Gently Floating

Alan Hunter
was born in Hoveton, Norfolk in 1922. He left school at the age of fourteen to work on his father’s farm, spending his spare time sailing on the Norfolk Broads and writing nature notes for the
Eastern Evening News
. He also wrote poetry, some of which was published while he was in the RAF during the Second World War. By 1950, he was running his own bookshop in Norwich. In 1955, the first of what would become a series of forty-six George Gently novels was published. He died in 2005, aged eighty-two.

The English Broads consist of but 150 miles of navigable waterways – not the 200 miles of the adman – and it is a forlorn hope that a favourite part of them can be used as the setting for a crime novel, and remain anonymous. So on this occasion I would like to remind you, with more emphasis than usual, that the characters and events in this book are fictitious; only the locale is sketched from life.

T
HE BIG MAN
left the office without noticing that he hadn’t locked it and went straight across the darkened yard to where his launch lay at the quay. There he hesitated, stood frowning, breathing the mild night air. The air had the sweet timber smell of boatyards mingled with petrol and the odour of the river. He was Harry French. He owned the yard. The yard let ninety-six craft. This was the Tuesday of August Bank Holiday week and all ninety-six craft were out. He didn’t know where they were, except two which were mooring at the quay. He had a son, John. He didn’t know where John was. Though he thought he could guess about that.

He stooped to untie the launch’s painter, changed his mind a second time: stood as before, breathing the air, looking out across the river. Nobody could have told Harry French how important were the impressions he was receiving. He was fifty-two. He had never thought very seriously about dying. He was highly successful with his business. He was not so successful with his family. His wife was dead. He had one son. His son didn’t take to the business. It was around ten p.m. on August 4th. Like every other season. Almost.

For example, all the evening Reuben’s fair had been pounding out music across the river, just as it had done every August Bank Holiday week since French had come to Haynor in nineteen twenty-four. Squeezed into the same pocket handkerchief between road, river and a mooring cut, the same ancient but virile Cakewalk rising above identical stalls. As a youth French had loved the Cakewalk and its challenging clatter of mechanical music; later, a parish councillor, he had tried to ban it; tonight, obscurely, it seemed a friend. Reuben, or Reuben’s successor, had not been seduced by recorded music. The Cakewalk played tunes of the twenties and thirties. At the moment it was playing ‘Donna Clara’.

Over the river, a little upstream, was this turgid violence of sound and light, beside the dark, heavy form of the hog-backed medieval bridge; and lining the quays, down both banks, the brooding whitenesses of moored craft, porthole lights reflecting from the water, a coal-blue sky empty above them. Traffic lights showed on the bridge, a double-decked bus rocked slowly over it. People moved along the bank, over the bridge, crowded under the fairground lights. ‘Donna Clara’, all the boats out. Like every other season, almost. Haynor or Harry French, either, it didn’t matter; for Thou art That.

And nobody could have told him how important it was on this night of August 4th. Or why his identity came to him sharply as he stood on the quay, testing a decision.

The music changed to ‘Harvest Moon’. At last he jerked the painter from its ring. He stepped aboard the mahogany launch, on the coamings of which dew had formed. She rocked, butted the tyre-sections nailed to the quay to serve as fenders; moved a little downstream on the ebb while he found his seat and reached for the starter. The engine snatched, took hold. He fingered the light-switch, didn’t press it. She remained a dark, low shadow, sliding softly from the quay. Pointing upstream, under the bridge, whose scarred stone arch bounced the murmur of her engine. By the shallow sheds of Spelton Bros., the empty tables on the Bridge Inn staithe. Towards the bungalows, huddled shack by shack on low plots between river and dyke. Towards the ghostly night of Haynor Sounds. Away from the big French house downriver.

But just above Spelton Bros. the launch drifted to her left, her engine idling at low throttle and barely stemming the weak ebb. French laid her close in, closer; found the ramshackle staithe for which he was searching. When she touched he cut the engine and stepped quickly ashore with the painter. He looked about him. The staithe fronted rough ground on which an old upturned boat lay decaying. Nothing moved there. Across the river lay a houseboat without lights. He hitched the painter to a post and moved silently across the rough ground. It was bounded by the cinder path which served the long string of bungalows. Down the path, towards the road, a light showed in one of the Speltons’ sheds, up the path, no light. French went up the path. He counted the gates in the wooden fence which separated the backs of the bungalows from the path. At the seventh gate he stopped, stood by it motionless for some seconds. The seventh gate glimmered faintly. He knew it was painted a whitey-green. If it had been daylight he could have read the name Marshways painted on it. Reuben’s Cakewalk was now playing ‘Valencia’ while French stood listening at the seventh gate.

He reached for the latch and pressed it softly. It was old, lifted sloppily. The gate itself had a creak which his gentle opening of it only prolonged. He went through. He stood in a cramped yard at the rear of the bungalow. It contained a square rainwater tank, an outside safe, a dustbin and a man’s bicycle. On the right the bungalow butted hard on the fence of its neighbour. On the left was a narrow mooring cut in which lay a ten-foot dinghy. A light in the front of the bungalow fell on the sternsheets of the dinghy. It showed a seagull clamped on the transom. It was a dinghy belonging to French’s yard. He moved to the back door of the bungalow, very close. A sing-song of voices came to him. One of the voices was a woman’s, but that was all he could tell certainly. He looked for a way round to the front, but the only way was through the building. He listened again. Laughter. Suddenly he was near to vomiting.

Instead, French closed his eyes and took several long full breaths, then he felt over the surface of the door until his hand found the knocker. It was a little souvenir knocker in the shape of a pixie. He took hold of as much of it as he could and beat with it sharply six times. The sounds it gave out were trifling, but immediately the voices in the bungalow fell silent. He thought he heard movement, a door open. He went on controlling his breathing. At last some steps, light knifing under the door, a hand fumbling with the bolt; then the door opening a foot to show the dark shape of a man. French crashed the door wide open. The man fell back from French’s weight. French went in. He said: ‘All right. I know he’s here. Where’ve you hidden him?’

The man was a head shorter than French and half a dozen years younger. He had a solid body and wide shoulders and short legs and he was humpty. He had a tanned porous face with a big squashed nose and a broad, round chin. His eyes were grey under heavy lids which were creased with habitual puckering. He wore an open-neck khaki shirt and navy bib-and-brace overalls and a pair of plimsolls with holes in them. He had thinned black hair, but no baldness.

He backed a few steps down the narrow hallway which ran through the bungalow, then stopped. He filled the hallway. French was forced to stop too. The man was on the balls of his feet, long arms hanging loose. His eyes puckered to small dots. His wide mouth stretched in a loose grin.

He said softly: ‘Now then, Harry, what sort of games are you playing at? You can’t do this sort of thing, you know, not busting into a bloke’s house.’

French said: ‘You’ve got my son here. Don’t try coming it with me, Sid.’

The man said: ‘Suppose he is here? He’s twenty-one, isn’t he? Does what he likes?’

French came on. ‘Just fetch him,’ he said.

‘Wait, now,’ the man said, raising his hands. ‘I didn’t say he was here, Harry, did I? But he’s got the right, you can’t deny that.’

‘Get out of my way,’ French said.

‘No,’ the man said. ‘Not in my own house. You may be the boss and all that caper, but you can’t bust into a bloke’s house.’

‘I want my son.’

‘Even so,’ the man said.

‘I’m going to have him,’ French said.

‘Not by busting in here you aren’t,’ the man said.

French looked at him. He felt the sickness again.

‘Now just be reasonable a moment, Harry,’ the man said. ‘You can’t push your boy around like this. He’s got a mind of his own too – wouldn’t be a French if he hadn’t got that. He’ll only hate you if you try to keep him down. And it won’t do no good. He’s twenty-one. And he’s got this money coming along from his mother. What’s the sense of trying to ride him?’

‘Sid, you’re sacked,’ French said.

‘It’ll be a union job,’ the man said.

‘Union or not,’ French said. ‘You’re sacked. Pick up your cards.’

The man shook his head. ‘They’ll be out. You won’t get rid of me that way, Harry.’

‘I’ll not only sack you, I’ll brand you,’ French said. ‘You’ll never get another job on the yards.’

‘It wouldn’t work,’ the man said.

‘I’ll have you out on the street,’ French said. ‘You’re a pimp and a rogue and a corrupt influence. And you’ve seduced my son. I’ll finish you, Sid.’

The man puckered his eyes. ‘That’ll do,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’ll finish you,’ French said. ‘You’re as rotten as they come, Sid. I knew it all along, you bloody lead-swinger you. But getting your hooks into John. You and that whore you call a wife.’

The man’s eyes were like needle-points. ‘Shut your trap and get out,’ he said.

‘I’m taking my son,’ French said.

‘You’re getting out,’ said the man.

He came at French, swinging. French grappled with him, glad of the combat. The man was strong, but he was much the lighter and French pitched him down on the hallway floor. The man squirmed up, swearing, murderous; rushed at French two-fisted. French poked a left into the man’s chest, threw a right to the face with all his weight in it. The man went backwards. He spat blood. He looked about him for a weapon. There was an iron doorstop by the further door and he caught it up, came again. French rushed at him and caught his wrist before the man could strike a blow. He bent the man’s arm back till he dropped the doorstop. The man screamed and went down after it.