by Alan Hunter
‘Do you think there’s anything in it?’
‘I dunno. That girl Susan who works up there dropped something about it one night, but I don’t pay any attention.’
Gently sliced an egg. ‘Is she the blonde piece?’
‘Ah, that’s the one. She’s a fancy bit of homework, I can tell you. But Fisher never got a look in there.’
‘How was that?’
The bar-tender grinned knowingly. ‘She’s got a boyfriend out of his class. She runs around with Huysmann’s manager, Leaming, his name is, a real smart feller. Fisher don’t cut much ice while he’s around.’
Gently doubled up a triangle of bread and butter and took a bite out of it. ‘That get Fisher in the raw?’ he mumbled.
‘You bet it does – he’d give his arm to tumble her!’
‘Mmn,’ said Gently, masticating.
‘I wouldn’t mind a slice myself, if it comes to that.’
‘Fisher been around lately?’
‘He came in when he knocked off yesterday and had a meal.’
‘’Bout two, was that?’
‘Nearer one, I should think. He hadn’t got much to say for himself.’
The bar-tender was called back to serve a customer. Gently plodded onwards through the sausage. As he ate he fitted into place in his picture each new fact and dash of colour. Fisher, jealous of Leaming. Fisher, wanting to be Susan’s lover. Susan, hinting at something between Fisher and Gretchen. ‘He lives for women, that bloke … after our Elsie till I choked him off … Fisher never got a look in there … don’t cut much ice while Leaming’s around …’ And Leaming had said, ‘There’s a streak of brutality in the man …’
The doorbell tinkled, and Gently looked up from his plate. It was Fisher himself who entered. Not noticing Gently, he swaggered over to the counter and ordered a cup of tea and some rolls, then stood there waiting while they were got for him. The bar-tender glanced at Gently, who winked back broadly.
Turning, Fisher saw Gently. He stopped stock-still. Gently nodded to him affably. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, indicating the chair vacated by the bar-tender. ‘I’ve thought up one or two more things I should like to ask you.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
A WHITE, EXPANSIVE April sun, low-tilted in its morning skies, looked down upon the rain-washed streets. In Chapel Field and the Castle Gardens birds were singing, thrushes, chaffinches, blackbirds, and on the steep southern and westerly slopes of the Castle Hill the daffodils looked down, proudly, consciously, like women dressed to go out.
Early traffic swirled up Princes Street and round Castle Paddock; the fast London train rumbled over the river bridge at Truss Hythe, swept out into the lush water-meadows of the Yar; passing over, as it did so, a stubborn little up-stream-making tug with a tow of five steel barges, on each of which was painted the name: Huysmann.
Onward puffed the little tug, bold as a fox-terrier, full of aggression and self-assurance, and onward crept the barges, phlegmatic, slow, till the cavalcade was in hailing distance of Railway Bridge. Then the little tug slowed down, trod water as it were, allowing the foremost barges to catch up with it. A man jumped out of the tug. He ran down the barges, jumping from one to another, till finally, coming to the last one, he loosed the sagging cable and cast her free. A shout ahead set the little tug puffing off on her interrupted journey, while the slipped barge, with the way left on her, was steered to a dilapidated-looking quay on the south bank.
Altogether, it was a smart and well-executed manoeuvre, thought Gently, watching it as he leaned over Railway Bridge. It was worth getting up early just to see it.
He crossed the bridge to watch the tug and its barges pass through the other side. A door in the rear of the tug’s wheelhouse was open. Through it Gently observed a lanky figure wearing a peaked seaman’s hat, a leather jacket and blue serge trousers tucked into Wellington boots. As he watched, the lanky man spun his wheel to the right. There was a tramp steamer on its way down.
Gently anticipated the warning hooter and got off the bridge. He stood by the railings to see the bridge rise, rolling ponderously, and moved further over to get a good view of the vessel as it surged by below. It was a bluff-bowed, clumsy, box-built ship, with a lofty fo’c’sle descending suddenly to deck level. The bridge and cabins aft were neat and newly painted, and the washing that hung on a line suggested that the captain had his family on board. The engines pounded submergedly as the steel cosmos slid through. There followed the bubbling and frothing under her stern. She was the Zjytze of Amsterdam.
Grumblingly the bridge rolled back into place and Gently, after a moment’s pause, strolled over to the little glass box where the bridge-keeper sat. ‘When did she come up?’ he asked.
The bridge-keeper peered at him. ‘Friday morning,’ he said.
‘What was she carrying?’
‘Timber.’
‘Where did she lie?’
The bridge-keeper nodded upstream to where the tug with its train of barges was edging in towards the quays. ‘Up there at Huysmann’s.’
‘Is she a regular?’
‘Off and on. She’s been coming here since the war, and before that there used to be another one, but they say she was sunk in a raid. It’s the same skipper, though.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘It’s a queer sort of name, something like Hooksy.’
‘Thanks.’
Gently gave the departing vessel a last look and hurried away down Queen Street. A police car was outside the Huysmann house and Gently noticed, in a side-glance, that Leaming’s car was parked inside the timber-yard. Constable Letts was on the door. ‘Hansom inside?’ asked Gently. ‘Yes, sir. Been here for some time, sir.’ Gently pushed in.
Hansom was in the hall, talking to a sergeant.
He said: ‘Why, here he is, all bright and early.’
Gently said: ‘There’s a ship just left Huysmann’s quays, the Zjytze of Amsterdam. Did you know about it?’
Hansom extended his large hands. ‘A little bird told me about it last night.’
‘And you’ve checked her?’
‘That’s sort of my job around here.’
‘Well?’
Hansom took a medium-sized breath. ‘They’re football fans,’ he said, ‘like everyone else round here, only more so.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They went to London to see the Gunners.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yeah – one big happy family. The Skipper and Ma Hoochzjy, the son who’s mate, the son who isn’t mate, the son who’s cook, three able-bodied cousins and a grandson who’s cabin boy. They lit out for town at ten o’clock on Saturday, and got back on the 11.53 last night. They spent the night at the Sunningdale Hotel in Tavistock Place – I checked it – and went to Kew yesterday to give the tulips a once-over. They think our English tulips are vonndervul.’
‘Did you check the vessel?’
Hansom gave a snort. ‘Why do you think they’ve got customs at Starmouth?’
Gently shook his head in slow, mandarin nods. ‘I don’t want to have Peter Huysmann arrested, but as one policeman to another …’
‘Good Lord!’ gaped Hansom.
‘… I think you’d better have the Zjytze checked before she clears Starmouth.’
Hansom was already doubling to the phone. ‘I’ll send some men out to Rusham!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ll have to wait there for the swing-bridge.’ And he dialled viciously.
‘Of course, he may be somewhere else entirely,’ added Gently, ‘he may even have grown a beard …’
They were sawing oak in the timber-yard. The smell of it, sweet with a sharpness and heaviness, carried into the street and even into the house, while the high-pitched whine of the saws, labouring at the hard, close grain, might be heard during intervals in the traffic as far as Railway Bridge. At the quays they were already busy with the barges. Two rattling derricks hoisted out bundles of rough-sawn planks and swung them to growing piles o
utside the machine sheds, where shouting men were stacking them. Close by an overhead conveyor trundled sawn-out stuff to a lorry. Pandemonium reigned in the great machine sheds. There were ranked the circular saws, buzzing at rest, shrieking with rage as they met the timber, whining viciously as they settled down to tear through it; the fiendish, screaming band-saws, temperamental and deadly; the soft, shuddering planers, cruel with suppressed power; and over all the sweet wholesome smell of sawn oak, of oak sawdust, of oak stacked in neat, separated piles.
Gently wended his way cautiously through this alien world. There was something shocking and amoral about so much terrible power, all naked; it touched unsuspected chords of destruction and self-destruction. He glanced curiously at the men who fed the lusting blades. They could not but be changed, he thought, they must partake of that feeling to some extent: become potential destroyers, or self-destroyers. He wished vaguely that such things were not, that timber could be produced by means other than these. But he could think of no other way, off-hand.
He came upon Leaming checking off a consignment of finished wood. Leaming grinned at him, a band-saw close by making oral communication impossible. Gently waited until he had finished checking, by which time also the band-saw had done ripping out scantlings.
‘It’s like this all day!’ bawled Leaming.
‘Doesn’t it drive anybody mad?’
‘They’re mad when they come here – or else they wouldn’t come!’
They walked on towards the comparative quiet of the planers, stopped to see the rough-sawn planks being driven over the steel bench with its wicked concealed knives. ‘Tell me,’ said Gently, ‘do you get many suicides in here?’
Leaming threw back his head in laughter. ‘No – they don’t commit suicide here. They go away somewhere quieter for that.’
‘Do you get accidents?’
‘Not so many as you might think.’
Gently winced as a flying chip went past his face. He was aware of Leaming quizzing him, a little contemptuous. ‘You soon learn to be careful when you’re working a buzz-saw – mighty careful indeed. Most accidents happen when they’re sawing up a tree with a bit of metal in it – an old spike that’s grown into it or something. Sometimes the saw goes through it, but sometimes it doesn’t.’
‘What happens then?’
‘The saw goes to pieces – and the pieces go a long way.’
Gently shuddered in spite of himself. Leaming laughed sardonically. ‘Anything can happen here, any time. The miracle is that nothing much does happen …’
They walked out of the inferno and into the yard. Gently said: ‘I suppose the old man Huysmann was rather like a buzz-saw in some ways.’
Leaming shot him a side-glance and then grinned. ‘I suppose he was, though I never thought of him like that.’
‘He buzzed and shrieked away happily enough until somebody put a spike in his log … and now nobody quite knows where the pieces will finish up.’
Leaming said: ‘But there’s one man with his neck right out to stop a lump.’ His grin faded. ‘I’d better get back to the office,’ he said, and turned away abruptly. Gently stared after him, surprised at his sudden change of mood. Then he noticed somebody standing at the entrance to the office, a tall but rather furtive figure: someone who slipped inside as he realized that Gently’s eye was on him. It was Fisher.
Two loaded transport trucks stood outside Charlie’s, both from Leicester. Inside there was an air of briskness which had been lacking the day before. Most of the tables were occupied and in addition there was a group who stood around the fireplace (in which there was no fire) arguing. Their subject was the murder, which by now was getting front-page billing in all the popular dailies. One of the standing group held a paper in his hand. ‘SLAIN MERCHANT – YARD CALLED IN’, ran the headline. ‘Son Still Missing …’
‘You can say what you like,’ said a transport driver, ‘when they talk like that about someone, he’s the one they want. They never do say anyone’s the murderer till they’ve got their hands on him, but you can tell, all the same.’
‘It don’t mean that necessarily,’ said a little stout man. ‘I remember somebody who was wanted like that, but he got off all the same.’
‘Well, this one won’t get off … you listen to me. I’ll have ten bob on it he hangs, once they get hold of him. You just read it again and see what they’ve got against him …’
There was a hush when Gently entered. Damnation, he thought, I must be growing more like a policeman every day. He ordered a cup of tea without sugar and added to it a cheese roll. The bar-tender’s place had been taken by a girl in a flowered overall. She banged his tea down aggressively and retired to the far corner of the bar. Gently sipped tea and reflected on the hard lot of policemen.
Halfway through the tea the bar-tender put in an appearance. He nodded to Gently, and a moment later leant over the counter. ‘Come upstairs, sir,’ he said, ‘there’s something I think you’d like to hear about.’
Gently finished his tea and roll and went up the stairs. The bar-tender was waiting for him on the landing.
‘Excuse me, sir, but you are Chief Inspector Gently of Scotland Yard, aren’t you?’ he asked.
Gently nodded, and sorted out a peppermint cream for digestive purposes.
‘I thought you was him, when I remembered the way our friend Fisher acted when you spoke to him yesterday afternoon.’
‘He was in his rights to tell me to go to hell,’ said Gently tolerantly.
‘Well yes, sir, I dare say …’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Gently.
‘I’m Alf Wheeler, sir.’
‘Charlie to your pals?’
‘Well, I do run this place, though there isn’t no Charlie really – that’s just what it’s called. And I hope you don’t think I was anyway disrespectful yesterday, sir, it’s just I didn’t know you were …’
‘A policeman?’
‘That’s right, sir … though I ought to have guessed from the way you was leading me on.’
‘Well, well!’ said Gently, pleased, ‘you’re not going to hold it against me?’
‘No, sir – not me.’
Gently sighed. ‘It makes a change … what was it you wanted to tell me?’
The bar-tender became confidential. ‘He was in here last night, sir.’
‘Who?’
‘Fisher, sir. He was a bit – you know – a bit juiced, and the girl Elsie and one or two of them was kidding him along, pretending they was scared of him – asking who he was going to do in next and that sort of thing. Quite harmless it was, sir – nothing intended at all.’
‘Go on,’ said Gently.
‘Fisher, he begin to get all of a spuffle. “I could tell you a thing or two you don’t know,” he says, “and I could tell that b–– Chief Inspector Gently something, for all his cleverness.”
‘“Why don’t you tell us, then?” says the girl Elsie.
‘“Never you mind,” he says, “but you’re going to see some changes round here shortly, you mark my words.”
‘“What sort of changes?” they say, but Fisher begin to think he’s said enough. “You’ll see,” he says, “you’ll see, and maybe it won’t be so long either.”
‘“Hugh!” says the girl Elsie. “I ’spect he thinks he’ll be manager at Huysmann’s now.”
‘“Manager,” he says, “I wouldn’t be manager there for something. And another thing,” he says, “there’s people cutting a dash today who may not be cutting one tomorrow,” and after that he shut up and they couldn’t get anything else out of him.’
Gently ate another peppermint cream thoughtfully. ‘Would you say that the last remark referred to the manager?’ he enquired.
‘I thought it did, sir, and so did the others.’
‘Have you any idea what he might have meant by “changes”?’
‘Well, you know what we was saying about there being something between him and Miss Huysmann? If that’s the case,
sir, then he’s probably thinking, now that the old man is dead, that she’ll take him on and make a man of him. I can’t think what else he may have had in mind.’
‘And then he would be in a position to deal summarily with Mr Leaming?’
‘You bet he’ll put a spoke in his wheel when he gets the chance.’
Gently shrugged. ‘It depends a lot on Miss Huysmann’s attitude,’ he said. ‘I wonder if, perhaps, he could be referring to something else …?’
He went down the stairs, followed by the bar-tender. A heated discussion amongst the group round the fireplace broke off as the door opened. Gently bowed to them gravely. ‘Carry on, my friends … don’t let us interrupt you,’ he said. Twenty pairs of eyes from all parts of the snack-bar turned on him in silence. He shook his head sadly and went out.
The bright sun of the street struck in his eyes, making him blink. A steady stream of traffic was making in both directions, slowing at that point to get round the two parked trucks. A few yards further back Mariner’s Lane disgorged a small, hooting van. Gently read the street sign with puckered eyes; at the same time he observed a figure standing in the gateway of the timber-yard. He turned directly and began walking casually towards the lane.
Mariner’s Lane threaded the jungle between Queen Street at the bottom of the cliff and Burgh Street at the top. It was narrow and steep and angular. It began at the bottom by a derelict churchyard, carved its way past walls and slum property, with occasional vistas of desolate yards and areas, and threw itself at last breathlessly into the wide upper street, a bombed-site on one hand and a salvage yard on the other. It was a mean, seamy thoroughfare, part slum and part derelict: its only saving grace was the view it commanded – over the roofs of Queen Street, over the river, over the railway yards, as far as the bosky suburbs rising out of the easting Yar valley.
Gently plodded upwards with tantalizing slowness, pausing now and then to study his surroundings. He did not look back – at least, he did not appear to look back; but he looked long and hard at each miserable series of yards, and sometimes peered curiously at sparsely furnished windows. One of the many angular turnings brought him to Paragon Alley. It was a neglected little cul-de-sac about fifty yards long, with grass and ragwort growing out between the made-up surface and the pavement. One side was derelict, the other comprised of high walls and forgotten warehouses. Gently turned into it.