‘Just a moment… let me have that phone!’
An Inspector Horrocks took the call at Chelmsford.
‘In connection with Johnson… he’s an ex-RAF pilot. Haven’t you got a charter-flight firm operating near the town?’
They had, as he remembered, and Horrocks hastened to put him through to it; the connection all the same took an unconscionable time to get. Hansom, stricken by sudden visions of his prey escaping for good, sat cracking his knuckles in a ferment of impatience. At last:
‘Wayland Charter Flights. Can we be of service?’
Gently carefully explained what he wanted to know.
‘Oh, yes. That’s the fellow who chartered our Proctor, X X-ray. He’s got it for a week, doing cross-country flips…’
Five minutes later they knew all there was to know, which was that Johnson was probably clear of the country. He had taken off with full tanks at nine a.m. that morning, and in the still air conditions prevailing, must long since have touched down in France.
‘He drove in here yesterday at half past two and asked if we had any light planes for charter. The Proctor had just come in and he took it up for a flip… he’s a beautiful peelo, his three-point was a natural…
‘He might have taken it away then — it had just had a one-twenty-hour inspection, but he preferred to wait and make his start this morning. We had it waiting on the tarmac and at ten to nine he took off for Lympne… yes, he paid for the charter in advance… he had a suitcase, and arrived in a taxi.’
A further call, to Lympne Airport, provided the necessary clincher. No Proctor from Wayland Charter Flights had been received that day. The only mystery that remained concerned Johnson’s curious lack of urgency — why, in effect, had he delayed, when he might have made his trip straight away?
‘He hired a car and doubled back to do this slashing lark!’ — Hansom bit the end off a cheroot, spitting the pieces into an ashtray. ‘It’s clear enough why he did it — he wants to sell us on a crazy killer. So then we go and chase our tails instead of chasing chummie Johnson.’
It was a theory that fitted and left no visible gaps. Johnson, possessed of means and motive, could easily arrange the opportunity. After he had chartered the plane, no doubt, he had bought a Times and concocted the letter. Then, having sold the too-risky Minx, he had hired a car and returned to the city… It was all of a piece, including the knowledge shown in the letter. There only remained that perpetual query — was Johnson really so fiendishly clever?
‘Where do you suppose he got the other knife?’
‘What was to stop him from buying one in Chelmsford?’
Gently shrugged. ‘They’re an obsolete pattern, so he couldn’t have chanced buying one down there. It was the nub of the plot, that other knife, and he must have had it before he did the letter. Thus he must have had it before he skipped, or why did he take the piece of paper with him?’
‘He’s a bright lad, you can’t get away from it.’
‘He’s a genius — or somebody is.’
The tracing of the knife was already in hand but was being frustrated, like other inquiry, by the fact that it was Sunday. The owner of the shop which carried a stock of the knives had been reported as having taken his family on a picnic.
Gently rang through to the Yard, and by luck caught Pagram. ‘I want a watch at all airports, just in case he lands somewhere. And his description to Interpol, with details of the flight…
‘And by the way — congratulations on getting Peachfield tied up.’
Hansom smoked three cheroots in rapid succession, his expression becoming more embittered the more he brooded over Johnson’s escape. He glared tigerishly through the smoke at the now brilliant afternoon, and snapped at the constable who brought them up a tray of coffee. He was, Gently could feel, blaming the Yard man for all this — wouldn’t a policeman with correct principles have arrested Johnson on Friday night? There was the clearest of cases against him, a case to rejoice the public prosecutor, and the passage of time had only strengthened it further…
‘Aren’t you going to tell your playmate that he’s wasting his time?’
Gently grinned distantly at his disgruntled colleague. On the face of it, perhaps… but the face of it was deceptive! It had been so on Friday night, and it was no less so on Sunday. And it was on Mallows, not Johnson, that Gently’s mind ceaselessly dwelt, remembering, checking and persistently setting in balance. The time was surely coming when they must try their strengths together, and as an experienced antagonist, he was weighing up his opponent. In the academician he could recognize a champion among mental fencers.
‘This time you’re going to charge him, I suppose?’
From the depths of his gloom Hansom dredged the sarcasm.
‘I want to talk to him — badly. He’s got the answer to a vital question.’
‘You talked to him before — and now he’s in France!’
What was the use of taking offence? One was obliged to sympathize with Hansom. At his best he was a jealous and surly kind of man. Twice before, once unofficially, Gently had taken a case away from him, and now, without rhyme or reason, he had let Hansom’s ‘chummie’ slide through his fingers…
‘Don’t take it to heart… we’ll get him in the end.’ To Stephens he had used almost the selfsame words.
‘I can see us doing that now he’s got across the Channel! Don’t forget he isn’t a rabbit — he’s the original cobber from Colditz.’
‘All the same, he’ll be up against it. He doesn’t have professional contacts.’
They were interrupted by the inexorable phone, bringing, this time, a report on Lavery. It was negative; but before Hansom could vent his disgust the instrument clicked and began buzzing again. Gently saw a change come over Hansom’s face. From antagonism it slid into blank perplexity. After a number of surprised-sounding monosyllables he concluded:
‘Yeah — we’ll have them sent straight away up!’
A minute later, during which time Hansom had said nothing, a detective constable entered carrying an official envelope. He had the complacent expression which Dutt sometimes wore, the expression of a man who had pulled off something good.
‘Shake them out on the desk.’ Hansom sounded suspicious, and his eye all the while rested pointedly on Gently. The man opened the envelope and slid the contents out cautiously: they comprised one mutilated Times — and a third steel paper knife!
‘Tell the Superintendent where you found them!’
Now there could be no doubting it. Hansom’s tone, like his look, was eloquent of what he was thinking.
‘At Mr Mallows’s, sir — and we very nearly missed them. They were hidden under the matting outside his front porch.’
If Hansom was unconvinced that Gently hadn’t foreseen this find there were adequate reasons for it in the latter’s sparse reactions. Though Gently, on occasion, had been known to show emotion, the present did not seem to be one of those times.
‘Get your print man on to them.’ His steady blankness was impervious — after a moment’s inspection of the exhibits, he seemed to have exhausted his interest. Still poker-faced, he knocked out his pipe and refilled it, and then quietly sat down at the side of the desk. Hansom, looking uncertain, waved a hand to the detective constable, then he too resumed his seat at the desk.
‘Well… that certainly gives the thing a different look!’
‘Hmm.’ Gently’s grunt was an archetype of neutrality.
‘If I’d guessed about that’ — Hansom stared hard across the desk — ‘I wouldn’t have been too worried about Johnson, either…’
The cue was plainly Gently’s, but just as plainly, he wasn’t taking it, and instead his eyes had lapsed into that distant, absent expression. Those like Dutt who knew him well could have suggested what this meant, but to Hansom it merely suggested that Gently wasn’t quite with him.
‘Let’s see where it gets us.’ Hansom grew tired of waiting. If Gently wouldn’t play, he was going to press on without him. ‘Mallows was stuck on Mrs Johnson, and he was the last person to see her alive. Her picture was painted on a special paper and Mallows has got some of that special paper. The letter was also on that paper, and it referred to another knife: and the knife, plus a mutilated Times, is found concealed at Mallows’s house.