‘Good. Will you be on duty, or could you stand a drop of sherry?’
‘I’ll be on duty…’
‘Never mind. I promise not to tell a soul. And I suppose it’s no use asking what you’re digging after now?’
Gently hung up, still chuckling. One couldn’t help being taken with Mallows. Mirrored in him, one could perceive a long line of master painters. They were professionals and proud of it! They had no time for self-centred aesthetes. They were the strong, the prolific creators, on whose brushes few doubts ever sat, and they produced those arsenals of work from which the small men and critics dissented.
He had the papers on his breakfast table and found that the Johnson case was overshadowed. The Yard had made their concerted sweep on the information of Herbie the Fence, and at last they had got their hands on Jimmy Fisher’s executioner.
SCOTLAND YARD STRIKES — SLAYER OF GANGSTER ARRESTED
38 Arrests in Mammoth East End Swoop
Warehouse battle — Constable shot.
In a series of raids carried out last night, Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police virtually wiped out the rival gangs of East End warehouse bandits. Acting on a tip-off, they surrounded a warehouse in Poplar. At the same time swoops were made on premises in Stepney, Wapping and Whitechapel.
At Poplar, where a gun battle developed, a constable was shot and seriously wounded. The gunman was later arrested with five members of his gang. They are expected to be able to assist the police in their inquiries into the killing of the notorious Jimmy Fisher…
The Scotland Yard officer in charge of the operation was Superintendent Pagram, of Homicide. Superintendent Gently was also working on the case, but left it yesterday to take charge of the Shirley Johnson murder.
The raids came as the culmination of long weeks of arduous routine work…
Gently wrinkled his nose and passed the paper across to Stephens. So they had finally done it: they had laid Jimmy Fisher’s ghost. There was, naturally, a good bit of ‘arduous routine’ still to be undertaken, but now it was coasting home on a downhill gradient; while, if they had recovered the gun, even that might be abbreviated.
‘I’m glad they got around to mentioning your name, sir.’
Secretly, so was Gently; after all, he had earned it! And from the way it was put… if you read between the lines… All in all, he finished his breakfast in a mood of quiet complacence.
At Headquarters he had to confer with Hansom and Superintendent Walker, two gentlemen who were bound to be critical of the way he had treated Johnson. Unlike Stephens, however, they had precedents to go on, and they warily refrained from open disagreement with Gently.
‘It turns out, then, that Johnson has got a rip-snorting motive?’
Hansom couldn’t help dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
‘You could pull him in at any time, and make a charge stick?’
‘At any time I feel that I’m one hundred per cent sure of him…’
He left them in the Super’s office to talk over his sins, Stephens, in the meantime, having fetched Dolly to make her statement. It amused him to watch Stephens’s reactions to the attractive barmaid; aware of his susceptibility, the Inspector became extremely punctilious.
‘You appreciate that we have to put it in statement form, miss…’
‘If you’ll be good enough to read it through, miss…’
‘Yes, miss. Sign it there…’
In the end it was doubtful who was most impressed by the other — Dolly, it was certain, had an eye for Stephens’s good looks. He saw her out through the foyer and they parted in mutual embarrassment. Coming back, he sat thoughtfully silent while his senior brooded over the statement.
‘What do you think about Aymas calling Mrs Johnson a liar?’
‘Aymas-?’
‘Previous to that, they’d been so friendly together.’
Stephens frowned and twisted his fingers. ‘She might have been kidding him about his pictures.’
‘“Liar” was a strong term to use.’
‘Well… about another bloke, then.’
There could be no question that they needed to know more about the meeting. It was the thought on which Gently had slept, and which had occasioned his call to Mallows. If you were going to mark time on Johnson, then the meeting became your first object; it was from there that Shirley Johnson had walked to her death, with the accusation of ‘liar!’ still echoing in her ears. And, out of all those that had been present, it was her accuser who most caught the eye.
‘It’s a pity that we didn’t get something positive from the breakers…’
He had seen the report of the detective who had been engaged in the search. The wheels, engine and body of Aymas’s car had been identified, but the body had been gutted and crushed in a press. The mats and linings had in any case been destroyed in an incinerator, while the seats and their cushions had been lost among a thousand others. Short of testing the whole pile there was nothing to be done, and even if blood reactions had been found, they could not be tied to Aymas’s car.
If Aymas had had something to hide, then he had hidden it with outstanding efficiency.
Butters’s Rolls slid up to HQ at a few minutes before ten o’clock. Butters, in honour of the occasion, wore a black jacket over pinstripe trousers. His buttonhole, almost inevitably, was a large white carnation, and on his head he wore a bowler and on his hands pigskin gloves. His daughter, looking dark-eyed, had also been produced in black; she wore a tailored two-piece suit but its lapel was innocent of flowers.
‘As you see, we’ve come along, sir… expect you need my statement too.’
He had been drinking already that morning: you could smell it two paces off.
Gently handed Butters to Stephens, wanting the daughter on his own; but if he had been expecting her to talk more freely he was in for a disappointment. Her mood had changed from that of last night’s. The hysterical undertone had been repressed. Now she was very much what she looked, the well-bred offspring of a ‘county’ family. She sat stiffly upright on the office chair, and neatly folded her hands on her lap.
‘Just some questions to start with, Miss Butters…’
Gently was consciously using his ‘paternal’ manner. Instead of facing her across Hansom’s desk, he had perched informally on a corner of it.
‘I’ve been talking to your fiance…’
Again, he deliberately chose this term.
‘He confirms what you were telling me, especially in relation to Monday night…’
But he might as well have saved his guile, because Miss Butters was not to be loosened. She had taken her second wind, as it were, and she was painfully on her guard. Her statement was carefully brief. It was a model of cautious admission. She answered his questions with unresponsive brevity and refused to be cajoled into voluntary additions.
Had she been on the phone to Johnson? Gently knew that he had spent the night at his flat.
‘What happened on the Sunday evening?’
‘Derek drove us to the cottage. During the afternoon we’d been sailing, and Derek had his tea with us. We said we were going for a spin to the coast.’
‘What time did you return to Lordham?’
‘At ten p.m.’
‘Did Derek go in with you?’
‘Yes. He had a drink with father.’
‘Was his wife mentioned that day?’
‘No, she wasn’t mentioned.’
‘On the Monday, what did you talk about?’
‘About the business, about Thrin Mouth regatta.’
And so it had gone on, from start to finish; you could almost hear the thud as the questions were dead- batted.
‘By the way! Touching your phone conversation with Johnson last night…’
