‘Hmm… letters were cut from The Times, I should think.’
‘You take The Times, do you?’
‘Of course — though I don’t read it.’
‘What about the paper?’
‘It’s a flashy Eytie stuff — no good for anything except to hang in the toilet.’
‘Where can you get it from?’
‘Nowhere, in perfidious Albion. But it’s common enough abroad, especially in Italy, where they make it.’
‘Have you seen any of the Palette Group with it?’
‘No… but they might have seen me. I bought some sheets in Verona, just to give the stuff a trial.’
Gently was suddenly aware that Mallows was eyeing him whimsically, his two demonic eyebrows lifted rather like horns.
‘Go on, you old bloodhound — now ask me if I did this letter!’
‘I was going to ask you something else. To whom did you give a sheet of that paper?’
‘Hah!’ Mallows made a ludicrous weaving motion with his shoulders. ‘You’re pretty certain, aren’t you, that I know who did it? Well, I’ve drawn you his portrait to the best of my ability — and now I can look you in the eye and tell you I gave that paper to nobody!’
‘Not even to Mrs Johnson?’
‘No — and I know what you’re getting at. She erupted her “Dark Destroyer” on to a piece: I noticed it when we were doing the selection.’
‘And you didn’t give it to her?’
‘No, Positively not. Nor to anybody else — so there’s your answer to the Clue of the Paper.’
Gently took back the paper and tucked it away with the ghost of a shrug. Was Mallows being the slightest bit overemphatic? It wasn’t easy to read his lively countenance; it was full of expression, but of expression under command. One suspected that very little slipped past it unawares.
‘Now I’ll do a little guessing. There’s a connection here, isn’t there? You found something here that put you on the trail of the letter. Otherwise you might have missed it, he might have kept it to himself. If I read that letter aright, he assisted — Johnson, was it? — to escape.’
‘It didn’t necessarily refer to Johnson.’
‘My dear fellow! Who else is there? He assisted Johnson to elude your clutches — you were shadowing him I suppose? And there’s this X, he didn’t like it, and it brought on another outburst. He left something here that was threatening to Farrer, and sent him that letter to make it plain…’
Gently felt himself grow cold. He had said not a word about Farrer! Deliberately, he had kept the name of the bank manager out of it. He stared unbelievingly at Mallows, and Mallows at him: they were both instantly conscious of that revealing blunder. Then slowly, rather sadly, Mallows began to shake his head.
‘I talk too much — don’t I? It’s always been my downfall… But you’d be a fool to attach too much importance to it, you know. To tell you the truth, Farrer rang me this morning — he was worried about Johnson and wanted to confess it. So it wasn’t too difficult to deduce that it was he who received the letter.’
A perfectly logical explanation — but the damage had been done. The playful intimacy that existed between them seemed to have felt the touch of a frost. Mallows stood biting at his lip and gazing down at one of the pictures. Gently, hands stuffed in his pockets, wore the most wooden of his expressions.
‘There are a few routine questions I have to put to you… and naturally, we’re making a thorough investigation.’
‘I understand that. Damn it, you’ve got to be thorough. I don’t suppose you like it any better than we do…’
But he went through the rest of it as quickly as he could, and Mallows confined himself to giving straight answers. He had spent the evening in his garden, and then gone to bed to read; like Gently, he had had his breakfast in bed that morning.
Gently watched him drive away, and then went straight to a phone box. In the directory he found the number of the bank house.
‘Superintendent Gently… did you ring Mallows this morning?’
Farrer began with a little hedging, trying to find what the query was about.
‘I can check with the exchange. I merely thought you’d save me the trouble.’
‘I see… yes… no, I haven’t rung him today.’
Gently clamped the receiver down hard on its rest. He remained there, leaning on it, for several minutes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He abandoned his plan of lunch at his hotel and returned instead to have it in the canteen. Hansom, who was a bachelor, made a habit of lunching there, and had a small, sacred table and even aspired to a private napkin. With this tucked under his chin he had a somewhat ogreish appearance.
‘Your playmate rang in — two of the Butters’s went to church, the mother and the eldest daughter, in the eldest daughter’s car. Then the old man came out and had a mooch around the lawn. He’d been sinking it, apparently, wasn’t too steady on his pins.’
‘Did nobody else visit the house?’
‘No… half a mo’, the paperman.’
Gently grunted into his soup, imagining the Sunday scene at Lordham. Stephens had taken with him a folding stool of the type familiar to fishermen. His car being concealed, he would have crept to some hedge or shrubbery, and there, with his glasses, have zealously watched the house and grounds. Then, stealing some hasty minutes, he would send his report back on the car’s radio, all the time in a frantic rush in case he were missing the vital moment. To be amused by that sort of thing one needed to be as young as Stephens…
‘You tipped him off about the Minx?’
‘I did — too true! And I gave him the dope about the slashings and the letter.’
This would redouble Stephens’s eagerness; now, he would be chafing to capture Johnson. Remembering the Luger, Gently experienced a moment’s uneasiness.
‘Remind him when he calls in again, will you…? If Johnson turns up he’s to report and stay with him.’
So far the ‘arduous routine’ had brought in little of interest, though the fact that it was Sunday was in some degree responsible. The various Palette Group members, heartlessly indifferent to police requirements, had proceeded to disperse on their lawful weekend occasions. Up till lunchtime only three had been questioned — Aymas, Baxter and Seymour — and of these only Aymas had a really firm alibi; with another man, he’d been up tending a sick pedigree cow. Seymour, the shy smiler, was the most pregnable of the three. Stammering and blushing, he had admitted to being out till three with ‘a woman’. He had got himself drunk and didn’t remember where she had taken him — and so another bit of ‘arduous routine’ was in process.
‘Did you get anything interesting out of Mallows this morning?’
Gently hedged. ‘It’s always worthwhile talking to Mallows. He recognized those capitals as being cut from The Times… and he’s got some of the paper. He recognized it directly.’
‘Did he now!’ Hansom grounded his irons for a moment. ‘Now that is interesting — very interesting indeed.’
‘Naturally, I asked him if he had given any away.’
‘And naturally he hadn’t.’
Gently shrugged, and ate assiduously.
Why was he wanting to defend the shrewd-eyed artist? Because that, when you boiled it down, was what he was instinctively seeking to do. Right then he was holding back and trying to dampen Hansom’s curiosity — throwing him titbits, as it were, to head him off from the main fact. But yet, while his hand had still lingered on the telephone, he had begun to comprehend, to see the way things had worked…
‘Suppose he didn’t give it away, then — suppose he sent that letter himself?’
‘In that case, how did Mrs Johnson get the rest of the sheet?’
‘He was lying, of course! He did give it to her.’
‘Then he might equally well have given her the lot.’
‘Yeah!’ It was logical, but Hansom wasn’t quite satisfied. His familiarity with Gently had perhaps taught him something. He sawed a long slice from his piece of steak, but sat looking at it for a while before raising it to his mouth. Then he chewed absent-mindedly, his fork still hovering.