and a few facts you’ve made me out to be inhuman — an egoistic monster, a psychopath at the very least! And I’m not — I’m not like that. It’s too utterly bloody ridiculous. Get on to my friends — I’ve got plenty of them! The worst they can call me is a line-shooting bastard… I’m human, I tell you, I’m not a bloody monster…’
He flung the hair out of his eyes and dragged his chair closer to the desk; with his hands gripping the edge of it, he was only a couple of feet from Gently.
‘Listen to what I tell you, cocker… I want to see that swine collared too! Not out of revenge, or anything like that, but because he ought to be put inside. Shirley… you know how I felt about her. She wasn’t any credit to the human race. But damn it, she had a right to live, and only a madman would take it away from her…
‘But now you’re playing the madman’s game, because it was someone who knew about me and Anne. He gambled that you’d pin it on me for certain, as soon as the rest of the tale came out. So for Christ’s sake try to see this straight — I wouldn’t have laid my little finger on Shirley!
‘On Monday night I did just what I told you. I was never near here, and I didn’t kill my wife…’
Gently had never stopped puffing at his pipe, but now he put an entirely gratuitous match to it. Having done that, he broke the match in two pieces and arranged them fastidiously in the ashtray.
Always, with Johnson, it was the selfsame question — was he being honest, or was he being clever? Before, they had given him the benefit of the doubt, and even now he was keeping his foot in the door. He had no defence against the charge, and yet… what was the answer going to be?
‘Take Mr Johnson back to the charge room, will you?’ He swung on Hansom’s revolving chair, so that his back was towards them. From the reluctant way in which Stephens got to his feet, Gently knew that the Inspector was critical of the order.
‘You’re holding me… is that it?’
‘I may want to ask some more questions.’
‘And meanwhile I’m in custody?’
‘You are assisting the police…’
They took him out while Gently was still savouring the irony of the phrase.
Stephens came back quickly, his face wearing a worried look.
‘Super, I don’t know…’
‘Sit down and light your pipe.’
‘Yes, sir. But my impression-’
‘Take a seat! I’m trying to think.’
Stephens did as Gently bid him with the best grace possible, but his pipe, that pride and joy, seemed unable to absorb him. Gently continued to face the wall, his cogitations marked by smoke rings; Stephens was not the first person to have noticed that the Super’s back was like an iron curtain.
‘So you’d slap him inside, and no more nonsense?’
Ten minutes had passed in the silent smoke rings.
‘Under the circumstances, sir-’
‘I’ve got no option. But suppose I was damn fool enough to make myself the option?’
Stephens was thoroughly unhappy and didn’t know what to say. He had never before come across Gently in this awkward, angular mood.
‘I must admit, sir… to my way of thinking…’
‘Just tell me straight out, Stephens.’
‘Very well, sir. I wouldn’t think twice about it. He’s our chummie, and we’d get a conviction.’
‘Hmm.’ Some more smoke rings rose towards the ceiling, and again the office was broodingly silent. Then suddenly Gently swivelled round in the chair, the ghost of a grin spreading over his face.
‘I always like to ask someone’s advice when I’m in danger of making a fool of myself! You are perfectly right about Johnson, of course. No jury would give him twenty minutes.’
‘Then we’ll go ahead and charge him, sir?’
‘No, just get him to amend his statement.’
‘But I don’t understand-!’
Gently’s grin grew broader. ‘That’s exactly what Johnson was trying to tell us…’
Once more he was rebelling against the accepted order, and once more he was positive that he was doing the right thing. He wished that he could have explained himself to Stephens, but how could one explain an unreasoning intuition? It was a faculty which had to grow, there was no passing it on.
As it was, he simply patted Stephens on the arm.
‘Don’t look so upset! I’m going to put a tail on him. If he tries to do a bunk we’ll pull him in fast enough. In the meantime, I don’t want to tie my hands with Johnson.’
‘But if ever there was a case where circumstantial evidence…’
‘I know. But Johnson made one very good point. We haven’t been here long and we don’t really know the people… why he said it doesn’t matter. We can afford to take our time.’
In the end he had Stephens partly propitiated; the young detective, though apprehensive, was eager to follow where Gently led. Johnson’s statement was revised, typed out and signed. Nobody had very much to say apart from the bare requirements of the transaction.
‘But I can take it that I’m still number one on your list…?’
If Johnson was surprised to be getting away with it, he was at pains to conceal the fact.
‘For the present I want you to stay within the city jurisdiction. If you try to go outside it you will be instantly arrested.’
The detective who was to tail him, a raw-boned local with prodding dark eyes, had been instructed that coyness was not essential to the contract. From the window they watched him setting out after his quarry — Johnson must have known he was there, although he didn’t turn his head.
‘I suppose it’s all right, sir, to let him go like that…?’ All Stephens’s uneasiness returned at the sight.
‘Come on — let’s go to bed! It’s getting on for two already, and in the morning we’ve got a couple of statements to take.’
The hotel into which they had been booked was only a short distance from the marketplace and as they walked there, step for step, they didn’t meet a single person. A train whistle from the Thorne Yards was the only sound to break the stillness and above them, in a clear sky, a new moon was scratched in silver.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘ Superintendent Gently.’
‘Damn it — you get up early, Gently!’
Gently grinned, snuggling himself a little deeper in his pillows. It was in fact five minutes to eight and he could hear the weather being announced: ‘An anticyclone over the Azores is continuing almost stationary…’
A cup of tea stood on the cabinet from which he had unlatched the phone, the sun was streaming through the window and the traffic was busy below. From next door, where there was a bathroom, he could hear the comfortable sound of a filling bath; in his imagination he could see the water descending and savour the voluptuous fragrance of bath salts and steam.
‘I’m sorry if I got you up…’
‘My dear fellow, don’t waste apologies. Though at this hour in the morning — you remember what Caruso said about it? “Madam, I can’t spit
…!” Well, it’s like that with me: I need at least a pint of coffee to turn me into a human being.’
‘I’d like to see you later this morning, sir.’
‘Then you’ll have to come along to my studio, Gently. I’m a professional, you know, not a mewling amateur — I stand to my easel between ten and one.’
Gently chuckled to himself. How the phrase suited Mallows! One could visualize his stocky figure planted, fencer-like, before a canvas. Off-hand he couldn’t remember ever having seen a small Mallows picture; they were created for noble rooms and for great carved and gilded frames.
‘I’ll be along at about eleven if I’m not held up.’
