Landed Gently

Alan Hunter

TO MY WIFE,

who never fails to listen respectfully when I read to her what comes out of my typewriter, nor ever fails to criticize it justly, fearlessly and with an almost prophetic insight,

THIS BOOK.

EDUCATIONAL NOTE

Those readers familiar with the glories of Holkham will be in no doubt as to the source of a number of architectural details distributed about this novel. Those who are not so familiar are recommended to close this book immediately and to hasten to repair an education so gravely defective. It should not be necessary to add, but I do so out of courtesy, that the characters in the book, unlike the architecture, are wholly fictitious, and have existed nowhere except in the mind of

Sincerely yours,

Alan Hunter

CHAPTER ONE

‘COME IN, DUTT.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘Grab yourself one of Mrs Jarvis’s mince pies and have a warm by the fire.’

‘Don’t mind if I do, sir. It’s perishing cold enough for brass monkeys outside.’

Gratefully the cockney sergeant tugged off his gauntlets and spread his numbed hands before the blaze. There was always a good fire in Gently’s room, he remembered; his senior had picked himself a jewel among landladies. It wasn’t all bunce, being a family man …

Down below the frosty dusk of a December afternoon was settling in the quiet Finchley road. Opposite Gently’s rooms the trees of a public garden made a gloomy and forbidding mass, and the streetlights, old-fashioned and inadequate, seemed to withdraw inside their tear-shaped globes. Another dose of fog on the way, no doubt. Up here you didn’t notice it so much, but as soon as you got down to St John’s Wood or a bit further in that direction … Dutt shivered and sank his teeth into one of the still hot mince pies.

‘These is a bit of all right, sir!’ he mumbled crumbily.

His chief grinned at him over the expensive new pike-rod he was playing with. ‘They’re laced with brandy, Dutt … it’s Mrs Jarvis’s special recipe. And talking of brandy, how about a drop of something?’

‘Yes, sir – you bet.’

‘Whisky would you like?’

‘Same as you, sir.’

Gently put down the rod with care and went over to the tray on his sideboard. Strange it was going to be, spending Christmas away from his familiar and comfortable rooms. Here were his usual collection of bottles, beside them a lavish bowl of fruit and a dish of nuts; holly garnished the photographs of his police college days, the case of his twenty-six-pound pike, the top of the bookcase with its rows of Notable British Trials and angling classics. And in the deep, generous Edwardian fireplace, magnificently wasteful, burned the sort of fire that Mrs Jarvis knew he liked, casting its flickering glow on the copper coal scuttle. Twenty … no, twenty-one Christmases he had spent in this room, with Dutt and the others dropping in, sometimes bringing their families.

‘Cheers, Dutt.’

‘All the best, sir.’

‘Let’s hope it’s a quiet Christmas.’

‘Would make a change, sir, wouldn’t it?’

Gently picked up the rod again and swished it once or twice experimentally. A real beauty, that. It must have cost his colleagues over a tenner. And his name on it, too, engraved on a little oval silver plate let into the butt.

‘Anyway, they won’t be calling me out! That’s one consolation.’

‘No, sir. You’re fireproof this time. They can’t call out the guest of a flipping chief constable.’

‘And it’s a long way away, up there in North Northshire. I shan’t look at a paper, Dutt, all the time I’m away.’

‘Don’t blame you either, sir. Shut the hangar door is what I says.’

Gently sighed softly and delicately dismantled the rod. He had to keep on telling himself that he liked the idea of being out of London for Christmas. Out of the blue it had come, that invitation. Two mornings ago he’d found a memo on his desk saying that the assistant commissioner wanted to see him.

‘Didn’t know you were a pal of Sir Daynes Broke, Gently.’

‘Sir Daynes Broke … ?’ Gently had stared at him.

‘He’s been on the phone about that escaped convict, and asked if you were getting a break over Christmas. I said yes, probably, and he asked if you’d be interested in some good pike-fishing. You are, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That’s what I told him. And he came up with an invitation for you to spend Christmas with him. I must say some of you blokes don’t waste your time when you’re out in the country.’

They’d all envied him, of course. They’d been collecting several weeks to make him a present to commemorate his twenty years with the Central Office, and a pike-rod was just the thing. But Gently himself wasn’t so sure of his good fortune. After twenty-one Christmases spent with Mrs Jarvis, he’d got into a pleasant rut, a rut that just suited him.

And all he knew of Sir Daynes, anyway, was what he had seen of him when he’d been out on a case.

‘That’s a good drop of Scotch, sir!’ Dutt was smacking his lips appreciatively.

‘Have another one, Dutt.’

‘No, sir. Not if you don’t mind.’

‘I suppose I’d better be getting my traps together. That train goes in an hour. And if I know Liverpool Street two days before Christmas …’

Dutt fumbled in the pocket of his overcoat and produced a small package done up in Christmas wrapping paper.

‘Here, sir. From the missus and me and the kids.’

Gently untied a wealth of tinselled tape to reveal a pretty little sandblasted briar, almost an exact replica of the one Dutt had seen in his chief’s mouth so often.

‘If you don’t like it, sir, they says they’ll change it, but I reckoned it was round about the mark …’

‘It’s perfect, Dutt. It’s the one I’d have chosen myself.’

‘The missus thought as how you might like a change, but I never see you smoke nothing different.’

‘I wouldn’t, Dutt, not if anyone paid me. And while we’re on the subject of presents, there are some things here for the missus, you and the kids.’

He pulled open the door of one of the cupboards under the bookcase and revealed a giant Christmas stocking. It was packed very tight, and looked excitingly nobbly, and the label that floated from it was cut in the shape of a dangling pair of handcuffs.

‘Don’t open it now … it’d take too long. By the way, what size was it you said the missus took?’

Dutt clasped the stocking to him grotesquely, something suspiciously like moisture in his eye. ‘Thanks, sir … you’re one of the best! The kiddies are going to miss you coming round, sir.’

‘I’m going to miss them too, but I’ll look in when I get back. You’ll be having a party at New Year, won’t you?’

‘Yes, sir – I got a split duty.’

‘All right then, that’s a date.’

They stood for some moments in silence, one each side of the lazy flames. Down below the paperboy was doing his rounds, and footfalls sounded sharply on the frosty pavement. Gently pulled two cigars from his breast pocket and shoved one of them into Dutt’s mouth.

‘Come on… I’ve got to go. It’s me for the wide-open spaces.’

Dutt nodded and scratched a light for them. ‘You won’t have to phone for a taxi, sir.’

‘Won’t have to … Why not, Dutt?’

‘’Cause I got a Jag outside, sir.’ The sergeant grinned at him guiltily. ‘It was going spare in the garage, sir. I reckoned nobody wasn’t going to miss it for an hour.’

Gently shook his head with mock gravity. ‘You’ll wind up bashing a beat, Dutt my lad! But since it’s here, we’d better not waste the Yard’s petrol. Get hold of that suitcase, and let’s try to look as though we own a Jag anyway.’

In spite of himself, Gently couldn’t help feeling a mild thrill of excitement as he and Dutt, laden with luggage and the precious pike-rod, plunged into the icy pandemonium of Liverpool Street Station. So many people going home – going home for Christmas! There were queues at every platform and every ticket-window, surging crowds of people, burdened, like himself, with suitcases, parcels, Christmas trees, everything under the sun. How could one fail to catch the spirit? How could one be chilled by the cold, or depressed by the great, dark, sooty vaults of the station, which echoed above the seething crowds below? Home for Christmas! All of London seemed to be in one mind. Pack your things – catch a train. Leave the streets and shop-windows, soon to be shuttered, leave the gloomy world of offices and work and worry. All that was over. A truce had been called. Now one could lock the door and forget the shabbiness, one could hasten to meet old friends, to renew oneself in the heart of the family. Catch a train, come home for Christmas!

Gently wasn’t going home, but he was too sensitive to atmospheres long to resist this one. Well … perhaps it wasn’t going to be so bad, after all! There were other sorts of Christmases besides the one he had made a habit of. And it might do him good to have a change, to see how it was with other people.

The queue for the Northshireman was already moving through the barrier. In his pocket he had an unaccustomed luxury, a first-class ticket.

‘Anything to read on the train, sir?’ Dutt motioned to the bookstall.

‘Everything they’ve got, Dutt! I don’t often go away for Christmas.’

An armful of expensive Christmas supplements was added to his load.

‘All right for tobacco, sir?’

‘One of those half-pound tins … and wait a minute! Some cigars. One can’t go empty-handed.’

All the way down the platform he added to his store. A sudden urge to lavishness overcame his customary frugality. Wasn’t this the time to spend, with the turkey round the corner?

‘Get me some fruit, Dutt – oh, and one of those boxes of chocolate … how about crystallized ginger? Get two, and take one home.’

He wouldn’t starve, at all events. As far as he was concerned, that train could now stick fast in a snowdrift. Struggling with the evidence of his extravagance, he got out the first-class ticket and waved it at the man on the barrier. Christmas with the upper crust – one had to make a gesture here and there.

The seat he had booked was in a compartment close to the barrier, and he was rather sorry to see that, in spite of the queue, he looked like having it to himself. In his present mood he wanted company. He wanted to keep himself immersed in the hurrying, scurrying current of home-bound people. But the train was filling up, and still he was the lone occupant. It looked as though first-class travel was getting to be a thing of the past.

‘’Fraid I’ll have to go, sir.’

‘You’d better, Dutt, and get that confounded Jag back in its garage.’

‘Well … have a good time, sir. And a merry Christmas from one and all.’

‘Same to you, Dutt, and many of them.’

He watched the burly form of the sergeant disappear through the crowd, and then sat down away from the window to make it quite clear that the compartment had vacant seats. Damn it all … there couldn’t be such a dearth of first-class custom going this way! Surely a latecomer would materialize from somewhere?

‘Say, is that train going to Norchester?’

He heard the American accent coming all the way from the barrier.

‘Hurry? You bet I’ll hurry! What have I been doing all the way from Oxford Street?’

Gently jumped up and whisked open the door.

‘Here!’ he called out. ‘There’s a seat here.’

A lanky figure, stooping low under its parcels, came bolting up the now-empty platform. Gently stood aside to give it passage. At the same moment the whistle shrilled and the Northshireman began to glide out.

‘Hell!’ ejaculated the sprawling American. ‘Who says these goddam Britishers don’t know how to get a hustle-on?’

Straight-faced, Gently gave him a hand up and helped him to organize his scattered parcels. He was a young man of about twenty-three, and although he couldn’t much have over-topped Gently’s six feet, he seemed big enough to fill up most of the compartment.

‘Hell!’ he exclaimed again. ‘Hell!’ Then he grinned at Gently suddenly. ‘Don’t you pay any attention to me, sir. Guess I’m just three parts riled with myself, that’s about it.’

‘You ran short of time?’ suggested Gently affably.

‘You can say that again – and again and again!’

‘It’s a bit of a rush up here at Christmas.’

‘A bit of a rush! Sir, you can put that down as the British Understatement of the Year.’

He brushed himself off, and, unconscious of Gently’s amused scrutiny, settled his fluffy brown hair with a comb. He had a pleasant, button-nosed face with a square jaw and chin, his eyes were hazel, and he had very white, even teeth.

‘Do you know something?’ he demanded, catching Gently’s eye over the mirror he was using.

Gently looked suitably inquisitive.

‘Well, this is the first time I’ve been in this city of yours – yes, sir, the very first time. And, man, did I underestimate it or did I?’

Gently clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘It’ll be quieter in a day or two.’

‘Lit in here, I did, like a hick from the backwoods. Sure, I was going to do my Christmas shopping. Sure, I was going to have it all sewn up in half a day. And do you know something else?’

Gently shook his head.

‘I didn’t do that Christmas shopping – I didn’t do the best half of it! One moment I was being shoved around that Selfridges like a steer in a stampede, next thing I know my train was due out in fifteen minutes. I ask you, where does time go to in this place? How do people ever get around to what they aim to do? I guess there’s only one thing left for this city, sir – you’ll have to done go and build some scrapers to get the folk up off the streets!’

Gently considered this solution seriously for a moment. ‘That’s a new idea for the planners, at all events,’ he replied.

‘You bet,’ said the American, intent on his parting. ‘It’s no good shoving the people out sideways.’

The north-east suburbs were crawling by on either hand, frosty deserts of streets and yards, dusted and parcelled with misty light. Hatched along the line came row after row of wretched slum properties, their obscene backs lit dimly from uncurtained windows. Fascinated, Gently watched the shameful pageant unfold. The imagination faltered at the sheer extent of such misery. Not a few hundred yards, not a mile, not two; it went on and on, district melting into district. Who would value honesty, trapped in that jungle?

‘Me, I’m Lieutenant William S. Earle of the United States Air Force.’

The American had got his packages on the seat and was sorting through them anxiously.

‘Me, I’m George H. Gently, Chief Inspector, CID, Central Office,’ returned Gently with a smile.

‘A chief inspector, huh?’ Earle said it as though chief inspectors meant nothing in his young life. ‘Well, I guess it takes all sorts. You going home for Christmas?’

‘No … not exactly. Someone invited me to stay.’

‘That’s nice, very nice. Me, I’ve got an invitation too. I’m having me a Christmas with a real live British lord – can you beat it? Right there on his estate out in the country, and, man, when I say estate I mean estate! He’s got a place back there would make an oil king throw fits.’

Gently made polite noises.

‘Yes, sir! Fits it would make him throw, and no two ways. But maybe you’ve heard of this guy. They call him Lord Somerhayes. Naturally, he’s got other names too, but once you get to be a lord, well, then I guess you just drop all the smaller stuff and leave it at that. You heard his name before?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I reckoned you would have, too. And maybe you’ve heard of his estate, huh?’

‘Isn’t that in Northshire somewhere?’

‘You’re darned right it is, plumb in the middle. And you know something else? We’ve got an airfield called Sculton not ten miles off, and that’s how Lieutenant William Sherwood Earle comes to be having himself a Christmas with a British lord.’

Having, as it were, established his bona fides, Earle offered Gently a cigar, and then took time off to brood over the seat-full of packages beside him. They were getting out of the slum area now. Dark gaps were appearing in the laval deposit of slate, bricks and dirt. With surprising frequency long, well-lighted platforms swung out of the darkness and flashed by before one could catch the name-boards … the Northshireman was picking up her easy, space-destroying stride. Gently settled himself back more comfortably on the generous first-class cushions. Why should he spoil the rare pleasure by tormenting himself with the imagined wretchedness of the dwellers in that petrified forest? It might be better than one envisaged … there were occasional television aerials. If people could afford television, surely they could afford to leave a district uncongenial to them? He thought of Dutt’s noisy terrace house at Tottenham. The back of that row would probably look like slum property, and certainly there wasn’t a shred of privacy. But Dutt didn’t care, nor did his neighbours, and nor, Gently recollected with some surprise, did he either, when he was there amongst it. It was all an attitude of mind. If you were brought up as a member of a semi-communal society, you would probably feel lonely and naked in a detached house in a fenced garden.

‘Say, are you married, Gently?’

Gently came out of his revery to find Earle holding up a frilly, black silk specimen of female underwear.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no. Guess I never was, Earle.’

‘Gee, that’s a pity. I thought maybe you could help me out over the size of these things.’ He inspected the exhibit with naïve admiration. ‘Cute, ain’t they? I paid nine pounds seven shillings and fourpence half-penny for these, and I guess that’s plenty. You think they will fit a sorta average kind of female?’

Gently gave the matter his attention. ‘It’s out of my province, but I imagine they probably would.’

‘Yeah, that’s what the sales girl reckoned. It’s darned difficult when you don’t know the lady well enough to ask her measurements. I been going through these things most of the afternoon – guess that must have been where it went to, at that.’

He wrapped the lingerie up carefully in its tissue, and put it away in a flowery carton bearing the name of a famous West End firm.

‘But don’t get me wrong when I call that female average, Gently. No, sir! There ain’t nothing average about the second cousin of a real live lord. You mix with the aristocracy, huh?’

‘Not habitually, Earle. I just run across them now and then.’

‘Guess you’ve seen some of those classy dames, duchesses and suchlike?’

‘An occasional duchess, perhaps.’

‘Well, a lord’s second cousin don’t rate as high as a duchess, of course, but the quality is there all right, don’t you forget it. I guess once you’re in on the blood, you’re in, and it don’t signify how many removes you come out at. Wouldn’t you say that was a fact?’

‘Guess you would, Earle, at that.’

‘And, man, this one surely is a peach – and nobody’s kidding nobody. Janice Elizabeth Augusta they call her, Feverell that was, Page that is. Married to a surgeon, she used to be, but he cashed his chips a couple of years back.’

‘And she’s living with her cousin now?’

‘She is too. Which is how Lieutenant Earle came to make her acquaintance. I guess you never did try your hand at tapestry-weaving, Gently?’

‘Tapestry-weaving?’ Gently stared at this abrupt and apparently irrelevant switch of subject.

‘Yeah, that’s what I said. Tapestry-weaving. Me, I didn’t know it was still going on till maybe a couple of months back. My old man runs a newspaper back in Carpetville, Missouri, and either I go on the paper when I come out or else I don’t. Well, if I don’t I aim to be a painter – they reckon I’ve got talent in New York, where I studied some – but now I’ve seen this tapestry-weaving slant I ain’t so sure as I was. You follow me OK?’

Gently blinked a little. ‘Could be,’ he conceded, ‘but what’s tapestry-weaving got to do with Lord Somerhayes’s second cousin?’

‘I’m coming to it. I just wanted to put you square with the set-up. Now a couple of months back there’s one of those culturals going on in camp, and this guy Brass comes along to chew the rag about tapestry. Well, that was all news to Lieutenant Earle, who used to figure tapestry packed up about the time bows and arrows went out. But no, sir, not a bit of it. Seems like they’d been turning it out steadily all the time. And this guy Brass, who’d spent a year or two in Paris, had got a workshop good and busy right there in Lord Somerhayes’s house. Well, Lieutenant Earle got mightily curious about this business. He got himself invited in to see how the stuff was cooked up. And now he’s taking lessons just as often as he can get there, and wondering whether the USA couldn’t use a tapestry workshop.’

‘And Lord Somerhayes’s second cousin?’

Earle waved his big hands.

‘They’re all knee-deep in the racket. I guess she helps with the business side. This Brass guy reckons Lord Somerhayes went off the deep end about something that happened in the House of Lords, can you imagine it? So he takes up this tapestry notion by way of giving the House of Lords the air. Sure thing he never sets foot in there these days, though I guess they get along pretty fine without him.’

Earle brooded a moment, frowning at the two inches of ash on the end of his cigar.

‘He’s a queer sort of buster, the lord. I just can’t get around to figuring him out. But Lord Chesterfield didn’t have nothing on him when it comes to class, and time you’re a lord I guess you’ve a right to act strange. Wouldn’t you say that was a fact?’

Gently grinned at the American’s puzzled countenance. ‘I think you would, Earle,’ he said, ‘I think you’d definitely say it was a fact.’

Onward thundered the Northshireman through the frost-sharp night. London was far behind them, only now and then did a cluster of lights shine out from the jet-like blackness, or a station briefly startle them with its astral flight. In the swaying compartment it was warm and drowsy. Several times Gently nodded off, to be brought back to consciousness by the sudden rasp of a bridge under which they had flashed, or the roll of the coach as it tore round a curve sharper than usual. Finally he must have dropped right off. He was wakened by a hand shaking his shoulder, and opened his eyes to see Earle standing by him, parcels piled high in the American’s arms.

‘End of the track, Gently … Guess you won’t get any further on this wagon.’

‘Norchester, is it?’

‘That’s what it says on the boards.’

Gently stretched himself, rose, and began pulling down his cases. Earle was having trouble opening the door with such an armful.

‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you, Gently. Reckon we’ll have to skip the handshake. You wouldn’t know where I pick up a train for a whistle-stop called Merely?’

Gently smiled into the distant reaches of the night.

‘It’s this one on the opposite platform. Get a move on or we’ll lose it.’

‘Hey,’ exclaimed Earle, ‘you wouldn’t be coming that way too?’

‘I would, Lieutenant. All the way to Merely.’

‘But jeez, there’s nothing there except the station-hut and the lord’s!’

‘There’s also the Manor House, Lieutenant … you must have overlooked it. I’ve got the impression that you and I are going to extend our acquaintance.’