Gently Instrumental (18 page)

David Crag took a swallow. ‘I just hadn’t never seen it, not till this man pulled it out in the Wimpy!’

He kept his eyes desperately on Gently’s but the eyes were becoming progressively wider. The fair hair was tousled about them and the cheeks a muck of sweat. Gently considered him silently. The eyes began to roll. Suddenly Crag snatched them away. His breath was coming rough and in starts: more like an animal’s than ever.

‘It won’t do . . . will it?’

‘Look, it’s right what I’m telling you!’

Gently shook his head. ‘We’ve heard it too often.’

‘There was this man—’

‘There wasn’t any man. You remembered too much about him for him to have been real.’

David Crag gave a whine. ‘You ain’t calling me a liar . . . !’ He doubled his fists into his eyes. ‘I ain’t a liar – you ask my grandad – I haven’t never told no lies!’

‘Perhaps you aren’t a cry-baby, either.’

‘You ain’t treating me fair!’ David Crag blubbered. ‘I never wanted that watch anyway – I was going to have one give me for my birthday.’

‘So why did you take it?’

‘I never took it. I bought it off the bloke, like I said.’

‘An eight-hundred-and-fifty-pound watch for a fiver?’

‘I only give him what he asked!’

Now he was blubbering in good earnest, tears vying with sweat on his freckled face. You might have taken him for ten or twelve instead of his seventeen or eighteen years. Gently waited patiently. The blubbering became intermittent, lost its conviction, stopped. Red-eyed, his mouth drooped for fresh sobs, he came out from behind his doubled fists.

‘So now you’ve got that off your chest, why not tell us what really happened?’

David Crag’s mouth crumpled. ‘You ain’t being fair! You tell me I haven’t got to say nothing, anyway.’

‘No, you needn’t, Gently said. ‘You can leave us to form our own opinion.’

David Crag snuffled some more and used the sleeve of the bush-shirt. ‘He – he give it to me,’ he said.

‘Who gave it to you?’ Gently eased himself on the hard-bottomed interrogation-room chair, aligned his hands and sighted over them at the melting David Crag.

‘Him . . . Virtue.’

‘Virtue gave you his watch?’

‘Ah. He give it to me.’

Gently grunted. ‘That’s likely, isn’t it! That he’d give you a watch worth as much as that.’

‘But he did!’ The reddened eyes were indignant.

‘He give it to me last Monday. Down in the summerhouse, it was. He pulled it off and give it to me.’

‘Eight hundred-odd pounds worth of watch.’

‘He didn’t know it was worth all that.’

‘And you thought it was brass.’

‘Well . . . no. I reckoned it might be worth twenty quid.’

Gently gazed across his fingers. Now the young gardener’s mouth wasn’t trembling. Hot-faced among his dishevelled hair, he was pouting childishly, eyes lowered.

‘What did you have to do for it?’

‘Didn’t have to do nothing, did I?’

Gently clicked his disgust. ‘We’re never going to believe that! Try me again with something more credible.’

David Crag’s hot face grew hotter. ‘Well . . . I never did it anyway, did I?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No I never! I wasn’t going to either, for all his old soap.’

‘But you must have promised something.’

‘I tell you I didn’t.’

‘Not for a present like that watch?’

David Crag jammed his fists together and sat boring one into the other.

‘Let me help you,’ Gently said. ‘This is what you promised. You promised to meet him on Tuesday evening. He told you to be at the cottage at about nine, and that he’d fix it so that Mr Hozeley wouldn’t be there. He’d expect that at least in exchange for his watch – even if he didn’t know its value.’

David Crag mauled his fists.

‘Well?’

‘He gave me the watch – he did!’

‘And you agreed to meet him at the cottage.’

He began to snuffle again.

‘So,’ Gently said. ‘You’d have to work it somehow so that your grandfather didn’t find out.’

David Crag’s eyes had a hunted look. ‘You leave my grandad out of this.’

Gently shook his head deliberately. ‘Your grandfather will tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘He may not want to, but he will. It isn’t worth your while to lie.’

‘Grandad don’t know nothing about it.’

‘He said you were at home mending your bike.’

‘That’s where I was!’

‘That’s what you told him – and what he believed.

But you weren’t there.’

David Crag blubbered. His sobs had the whining note of a small child – somewhere, a mother should have heard and set him on her knee to comfort him. It made the policewoman fidget uneasily and sink her head over her pad.

‘I can guess how he worked it, sir,’ Leyston said. ‘They’ve got long gardens at those cottages. Crags have a shed at the bottom of theirs, and that’s where sonny would keep his bike. So he’d tell his old man he was off down there, and likely the old boy would never check. Sonny could have left his transistor playing. It’s straight out of the garden on to the Common.’

‘Straight out to the Common.’

Leyston nodded. ‘That’d be the way he goes to work.’

‘He give me the watch,’ David Crag sobbed. ‘He did – he did!’

Leyston stared at him with empty eyes.

Gently spread his hands. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll take that as read. You had an alibi with your grandfather and a safe route to the cottage.’

‘I didn’t go nowhere!’

‘What time did you leave?’

David Crag whined and cuffed his face. ‘I never saw him, and that’s straight. Not since the time in the summer house.’

‘Still . . . when did you leave?’

‘It ain’t like you think. I never had no transistor down there.’

Gently said nothing.

David Crag swallowed. ‘Reckon it might have been half-past eight.’

‘You went over the Common.’

He pouted. ‘Yes.’

‘Who did you meet on the way?’

‘I didn’t meet nobody, did I? That was about closing-in time.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well that’s it, then. I went to the cottage and never saw him.’ His eyes avoided Gently’s. ‘He wasn’t there, like. Not when he said he was going to be.’

‘When did he say he’d be there?’

‘Said he’d be there after nine.’

‘Where were you to wait for him?’

‘Well . . . at the cottage. I couldn’t very well go inside.’

‘And?’

He rasped his lips. ‘Then I waited a bit, didn’t I?

Down the garden . . . in the summer house, like. I waited a bit. Then I went home.’

‘Having seen nobody.’

‘No, I’m telling you.’

‘You were never nearer to the cottage than the summer house.’

David Crag gulped. ‘No. I wasn’t.’

Gently gazed at him. And shook his head.

David Crag covered up again: but by now he’d almost expended his stock of tears. His sobbing had struck an unconvincing falsetto, a sort of dry, girlish whimper. Nobody interrupted him; he was left to play out the act solo. At last he ended on a wailing moan and let his fists drop from his eyes.

‘I ain’t going to say no more . . . !’

That didn’t get a response, either. Helplessly he

sat with rubbed eyes staring and breath coming in snatched gasps.

‘Let’s take it from when you arrived at the cottage.’

‘No!’ The hunted expression was back.

‘It was beginning to get dark, wasn’t it . . . and of course, there weren’t any lights in the cottage.’

‘I ain’t saying nothing!’

‘Virtue hadn’t returned. It was probably a little

before nine. You’d have gone up through the garden, wouldn’t you, and round to the front? To the gate.’

‘No I never!’

‘And there you’d have waited . . . for somewhere around twenty-five minutes. Time for you to do a bit of thinking – if you hadn’t done it before.’

‘But I wasn’t never round there . . . !’

Gently leaned across the table, his eyes trapping David Crag’s eyes. ‘And you were thinking like this: that you’d be a mug if you carried on and did what he wanted. Because you didn’t have that watch yet. You weren’t going to get it till you’d delivered. And knowing Virtue, that would probably be never. The watch was just a carrot to con a yokel.’

‘But he’d give it to me – he had!’

‘He’d given you nothing and never would have.

And you had time to think it over, waiting for him there at the gate. He was playing you for a mug, but you weren’t such a mug as all that. So you were going to get even with him. You were going to thump him – there’s no risk in thumping queers, is there?’

David Crag’s mouth was sagging lower than ever and his eyes had lost focus. He was taking great gulps of breath and grinding his calloused hands together.

‘Oh . . . no!’

‘Oh yes. Because that’s the way it happened,

wasn’t it? You fetched a handy tool from the tool shed, waited behind the laurel bush, then let him have it. Only Virtue wasn’t so easy. He dodged away and picked up that flint. He could have killed you – most likely would have done – and so you had to put him down. And when he was down, there it was – the watch he had tempted you with in the first place. He deserved to lose it. You whipped it off him and hurried back down again to your bike shed.’

‘I didn’t . . . I never . . .’

‘You were found with the watch.’

‘I keep telling you . . . he give it to me!’

‘And we don’t believe you.’

‘Oh, my Lord.’ He crammed his fist in his mouth and whined.

‘Why not get it over?’ Gently said quietly.

David Crag bit the fist and moaned. His eyes were glazed and half-closed, with tears squeezing from the corners. But he pulled himself together for a last try.

‘There was someone else . . . up at the cottage.’

‘We know that,’ Gently said. ‘Mr Meares was there. He saw what happened.’

‘I never saw Mr Meares!’

‘Quite likely you didn’t.’

David Crag’s messy eyes had a doubtful expression. He wet his lips and took several swallows, the fist still held close to his mouth.

‘It . . . wasn’t him.’

‘Then who was it?’

‘I couldn’t see proper . . . it was dark.’

‘You’re lying again.’

‘No I ain’t!’ He rocked a little, eyes starting to roll.

‘It was . . . that man.’

‘I want a name.’

‘Him . . . the one I saw before . . .’

‘Either give me a name or forget it.’

His mouth jogged uncontrollably. ‘It . . . was . . . him.’

Then the mouth shut with a snap and David Crag began to slide. It may have been the heat, but they were going down like flies in the interrogation room that morning.

Out in the charge room Meares sat on a bench, staring at a cutie on a pin-up calendar. Seeing Gently he made to rise, but Gently motioned him to stay put. He crossed and sat down beside Meares. Meares regarded him apprehensively.

‘We’ve got young Crag in there,’ Gently said.

‘David . . . ?

‘He was found in possession of the watch.’

‘But . . . that’s impossible!’

‘Is it?’

Meares drew back in consternation.

‘You can’t seriously believe that David did it.’

‘Why can’t we?’ Gently said.

‘Because he wasn’t there.’

‘How would you know that – when you didn’t arrive until the killer had left?’

‘Because – because—!’ Meares floundered. He jerked his face away from Gently’s. ‘What you are saying is quite incredible. There must be some other explanation.’

‘Listen,’ Gently said. ‘David Crag has admitted being there. He denies having seen you there, and now you’re denying having seen him. But you did see someone who wasn’t him, and he claims to have seen someone who wasn’t you. There was a third man at the cottage. And that’s the man I want to talk to.’

‘But I saw nobody.’

‘We’re holding David.’

‘No. You can’t put it on him!’

‘So talk, Mr Meares.’

‘I’ve . . . told you everything.’

‘Then David walks into a cell.’

Meares jumped up in agitation and went to stare hard at the calendar. The cutie, though suffering from a high rate of inflation, continued to smile back unmoved.

‘I can’t – I won’t change my statement.’

‘I’m tired of guessing, Mr Meares.’

‘The position I’m placed in is impossible!’

‘You’ll have to judge how much loyalty is worth.’

‘Look . . . Superintendent.’ He turned appealingly. ‘Can’t you see that no sort of justice would be served . . . ?’

Gently shook his head and stared the look of appeal down.

Meares groaned. He stood in torment, scowling at a rent in the charge room’s lino. His neat hands clenched and unclenched, tightened at last into fists.

‘Then – you must do what you think best!’

‘You won’t give me that man’s name?’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘You may be liable to a charge of accessory after the fact.’

‘Then I’ll be liable to it.’ His chin rose stubbornly.

‘And meanwhile David Crag will stay inside.’

Meares’s mouth jammed in a tight line and he aimed his scowl at the charge room’s light-fixture.

Just then Mason and a DC entered lugging holdalls and a bundle of sticks. They were followed by William Crag also laden with a bag and stick. Crag’s eye fell on Meares. He came to a stand. The two men eyed each other. Meares’s face had suddenly become blank. Crag’s face expressed scorn and a sort of furious satisfaction. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He turned abruptly to Gently.

‘I’ll need a word with you, old partner.’

‘You seem to be having it,’ Gently said.

‘In private, my man.’

Gently stared. He nodded to the door.