The super didn’t snarl, although he looked as though he would have liked to. But he knew sense when he heard it and this, he knew, was sense. So he contented himself with putting a band-saw edge into the tone of his next remark.
‘Then if we never get Hicks, what in the thirty-seven blue moons of Gehenna are we something-well going to do?’
Gently produced a peppermint cream from somewhere and began chewing it with insubordinate slowness.
‘I haven’t got a solution… I only know I’m not happy with the facts. Of course there’s some routine-work we haven’t covered yet, like the outgoings from Mrs Lammas’ banking accounts, and what Marsh’s servants know about his movements last night. I’m not expecting too much from either source. For the rest I just don’t know. I’ve got a hunch that there’s a penny due to drop.’
‘But what are you going to do, man?’ exploded the super, not at the moment a great backer of hunches.
‘I’m going to charge Linda Brent… can I borrow your phone?’
The super watched him malevolently as he dialled a number. There had been times before when Gently had made the great man want to tear his close-cropped hair…
‘This is Chief Inspector Gently, Central Office, CID. I’ve a statement for you… give me a machine, will you? This evening Linda Brent, etc., wanted by the Police for questioning in connection with the murder of James William Lammas, was taken into custody and charged with conspiring to defraud while an employee of Lammas Wholesalers Ltd.’
‘You’ll never make it stick, Gently!’ rapped the super as the phone was replaced.
Gently supplied himself with another peppermint cream.
‘I don’t really mind if I don’t,’ he replied wearily.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Move in Lammas case — Gently Charges Linda Brent. It was bannered beautifully across the morning paper which lay by Gently’s cup of tea.
Outside, the river-dwellers were stirring about their business. Pedro was off fruit-picking again, Thatcher was digging for worms, the slattern was getting off to school her own and Cheerful Annie’s offspring.
‘I see you’re findin’ out things, sir,’ sniffed Mrs Grey as she set down the breakfast bacon. She had always a tear to command since the rumour about her nephew being seen had got about.
‘We do our best, Mrs Grey.’
Gently beat Dutt to the crispest-looking rasher.
‘You haven’t found my poor sister’s boy, sir, not with all your tryin’ — and I don’t reckon you will, now, either.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Mrs Grey. It’s surprising how they turn up.’
‘I know, sir. But don’t it stand to reason? He’s done away with himself, that’s what he’s done, and I say Heaven forgive them what druv him to it!’
And the poor lady went out in a storm of tears.
Gently made a face as he took the mustard.
‘Another theorist, Dutt… and not a bad one at that.’
‘Yessir… we’d look silly if he comes to the surface somewhere.’
‘We’d look sillier still if he had a. 22 bullet in him!’
The sun was beaming down with its customary splendour. Nothing was going to spoil this paragon of Junes. On the wicked and the innocent alike it spread its glamour. Colour seemed a new invention, the air a crystalline liquid. Even Thatcher had a romantic look, scruffing away with a handleless trowel — he might have been some old earth god about his masonic delvings.
‘What’s three half-crowns worth to you?’
Thatcher looked up quickly.
‘We want the use of a dinghy… yours will do, if it doesn’t leak too much.’
‘Ah, but wait yew a minute, bor!’
Nobody made snap deals with Thatcher.
‘Dew yew want it all day that might come a bit more… tha’s what yew might call the Season at this end of June!’
But Gently didn’t want it all day, and the seven and six changed hands. Dutt was allotted the oars, Gently seated himself in the stern and Thatcher shoved them off with professional panache.
The river was shut-in all the way to the dyke and the shack where the jacket had been found. Snaked roots of alder reached out from either bank, screens of reed, bramble and wild currant formed a barrier to the eye. The carrs were a secret place. They warned you off with their stockaded boundaries. To get in there you must be prepared to have the clothes torn off your back, the shoes from your feet, and you must suffer beating, scratching, soaking and an overlay of mud…
‘Not a place one would choose for a man-hunt, Dutt.’
‘No, sir… you takes the words out of me mouth.’
‘But a good place to hide something, other things being equal.’
Gently had the map on his knee and it was necessary equipment. They went past the dyke twice before spotting where it lay. Its mouth was concealed by a floating reed-hover, but even had it not been one would have had difficulty in recognizing the grown-over inlet.
‘Get your head down, sir!’
Gently didn’t need telling. The alder twigs whipped and stung them as Dutt poled in with one oar. In the slip of a dinghy they had to crouch double and every few yards the inch of keel was touching sugarily on the mud. But they weren’t sticking fast — that was the point to be proved! Yard by yard, they were continuing to find clean water ahead. You could get a dinghy up there. Especially if there was only one of you…
The dyke came to an end as indefinitely as it had begun, simply oozing out of existence in mud and rush jungle. Gently scrutinized what could theoretically be called the bank.
‘Of course they didn’t look for this… and of course they didn’t find it!’
He reached over into a mass of mint and meadowsweet and tugged something out. It was a long, straight rod of willow, which had been pushed slantwise into the greasy peat.
‘One should always moor a dinghy.’
He shoved the rod back again.
‘Now let’s see if we can find anything else they didn’t notice!’
If it had been trying in the dinghy, it was doubly trying out of it. After half a dozen steps, one just forgot about dry feet. And there were brambles like saws, and nettles like wasps’ nests, and the moist, enclosed air made perspiration start at the slightest exertion. There was a track of sorts, or at all events a line of least resistance. Along it had recently sploshed a number of police-issue boots but they weren’t responsible for everything. Gently noticed signs of earlier passages. Here there was a snapped twig with leaves which had withered, there a turned-back bramble trying to grow in its original direction.
Not recent at all… those dry leaves weren’t properly developed.
‘Blimey — just give me the Commercial Road!’
Dutt was mopping a streaming face and snatching at the rubbish in his hair.
‘No wonder the charlies round here live in rubber boots — it’s a marvel they ain’t born wiv webbed feet!’
Gently grinned commiseration. ‘Stick it out, Dutt… it’s all experience.’
‘Hi know, sir — and I hopes it’s worth it!’
‘Here’s the shack now… but I wish we’d been here yesterday.’
The shack was as the super had described it. It consisted of three sides framed in rough timber and filled with reeds, while some aged reed-thatch served for a roof. It was built on ground that was a little higher and therefore a little drier than the carrs surrounding it. This feature seemed to have made it rather popular with five score of policeman.
Gently sighed as he cautiously approached it. Yet what was he hoping to find there, after all? Perhaps he was only being fascinated by yet one more fact that didn’t quite fit… wanting to worry at it, to double-check it, to wrest sense out of it somehow. Because there was no doubt that it didn’t fit. It would only have fitted if Hicks had been hiding there. Then one could show how he had slipped out in a dinghy… how he had been secretly provisioned by his aunt… how he had come to kill Cheerful Arnie. It would have been full of possibilities! Only Hicks hadn’t been hiding there. You had only to look at the shack.