Gently with the Innocents (3 page)

‘Let me put you in the picture. I’ve had another long chat with young Peachment. I can’t shake his story about finding the medal. I think we’ll just have to accept it.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Boyland said dubiously.

‘Naturally, I’ve done some checking on Peachment. He seems to be a fairly clean-living young man. No trouble with us. No doubtful acquaintances.’

‘Have you checked on his alibi, sir?’ Gissing asked.

‘Yes. He was back in his flat by ten p.m.’

Gissing’s eyes were blank. ‘He could have done it,’ he said. ‘It’s running it close . . . but he could have.’

Gently drank a mouthful of nut-brown.

‘Just for the moment, let’s leave him in the clear. He’s telling a straight story about his movements, about finding the medal in his uncle’s book-room. Now, if the theory’s right, someone knew about that medal, and that’s why Peachment was beaten up. What I want is a list of people who were friends or associates of the dead man.’

Boyland shook his head. ‘Won’t be easy. Peachment didn’t have any chums.’

‘People he talked to.’

‘That’s just it. He never gave time of day to anyone.’

‘He was a rum ’un, sir,’ Gissing put in. ‘After his wife died he sort of closed up. You’d see him ambling around and muttering to himself; but he’d never speak a word to you.’

‘What about tradesmen?’

‘There’s the milkman,’ Gissing said. ‘It was him who went in and found the body. But he was in bed asleep when Peachment was killed – I checked him out. His family vouch for him.’

‘Other tradesmen?’

‘Nobody delivered. He’d buy his bits and pieces out.’

‘Doctor?’

‘He was on Doctor Paley’s list, but I don’t think the Doctor ever visited him.’

‘And he didn’t have any neighbours,’ Boyland said. ‘He was the only resident in Frenze Street. It’s the livestock market down there, and Hampton’s warehouse, and some other old properties.’

Gently drank some more nut-brown. Almost, you felt, they were trying to be unhelpful! If there was a murderer going loose, they didn’t want him pinned to the comfortable, crime-free town of Cross. Whereas young Peachment . . .

‘Where’s the PM report?’

Boyland slid off the desk and fetched it for him. It listed twenty-seven separate bruises on different parts of Peachment’s body. They were indifferently distributed about arms, legs, body, face, and only two were described as severe. The fractured skull presumably came from the stairs.

‘Anything strike you about this?’

Boyland’s stare was non-committal.

‘I saw the corpse, sir,’ Gissing said. ‘There were too many bruises there for a tumble.’

‘But the bruises themselves?’

‘Well . . . all over him, sir. Only light bruises, most of them.’

‘If a man were being beaten to extract information would you expect bruising like that?’

Gissing’s eyes went blank. Then he slowly shook his head.

‘You’d expect them more . . . localized, sir,’ he said. ‘And more severe?’

‘Yes, sir. More severe. I don’t think he was duffed up to make him talk.’

‘Then why was he beaten?’

Gissing’s head kept shaking. ‘It struck me as queer at the time, sir. Maybe revenge . . . something like that. All I know is they weren’t an accident.’

‘Maybe a nutter,’ Boyland said.

‘You have any nutters?’ Gently asked.

Boyland shrugged his plump shoulders. Clearly he wasn’t going to admit that!

About the legend of the gold hoard they were derisive. It was going around when Boyland was a kid. Wasn’t there always a tale of that sort about old houses like Harrisons? A queer old house, a queer old man – to the kids, he’d never be less than a miser. Gissing, who’d poked about the place pretty thoroughly, discounted the notion of a secret hiding-place.

‘You went through the book-room when you were there?’

‘Yes, sir. At least, there’s a room with books in it.’

‘Young Peachment says the medal was in a drawer in the book-room.’

‘Well, sir . . . actually, I was looking for a blunt instrument.’

‘What about the drawer?’

There were a couple of drawers. Gissing had glanced in and seen old papers. He had rustled them with his hand, found nothing sinister, closed the drawers and passed on.

‘So the medal might have been there?’

Yes, it might have been, folded away in its manila envelope. Which envelope Gently had sent down to the lab and had received a report on that left him no wiser.

He told them about the medal. He’d taken it back to Seaby’s, who of course remembered young Peachment bringing it in. As soon as Peachment had gone they’d done their own checking – none of the known Innocent III medals was missing. Two were in museums, in London and New York; the third belonged to a Greek millionaire. Gently had nailed them down to a valuation of fourteen hundred, though in an auction it might go higher.

‘And this is it.’

He laid the medal on the desk. They gazed at its heavy disc in silence.

That was what had been under the old bills, and what Gissing had nearly put his hand on . . .

‘Any coin-collectors in the town?’

He knew that would be a forlorn hope.

‘There’s Bressingham . . . he keeps an antique shop. But he wouldn’t stock anything like this.’

‘I’ll talk to him. He might know something.’

‘This knocks me all of a heap,’ Boyland said. ‘If old Peachment had one of these, why not a dozen, or a score?’

‘The hoard of gold, sir,’ Gissing said.

‘Meanwhile,’ Gently said, ‘this one. If there’s nothing else you can think of to tell me, I’d like to go along and look at the house.’

They watched with the same, childlike silence as he wrapped up the medal again in its tissue.

‘If there’s room in your safe . . .’

‘Of course.’

Boyland hastened to unlock the old, double-doored Chubb, which stood in a corner.

‘You’d like a receipt?’

‘I’ll trust you this time.’

Boyland took the medal into his two hands, handling it as though he thought it might burn him.

A clock struck somewhere in the gloom as Gently and Gissing came out of the police station. It was noon, but it might have been any hour of what passed for daylight at the end of November.

They snuggled gratefully into Gently’s Sceptre, still a little warm from the drive down. Gissing had donned a hefty tweed greatcoat of a style that Gently hadn’t seen for years.

‘Have you had any snow here?’

‘Two nights ago. We’ll be getting some more soon.’

‘What sort of weather was it when Peachment was killed?’

Gissing thought a moment, then said, ‘A mild spell.’

He directed Gently back down Water Street and then left past a car park. A further left turn brought them into a narrow street with a sale-ground and cattle-pens along one side. Opposite was a terrace of old straw-thatched cottages, their thatch moulting, windows boarded; beyond, and set back, steep pantiled gables, and finally a dreary red-brick depository warehouse.

‘Frenze Street . . . it’s pretty old.’

Gently grunted, let the Sceptre coast.

‘Before they built the market there were a lot of old houses . . . looked like something out of Dickens.’

‘A cul-de-sac?’

‘Yes. There’s a footway through to Thingoe Road.’

‘Cars park here at night?’

‘Never seen many. The park we went past is free.’

Even now Frenze Street had atmosphere, with the best part of its glories gone. It was slightly dog-legged, a little sloped. Its buildings seemed watchful in the misty twilight. Pretty old . . . A spirit of age had taken root in the place.

‘Here’s Harrisons.’

It was the house of the pantiled gables, at the very end of the street and butting on to the warehouse yard. A [-shaped Elizabethan house, with the two gable-fronts of unequal size. The wings were apparently of three storeys and the central portion of two. There were a number of irregular small windows. The front had been rendered with a drab plaster. It stood withdrawn from the street behind rusting palings and a tangle of dead willow-herb, nettles and rank grass.

‘Goes back a bit, wouldn’t you say?’

Above the steep roofs were tall, twisted brick chimneys. One of them had been rebuilt at some stage. The other was an original Tudor chimney.

‘Why is it called Harrisons?’

Gissing shrugged. ‘Name of the bloke who built it, I reckon.’

‘It’s not on record?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Perhaps the Town Clerk knows something about it.’

‘Yet a place like this . . .’

It stood out sharply: once, this had been an important house. The house of a mayor, or a lord of the manor – perhaps the most important house in Cross. Surely all record of it hadn’t vanished except for the name of one forgotten owner?

‘Perhaps you’ll get on to the Town Clerk for me.’

‘Yes, sir. Though I’m pretty sure there’s nothing known about it.’

‘Who’ll have the deeds?’

Gissing thought. ‘I believe Howard and Patch are the lawyers.’

He ignored the beleaguered front of the house and led Gently into the warehouse yard. The house apparently shared the yard because it was separated by no fence. A side-door opened directly into it, then came an outwork with grass-choked gutters, then an open-sided shed almost full of junk, and finally a high garden wall.

‘That’s the footway to Thingoe Road.’

A dim passage led away past the wall of the warehouse. Half a dozen kids who’d been chasing in the passage now clustered at the entry, watching the two policemen.

‘A right of way?’

‘Yes. That fellow’s Colkett.’

A hard-framed man wearing a baize apron stood at the warehouse door, also watching.

‘Did he see anything?’

‘No. He packs up there at half-past five.’

‘Did you talk to the kids?’

‘One or two of them. But by then they’d all gone home.’

And that was that. By eight p.m. there would be nobody left in Frenze Street – perhaps not even a parked car farther down, at the town end. Just the old man living alone in his old, decaying house. With a door which, according to his nephew, didn’t even possess a bolt.

And in one of his drawers, a fabulous medal. Why hadn’t the murderer made a search?

‘That door – the one that didn’t lock – has it been secured since?’

‘Yes, sir. We put a padlock on it.’

‘Which is it?’

‘This way, sir.’

Gissing led him into the open-sided shed, skirting several piles of rubbish. It was dank inside, and ferns grew on the house wall where rain dripped on it from the shed roof. Gissing struck a match. It revealed a cottage-type door with a simple latch-handle, but now fitted with a sturdy padlock which looked some centuries out of place.

Gissing unlocked it and pushed open the door. They went into a sort of hall or passage. At one end was a rusty gas-cooker and another door, which simply pushed open.

‘The kitchen . . . I’d say he mostly lived in here.’

‘What did he do about lights?’

‘This . . . I reckon.’

Gissing pointed to a hurricane-lamp that stood on a concrete draining-slab near the door.

‘Well – light it.’

The lamp made a squealing as Gissing hooked up the globe. A moment later its yellow light dimly showed them the low-ceilinged room.

A table, two deal chairs, a grandfather chair by the old hobbed hearth. On the worn brick floor a strip of coconut matting. A brown-painted dresser with some bits of crockery. In one corner a door stood ajar to reveal twisty, naked backstairs. A third door led to an adjacent room. A fourth into a passage.

‘Not much comfort in here.’

Only where the grandfather chair stood. The rest would be a wilderness of draughts, torturing the rheumatism in old bones.

‘I reckon you’d need to be cracked, sir.’

Alone, with the winter nights passing. By a small fire with a dim light. The other one gone. Alone.

‘Had he any money?’

‘A few hundred quid, sir. All invested with a housing society.’

‘And the medal.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know its value.’

Or perhaps he didn’t care. There was nothing left to buy.

‘Let’s see where you found him.’

Gissing took him down the passage, past a back hall with a fourth outer door, then to a front hall which ran the depth of the house and had two sets of stairs leading from it.

‘Right there, sir. Where you’re standing.’

They were at the foot of the inner stairs. A short set, they rose to a landing closed by a dark, panelled door.

‘He was lying with his legs still up the stairs and his head twisted under a bit. Brinded, that’s the milkman, came in for his money, looked up the passage and saw him there.’

‘Did he move him?’

‘Says he didn’t. Not much doubt the old boy was dead.’

‘Did you notice the expression on Peachment’s face?’

‘Yes, sir. Eyes open. Scared.’

And on the grimy floorboards, the bare stairs, no intelligible marks or footprints: not even much blood. A little had leaked from a broken bruise on the old man’s cheek.

‘Presumably he was attacked up the stairs?’

‘Well, he did fall down them, sir.’

Though this was inference again. The appearance of a fall might have been faked.

‘What’s up there?’

‘Just an empty room.’

‘What was his purpose in an empty room?’

Gissing shook his head. ‘That’s a mystery, sir. Unless he went up there to hide.’

They went up the stairs. All they led to was an L-shaped room with a small window. It was not much larger than a big cupboard and was fitted with wide shelves in the toe of the L. They were made of thin, scrubbed, knotless boards, and suggested an old country-house pantry. A small deal table and a kitchen chair occupied a position by the window.

Gently pointed to the latter. ‘These were here?’

‘Yes, sir. Just where they are now.’

‘You examined the shelves?’

‘Yes, sir. No signs that anything had been removed.’

A strange room! How had it come to be worth a separate flight of stairs? And why the chair and the table. What had old Peachment done up here?

If he’d been a writer, now . . .