Gently in the Past

Book 0: George Gently

by Alan Hunter

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

In a lonely thicket of gorse near the Suffolk coast, a man lies dead on a summers afternoon: Frederick Quennell, amateur yachtsman and head of a successful local firm of printers. Later examining the site, Chief Superintendent Gently (newly married to Gabrielle Orbec, and reluctantly in charge of the investigation) wonders who wanted Quennell dead. There is no shortage of suspects, as the Suffolk police point out. Quennell's neglected wife is deeply in love with an artist - a man moreover, who's been suspected of murder once before. What about Raymond Tallis, who headed the printing firm until Quennell took his place? Tallis's own family affairs are complex: his brother Arthur drowned in a yachting accident, with Tallis and Quennell both on board at the time, and Tallis then married his brother's widow . . . In the tranquil Suffolk countryside, scented with heather and sea-breezes, Gently sets to work to disentangle the emotional bonds - the jealousy, love, hatred, and remorse - that enmesh the dead man's family and friends. And he starts by contemplating not just one previous death, but two . . .

Release date: June 30, 2016

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 256

Sample

GENTLY AWOKE WITH a start to find sun outlining the curtains of the big bedroom and to hear, outside in Lime Walk, the cheery clatter of milk delivery. For some moments he lay quite still; then he reached out and felt beside him. But all his hand met was cold sheets and, turning, he saw the undinted pillow.

It was a huge room, much too large, and just then almost devoid of furniture: you got the impression of camping out or of a temporary billet in wartime. Across the hall was another huge room containing only two fireside chairs. Then, at the back, there was an empty kitchen and a bathroom with a single towel.

Outside the milk-trolley whirred and passed on, while someone was trying to start a car. One heard distant traffic; shadows of leaves stirred on the sun-flooded curtains. And he was alone there, quite alone, hugging a corner of this anonymous nowhere, in a part of London he scarcely knew: a flat that smelt vaguely of furniture warehouses.

Grunting, he felt on the floor for his pipe: as yet they hadn’t got round to buying bedside tables! All the same they’d been lucky to get that flat, the lease of which had been handed on by a retiring colleague. Lucky to get it: but could he ever settle there, in those rooms the size of station booking-halls? Alone, he felt like a bit of left luggage, some human flotsam that had lost its label.

He grunted again, shoved his feet into cold shoes and hiked across the hall for his paper. Three days they had been in the flat, returning to it straight from the honeymoon. Perhaps at first the glamour had spilled over to the flat, which he’d seen only in terms of its convenience – between Kensington Church Street and Holland Park, ideal both for him and for Gabrielle. For him five stations on the Circle Line, for her easy access to Heathrow. The emptiness, the vast rooms and warehouse-smell ... why hadn’t he noticed them till now?

Grumpily he shuffled into the kitchen and filled the kettle for his pot of tea. In the sink lay the dirty coffee things of the previous evening, coffee he had drunk while waiting for her call. The parting had been traumatic: so soon afterwards! In the departure lounge they had both been brave. Then, when her flight was called, her smile had scarcely lasted till she’d turned to leave, running ...

Yet they had known this would be routine, that business would regularly call her back to France. Perhaps ... after this first time? Even last night, the flat had remained steeped in her presence.

He placed a bowl of wheatflakes on the teatray and shambled back with it to the bedroom, where in fact a windowseat was the only place to set it down. The sun, when he pulled the tall curtains, burst into the room almost indecently; across the road, a woman getting in her milk paused to stare at his pyjama-clad figure.

What was he doing here? Up in Finchley Mrs Jarvis, his housekeeper, would also be stirring; would by now, had he returned there, be knocking on his door with a breakfast-tray. And then the familiar routine would follow, as it had done for so many years, in his own house, among his own things, with neighbours who smiled when they caught his eye! Had it all ended, and so completely? He had taken Gabrielle to Finchley, she avid with curiosity to see the home of the man who had swept her into church ... And suddenly, for him too, it had become a strange place, stamped with another man’s personality. How could it have happened? Even Mrs Jarvis had treated him with reserve, almost with resentment.

‘My friend,’ Gabrielle had said when they left, ‘that woman is wondering if there is still a place for her in your household.’

And it was so. With shock he had realized that he could never return to live in Elphinstone Road. The man who had lived there was no longer himself: himself had been pitchforked into the street. Then live where? In this drum of a flat? But that was a convenience, not a home! They had discussed it but come to no decision except that both wanted a home outside London ...

He ate his wheatflakes sombrely, sitting there in the window-seat, staring now and then at the paper, which he’d propped against the sill. This was a low spot, that was all: Monday morning and Gabrielle gone. No need to panic ... Soon she would be back, and they’d go out to buy furniture for those empty rooms.

He bathed, shaved, dressed and went to the mews to collect his car. The sunny morning, which made the streets quite gay, did nothing to improve his grouchy mood. All the weekend had been rainy: today they chose to restart summer! Typists, office workers hurrying to work were wearing light clothes, as though off to a beach.

It was no better at the Yard, where file-carrying colleagues came up to slap him on the shoulder, or to tell him about the collection which his whirlwind wedding had made retrospective. In his office, bleak with inoccupancy, he found cards and a giant bouquet. The latter, composed of chrysanthemums, made the place smell like a funeral parlour.

‘How did it go, Chief?’

That was Dutt, who had been hovering at the communicating door. Behind him was Blondie, the AC’s nubile secretary, who no doubt had been responsible for the flowers. Everyone smiling ...

Did they take him for the same man who had walked out of that office just three weeks before?

‘Sir, the AC would like to see you right away,’ Blondie said. ‘I think it’s about something that came in from Suffolk.’

That put the tin hat on it. If he were out in the country, Gabrielle would be ringing an empty flat.

‘So what’s happened in Suffolk?’

‘It’s a stabbing case, sir, the managing director of a firm of printers. Only they think his wife was involved, also a boy friend called Reymerston.’

‘Reymerston ...!’

His stare must have been forbidding, because Blondie’s azure gaze faltered.

‘Where did it happen?’

‘Near Wolmering, sir. But I forget the name of the village.’

‘Reymerston,’ Dutt repeated thoughtfully. ‘Chief, wasn’t that the chummie who confessed to the Selly job?’

In the Assistant Commissioner (Crime)’s office sun was laying bars on the bouncy carpet, and the AC was engaged in the devotional coffee-making which, with him, had replaced an addiction to cigarettes. Beside a percolator beginning to bubble stood two tiny, fragile cups, a screw-lid silver canister and a small silver bowl of Demerara sugar. Cream there was not: the AC regarded cream as a taste for peasants.

‘Ah ... our matrimonial casualty. Take a pew while I pour, Gently.’

Gently sat. Pushed aside on the desk were a couple of files, both open.

‘How was France?’

Gently merely shrugged. Did one answer such questions? ‘We came back on Wednesday.’

‘Ah yes, Wednesday. Gave yourself time to settle in.’

As though it came at ten guineas a bottle the AC was decanting his jet-black brew. As time passed it had got stronger and stronger till you could smell it being distilled when you stepped from the lift.

‘Here.’

Gently took his cup, but contented himself with inhaling. With thin, pursed lips the AC sipped an experimental mouthful.

‘Now. It’s providential your coming back on the strength this morning, Gently. Something has come in right up your alley – in fact, you’ve been specially asked for.’ He pulled up a file and settled his glasses. ‘No doubt you’ll remember Andrew Reymerston?’

‘I remember him.’

‘Ye-es,’ the AC said. ‘Not one of your most scintillating cases, was he? According to your report he confessed to killing the Selly woman, not to mention a large-scale embezzlement. Yet the case is still on the file.’

‘It was an unsupported confession.’

‘But you believed him?’

‘He made the confession to me in private. He refused to repeat it before witnesses and there wasn’t a scrap of evidence to connect him.’

‘But you believed him – yes or no?’

Unwillingly Gently nodded. ‘We had an open-and-shut case against another man but had to drop it after Reymerston’s confession. It showed sufficient cognizance of the crime to make it unsafe to proceed.’

He took a sip of the AC’s corrosive brew. Here was a fine business to come back to! Reymerston: an ache lying in his past, a man he had always tried to forget. They’d had another man – a Major Rede – in a double bind because his niece had been deeply implicated: had only to break him, and he was tottering. And then Reymerston had thrown his spanner.

Yes, a failure ... and a bitter one. The more so because he had damaged an innocent man.

‘A pity,’ the AC was saying. ‘But not to worry, you’re getting a second bite at the cherry. There’s been another job near Wolmering and Reymerston is the man the locals fancy.’ He pulled over the other file. ‘Perhaps you’ve heard of the Tallis Press?’

‘The which ...?’

‘Please pay attention, Gently! Getting married doesn’t seem to have sharpened your wits.’ The AC stared waspishly for an instant before returning to his file. ‘They’re a firm of printers and book manufacturers with works at Stansgate, twelve miles from Wolmering, and the managing director, Frederick Quennell, lived at Walderness, across the river from Wolmering. You know of it?’

‘I’ve seen it.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll know there’s a yacht club there. On Saturday Quennell seems to have rung the yacht club to say he’d be missing the first race. He didn’t turn up for the second either, and yesterday morning they found the body. It was on a heath outside the village. He had been stabbed in the back.’

Gently said nothing. The AC sipped and turned a sheet in the file.

‘Ah yes – here we have it. They found a letter on the body. An anonymous letter in a feminine hand, making a rendezvous at the place where they found him. The locals went through his papers looking for a match for the handwriting, then they showed it to the family, and that put the cat among the pigeons. It was his wife’s writing. She denied it and swore the letter was a forgery. The son shut up tight and the daughter had some sort of fit. The wife then volunteered an alibi of visiting a friend, only she forgot to warn the friend, who was in London at the time. Promising, eh?’

Gently hunched. ‘Weren’t there dabs on the letter?’

The AC frowned, skimming a sheet. ‘Nothing down here, but I dare say the paper was soggy because of Saturday night’s rain. Anyway, the locals snouted around some more and came up with a fistful of gossip. Frederick Quennell was estranged from his wife and had a long-running affair with a secretary. Meanwhile his wife was a model of rectitude – or that’s what everybody thought; only she wasn’t. When her alibi was bust she had to come out with a better story.’

‘Reymerston?’

‘Exactly. She spent the afternoon with him in a friend’s cottage. And the cottage is only a mile away from the spot where Quennell’s body was found. He’s a painter, is he?’

Gently nodded.

‘Said he was painting a great way off. But then La Quennell must have got in touch with him, because he changed his story to square with hers.’

‘Any confirmation?’

‘None mentioned . . . Of course, the locals turned him over. They took a steel letter-opener from his house that might have been the weapon, but apparently wasn’t. What the lab specifies is something similar, but of circular section . . . poetical references to poniards and stilettos. Quennell was killed by a single blow.’ The AC sat back. ‘So that’s it. The locals have come to a stand. The wife continues to swear that the letter is a forgery, she and Reymerston back each other’s alibis, the son’s alibi is provable and the daughter’s memory refuses to return. A nice one, as they say. With the locals understandably backing Reymerston.’

Gently ventured another sip. ‘They think it may have been a deliberate plot?’

The AC stared sapiently. ‘Either way would fit the bill, I imagine. Quennell could have happened on the letter by chance, or had it shoved under his nose. Is Reymerston a devious type?’

‘He’s certainly clever.’

‘Getting away with it last time may have made him cheeky.’

‘At the same time, it wasn’t very clever to leave the letter on the corpse.’

The AC removed and dandled his glasses. ‘Well – that’s for you to sort out, Gently. And this time there is some evidence, so I’m anticipating a result.’ He closed the file and pushed it across. ‘You know the local man, Inspector Eyke. Give him a ring before you leave – and remember to give my love to Suffolk.’

Back in his office, someone, Blondie, had found a jug for the flowers, while on the desk lay an absurd caricature depicting himself, pipe, in mouth, a chain dragging from his ankle. Recognizably the work of Pagram, it was captioned: ‘Benedick, the Married Man’.

He rang Eyke, who wasn’t in, thought of ringing Rouen, but didn’t. By now Gabrielle would be out at the china factory, choosing new stock from their showrooms ...

And meanwhile, at Lime Walk, was a desolate flat, and up in Finchley an alien house. And now Reymerston: again. He picked up his away-bag and went down to the car.

Sun followed him up the A12. When he drove into Wolmering the small town was drowsing in midday heat, its narrow main street thronged with visitors in spite of its being early September. Coming along, he had stopped in a lay-by to remove his jacket and roll up his sleeves; yet the heat was not oppressive, just the kindly warmth of late summer. He had passed by fields of burning stubble, the smoke lazy in still air, and once a purple rash of heather; then there’d been verges yellow with ragwort.

At the police-station Eyke must have been watching out for him, since he appeared at once when Gently parked. He shook hands shyly; five years had altered little in his anxious, wry-nosed face.

Unlike Gently he was neatly dressed and even sported a discreet tie. He hesitated awkwardly before plucking up courage to say: ‘I’m told you’re just back from your honeymoon, sir ...’

Gently grunted and followed him into his office. Nothing had changed much there, either. Looking round, Gently recognized the very chair where the Major had sat when they were demolishing him ... five years since: while, in hospital, his niece was having aspirin pumped from her stomach.

And Reymerston, had he gone on living here, knowing that the police knew what they knew ...?

He growled: ‘What happened to the Major?’

Deferentially, Eyke had ushered him to the chair at the desk: he himself had taken a chair in front of it, where he sat embarrassedly, like a visitor.

‘Cleared out, sir. He went down south ... Budleigh Salterton, I think it was. He went to stay in Felixstowe for a time, till they found a buyer for the house.’

‘And the niece?’

‘Went back to Jamaica. Her father was vice-consul there.’

‘And Selly?’

‘Don’t know about him, sir.’ After a pause, Eyke added: ‘He was at the funeral.’

Yes, that checked: for all his brash callousness, Selly’d had some feeling for his abandoned wife. Not very. . .