Gently through the Mill by Alan Hunter

Author:Alan Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781849017923
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2011-06-06T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

GENTLY SLEPT BADLY that night in spite of the blandishments of the sprung mattress with which the management of the St George had furnished him. He couldn’t get the baker out of his mind. The wretched fellow haunted his dreams all night long. Now he would wake up arguing with him, chewing away desperately at some perfectly obvious proposition which Blythely was simply staring out of existence; now the situation appeared in symbols, with Blythely as a towering cliff and Gently’s logic the waves beating helplessly against it.

The baker had got the better of him, that was the whole trouble. For once in a way he had met somebody who was a match for him. He had never got hold of the initiative. It had always lain with Blythely. The baker’s wife had given Gently weapons, but they had glanced aside from her husband’s head. Blythely had told him just as much as he wanted to, no more and no less, and the defeat rankled in a thousand uneasy images.

Because, after all, hadn’t Gently pierced the defences of a score of antagonists more redoubtable than this small-town provincial tradesman? Professionals, some of them had been! – men who had known every twist and pressure of the interrogator’s art.

Yet here he had been checkmated, firmly and unhesitatingly.

The baker was wearing an armour more impregnable than guile.

A clatter of bells penetrated the troubled caverns of his sleep, shattering, insistent, not to be denied. Gently groaned and opened his eyes. The telephone on his bedside table was ringing. A grey, unfriendly light suggested that the hour was unseasonable. He couldn’t quite see whether his watch pointed to five or six.

‘Yes … Chief Inspector Gently?’

In the courtyard below his window somebody was having trouble starting a car.

‘Inspector Griffin here … sorry to wake you up. We think we’ve got a line on one of those two men.’

‘Ames and Roscoe, you mean?’

Gently sat up with a rush.

‘Yes, but he’s dead. The county police have pulled him out of the river a couple of miles upstream. They think he’s Ames and we’re sending our print man. I thought you’d like to get out straight away.’

He could see his watch now. It was seven minutes past five. The car outside was firing jerkily, probably on only three cylinders.

‘What happened … how did he die?’

‘They think he was stabbed.’

‘Send round for me, will you? I’ll be ready in five minutes.’

Automatically he dropped the receiver and began feeling for his clothes. Another one of that fated trio – dead, and making sixes and sevens!

For the moment he couldn’t react to the information, it was so unexpected and cataclysmic. He pulled on his clothes stupidly, entirely forgetting his collar and tie.

Down below he found a sleepy-eyed maid and got from her a strong, sweet cup of tea. The refractory car, an ancient Morris, got going just in time to make an incoming police Wolseley pull up with a squeak of tyres.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.