‘If only people wouldn’t lie to the police!
‘The next morning I was hard at it, proving that Mrs Lammas knew what her husband was trying to do. I had just succeeded in doing that when I heard about Annie Packer.’
Gently broke off, ostensibly to fill his pipe. But the super was well aware of the reason for that delicately-timed little pause. He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly.
‘I suppose I ought to apologize…’
‘Admittedly, I was being a fool.’
‘You couldn’t have saved Annie Packer.’
‘No, even Lammas couldn’t have foreseen…’
‘And I should know you better by now!’
Gently lit his pipe forgivingly. A gesture was all he asked for. He breathed a long stream of smoke into the darkening room and prepared to take up his tale again.
‘Anyway — it brought me up with a jolt!
‘It needed a fantastic theory to cover it. If Hicks had been the tool he must have been packed off into hiding — they wouldn’t have left him dodging about the neighbourhood. And if someone else had done it, then it could only have been for a blind… but what sort of blind was this, which involved the murder of an innocent person? People don’t kill so lightly, not even people with blood on their hands. There were a dozen ways short of murder to make us think that Hicks was still around — and all of them a good deal less risky.
‘Yet murder had been done. Right there, on my very doorstep. And to make it artistically right, somebody had circulated a rumour of Hicks having been seen there before the murder took place.’
‘Of course, we know now there was no connection,’ the super interrupted. ‘The rumour was Lammas’ red herring. Packer’s murder was purely fortuitous.’
Gently nodded.
‘We know it now… but we didn’t guess it then. I could see it only as an incredibly cold-blooded manoeuvre. And it seemed to indicate that somebody was getting scared, very scared indeed — a fact which pointed in only one direction.
‘But before going into that I had to learn what I could about Annie’s killing. There were several curious points connected with it, not the least being the one you noticed about the origin of that rumour. How could it have been started by a stranger in a place like Upper Wrackstead? Everyone knew everyone, and strangers drew attention. Yet if a stranger hadn’t done it then a native must have done… or else somebody actually had been seen who might have been taken for Hicks.
‘You can judge how far I was out of my depth. I actually accepted the latter alternative — at least as a working hypothesis. I was so taken up with the idea of Mrs Lammas and Paul being in on it that I was looking at everything from their angle… you don’t know how hard it is for me to admit that.’
Dutt cleared his throat sympathetically. He knew how hard it was!
‘But to get back to the killing.
‘Up to a point, I could reconstruct it. I could understand how Annie slipped out to visit Thatcher, how she was intercepted on the way, how she was shot with a silenced revolver and how her body was disposed of. What I couldn’t understand was the absence of blood-stains. There had to be some, unless she’d been shot where she would fall into the Dyke. But that would have made a splash and there wasn’t any splash — so there had to be some blood… and there wasn’t any blood!
‘Looking at it now, I can’t think how I could have been so dense. Certainly, I got part of an answer when I discovered that the wounded head had been bandaged. But the major fact was unexplained — some blood had been shed somewhere — and it was sheer, blind prejudice that stopped me from going to the right spot. You see, I was assuming that Annie’s killer came from outside. He had waited for a victim to emerge, and of course Annie was shot on the bank. Was there ever such a classic example of an investigator preferring a theory to a fact?’
The super frowned uneasily at his blotter. He’d harboured a theory or two himself in this case.
‘I don’t see what else you could have thought at the time,’ he observed cautiously.
‘I could have followed that fact up. The answer wasn’t far away. If I’d been on top of the situation just then we might have arrested Lammas twenty-four hours sooner than we did.’
The super held his peace. It wasn’t entirely displeasing to hear Gently admit himself at fault. At the same time, he couldn’t help feeling that Gently aimed at impossibly high standards in criminal investigation…
‘Then there was the stub of greasepaint liner that I picked up off the rubbish-heap. Naturally, I was too bemused to see the significance of that right away. It seemed to connect somewhere. The Lammases were mixed up with amateur dramatics. But all I could think of was that Paul may have got hold of some of his sister’s greasepaint and doctored himself to pass for Hicks… he could have dropped that stub out of his pocket while he was busy with Annie Packer.
‘Anyway, I went after Paul in the best way I could, which was by showing him how near his mother stood to a murder charge. That took me to Marsh, and probably to the truth of what went on on Friday night. Only I didn’t know it was the truth… and it might so easily not have been. At that point I was almost ready to back the Paul-Marsh-Mrs Lammas combination. It seemed too tempting to pass over. We hadn’t got enough proof, and it might take some digging up, but we hadn’t quite exhausted the possibilities — and there’s such a thing as luck.
‘And then I was checkmated again. Dutt, here, found us Linda Brent. We picked her up — you know what happened. It seemed past doubt that Linda Brent had guilty knowledge of l’affaire Lammas. And if she had, or even thought she had, then what became of a conspiracy which couldn’t have been hatched till just before the murder? No — it went back further! It must have been plotted before Mrs Lammas discovered what her husband was doing and probably before the trip on the Harrier.
‘There was the further factor of Miss Brent being in love with whoever she supposed did it. This seemed to point to Paul, and certainly Paul might have got at Hicks after he had paid his visit to “High Meadows”. But how could Paul have planned what took place on Friday in advance?’
‘This Brent woman might have let him know what his old man was up to,’ suggested the super, intrigued.
‘Yes — as far as the trip went. But how could she have known that Lammas would go up Ollby Dyke in such a convenient way, setting her off first at Halford Quay?’
‘She might have been able to fix it…’
Gently nodded eagerly.
‘That’s where I began to smell the scent again. Because I couldn’t think of one single way in which she or any of the others could have fixed such a thing!’
He eased back on his chair to give them time to appreciate the proposition. It was clear enough now, when one knew the denouement!
‘You’ve got to remember how Lammas was placed. He’d cut his ties with his past, there was nothing there for a motive. It wasn’t his business or his family which could draw him into a secret rendezvous. And if it wasn’t these, what was it? What else could have been used to get him up Ollby Dyke just as he was about to fade away?
‘There isn’t an answer, but there is a corollary. If Lammas wasn’t enticed up the dyke, then he must have gone there on his own initiative — and if that was the case, who could have known he was there?
‘Mrs Lammas couldn’t. She only knew he had set out towards Wrackstead. Paul couldn’t. He didn’t even know as much as that! And as for Marsh, he only knew what Mrs Lammas told him.
‘Lammas was the only one who could have phoned Hicks and told him to come to Ollby Dyke.’
‘You’re forgetting Linda Brent,’ the super interrupted. ‘She may have known about Ollby Dyke and tipped Paul off.’
‘No.’ Gently shook his head. ‘Paul couldn’t have been tipped off. If he’d known what he was going to do, he’d have fixed the chauffeur before he left. He didn’t need to phone unless his father hadn’t arrived at Ollby, which was not the case.
‘I’d got to this stage last night when we brought in Linda Brent. It still wasn’t making sense, in fact I seemed to be back at the beginning again. If nobody else was involved, then Hicks must have killed him for the money… and if Hicks had done that, he was at once the cleverest, stupidest and luckiest criminal I had ever had to do with. In addition to which Linda Brent was violently in love with him!