Gently in the Sun

by Alan Hunter

  ‘Young man up there!’

  His voice was clear, and ringing. Even hanging on to a ladder he preserved an air of clerical dignity.

  ‘Young man, are you aware of the gravity of your behaviour? Are you aware of the awful sin you are about to commit before the eyes of God?’

  Simmonds was perched exactly where Gently had first seen him, a little to the left of the belfry window. There could be no doubt that he had shuffled along the ledge and perilously knelt for that abortive interview.

  ‘Young man, I am praying for you, I am praying for your enlightenment. May God, in His infinite mercy, remove the cloud from your understanding. He it was Who gave you life, not, as you presume, to be wilfully disposed of.’

  Was he listening, pressed to the stones, the blood now drying on his restless hands?

  Hawks, Gently saw, had edged a yard or two closer, his expression changed to one of indignant anxiety. His dark eyes were boring into the figure of the artist, he seemed to be willing him to make the fatal decision.

  ‘Dare you face your Creator, young man, in such sin?Will you meet Him this day with such a burden of guilt?’

  A little girl began to cry and was snatched up by her mother: a man, looking pale, seated himself upon a tombstone.

  ‘I beseech you to think again – think of those who hold you dearly.’

  If Simmonds would just keep still with those Cainlike hands.

  ‘Your life is a precious thing, redeemed for you by Christ Jesu: put your trust in the Lord and preserve your immortal soul!’

  The vicar had done and was bowing his head in prayer. Several of those round about had their hats in their hands. In all it was like a sacrament, a last rite for the dying; all earthly aid had been rendered, only the event now remained. And Simmonds … his hands were stiffening, they were pressing him out into the void: he was balancing on the edge only a hairbreath from eternity.

  ‘No!’

  The stifled cry coming from him scarcely seemed a human utterance. It was wrenched from between teeth set together like a trap.

  ‘I don’t want to die. Oh God, I don’t want to! Get me down off here … get me … get me down!’

  He was back against the wall, scooping at it in a frenzy. For the first time he seemed to understand his frightful position. He cringed against the flint, his knees sagging, his body trembling: they could hear his breath coming in little suffocated gasps.

  ‘Someone get me down!’

  His face was ghastly with its terror. Nothing remained of the insensate coolness which till now had carried him along.

  ‘I don’t want to die … help me … come and get me down!’

  In a moment or two, it seemed, he must slither off the ledge.

  And nobody could do a thing! They would liked to have done, now. The whole current of the affair had undergone a change. Simmonds was no longer braving them, flouting them, indicting them: with his terror and his cries he was back on their side.

  ‘Simmonds … get back on the roof!’

  ‘Get back – get back!’

  Gently’s shout was repeated by a hundred different voices. ‘Reach up to the parapet – pull yourself over!’

  ‘Put your foot on the spout!’

  ‘Just heave and roll over!’

  Sobbing and panting the artist made a feeble effort, but in doing so he nearly lost his balance on the ledge. He screamed like a child and fell back into a crouch. A piece of loose rubble fell pattering among the reporters.

  ‘Can’t we get up inside?’

  There was a panic to be doing something. Two fishermen wanted to run for their nets. Remembering the bell, Gently sent Dutt to guard the church door. Dyson had popped up in the phone box where he was bawling unintelligibly to someone.

  ‘Get me down … get me down!’

  Simmonds’s voice had sunk to a wail, and the quality of death itself was echoing in that plea. He couldn’t last for very much longer – you could hear it in every vibration. Like a dislodged sack of flour he was going to slither from his perch.

  ‘Sir – come here a minute!’

  Dutt was beckoning to him from the doorway.

  ‘According to the bloke what keeps the pub, that fisherman has just gone into the church.’

  ‘Fisherman? Which one is that?’

  ‘The big bloke – Dawes, I think they call him.’

  ‘Dawes! Has he gone up into the tower?’

  ‘I reckon so, sir. He isn’t inside.’

  Esau … gone up into the tower! Gently stared at the sergeant in amazement. What was the Sea-King doing up there, that silent, unpredictable man of mystery?

  ‘Hadn’t I better fetch him down, sir?’

  ‘Yes … but watch your step in the belfry. If he gives you any trouble I’ll send Mears to lend a hand.’

  Just then the crowd gave a shout and made him turn in apprehension, but the artist still crouched on the ledge, still clung to his last few moments of life. It was something else that was happening up there! – The slats of the window were being driven outwards. Through the disintegrating wood came a jabbing sea boot, thrusting, splintering, and smashing at the framework.

  ‘It’s Esau … he’s going to get him!’

  Was it physical, that surge of hope? There was a roar in their throats like the roar of a football crowd, unconscious, compulsive, a single, primitive voice. The Sea-King would do something – he was more than mere humanity! He could grapple with the impossible, he could wrest it to a conclusion.

  Through the fragments came the fisherman with majestic unconcern. He might have been drawing himself through a hedge, so little concern did he seem to attach to it. Having got through the window he reached up for the ledge, and having grasped that, rose easily on to it. As a feat of strength it was fantastic, it could have baffled a trained gymnast: yet the white-bearded giant made it seem a matter of course. With a quiet word to Simmonds he went up and over the parapet, then, taking the artist by his armpits, he drew him firmly on to the roof.

  Pandemonium broke loose! It was the only word to describe it. Gently himself was babbling something, he could never remember what. The uproar was so deafening that one never noticed the fire engine – its crew must have thought that they had stumbled into bedlam. Some were running into the church, some embracing each other: even the reporters were shaking hands and dancing about just like the rest. Above the tumult the sudden tolling of the bell sounded quite in order – it had to clang three times before Gently realized …

  But, after all, he needn’t have worried. Nothing, it appeared was to spoil that moment. The bell had deafened poor Dutt – he was deaf for a week – but it had done nothing else except to stir up dust. Gently arrived just in time to see the trap door opening. He helped to bring the collapsing artist down the rickety ladder. Esau, always Esau, was slowly piling the stones in a heap; he wouldn’t even look at Gently, wouldn’t answer a word that was put to him.

  ‘Nothing but shock, is it?’

  Dyson had forced the Wolseley through to the gate. From porch to road it might well have been a wedding – everyone was trying to pat Simmonds on the back.

  ‘The shock – but that’s enough!’

  Simmonds was only partly conscious. His feet were dragging after him and he needed support on both sides.

  ‘To the Police House, then?’

  ‘Yes – and get a doctor to him. Take Mears along with you. His wife’ll know what to do.’

  The crowd hadn’t time to take it in before the artist was whisked away. The reporters, too, were rather at a loss. But then they remembered Esau – Esau, who had worked the miracle. Could it be that he’d escaped in the excitement surrounding Simmonds?

  No, Esau was there – at least, for their cameras. Gently could have told them not to expect more than that. The Sea-King came out of the church with his admirers crowding about him … at a distance, a little distance: he had the divinity that hedges kings.

  ‘Dawes is the name, isn’t it?’


  ‘Were you born in the village?’

  Did they really think he was going to answer their pitiful stock of questions? He paid no more regard to them than to the fluttering black flies – perhaps a little less, because the flies told him something.

  ‘There’s a storm coming up.’

  To himself he murmured it. They were the only words that Gently had heard pass his lips that day. A storm was coming up! – he turned his steps towards the beach. The reporters, still to learn wisdom, hurried after him in a pack.

  But the drama wasn’t quite finished under that lowering, blind-eyed tower. By the gate was standing Hawks with a look of murder on his face. He waited till Esau drew level, then he spat, full at the other: all the hate in his warped being was concentrated in the action. Esau’s arm swept in a gesture, as though he brushed away an insect. Hawks went rolling in the dust. There was no more to it than that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FOR A LONG time Gently stood still beside the spot where Hawks had fallen. The fisherman had scrambled to his feet and gone off after the others. A good few of the crowd still remained there, talking, and the vicar was turning some small boys out of the churchyard. Dutt had accompanied Simmonds – he still felt responsible for him, and Mears, who had returned the ladder, was now pedalling off on his cycle.

  It was over – it was calming down; things were getting back to normal. Why, then, did he have this feeling that in reality they had just begun? Something had clicked as he saw Hawks go sprawling in the road, a premonition, an unconscious warning, you could call it what you liked. A climax was being reached: he couldn’t get any closer to it. A climax of a tragic nature, coming up like the storm, Yet what, excepting imagination, was suggesting this present catastrophe? What harm could come to the Sea-King, with his rout of subjects about him?

  He stood a long time, vaccillating! His instinct was to follow Esau. His whole being seemed to pulse with a blind necessity for it. Against that there was feeble reason and some questions he had for the vicar: Dyson, no doubt, had asked the wrong ones, or he hadn’t known what to ask.

  It was the vicar who finally settled him, coming over to Gently voluntarily. Would the inspector step across the road for a glass of home-made lemonade? Gently, went, though with grave misgivings. He couldn’t conquer his foreboding so easily. But there were no rational grounds for it and the vicar was on the spot … what else could he do but seize time by the forelock?

  The vicar was a widower who lived with his youngest daughter. She was a plain-faced but smiling girl of two- or three-and-twenty. The vicarage was a large one and bore affinities to the Bel-Air; it was sparsely furnished with old, worn furniture, and yet, all the same, had an air of negligent comfort.

  ‘A terrible, terrible business, Inspector.’

  The vicar had taken him into what was obviously his den. A roll-top desk occupied a space by the window and the other three walls were lined with bookshelves. The books themselves were cheerfully dilapidated. Quite a number of them were innocent of backstrips and covers. The desk was littered with papers, some of them weighted with lumps of amber. Above the desk, in a frame of maple wood, hung a photograph of a college eight.

  ‘That poor young man! What in the world constrained him to do it? Upon my word, it was a mercy that Skipper Dawes …’

  Gently shrugged and looked for an ashtray in which to scrape out his pipe. Had the vicar called him in to see what he could pump from him? Soon the daughter re-appeared carrying the lemonade on a tray. While he poured it the vicar continued his musings and exclamations.

  ‘In your business, Inspector …’

  ‘We don’t see a lot of suicide.’

  ‘But to a certain extent you must be innured to these things. I understand that the young man …’

  ‘He is a material witness.’

  ‘I had heard, perhaps, incorrectly …’

  ‘There’s always gossip in these cases.’

  The vicar nodded his head gravely. It was probably wrong to suspect him. He was shocked by what had happened and wanted to talk it over with someone.

  ‘I feel that if ever prayer was answered …’

  ‘You did more for him than I did.’

  ‘You, too, have the conviction?’

  ‘Didn’t you make him change his mind?’

  He was afraid he had earned a lecture by this hint of unbelief. Over his tumbler of lemonade the vicar was staring at him solemnly. Then he sighed, and took a pull from it. This wasn’t, perhaps, the time! Gently, poker-faced behind his pipe, looked less than apt as a subject for lectures.

  ‘I had a visit from your colleague.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gently puffed a ring of smoke.

  ‘I couldn’t help him much, I’m afraid, unless it was help of a negative nature. These have been truly distressing days, Inspector. We live in an atmosphere of doubt. The sin of one man can infect a community – in a sense, we are all of us sharers in his guilt.’

  ‘You are referring to society?’

  ‘Every one of us, Inspector. The commission of a crime is like a ripple in a pond. We have impulses of good and impulses of evil, and both can be excited by the presence of their like. Those people out there! They are good souls, all of them. Many of them I have known all the days of their lives. Yet in the presence of sin they become themselves sinful, they feel guilt in themselves and their hearts become as stone. And when you find your culprit and bring him to the gallows their guilt, I’m afraid, not their justice, will rejoice.

  ‘The most tragic two words in the language are “Crucify him!” There, Inspector, lies the shipwreck of the human spirit.’

  Gently nodded without comment – he hadn’t come to discuss the morals of it. At the moment he wanted something more directly germane. ‘All the days of their lives’ was the phrase which had struck him … the vicar was an observer who might hold vital information.

  ‘How long have you been in Hiverton?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Inspector!’

  He pointed to his short grey hair with a smile.

  ‘I came here from Tuthill – that’s a parish in Dorset. It was winter at the time and I thought I’d come to the North Pole.’

  ‘Many years ago, was it?’

  ‘In twenty-seven, to be exact. I ought to remember it because poor Mary was having John. We were snowed up for three weeks – no hope of a midwife. John was our first, you know. I shall never forget it.’

  ‘Things have changed, I expect.’

  ‘Yes. Even in Hiverton.’

  ‘And people, no doubt.’

  ‘They change, but they stay the same.’

  ‘The fishermen too?’

  ‘Especially the fishermen! They haven’t altered, Inspector, since Peter cast his nets in Galilee.’

  ‘What about Robert Hawks?’

  ‘Are you interested in Bob?’

  ‘I’d like to hear anything you can tell me about him.’

  The vicar, rather to Gently’s surprise, himself produced a pipe. It was a pleasant little briar with an apple-shaped bowl. He tapped it once or twice fastidiously before filling it from a tin – the mixture, Gently noticed, was a mild-flavoured blend.

  ‘You’ve been using your eyes, haven’t you?’

  Gently offered his matches, shrugging. The vicar lit his pipe attentively, letting the match burn almost to his fingers.

  ‘In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me … how much do you really know about them? Because Dawes comes into it, all along the line. If you’re interested in one then you’re interested in the other.’

  ‘In both if you like. I was going to ask about Esau.’

  The vicar nodded wisely and adjusted his pipe with his thumb.

  ‘Well, when I first came here, things were altogether different. In those days they used to go drifting – Esau’s got his skipper’s ticket. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see much of them. They used to follow the fishing for the best part of the year, and were at Hiverton for only a few weeks at a time.’

/>   ‘How long did that continue?’

  ‘Oh, only for a year or two. I imagine they were saving their money to buy themselves boats. But what I was going to tell you was that then they were the best of friends – now, as you may have seen, they’re on a rather peculiar footing.

  ‘Bob, when I first knew him, would be round about thirty. He was a swashbuckling young man with very good looks. You’ve seen those dark eyes of his – they played havoc among the females. And he was a spark in those days, he’d got a joke for everyone.

  ‘Esau was a few years older and a steadier type altogether. He was always a bit reserved, a bit distant from the other fishermen. He was a skipper, which made a difference. He got his ticket very young. I believe he was very much sought after and had a wonderful record of catches.

  ‘Well then, as I say, they bought themselves boats – or more likely, Esau bought them: he was the one to have had the money. Esau’s boat was built at Wrackstead. I can remember them bringing it round. It’s unique in the line of fishing boats and there were pictures of it in the Eastern Daily Post.’

  ‘Can you remember what year that was?’

  ‘It was the spring of twenty-nine. Mary was having Anne, and she was born on the first of June.’

  ‘How did they get on with the boats?’

  ‘Oh, well – at least, Esau did. Bob, I imagine, was paying off instalments, but I don’t think it was that which came in between them. Esau had a spanking year. He was after his second boat. He owned five altogether by thirty-two or three, and later, for no good reason, he sold them off again. You’ll have to do a lot of probing, Inspector, to get to the bottom of Esau.’

  ‘But this thing … whatever it was?’

  ‘That’s just what I’m coming to now.’

  The vicar re-lit his pipe with a little conscious art; but then, after puffing once or twice, he produced an anticlimax.

  ‘I don’t know what caused it, and that’s being honest with you. I can’t even be sure of when it took place. They’re chapel, you know, like most of the fishermen, and not so close to me as my own congregation. But something went wrong, that was plain to everyone. You never saw them together again as they were in the old days. Esau shut himself up just the way he is now and Bob – well, you’ve seen him. He changed out of mind.