Gently Where She Lay

by Alan Hunter

‘Could he swim?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  ‘Right. Then get you back there, old partner, and keep your eye on him, or he’s a gonner.’

  The patois sank in; I rushed from the office and pounded up the jetty again. Keep an eye on him! But already he’d have vanished in the thickening gloom of the twilight. At first I saw nothing but grey wrinkled water fining and blurring into the horizon, and it was only after staring till the tears came that I caught a glimpse of a speck of white. The lifebuoy: he’d be near that: they were both being carried by the same current! At least now I had his rough direction and could point it out to possible rescuers. I scoured round the jetty for a splinter of driftwood and laid it out on the bearing of the lifebuoy. Then I jogged up and down impatiently, willing the rescue boat to arrive.

  About then it struck me: was it just possible that I’d been making a fool of myself? After all, I knew nothing about the fellow in the blue jersey, and certainly there’d been no panic in his demeanour. He had set off with confident, unhurried strokes, like a man who knew how to pace himself over a distance; and I couldn’t help recalling that touch of irritability when I’d dropped the lifebuoy in his path. Then there was the accent – not that of a fisherman; it suggested intelligence, cultivation. And the quick impression I’d received of his face was of well-modelled features and lively eyes. A man of about my age. Was he some well-heeled resident who liked to swan around in a fisherman’s outfit – and an ex-Channel-swimmer on top, quite capable of throwing off a few sea miles?

  But I wasn’t left long to wonder. An engine buzzed waspishly up the harbour. Within seconds a rubber inshore rescue-boat came busily slamming down the tide. It spun to a brisk stop by the jetty and one of the two men grabbed an iron rung. The other, a burly fellow with a frieze of beard, throttled back the engine and squinted up at me.

  ‘Can you give us a bearing?’

  I checked with my piece of driftwood. ‘Say ten degrees south of the line of the jetty. Watch for a lifebuoy. I threw one near him. I saw it two minutes ago on that bearing.’

  ‘How far out?’

  ‘Say half a mile.’

  ‘When did he fall in?’

  ‘Seven minutes ago.’

  The bearded man thumbed the throttle and the boat surged away, to take up a course, it seemed to me, a good deal too far to the south.

  And in the end, I have to admit, I was mildly pink about the ears. Just half-an-hour later they fetched my man into the harbour-master’s office. He was sodden of course, but in no way distressed, and was clearly well-known to the harbour-master and the boat-crew. He gave the former a broad grin and me rather a sheepish one.

  ‘Sorry. The poor devil sank before I got to him.’

  ‘I should think he did,’ said the harbour-master dryly. ‘I reckoned this was one of your tricks, Mr Reymerston. I’ve laid out your size of gear in the store.’

  The man, Reymerston, went into the store to change, and the harbour-master poured out some cocoa he’d been heating.

  ‘So you know him,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, ah. Pretty well. There’s not many people don’t know Mr Reymerston.’

  ‘He must be a good swimmer.’

  ‘He’s a funny man in the water. And there’s people about who reckon he can paint.’

  ‘He’s an artist, then?’

  The harbour-master looked sidelong. ‘Depends a bit on what you call art. But I tell you straight, if I owned a fishing-boat I wouldn’t pay Mr Reymerston to do its picture.’

  When Reymerston came out I asked him questions about Tuesday, then left him to drink cocoa and chat with the others. I had already put my questions to them and added a few more negatives to the grand total. But the dog was crossed off. Now I knew it had been with Vivienne. For a moment, through the dog, I had almost touched her. And though the dog had gone now, like its mistress, it had left me with a clue.

  The other half of its lead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A STRANGE THOUGHT: fourteen hours earlier I hadn’t known that a Vivienne Selly existed. Now she was as familiar to me as a sister who I was meeting again after a long absence. I wasn’t liking her very much, but that was irrelevant: Vivienne was one of the family; one of a big, sad family, none of whom I’d met in the living flesh.

  The way she’d died. This was unusual and somehow oddly appropriate to Wolmering. A genteel death. She’d been suffocated in a way that left no traces. I didn’t know how. There is usually bruising and other superficial injury. The victim struggles, breaks her nails, has to be wrestled with, struck. Not so in Vivienne’s case. The body was curiously immaculate. Not a scratch or a bruise, and the nails prettily manicured, and clean, as though they had been lately scrubbed. The face had set in a relaxed expression, simply blank and dead, and the limbs lay naturally and straight, with the fingers of each hand gently curled. She hadn’t been drugged and there had been no intercourse. Her clothes had not been rumpled or torn. It was as though, expecting death, she had calmly undressed, laid down, composed herself, and died. Rather uncanny. Yet, as I said, strangely appropriate to Wolmering.

  George Selly. The reason we hadn’t questioned him was, frankly, because we hadn’t been able to lay our hands on him. George Selly was missing, though whether by accident or design was a question that remained open. He lived at Castleford, seventy miles off, with a widow, a Mrs Bacon; but when the local C.I.D. visited her house on Wednesday afternoon they found it locked and the garage empty. Selly was a rep for the Corstophine Drug Co. Ltd, an Edinburgh firm of manufacturing chemists. All they could tell us was that he had time-off due to him which he was free to take when it suited him. Mrs Bacon had stopped her tradesmen for the following ten days and had paid them up to date, but the couple had told nobody where they were going and as yet we had no lead at all. Selly a likely culprit? Difficult to judge without actually having observed the man. He was paying Vivienne a fair allowance (vide her bank), and she was keeping him out of a valuable little property. But against that he was earning a comfortable income as Corstophine’s East Anglian rep, and with the new divorce law on the book he’d be free of her anyway in a year or so. Also the style of the crime seemed wrong. Between husband and wife one would have expected some violence. Then there was the circumstance of Selly coming from outside and the body being left at the far end of the heath. Nothing logically conclusive of course – that’s a rarity in criminal investigation – but enough to make me leave a question-mark beside Selly and to keep a keen eye on the field.

  The style of the crime. What you had to rule out was robbery and sex, unless the latter was psychopathic to a degree I hadn’t met with. Possible (one must consider everything) but only on the margin of probability: leaving the more familiar motives like hindrance, threat, blackmail. Hindrance was Selly’s motive. Threat and blackmail remained. Of these, as yet, no indication, but we were in the early days of the case. Perhaps more important at the moment was that curious and gentle execution, an almost reverent, affectionate killing, done without any sign of hatred. Who would kill in such a way? A person of strong sensibilities. A merciful person, and intelligent enough to perform the deed in the way it was done. A lover? No, he would kill passionately. A relative? None in the picture, except Selly. A woman? This was worth hesitating over, because the picture did include women.

  Friday morning: I breakfasted with Eyke in the coffee-room at the Pelican. The Pelican is the best hotel in town and Eyke booked me in there as a matter of course. I liked Eyke. He was one of those slow-spoken, conscientious provincial Inspectors, very careful, very responsible, never likely to be rushed into a wrong decision. Tallish, solidly built, brown-eyed, his cropped hair very grey for forty-five, he had a slightly heavy, fresh-complexioned face with a wry nose, got through boxing.

  He brought news. Selly’s car had been seen in Carlisle. It had been misparked during yesterday’s lunch-hour and a warden had written it a ticket. Unfortunately this news wasn’t filtered to the police until late in the evening, by whi
ch time Selly was long gone, north or south as the case might be.

  ‘I think he’s in Scotland, sir,’ Eyke ventured. ‘If he’s touring it fits about right. He couldn’t have left Castleford very early yesterday because Mrs Bacon was there when the baker called at one p.m. So they probably left in the afternoon and spent the night on the road somewhere. Then yesterday they’d be at Carlisle for lunch. I’d say that Castleford only just missed them.’

  ‘It all sounds very innocent.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know, sir. He may have rigged it to look like that. And he couldn’t have known the body would be found straight away, so this trip to Scotland may have been a sort of alibi.’

  ‘The story didn’t make the papers on Wednesday?’

  ‘No sir. And they didn’t give it much of a spread yesterday.’

  ‘So he could have missed seeing it.’

  ‘Yes sir, he could’ve done. Murder isn’t the eye-catcher it was in the old days.’

  Eyke was deferential. Some of the police in the provinces are veiledly hostile to talent from the Yard. Not Eyke: he had a crime that was strange to him, and he was genuinely grateful to be given a specialist. We discussed the dog. It must, we decided, have been living rough around the town since Tuesday; if it had stayed on the Common or the marshes adjacent it could very well have passed unnoticed. There was nothing to be surmised from its appearance at the harbour, where a scavenging dog might naturally stray; but its being in the town made it now virtually a certainty that it was there the crime had been committed. Vivienne would not have been voluntarily separated from her dog: it must have accompanied her to wherever she’d been lured. There, either she or the murderer had tied it up, and subsequently it had broken its lead and escaped.

  ‘You’re assuming she went into a house, sir.’

  ‘I think the manner of her death requires it. There was no struggle. She’d have been lying down somewhere. There had to be a very soft pillow handy.’

  ‘Then like that it’s someone who lives in the town.’

  ‘That was the most likely prospect from the start.’

  Eyke looked down his wry nose a little: it wasn’t a prospect that appealed to him.

  ‘It may have been a visitor, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps. But the balance of facts is against it. If it had been a sex crime now, or a robbery. But what we’ve got points to a resident.’

  Eyke sighed and nodded. ‘So it comes down to this, sir. House-to-house enquiries.’

  ‘I’m afraid it does. And watch out for the lead. It’s the one thing we have that ties our man to the job.’

  Eyke had only a sergeant and two D.C.s; I suggested we called in help from Eastwich. Eyke was up in arms directly, so I dropped the idea for the moment. We’d make a start, I told him, with the houses bordering the Common, and commencing in the area of the car park; also we’d follow up people who used the car park regularly and who’d left cars there Tuesday evening. Eyke was cheered by the latter instruction.

  ‘Most of those will be visitors.’

  I grinned. ‘But don’t neglect the houses.’

  Eyke smiled shyly. We were going to make a good team.

  My own car (the Lotus) was in dock, and M/T had supplied me with a Cortina. I drew it from the cramped yard of the Pelican and tinkered it slowly down Wolmering’s High Street. A modest street. Its most ambitious building was the Pelican itself, a tall, elegantly veranda’d example of the Georgian, partly festooned with a tree-like creeper. The front was recessed at one side to permit a bow that ran up to the eaves, with semicircular extensions of the verandas; giving it a ramparted appearance. It fronted a triangle at the top of the street which probably once had been a green but which now, paved and ornamented with a town sign, offered a little free parking and a site for half-a-dozen stalls. For the rest the High Street was a mixture of undistinguished period and dull Victorian buildings: almost drab, yet somehow expressing the relaxed, loitering flavour of Wolmering. No traffic warden, and Eyke had boasted you could leave your car unlocked for days.

  I drifted on: you couldn’t hurry; pedestrians tended to share the street with you. Many were elderly, well-dressed people of whom Mrs Lake was the type. The High Street was their boulevard where they shopped, gossiped and drank coffee; or introduced coltish grandchildren from this or that university. The shops were largely their shops. I noticed two displaying fashionable clothes; a good florist, a well-stocked bookshop, a cake-shop advertising brick-oven baking. A well-bred town. I didn’t think the gossip was over-much engaged with Vivienne Selly. In life and death she didn’t belong here, and God willing, her murderer didn’t either.

  At its lower end the High Street split and passed to each side of a craft-shop. It was about here that one became aware of an invisible line running through the town. Not blatantly a class-line: nothing so crude, it could be legitimately described in terms of architecture. To the south of the line the style was prevailingly Georgian, to the north Victorian, with an outer skin of modern. Yet in effect it did serve as a class-line; you could tell that without meeting the inhabitants. The commodious, though dreary, 1880 terrace houses were a step below the cramped but highly-decorated ex-fishermen’s cottages. The unfortunate pier was below the line, and so were the sea-front hotel and boarding-houses. The great ornamented flint church, with its inevitable green, made the line take a respectful bend round its precincts. Class: very subtle, but distinct; and the Sellys, perhaps in ignorance, had stepped over the line. To the north, among the tweenwar suburban semis, they might have put down comfortable roots in the hierarchy.

  I passed the craft-shop and coasted down a gradient through the low-caste terraces. These ended in a garage and a glimpse of thirties modern, after which one crossed a bridge over a creek that bounded the town. Coming and going you crossed the bridge: there was no other access to Wolmering. If Vivienne had not been murdered in the town she had crossed that bridge twice, once alive, once dead. I glanced back at it in the mirror. No, my reasoning was sound: she had died in town. There was no purpose to be served by returning with the body when there were remote spots everywhere to hand.

  Another gradient took me away from the bridge and through a strip of extra-mural development; then I was clear of the town and following the line of a low bluff, with the Wolmer and its marshes below on my left. Just ahead, also left, was strung a line of closely-clipped yews, above which I could see a screen of copper beeches and the roofs and dormers of a large house. Huntingfield School. About a mile out of town. I slowed before a pair of open wrought-iron gates. On the gravel before the house were parked ten or twelve cars, including Pamela Rede’s red Mini. I parked beside them.

  A faint smell of apples and a sensation of warmth, like the warmth of a beehive (or a jail). From behind a door, a carefully modulated voice, flattened by the acoustics of an occupied class-room. A middle-aged woman in an overall was polishing the black-and-white tiles with a cloth placed over a mop: she paused to look up suspiciously as she heard my step on the metal grille.

  ‘Yes – what is it?’

  At the moment, her eyes said, she was the guardian of this institution.

  ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Gently. I’d like a word with Miss Swefling.’

  ‘Is it an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid Miss Swefling is busy.’

  But her eyes switched briefly to the broad staircase that rose from the hall to a railed landing.

  I smiled at her and went up. She stood staring hostilely, but didn’t intervene. The staircase, which had shallow marble steps, made a handsome turn through a half-circle. The landing was spacious enough to be called a mezzanine and had a polished floor and a carpet. It was furnished with low book-cases containing children’s classics, and above these were taped some youthful watercolours. Several doors led off. One was glass-panelled; I could see through it girls sitting at their desks; and though I made no sound on the soft carpet, every head was turned in my direction. A voic
e snapped imperatively: the heads jerked round, but then one or two covertly looked again; bright-eyed, giggling little girls of about eight or nine, in cream blouses and plum skirts. I moved out of their vision. At the far end of the mezzanine was a panelled oak door inscribed: Knock – and Wait. I knocked twice. A firm voice said: ‘Enter’, and I opened the door and went in.

  A woman was seated at a big pedestal desk with a graph-paper chart spread before her. She was shading-in squares with red and black pens and didn’t immediately take notice of my entry. The room was large and lofty and sunny. The walls were lined with glass-fronted varnished bookcases. Other than these there were two filing-cabinets and three pleasant mahogany chairs with red plush seats. On the walls hung several watercolour landscapes by a nineteenth-century painter who I couldn’t identify, and on the floor was a fine Persian carpet with colours too delicate for it not to have been expensive. I closed the door. The woman finished her shading and laid her pens on a tray. Then she looked up. Her eyes went large, her expression quite blank.

  ‘Miss Swefling?’

  ‘I am Miss Swefling.’

  ‘I’m Chief Superintendent Gently.’

  ‘Yes. Your picture was in The East Anglian Daily Times. But I’m not sure you are welcome here, Superintendent.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Why is that?’

  ‘Because our reputation has suffered quite enough. I would consider it a kindness if you kept away from Huntingfield and had no further contact with our girls.’

  One of the chairs was placed in front of the desk, perhaps for the reception of erring pupils. I came forward and sat myself on it. Miss Swefling watched me with cold eyes. She was in her late forties; an attractive woman. She had an oval face with a widish jaw. Her hair, barely touched with grey streaks, was luxuriant and worn medium-long. She’d be on the tall side, and as far as I could see had a full and handsome figure. She had strong but pretty hands. She was wearing a grey dress with blue facings.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be good enough to state your business.’