Gently Down the Stream by Alan Hunter Page A

well!
    Wouldn’t it be easy to imagine they were in love? Wouldn’t it be easy to be reckless, when there were so many advantages in the match?
    Only of course they weren’t in love … that was something they had to discover later. In twenty-odd years. In two decades of slow division. Beginning – with what subtle modification of attitude did it begin? – in those hopeful, optimistic days of the early thirties; and ending when a disillusioned businessman, now no longer young, set out on a pleasure cruise with his secretary and all his realizable assets, heading for … what?
    Gently’s head shook slowly at the riotous jungle of the carrs. That was the crucial question which preceded all theory.
    Only, it helped to keep that picture firmly in view. Unless it was there one could easily overlook a detail which might be the very one.
     
    The launch slid up to the quay at Eccle and Gently jumped out without waiting for Dutt to make fast. Eccle Bridge was a little yachting community on its own, solitary in the wide marshes. A mile away was the village. Against the bridge clustered a boat-yard, a store, and at some distance a public house. For the rest it was a long, straight reach with good mooring on scrubby raised banks.
    Gently poked his way into a boat-shed.
    ‘Hi, you! Where’s the gaffer?’
    He was a tall, pale-eyed man of fifty, with a stoop and the calloused hands of a carpenter.
    ‘Police … Chief Inspector Gently. Is it right that Sloley’s Harrier moored here yesterday week?’
    It was. The tall man had seen it himself. They had come in at about 7 p.m., when the moorings were already crowded, and tied up about halfway down the opposite bank.
    ‘Did you know who it was?’
    ‘No … it’s the boats one notices.’
    ‘You wouldn’t know what they did that evening?’
    The tall man simply shrugged.
    It was the same at the pub – nobody knew Lammas, or knew if they’d seen him. Neither did they at the store, though they had a small piece of information for him.
    ‘Of course I never knew Mr Lammas, but we’ve always done business with him. He’s our wholesaler for a lot of lines … a lot of us deal with him round the Broads.’
    ‘You do, do you? And who’s his representative?’
    ‘It’s a traveller called Mr Williams.’
    ‘Did you owe him any money?’
    The store proprietor looked hurt.
    ‘We keep a small account, naturally.’
    ‘Nobody’s tried to collect it – say first thing last Monday morning?’
    But they hadn’t, of course. That wasn’t going to be the answer. Whyever else Lammas had spent his weekon the Broads, it wasn’t to square up his odd accounts. At the same time … wouldn’t there be any of his customers who knew him personally? And if so, wasn’t it getting riskier and riskier, that honeymoon trip in the Harrier ?
    Gently sat like a carved idol beside his colleague all the way up the Thrin to Hockling. Lammas couldn’t have kept that trip secret! Somewhere, sometime, he must have blundered into someone who would recognize him; even, perhaps, his own traveller. And then what had happened? Had they got on to Mrs Lammas? Or did they represent a mysterious extra element which so far hadn’t come into his calculations?
    And then once more … who knew better than Lammas the risk he was taking?
    He might have spent that week anywhere else in the wide world!
    ‘Stop here.’
    They were passing the village of Petty Hayner.
    Dutt fumbled with Old Man Sloley’s list.
    ‘It ain’t one of the places, sir.’
    ‘I know it isn’t, but he’d stop for lunch, wouldn’t he?’
    And so it went on through the burning afternoon and the endless evening, stopping, checking, throwing out leading questions – and getting nowhere. It was only the Harrier people had seen. It was a chronic complaint with them – they noticed boats, but they didn’t notice people. And, they would always add, if they had seen Lammas they wouldn’t have known him … it was like inquiring for someone