command. One suspected that very little slipped past it unawares.
‘Now I’ll do a little guessing. There’s a connection here, isn’t there? You found something here that put you on the trail of the letter. Otherwise you might have missed it, he might have kept it to himself. If I read that letter aright, he assisted — Johnson, was it? — to escape.’
‘It didn’t necessarily refer to Johnson.’
‘My dear fellow! Who else is there? He assisted Johnson to elude your clutches — you were shadowing him I suppose? And there’s this X, he didn’t like it, and it brought on another outburst. He left something here that was threatening to Farrer, and sent him that letter to make it plain…’
Gently felt himself grow cold. He had said not a word about Farrer! Deliberately, he had kept the name of the bank manager out of it. He stared unbelievingly at Mallows, and Mallows at him: they were both instantly conscious of that revealing blunder. Then slowly, rather sadly, Mallows began to shake his head.
‘I talk too much — don’t I? It’s always been my downfall… But you’d be a fool to attach too much importance to it, you know. To tell you the truth, Farrer rang me this morning — he was worried about Johnson and wanted to confess it. So it wasn’t too difficult to deduce that it was he who received the letter.’
A perfectly logical explanation — but the damage had been done. The playful intimacy that existed between them seemed to have felt the touch of a frost. Mallows stood biting at his lip and gazing down at one of the pictures. Gently, hands stuffed in his pockets, wore the most wooden of his expressions.
‘There are a few routine questions I have to put to you… and naturally, we’re making a thorough investigation.’
‘I understand that. Damn it, you’ve got to be thorough. I don’t suppose you like it any better than we do…’
But he went through the rest of it as quickly as he could, and Mallows confined himself to giving straight answers. He had spent the evening in his garden, and then gone to bed to read; like Gently, he had had his breakfast in bed that morning.
Gently watched him drive away, and then went straight to a phone box. In the directory he found the number of the bank house.
‘Superintendent Gently… did you ring Mallows this morning?’
Farrer began with a little hedging, trying to find what the query was about.
‘I can check with the exchange. I merely thought you’d save me the trouble.’
‘I see… yes… no, I haven’t rung him today.’
Gently clamped the receiver down hard on its rest. He remained there, leaning on it, for several minutes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He abandoned his plan of lunch at his hotel and returned instead to have it in the canteen. Hansom, who was a bachelor, made a habit of lunching there, and had a small, sacred table and even aspired to a private napkin. With this tucked under his chin he had a somewhat ogreish appearance.
‘Your playmate rang in — two of the Butters’s went to church, the mother and the eldest daughter, in the eldest daughter’s car. Then the old man came out and had a mooch around the lawn. He’d been sinking it, apparently, wasn’t too steady on his pins.’
‘Did nobody else visit the house?’
‘No… half a mo’, the paperman.’
Gently grunted into his soup, imagining the Sunday scene at Lordham. Stephens had taken with him a folding stool of the type familiar to fishermen. His car being concealed, he would have crept to some hedge or shrubbery, and there, with his glasses, have zealously watched the house and grounds. Then, stealing some hasty minutes, he would send his report back on the car’s radio, all the time in a frantic rush in case he were missing the vital moment. To be amused by that sort of thing one needed to be as young as Stephens…
‘You tipped him off about the Minx?’
‘I did — too true! And I gave him the dope about the slashings and the letter.’
This would redouble Stephens’s eagerness; now, he would be chafing to capture Johnson. Remembering the Luger, Gently experienced a moment’s uneasiness.
‘Remind him when he calls in again, will you…? If Johnson turns up he’s to report and stay with him.’
So far the ‘arduous routine’ had brought in little of interest, though the fact that it was Sunday was in some degree responsible. The various Palette Group members, heartlessly indifferent to police requirements, had proceeded to disperse on their lawful weekend occasions. Up till lunchtime only three had been questioned — Aymas, Baxter and Seymour — and of these only Aymas had a really firm alibi; with another man, he’d been up tending a sick pedigree cow. Seymour, the shy smiler, was the most pregnable of the three. Stammering and blushing, he had admitted to being out till three with ‘a woman’. He had got himself drunk and didn’t remember where she had taken him — and so another bit of ‘arduous routine’ was in process.
‘Did you get anything interesting out of Mallows this morning?’
Gently hedged. ‘It’s always worthwhile talking to Mallows. He recognized those capitals as being cut from The Times… and he’s got some of the paper. He recognized it directly.’
‘Did he now!’ Hansom grounded his irons for a moment. ‘Now that is interesting — very interesting indeed.’
‘Naturally, I asked him if he had given any away.’
‘And naturally he hadn’t.’
Gently shrugged, and ate assiduously.
Why was he wanting to defend the shrewd-eyed artist? Because that, when you boiled it down, was what he was instinctively seeking to do. Right then he was holding back and trying to dampen Hansom’s curiosity — throwing him titbits, as it were, to head him off from the main fact. But yet, while his hand had still lingered on the telephone, he had begun to comprehend, to see the way things had worked…
‘Suppose he didn’t give it away, then — suppose he sent that letter himself?’
‘In that case, how did Mrs Johnson get the rest of the sheet?’
‘He was lying, of course! He did give it to her.’
‘Then he might equally well have given her the lot.’
‘Yeah!’ It was logical, but Hansom wasn’t quite satisfied. His familiarity with Gently had perhaps taught him something. He sawed a long slice from his piece of steak, but sat looking at it for a while before raising it to his mouth. Then he chewed absent-mindedly, his fork still hovering.
‘He was pally enough with Mrs Johnson, wasn’t he? Used to take her out for lunch and that sort of thing?’
‘So did a lot of others.’
‘But they haven’t got that paper! And she only had that piece, because I’ve sent Ephgrave to the flat to check. Now if Johnson sent the letter he might have destroyed some remaining paper — that’s possible. I agree, though, it could be more probable; but it’s probable enough that she got half a sheet from Mallows — and that that’s all she ever had: it’s as probable as hell!’
‘Then why did he admit to me that he had some?’
‘You tell me, you’ve made a study of the bloke. All I can say is that he’s making me curious… yeah, and wasn’t he the last one to see her?’
‘You’ve forgotten something important.’ Still he was defending Mallows! Reluctantly, he was letting Hansom draw a decisive point from him. ‘He couldn’t have composed that letter because he didn’t know about Johnson and Farrer. We didn’t release it to the press, and Mallows wasn’t there to be an eyewitness.’
‘How do you know he wasn’t there?’
‘I had an appointment with him at eleven. He was waiting for me in his studio, and I found him working on a canvas.’
‘Supposing Farrer rang up and told him?’
Gently with difficulty suppressed a smile. This was the first thing that people thought of; the easy, automatic,
