‘No… no… you don’t understand…’
‘You knew quite positively that Johnson was innocent?’
‘No… I didn’t… didn’t know… not positively…’
‘Was Seymour the person you meant?’
‘No…’
‘Aymas…?’
‘Didn’t fit… couldn’t fit…’
‘Wimbush, perhaps… perhaps Baxter?’
‘Not Baxter…’
‘Wimbush?’
‘Him neither…’
‘What about Watts?’
‘That too… ridiculous…’
‘Yet you knew about the letter.’
‘Yes, I knew… of course I knew…’
‘How did you know?’
‘I told you… guessed it.’
‘How did you guess it?’
‘Easy… easy…’
‘Tell me how.’
‘I’ve told you already.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘No… not again…’
‘But I want to know how you guessed it.’
‘Yes… I know… you want to know how…’
‘What reason did you have for trying to mislead me?’
‘Didn’t mislead you… meant in good faith…’
Ponderously Gently relit his pipe, his movements seeming to come from some slow-motion film. For at least a minute he sat silently puffing, puffing, too exhausted, apparently, to form his usual smoke rings. Hansom watched him, bleary-eyed, Walker was unobtrusively napping; Stephens, to keep awake, was staring with eyes unnaturally wide. The stenographer, his pencils arranged fan-wise in front of him, lay back in his chair, his lids narrowed to two slits.
Gently rose to his feet and walked round to the front of the desk. He leant heavily against it, dropping a hand on Mallows’s shoulder.
‘It’s time, perhaps, that I spoke more frankly…’
Mallows, with an effort, lifted up his head. Through the settling smoke of Gently’s pipe Hansom could see the pair of them, eyeing each other.
‘How did the letter prove that he’d done it?’
‘You bastard, Gently… you out-and-out bastard…!’
‘But it did prove it, didn’t it? The paper was yours.’
‘Yes… and you’ve known it all along… you devil!’
‘How did he get it?’
Mallows gestured, feebly, helplessly. ‘It was pinched from the studio… he studies papers, you know. I don’t suppose he knew that I’d seen him take it, but I had… so as soon as you showed me the letter
…’
‘But you knew something before that?’
‘Yes… everything… I told you. Then he wasn’t at his car, though he left the cellar before me…’
‘Why wouldn’t you tell me?’ Gently leant back on the desk: he neither knew nor cared whether the others could fathom this moment of truth.
‘You may not understand it, but he’s a decent fellow, at the bottom… I was probably his nearest friend… with me, he was like a child.’
‘Yet you knew he couldn’t go free.’
‘It’s not enough to know these things. You don’t betray your friends because of the logic… only by blunders. That’s how you betray them.’
‘The blunders imposed by your conscience.’
‘No, my dear fellow… no phrases…’
‘You knew, and you knew you must tell.’
‘I knew he was decent… who was I to condemn him?’
There was silence. Nobody stirred in the hazy, thickaired office. The only motion was of the smoke which curled in tendrils from Gently’s pipe. It seemed an age before Mallows, drawing his head up again, said:
‘What happens now — are you going to pull him in?’
Gently slowly shook his head. ‘Not now… he’ll keep a while. I’ve had a man outside his house since yesterday morning.’
‘He’s a family man, you know.’
‘Yes.’ Gently pulled on his pipe. ‘Perhaps, after the bank opens… myself, I’m not in a hurry.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gently had rarely felt so impersonal about the delinquent in a case and nor, as it turned out, was he ever to have less to do with one. Farrer was never brought to trial; he wasn’t even arrested; in fact, while Mallows was still protecting him, there had ceased to be any Farrer. He had gone into his office and he had there quietly hanged himself. He had done it with some lighting flex suspended from a blind bracket.
He was smiling; that was a feature which added an especial touch of the macabre. His face wore exactly the expression with which he had been used to greet his customers. To perform the deed he had changed into his bank clothes, knotting with care his black bow tie; he had pinned some violets into his buttonhole and dressed his hair with a popular cream. Then, at around one a.m., he had stepped smiling from the window sill. His wife, who slept apart, hadn’t missed him until breakfast.
‘And what sort of a case did we have against him?’
Gently frowned when Superintendent Walker pinned him down with this question. Lack of sleep had made him bearish and his throat was painfully sore — he’d spent a quarter of an hour gargling it, and was still as hoarse as a crow.
‘Not so good as the case we once had against Johnson… that’s the reason why Mallows had to go through the hoop. But we could have built it up… perhaps got a confession. On the other hand, I doubt whether he’d have been fit to plead.’
To be truthful, the case against Farrer was slender, in spite of one or two circumstances that seemed most telling. It depended far too largely on the testimony of Mallows, and entirely so when it came to motive. But time, as usual, supplied a few clinchers. That was commonly the case when one had struck the right trail. Farrer, with all his cunning, had made some careless mistakes, and the most damning of these related to the paper knives. The second pair of knives he had actually bought in person. He had trusted to the likelihood that the supplier didn’t know him. This was true, but the man had a good memory for faces, and he was quite able to pick out a photograph of Farrer. In addition:
‘Just a moment! Doesn’t this fellow manage a bank?’ The picture had given a jog to a sluggish recollection. After searching through his files he came up with an order sheet: it was dated two years previously and bore Farrer’s sweeping signature.
‘There you are, I could have sworn that we’d done some business with him.’
The second item on the sheet was a stainless-steel paper knife.
Two more slices of luck followed one after the other. A constable who knew Farrer had met him early on the Sunday morning. It was in Oldmarket Road and Farrer was proceeding towards the city, having just, without doubt, planted the knife and paper on Mallows. He had been striding along confidently and he had aroused no suspicion; according to the constable, he was whistling softly to himself.
More significant, probably, was the evidence of a cinema manager, who until he heard of the suicide had attributed no importance to what he had seen. Farrer had been noticed by this man on the night of the murder when, his last house being out, he had gone to the Haymarket for his car. Farrer was standing under a street light and intently examining his clothes. Then, extending his gloved hands, he had pored over these as well. The time was approximately five minutes to eleven, and the manager had driven away to leave Farrer still standing there.
But the corroborative evidence was to Gently by way of a bonus, and it was Mallows who supplied the really satisfying background. He had probed into Farrer’s character during a long and intimate acquaintance, and had watched, with a clinical interest, the banker’s relations with Mrs Johnson. It was a connection which boded tragedy but which had appealed to the academician’s irony. His advice to Farrer had fallen on deaf ears and there was little he could do but observe developments.
‘You couldn’t foresee that something like this might happen?’
‘Good lord, no! I was thinking in terms of a nervous breakdown. Farrer was always close to that — he was a chronic schizophrenic; one half of him was the bank man, and the other a frustrated Van Gogh. A jolly good breakdown was just what the fellow needed. It would have put him in the way of some psychiatric treatment. As I saw it, dear Shirley was going to break him to make him, and l didn’t see any good reason for interfering.’