Now he was merely a poster artist, but some time, when he would, he could burst through that disguise and blaze his name to the high heavens… perhaps, when Shirley Johnson became his worshipping mistress. Yes, one could believe it of the nervously whiffing Baxter: it needed only the conscious smile — and wouldn’t that have been lost on Monday night?
Gently snapped shut his notebook and pushed his way across to the booth. There, temporarily free of inquirers, Watts was adding up some figures on a pad.
‘Are you making plenty of hay?’
‘Yes, sir! This is our best… our best ever. Even Arthur Wimbush… I really think we’re going to sell out…!’
‘Have you sold Mr Baxter’s poster?’
‘Yes, sir. I saw you talking to him…’
‘Doesn’t he paint anything else besides posters?’
‘Oh yes, sir. He paints landscapes too.’
‘Hmn.’ Gently appeared to meditate the point. ‘Has he done anything that might suit a detective’s den?’
‘Well, sir…’ Young Watts was equally thoughtful. ‘He’s done a fine view of the Heath with a prospect of the prison…’
‘Good is he — apart from these posters of his?’
Watts flushed. ‘I don’t think… I couldn’t say, not really. He usually sends several things to the exhibition… I believe they think that he’s best at posters.’
So that was Baxter lined up behind the absentee Johnson, with, in a manner of speaking, Allstanley still to play. But to them one was obliged to add an unlimited number of outsiders, since suspicion could not be confined to the group members alone.
On returning to Headquarters he found, already, a message from Stephens:
‘Couldn’t we have the phone tapped? I’ve seen her using it, I think…’
This conjured up a picture of Stephens lurking among the laurels, and trying to stifle a treacherous sneeze as the gardener passed by him.
Hansom, who had taken the tip about checking on car purchasers, had so far only uncovered a minor misdemeanour.
‘A chummie with an expired licence bought a car and drove it home
…’
He seemed to take it much to heart that they hadn’t immediately grabbed Johnson.
Gently arranged for Stephens’s relief and then departed again for Glove Street. The manageress, treating him now as a regular, found him a table beside the window. Most of the patrons had evening papers in which they were reading of Pagram’s triumph, but the local titbit, Johnson’s flitting, had been temporarily placed under wraps.
Beyond Glove Street, in St Saviour’s, one heard the weekend exodus in motion, and several patrons were claiming suitcases when they went to pay their bills.
CHAPTER TEN
No calls had been put through to the hotel during the night, and Gently heard nothing about the slashings until he checked in at Headquarters.
The morning was dull and uncommitted, promising neither sun nor rain; it was a morning when you didn’t much care whether you were stuck in the city or out of it. Stephens he had seen the evening before, and the Inspector was gone again before Gently got up. After the degenerate custom of Elphinstow Road, he had ordered his breakfast to be sent up to his room.
There, among the pillows, he had disembowelled the papers, making them greasy with his buttery fingers; then, feeling irritable and inclined to a headache, he had taken himself off to a tepid shower.
Up here, the Sundays were so intensely sabbatical! In place of traffic one heard the chirping of sparrows under the eaves. And there were huskily crooning pigeons in the elm trees beneath the Castle, and the weird, unanalysable cries of an itinerant news vendor.
While dressing he had looked through his window into a street completely deserted; there wasn’t even a Sunday stroller where a traffic jam had been yesterday. He was tying his tie when he caught sight of the first pedestrian, and then it was a bus conductor on his way to the terminus. As for cars! Well, a couple of them were parked across the way, but there was nothing else in that line except a locked and deserted motor coach.
Not until he reached the marketplace did he discover a semblance of life. Here some corporation employees were hosing down the numerous gangways. The water had spread across the Walk, bearing litter and shavings with it, and there was a smell of damaged fruit and an echoing grate of shovels. A shabby old man stood furtively watching… was it the same one who had discovered the body? Suddenly he dived into the heap of rubbish, producing a coin which he rubbed on his sleeve…
Hansom had also bought a sheaf of papers and he was digesting them in his office. He was chewing a short, black cheroot, his favourite form of nicotine ingestion.
‘Well, I found that car dealer for you!’ He tossed a report sheet across the desk. ‘He flogged Johnson a nice quiet ’53 Minx — a bit of a change from MGs, isn’t it?’
Gently took up the report sheet and glanced over it, shrugging. A Minx was an obvious choice for Johnson. It was a car as unobtrusive as any car could be: the unregistering norm, a car to go unnoticed.
‘You’ve put it out, have you?’
Hansom ringed him with cheroot smoke. ‘We made it an all-stations, because where the hell is he by now? Not in Northshire, that’s a safe bet, and maybe not in England either. But my guess is that he headed straight for the Smoke.’
‘When did you find this car dealer?’
‘Just this morning, like it says.’
‘Any message from Stephens?’
‘Nope. His relief is in the canteen.’
Gently went to talk to the relief, who was sombrely eating a canteen breakfast. The man had spent a tranquil night and had nothing of interest to report. Previously, as Stephens had told Gently, Butters’s family had arrived in two cars; lights had been burning when Stephens was relieved and had continued to do so until past one a.m.
‘Did you see any traffic go past the house?’
‘Not till seven, when the milkman got there.’
‘You had a good look at him, did you?’
‘Yes. He was a young fellow; short; dark brown hair.’
It was five minutes later, when Gently was back in Hansom’s office, that the desk sergeant buzzed to say that Baxter wanted to see them. He was shown up straight away and he arrived strangely breathless; his glasses were held in his hand, which added to his distrait appearance.
‘I’ve just come from the exhibition — run all the way…!’
He brushed aside Gently’s suggestion that he should take a seat.
‘No, this is serious — deadly serious, you understand? That fellow — that barbarian Johnson! He’s slashed all the paintings!’
‘Johnson!’
Hansom was on his feet in a moment. From the beginning, one felt, he had looked on Johnson as personal meat.
‘You’ve seen Johnson around?’
‘No… don’t be silly! But he’s slashed them with the knife — the same one. It’s still there!’
A minute or two of careful questioning was required to get the facts from him. For once he had been rattled out of his disdainful sang-froid. He stuttered and gestured and stared with his naked eyes, too upset, apparently, to clean and replace the smeary glasses.
‘I–I… this morning I had to go there — Watts gave me the key — on Sundays it’s closed… the exhibition, I mean! And that’s how I found it — slashed, every one of them! The glass all broken… the knife stuck in a
