Gently With the Painters (20 page)

Mallows gestured, feebly, helplessly. ‘It was pinched from the studio … he studies papers, you know. I don’t suppose he knew that I’d seen him take it, but I had … so as soon as you showed me the letter …’

‘But you knew something before that?’

‘Yes … everything … I told you. Then he wasn’t at his car, though he left the cellar before me …’

‘Why wouldn’t you tell me?’ Gently leant back on the desk: he neither knew nor cared whether the others could fathom this moment of truth.

‘You may not understand it, but he’s a decent fellow, at the bottom … I was probably his nearest friend … with me, he was like a child.’

‘Yet you knew he couldn’t go free.’

‘It’s not enough to know these things. You don’t betray your friends because of the logic … only by blunders. That’s how you betray them.’

‘The blunders imposed by your conscience.’

‘No, my dear fellow … no phrases …’

‘You knew, and you knew you must tell.’

‘I knew he was decent … who was I to condemn him?’

There was silence. Nobody stirred in the hazy,
thickaired
office. The only motion was of the smoke which curled in tendrils from Gently’s pipe. It seemed an age before Mallows, drawing his head up again, said:

‘What happens now – are you going to pull him in?’

Gently slowly shook his head. ‘Not now … he’ll keep a while. I’ve had a man outside his house since yesterday morning.’

‘He’s a family man, you know.’

‘Yes.’ Gently pulled on his pipe. ‘Perhaps, after the bank opens … myself, I’m not in a hurry.’

G
ENTLY HAD RARELY
felt so impersonal about the delinquent in a case and nor, as it turned out, was he ever to have less to do with one. Farrer was never brought to trial; he wasn’t even arrested; in fact, while Mallows was still protecting him, there had ceased to be any Farrer. He had gone into his office and he had there quietly hanged himself. He had done it with some lighting flex suspended from a blind bracket.

He was smiling; that was a feature which added an especial touch of the macabre. His face wore exactly the expression with which he had been used to greet his customers. To perform the deed he had changed into his bank clothes, knotting with care his black bow tie; he had pinned some violets into his buttonhole and dressed his hair with a popular cream. Then, at around one a.m., he had stepped smiling from the window sill. His wife, who slept apart, hadn’t missed him until breakfast.

‘And what sort of a case did we have against him?’

Gently frowned when Superintendent Walker pinned him down with this question. Lack of sleep had made him
bearish and his throat was painfully sore – he’d spent a quarter of an hour gargling it, and was still as hoarse as a crow.

‘Not so good as the case we once had against Johnson … that’s the reason why Mallows had to go through the hoop. But we could have built it up … perhaps got a confession. On the other hand, I doubt whether he’d have been fit to plead.’

To be truthful, the case against Farrer was slender, in spite of one or two circumstances that seemed most telling. It depended far too largely on the testimony of Mallows, and entirely so when it came to motive. But time, as usual, supplied a few clinchers. That was commonly the case when one had struck the right trail. Farrer, with all his cunning, had made some careless mistakes, and the most damning of these related to the paper knives. The second pair of knives he had actually bought in person. He had trusted to the likelihood that the supplier didn’t know him. This was true, but the man had a good memory for faces, and he was quite able to pick out a photograph of Farrer. In addition:

‘Just a moment! Doesn’t this fellow manage a bank?’ The picture had given a jog to a sluggish recollection. After searching through his files he came up with an order sheet: it was dated two years previously and bore Farrer’s sweeping signature.

‘There you are, I could have sworn that we’d done some business with him.’

The second item on the sheet was a stainless-steel paper knife.

Two more slices of luck followed one after the other. A
constable who knew Farrer had met him early on the Sunday morning. It was in Oldmarket Road and Farrer was proceeding towards the city, having just, without doubt, planted the knife and paper on Mallows. He had been striding along confidently and he had aroused no suspicion; according to the constable, he was whistling softly to himself.

More significant, probably, was the evidence of a cinema manager, who until he heard of the suicide had attributed no importance to what he had seen. Farrer had been noticed by this man on the night of the murder when, his last house being out, he had gone to the Haymarket for his car. Farrer was standing under a street light and intently examining his clothes. Then, extending his gloved hands, he had pored over these as well. The time was
approximately
five minutes to eleven, and the manager had driven away to leave Farrer still standing there.

But the corroborative evidence was to Gently by way of a bonus, and it was Mallows who supplied the really satisfying background. He had probed into Farrer’s character during a long and intimate acquaintance, and had watched, with a clinical interest, the banker’s relations with Mrs Johnson. It was a connection which boded tragedy but which had appealed to the academician’s irony. His advice to Farrer had fallen on deaf ears and there was little he could do but observe developments.

‘You couldn’t foresee that something like this might happen?’

‘Good lord, no! I was thinking in terms of a nervous breakdown. Farrer was always close to that – he was a chronic schizophrenic; one half of him was the bank man,
and the other a frustrated Van Gogh. A jolly good breakdown was just what the fellow needed. It would have put him in the way of some psychiatric treatment. As I saw it, dear Shirley was going to break him to make him, and l didn’t see any good reason for interfering.’

‘You think he intended to walk out of the bank?’

Gently couldn’t help feeling surprise at the way Mallows had taken that lambasting. Instead of making the artist shrink from him, it seemed to have roused his admiration; he appeared delighted, in retrospect, at the way Gently had got the better of him.

Now, on the Tuesday, when Gently had been scrawling out his report, Mallows had called to take him to lunch without even bothering to ring him first. The lunch had consisted of that missed fried chicken followed by an ice-cream meringue, which being eaten, they had taken their coffee and cognac to a swing sofa on the lawn.

‘I’m certain he did. It was something he often spoke of. I made it a joke, but Farrer took it quite seriously. He was in Paris last year, you know, sort of spying out the land – he came back with a load of addresses, not to mention a caseful of literature.’

‘Yes … we found it in his desk at the bank.’

‘Did you? He showed it to me, at the time. Asked me if I’d ever had rooms in Montmartre … it was the Rue Lepic which seemed to take his fancy.’

‘There were two addresses in the Rue Lepic.’

‘Yes. It was just the sort of spot to attract Farrer. Then he asked me about cafés – where did one meet Picasso, etcetera – all the same, I thought it was foolery till I read the papers on Tuesday. But now, of course, I’m quite
certain that he was proposing to leave, and that Shirley was intended to go along with him. When did you first begin to suspect him, by the way?’

‘I don’t know … when I found that his picture wasn’t slashed.’

‘That was a bad mistake, I agree, though completely typical of Farrer’s make-up. And then?’

‘And then the letter … how many people could have concocted it? In actual fact there were only two, and they were Farrer and Johnson. There might have been a leak – one or the other of them might have talked – but it was a very suspicious circumstance and it kept me thinking about Farrer.’

‘After which I made my bloomer!’

‘Yes, that practically put a seal on it. I was positive then that Farrer was the X of your description. It was incredible that you should have known what had happened at the bank, and there could only have been one other reason for supposing that Farrer had received the letter. You knew that he was the murderer. You knew that he had composed the letter.’

‘Guessed, my dear fellow, in deference to protocol. I didn’t see him do it and I didn’t hear him confess. But, between you and me, I never had much doubt about him, and a glance at the letter disposed of any doubt I had. Yet how could I do it? How could I throw him to the wolves? I tell you again that, in spite of his failings, Farrer was a very decent fellow. He was human at his job – which isn’t noted for the humanities – his employees all got on with him, so did his colleagues, and so did we. If his painting was a joke – and it was, behind his back – yet he was the first to reach
in his pocket when the Group was short of funds. Did any of the others run him down?’

Gently gave a shake of his head.

‘No – they liked him, you see, whatever they thought of his daubing. The only reason why I was idiot enough to draw you his character was to stop you from nailing the job on Johnson.’

‘Didn’t you falsify his character?’

‘Not I. How do you mean?’

‘About the smile … I wouldn’t have described Farrer’s smile as being “shy”.’

‘Aha, my dear fellow!’ Mallows winked at him
delightedly
. ‘But it was the smile he used to me and not to his customers that I described. There was a difference, I admit, and you should have been clever enough to tumble to it. I caught you napping there – didn’t I, Superintendent Gently?’

About his grilling he asserted that Gently would never repeat his success:

‘You took me by surprise, you old devil, or we’d still be arguing the toss.’

And of the danger he’d stood in from Farrer, who had clearly suspected what Mallows knew:

‘Now you’re making it melodramatic – he’d never have dreamed of hurting me.’

Their conversation about the case drifted leisurely to other subjects, became a wandering, vagrant chat, in tone with the summer afternoon. They had found, each in the other, something that exactly suited their taste; and what better thing was there to be done than to talk at ease in the bird-haunted garden?

‘You’ll be going back, will you, to start on something fresh …?’

‘Yes … but I’ve got my holiday coming shortly.’

‘Fishing, I thought you said?’

‘I’m spending one week fishing, near Lynton.’

‘And the other week?’

Gently shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to be visiting my sister in Wiltshire.’

‘My dear Gently! Spend it with me. I keep a houseboat on Burton Broad.’

It was arranged as easily as that. It needed no pressing or polite reluctance. Afterwards Mallows took him up to the studio, where a fresh canvas stood clamped to an easel.

‘You see? I’m not entirely disinterested! I’ve begun a portrait and I want to finish it …’

On the canvas, blocked out in charcoal, was Gently caught with his far away smile.

The turn of events had been saddening to Stephens and his cup was filled when they were cheated of an arrest; he had wanted a resounding success so badly, the sort of success that one expected of Gently. He was also a little piqued about Johnson. His efforts there had been slenderly rewarded. Instead of the heroic capture of the murderer they appeared, indeed, as an indiscretion of youth.

‘It wasn’t even as though Farrer were a principal …’

Hansom, too, had made the same complaint:

‘This boyo breezed into the case from nowhere – like somebody had pulled him out of a hat!’

Were they wiser as well as sadder? In Hansom’s case Gently had his doubts; but Stephens, he decided, had learnt a lesson here and there. He himself had learnt something
too. He felt his rank sitting easier upon him. He was still a rebel, always a rebel, but hadn’t the world a great many mansions? And at heart, wasn’t there a dash of the rebel in everyone?

Driving back, he came suddenly to a very solemn conclusion. It was time he sold the Riley, time he bought something a little newer …

Brundall, 1958.

Alan Hunter
was born in Hoveton, Norfolk, in 1922. He left school at the age of fourteen to work on his father’s farm, spending his spare time sailing on the Norfolk Broads and writing nature notes for the
Eastern Evening
News
. He also wrote poetry, some of which was published while he was in the RAF during the Second World War. By 1950, he was running his own book shop in Norwich and in 1955, the first of what would become a series of forty-six George Gently novels was published. He died in 2005, aged eighty-two.

Gently Does It

Gently by the Shore

Gently Down the Stream

Landed Gently

Gently Through the Mill

Gently in the Sun

Gently with the Painters

Gently to the Summit

Gently Go Man