After his office — bound routine of the last few months Gently was possessed of a guilty feeling, as though he were off on a secret spree. As he was shaving he made ridiculous faces in the mirror, and several times he caught himself grinning idiotically at nothing. A shadow had been lifted, the shadow of new responsibilities. Once more he was off on his own cherished authority. Like a virtuoso, who, for a time, has been obliged to assist the orchestra, he was released again to his independent rhapsodies.
‘And some they whistled, and some they sang.’
The most nonsensical of things kept running through his mind. At breakfast he astounded Mrs Jarvis by reciting a verse from a ballad, though why it should seem so apposite he couldn’t have explained, even to himself.
‘Are you going to be away for long, Superintendent?’
She regarded him, he noticed, with a blend of reproval and concern. Stephens, who arrived early, had brought an enormous suitcase with him. His face shone as though he had scrubbed it and he had recently clipped his small, downy moustache.
‘I’ve been thinking the case over…’
Gently gave him a cup of tea. In the morning papers, he had been glad to see, there had been no recurrence of the ‘calling the Yard’ theme. Their space had been largely given to the exhibition and to the mysterious picture. Handsome Hansom had had his photograph taken along with the Lord Mayor and Charles St John Mallows.
By half past eight the Riley was outside and their luggage deposited in the boot. Mrs Jarvis had made a packet of sandwiches from last night’s neglected joint, and this, with a couple of thermoses, she gave into the care of Stephens.
‘Just see that the Superintendent eats something…’
She stood at her gate to watch them departing. It was a brilliant morning with a few scanty clouds, and the early traffic had not yet become troublesome.
‘I thought you’d expect me to do a little work on it, sir. I’ve made a few notes of points which occurred to me. Of course, it’s too early to be certain of anything…’
Nevertheless, Stephens had already propounded a theory to himself.
‘If we rule out the husband — and the local police seem to have done it — then I’d say, sir, that we ought to look out for signs of blackmail. There’s this St John Mallows — she might have had her hooks into him, and he must have been near the spot at the time she was murdered.’
‘What do you think she had on him?’ The youngster’s zeal amused Gently.
‘Well, sir, they might have been intimate together.’
‘But St John Mallows isn’t married.’
‘No, but she is, sir. Then there might have been perversity, or something of that kind.’
Had it all seemed so easy when Gently was a young Inspector? Looking back, he couldn’t remember ever having been very sure of himself. But that, possibly, was just the difficulty which Stephens was trying to counter; he was rushing at the case and searching feverishly for a pattern in it.
‘That’s something which we shall have to bear in mind, of course.’
‘Yes, sir. I could almost swear — if we can once rule out the husband!’
‘At the same time… by the way, here’s Tally-ho Corner. I suppose you never read up the Rouse case, did you?’
It was as he had thought — Stephens was desperately unsure of himself. He welcomed the opportunity to switch the conversation elsewhere. The Rouse case, fortunately, was one that he had swotted up, and he talked about it readily as they made their way through Barnet and Hatfield.
‘If he’d kept out of the witness-box, sir — that was his undoing. They’d never have hanged him on the evidence alone.’
‘I imagine that the prosecution were banking on that. Knowing Rouse, they were pretty certain that he would take the stand.’
‘Do you think so, sir? Was it a legitimate gamble?’
At Newmarket, where they stopped for coffee, Stephens insisted on receiving and paying the bill. He was smoking a pipe which, Gently noticed, was a sandblast much like his own in pattern. It was nearly new, with an unscratched mouthpiece. He couldn’t remember whether he had seen Stephens smoking a pipe before or not.
‘Like to try some of mine?’
He pushed across his tin of navy-cut. Stephens accepted a couple of slices and maladroitly stuffed his pipe with them. From the awkward manner he had of holding his pipe while he was smoking, Gently deducted that this was the young detective’s first essay in the art…
By noon they were in the outskirts of the old provincial capital, familiar to Gently if not to his protege. It possessed a fine approach along a wide and tree-lined carriageway, on either side of which stood attractive houses in well-kept grounds.
‘Aren’t the Northshire people rather difficult to get on with? Someone was telling me in the canteen…’
Gently smiled at the keep of the Norman castle, now lifting distantly above the rooftops.
‘Don’t pay attention to all you hear! You’ll find them much the same as the rest.’
‘But you’re the expert on these parts-’
‘You’ll be one too, before we’ve finished the case.’
And Stephens, biting on his pipe, tried to look as though he believed he would.
At Police HQ, Superintendent Walker was waiting for them. Gently introduced Stephens to him and there followed the usual bout of shaking hands. A constable was dispatched to summon Chief Inspector Hansom, who, two minutes later, appeared still eating a ham sandwich.
‘I thought they’d have sent someone else, now that you’d reached the giddy heights!’
Gently shrugged, finding a seat for himself beside Walker’s desk. Between himself and Hansom there had ever been an armed neutrality; they were antipathetic towards each other, and yet, oddly enough, exerted a mutual fascination.
‘You’ve had Hansom’s report, Gently… where would you like him to begin?’
It was very nearly lunchtime, and the Super was eager to get to their business. Hansom, eating largely to get rid of the sandwich, had dumped himself clumsily at the other end of the desk. There wasn’t a chair for Stephens and so he was obliged to remain standing; he stationed himself behind Gently, where he kept uncomfortably shifting his feet.
‘I’d better begin at the beginning, which was about six a.m. on Tuesday. Sergeant Walters, who was on the desk, saw this old fool, Coles, hanging around. He’d been out there for half an hour, just loitering about and doing nothing; every time Walters went to the window he turned his back, or fiddled with a shoelace…’
Gently knew the type referred to and had given them a private cognomen: they were the ‘angry old men’, of whom every town could show some examples. Seedy, shabby and without any friends, they haunted the market places and busiest streets; they wore an expression of angry surprise, as though perpetually indignant at their age and poverty. And always, if anyone caught their eye, they furiously frowned and turned away…
‘Walters went out and accosted the old idiot, wanting to know why he was hanging about there. He says it took him a good ten minutes to get anything intelligible out of the fellow. In the end he said, he supposed that Walters knew all about her — Walters said “Who?” — and this article said: “The sick lady”!
‘He’d found Shirley Johnson with a knife sticking out of her shoulderblades, and that was the nearest he could get to describing her!’
So Walters had followed the old man into the car park, which, ironically enough, adjoined Headquarters as well as the City Hall; and there, behind the dustbins in which the ancient had come to forage, he found that very sick lady lying stiff in the morning dew.
‘When you’re ready, if you like, I’ll take you round and show you the spot, but you’ll see how we found her in these photographs here. There wasn’t a lot of blood owing to the knife being left in, but we found one or two splashes leading from a spot about ten yards away.
‘He simply stabbed her, I imagine, and then lugged her over to the dustbins. As you see here, he chucked her handbag and coat down beside her. She wasn’t tampered with or mussed up and there were twenty pounds in her bag — likewise her driving licence, so we had no trouble in tracing her.’
Gently nodded, accepting the proffered bunch of glossy prints. They were interestingly gruesome, but not notably informative. The bins were standing by a terrace wall which flanked the large and much-used park, and though by day they offered little concealment, they would be effective enough after dark. The body had been carelessly dumped behind them. It had fallen on its face and had the right arm twisted beneath it. The thin handle of the paper knife protruded from below the left shoulderblade, and on it, in close up, one could read the inscription: ‘Pearson Cutlers, Sheffield, Eng.’ Only a small stain had appeared on the light-coloured dress.
‘Did you find any prints?’
Gently handed the pictures to Stephens. The young man examined them with a painstaking thoroughness.
‘Only hers, on the handbag. Chummie must have been wearing gloves. The handle hadn’t been wiped, it just didn’t have anything on it. There were some contusions on the throat which the Doc says were made before death, so it looks as though he were taking care that she didn’t scream when she got the knife. Anyway, nobody heard her scream, and there would have been enough people about. According to the Doc she was killed between ten p.m. and midnight.’
‘What time did she leave this artists’ meeting?’
‘Some time after ten-thirty, say twenty to eleven. She stayed talking outside with Mallows and maybe some of the others, then went off alone in the direction of her bus stop.’
‘That’s the one beside the car park?’
‘Yes, the City Hall stop. It can’t be more than a couple of hundred yards from the George III. You go up a flight of steps and then along the front of the City Hall, then turn left into St Saviour’s, and there’s the stop, nearly under the clock-tower. The bus she went after was an eighty-eight, which leaves that stop at ten to eleven.’
‘But she didn’t catch it, of course.’
‘Yeah — so we narrow things down to ten minutes.’
‘Were there no witnesses in the car park?’
‘Two we’ve got, and they didn’t see a sausage.’
The Super put in: ‘It just missed the theatre turn-out. It’s the patrons of the Playhouse who mostly use that park of an evening. Only half an hour earlier and the place would have been crowded, but they’ve all got away by twenty to eleven.’
‘What about people using the bus stop?’
Hansom extended a pair of none-too-clean hands.
‘How do you make them come forward, that’s what I’d like to know! We’ve appealed in the press a couple of times, but all it brought us was an old tabby with a complaint about a conductor. By her account there were six or seven other people waiting, but that’s the beginning and end of her information.’
Gently nodded and drew some patterns on the desk with his finger. This murderer had either been lucky, or else very clever. He had committed his crime in the most improbable of places, and yet, by chance or plan, seemed to have got completely away with it.
‘The buildings bordering the park — was nothing seen or heard from them?’
‘Police HQ, I suppose you mean…! Well, we didn’t, so there you are. From the back here, I daresay, we could have watched from a score of windows — we could have done, but we didn’t. We don’t expect chummies down there!’
‘You’ve got to remember that it was dark,’ added the Super. ‘The car park isn’t lit and the nearest lights are in St Saviour’s. To see anything going on you’d need to put a searchlight on it, and naturally, we don’t spend our nights inspecting the car park with a searchlight.’
‘What about the other buildings?’
‘In effect there’s only the City Hall. The fourth side of the park is bounded by blind ends and derelict property. We questioned the nightwatchman from the City Hall, but it appears that he was doing his pools in the basement.’
Gently was conscious of Stephens leaning forward from behind him. He turned his head. ‘You’ve got a question, Inspector?’
‘Yes, sir — if I may! Perhaps the Chief Inspector can tell me… I was wondering how chummie got the woman into the car park — that is to say, when she was waiting for her bus?’
It wasn’t a question as much as an answer. Put like that, it immediately offered the solution. Gently nodded his satisfaction at his lieutenant’s acuteness, and from the corner of his eye he noticed the youngster colouring up.
‘Of course…!’ Hansom could tell a hawk from a harnser. ‘He was offering her a lift, that’s as plain as my eye. He was someone who knew she was going to catch that bus home, and what’s more, he was someone who was known to Shirley Johnson.’
‘And had his car on the car park.’
‘Too true… her husband! He was sculling around in his car all the evening. He says he was on a pub crawl out by Halford Ferry and Lordham, but it’s a fact that we can’t check his movements after half past nine.’
‘It might equally well have been someone else…’
‘Don’t you believe it — Derek Johnson hated her guts. He’s the dead spit of Neville Heath, eyes, curls and everything. I could smell him for our man the moment I set eyes on him, it was only this other business that put me off him for a bit.’
Gently shrugged indifferently, knowing Hansom’s enthusiasms from of old. It needed only the appearance of progress to set him in full cry. But Stephens’s suggestion, though it narrowed the field a little further, didn’t point to Derek Johnson or to any other individual.
‘Do you know where the Palette Group members parked their cars?’
Stephens had taken the question off Gently’s lips.
‘They’re a poverty-stricken bunch, I shouldn’t think they’d got any cars.’
‘Not the chairman, St John Mallows?’
‘Oh, him. He’s got a Daimler.’
‘And did you find out where he parked it?’
‘Huh…! Hansom made a contemptuous motion of his head.
A moment later, however, he climbed off his high horse. He was far from being dense when he gave himself time to think.
‘There are two or three others who own heaps of some sort — Aymas is one, and Farrer, and Allstanley. But I wouldn’t mind betting that they parked them in the Haymarket — or Chapel Street, in front of us. That’d be nearest for the George III.’
‘But, to date, you haven’t made any definite inquiry?’
‘Nope. I like to leave something for Scotland Yard to have a chew at.’
Gently smothered a grin in the lighting of his pipe. It hadn’t taken Stephens long to measure swords with the handsome Hansom. Already, he was sure, the Chief Inspector bore a ‘difficult’ label — without being aware of it, he was supporting Northshire’s reputation. And now, with hands that trembled slightly, Stephens was also lighting his pipe…
‘Let’s leave that for the moment. I’d like to hear more about the Johnsons. You haven’t got a portrait of the victim, I suppose?’
Hansom dipped into the manilla folder which had contained the official photographs, finally selecting a half-plate print to skim across the desk to Gently.
‘That’s a recent one, I’m told… It just about gives the right effect. Don’t forget that you’re talking to an eyewitness — I danced with this femme, at the Charity Ball.’
He leaned his elbows on the desk and watched as Gently examined the print. It showed a fragile-looking blonde whose eyes, one could swear, had been hyacinth blue. The hair was short and only slightly wavy, the nose rather straight over a small mouth and chin. Though not very striking she’d been pretty in a way… for a moment, Gently couldn’t put a name to the quality.
‘You begin to catch on, do you? Well, you’re wrong — she wasn’t a lesbian. She’d got the look and the manner, but you only saw her around with men. Mind you, she might have had some girlfriends in private… that’s possible: but she was the one and only female who belonged to the Palette Group.’
Gently inclined his head, passing the portrait on to Stephens.
‘How old would she be?’
‘Twenty-nine last May. She stood five feet seven and had a fashion-horse sort of figure — as lean as a lath, with just a top dressing of sex. She had a bedward way of gazing at you with her innocent blue eyes. Her voice was the tinkling sort, but you can bet it had an edge, too.’
‘Did she belong to these parts?’
‘Not her. They came from Bedford. Johnson arrived here five years ago and branched out as an estate agent. He’s a right Battle-of-Britain charlie, complete with MG. You could hang up your hat and coat on one side of his handlebars.’
‘Does he make a go of the business?’
‘His car and clothes say he does.’
‘You’ve seen his flat, of course?’
‘Yeah. It’s a posh, brand new one. Over an office block.’
Hansom produced the estate agent’s statement — not a great deal to show for three hours of grilling — and Gently skimmed through its inevitable police jargon, pausing occasionally for Stephens, who was reading over his shoulder.
A peculiar household must that one have been! Here and there, through the stiff formality, a telling phrase or two crept out. ‘I wanted Shirley to have a baby but to this she would not agree.’ ‘I bought a new bed for the guest room and have been sleeping there for three years.’ ‘I do not know if she has been unfaithful and I myself have not been unfaithful.’ ‘I agree that I wanted a divorce, but that she would not contemplate a divorce.’
And then his account of Monday evening:
‘When I arrived home my wife was going out. I did not ask her where she was going as we had agreed not to ask one another this. I found some eggs in the larder and poached two for my tea. Then I got out my car again and drove first to the Halford Ferry public house and afterwards to several public houses, including the Lordham Dog and the Porter Haynor Falgate. I returned to the Ferry and remained there till closing time, fetching my drinks from the bar to a table by the river. I arrived home at eleven o’clock or soon after. I went straight to bed without visiting my wife’s room, and I did not know that she was missing until I was informed of it by the police.’
Hansom sneered: ‘He was playing it close to the chest, don’t you think? The innocent wronged husband who doesn’t know a thing! We checked at the pubs which he condescended to mention, and like I told you, they don’t remember him after half past nine.’
‘Is he fairly well known to them?’
‘You bet. He’s that type. His MG would do the circuit with him blind drunk in the dickey.’
‘Halford Ferry is that large pub…?’
‘Yep. He’s a regular clever boyo. It’s big, and rushed off its feet at this time of the year. Naturally, they won’t swear that he wasn’t there till closing, especially with him claiming that he sat at an outside table. He may have sat nursing a pint for an hour.’
‘It’s either true or very clever.’
‘Cobber, you’ve put him in a nutshell.’
The Super, feeling perhaps that he was being ignored, now filled in some details of their investigation of Johnson. His service record was good, they knew nothing against his character, and though he owned a fast car his licence was virgin of endorsements. He had friends in his own profession and was generally well thought of. His business was honestly conducted and had a good reputation. That he was estranged from his wife was no secret to his acquaintances, but the subject was painful to him and he became abrupt if she was mentioned.
‘Can anyone vouch for the time he arrived home?’
‘No, and that and the time he gives seem to lend support to his good faith. If he had known at what time his wife had been killed, he could have sworn that he was home by ten without fear of contradiction. Inspector Hansom here thinks that it’s an example of Johnson’s cunning, but failing evidence to the contrary one is bound to allow him the doubt. It was small things like these which made us uncertain about Johnson, and I suggested that we should turn our attention elsewhere.’
‘Elsewhere’, of course, was the Palette Group and its members, and from Hansom’s bored expression Gently could judge what luck they had had. From his folder the local man produced a sheaf of bitty statements, the result of many hours of unprofitable labour.
‘Perhaps you could give me the overall picture.’
‘Sonny, I’d be delighted! They all had a “thing” about her.’
‘Infatuation, you mean?’
‘Hell, no — these are painters! There were some who thought she could paint, and the rest who thought she couldn’t. Apart from some guessing about times, there’s damn-all else.’
Gently paused for an instant before putting his next question; he wasn’t confident that Hansom could give him the answer.
‘Did it strike you as being the… usual relation, as between artists, or was there a little bit more of a point to it?’
‘How the devil should I know!’ Hansom stared his disgust at Gently. ‘They’re queers, the whole bunch, and that’s putting it mildly. The fact that she was croaked didn’t seem to have penetrated — they were only concerned with the way she lashed paint on.’
‘But they were concerned about that — they held strong opinions?’
‘I couldn’t get them to talk about anything else. And yesterday it broke out again, when they opened the exhibition. We had to grab that picture to save ourselves a riot.’
The picture was produced and displayed on the top of a filing cabinet. On the whole, it seemed to lack something as a potential riot-raiser. A monotone drawing of about eighteen by twelve, it showed practised execution but no startling originality. There were qualities, however, which had been lost in reproduction. The figure wasn’t striding through rain but through a grove of wire-like stalks. And it was a strangely evil figure, something medieval and witch-like; little breasts, like shrivelled gourds, hung from the wasted and wrinkled chest.
‘Urs Graaf… possibly Durer.’
Stephens, it appeared, was knowledgeable in art. Both the Super and Hansom viewed the picture with degrees of distaste.
‘But that’s the sort of thing she’d paint…!’ Hansom lofted his beefy shoulders. ‘She was dried up somewhere herself, with all her beautiful come-on eyes.’
‘Have you seen her other pictures?’
‘There’s a room full of them, back at the flat. I saw a pair that hung in her bedroom, but I hadn’t any reason to look at the rest.’
Oddly, though, the picture seemed to fascinate them, and each one kept his eyes fixed upon it. In the Super’s office there was silence for a minute while they steadily appraised the dead woman’s last conception.
‘Their chairman… what had he to say about her painting?’
‘Oh… him! Well, he was more sober than the rest. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he mentioned it. It was from him that I managed to get the facts about the meeting.’
It had lasted three hours, from seven-thirty till ten-thirty. According to Mallows, it had run its usual course. The members, carrying their pictures, had foregathered in the cellar, and, aided by pints from up the stairs, had criticized each other’s work.
‘There was a little bit of business — subscriptions, reports, the usual thing. Then they started showing the pictures on an easel they’d fetched along. Mallows, being the chairman, was the first to have a crack, after which all present took a hand in the discussion. When they’d had a bellyful of one picture they set up another, and started crabbing that.’
‘Did Mrs Johnson show a picture?’
‘No, but she was a leading critic. Apparently she carried a bit of weight about the cellar. They would listen to her even when they were hotted up — because she was the only sheila there, do you think?’
Then followed the important timetable of the order in which the meeting broke up, though Hansom warned Gently that it wasn’t unanimously subscribed to. Mallows had given him the outline and he had checked it with the various members, but some of them couldn’t remember and others denied its accuracy.
What appeared was that six members had left the cellar before Mrs Johnson, one of them, Shoreby, as early as ten, in order to catch his last bus to Cheapham. The others had left when the proceedings ended, all of them within two or three minutes of each other. Their names were Seymour, Lavery, Farrer, Baxter and Allstanley, but the precise order of their leaving could not be agreed on. Mallows thought that Allstanley was the first to depart, but Allstanley denied it and said that someone went out ahead of him. Lavery admitted that he was one of the first to leave the cellar, but claimed that he had returned to fetch his canvas, which he had forgotten.
‘And after those six came Mallows and Mrs Johnson?’
‘That’s right. They stood in the doorway chatting for a moment. The cellar at the George III has got a separate door from the pub — it’s on a little side-lane, at the end of the marketplace.’
‘Then he saw her depart in the direction of the bus stop?’
‘Yeah… that seems to indicate that his car was parked elsewhere.’
‘Which makes him the last person to have seen Mrs Johnson alive.’
‘Excepting everybody else she might have passed on her way.’
Along with the reports, that had to be enough for the present. The solemn boom of the City Hall clock had already announced the hour of lunch. Superintendent Walker, who had a great respect for his meals, had for the last five minutes been pointedly examining his wristwatch.
‘Just one other thing — the knife. Did you find out where it was purchased?’
‘They stock them at Carter Brown’s, a draughtsman’s supplier in Prince’s Street.’
‘But they don’t remember selling this one?’
‘Not on your life. That would make it too easy. They haven’t sold one for several years — there’s a plastic job which has swept the market.’
For lunch, Gently took Stephens to a cafe which he knew about in Glove Street. The young Inspector had little to say to him as he accompanied him thither. Until the sweet came he was silent, a picture of solemn preoccupation, then, dipping his spoon in a trifle, he murmured:
‘It’s got to be blackmail or nothing!’
Through a mouthful Gently murmured back:
‘Unless the estate agent’s got a girlfriend…’