ Gently filled Stephens in on this. ‘He could hardly have stabbed her in his car, so why did he sell it to the breakers?’
‘He might have had blood on himself, sir, and then traasferred it to the car.’
‘It’s a possibility, of course — only there wasn’t a lot of blood.’
But the point might still be settled by a lucky find at the breaker’s yard, though the fact that the parts had been dispersed would weaken the evidence if it came to a case. It would be necessary to prove to the hilt that they had, in fact, come from Aymas’s car.
‘I’ll give you the rest of the dope on Aymas…’
Stephens heard him with eyes that glinted; it was plain from the youngster’s enthusiasm that he was abandoning his theory of blackmail. Now it was clearly a crime passionel, a case of sudden and irresistible impulse. Shirley Johnson had quarrelled with her passionate lover, and with the first weapon to hand he had stabbed her to the heart. Didn’t the facts support this thesis? Hadn’t they the grounds of an open-and-shut case?
But even as he was building it up, Gently was slowly rejecting the idea. Could it be that Stephens’s enthusiasm had sounded a still, small note of warning for him? It was altogether too simple — it didn’t harmonize as it should! There were undertones everywhere that produced an overall chord of dissonance. He had got so far into the business that he was beginning to feel it intuitively; it was no use selecting some facts from it to make a pattern that jarred with the remainder.
‘It might be best to wait a little…’
‘You mean, we’re not going to charge him tonight?’
Stephens, whose mind had been racing ahead, sounded as disappointed as a child.
‘Oh… we’ll put him through the hoop and see how much we can squeeze out of him. But don’t expect him to break down and dump confessions in your lap. For the rest, it depends on tying in his car, and unless you can do that, the Public Prosecutor won’t look at it. Now give me the phone — I want to hear what Butters can tell us.’
The number was on the Lordham exchange, and this, at eight p.m., seemed difficult to contact. The Grieg dance which Gently had heard persisted in running through his head, conjuring up, quite irrelevantly, a picture of the rainy Bergen hills. And below them, in the fish market, knives were flashing on the busy slabs, while down the quay, beyond the Tyskebryggen, the Venus or the Leda waited…
