Gently Sinking (10 page)

‘It’s tempting,’ Gently said. And I can add another motive.’

He sketched his interview with Mrs Grey.

‘Oh, very sweet, sir,’ Makin said. ‘Grey egging them on. Then fingering Taylor.’

‘You think that’s it?’ Gently said.

He lit his pipe, went to sit down.

‘Well, it adds together, sir,’ Makin said cautiously. ‘We’re short of proof, but it adds together.’

Gently puffed, said, ‘Let’s add it together. Grey hated Blackburn for personal reasons. He also stood to take over the business if Blackburn predeceased him. Sadie Sunshine is Blackburn’s mistress but she’s begun to take up with Grey. She loves Grey, but the affair is kept secret, say because Grey’s married, or because they’re afraid of Blackburn. Comes the
Naxos Island
sinking. Grey sees his chance here. There’s feeling against Blackburn among the black community, and the Sunshines have lost a kid brother on the ship. Grey urges them to be avenged. He puts special pressure on Sadie, who loves him. The Sunshines kill Blackburn. Sadie has tipped Grey, who sets up an alibi we can’t break. Sadie loses her nerve and runs. Taylor’s knife was used. Grey fingers Taylor.’

He puffed several times.

‘Is that about the case?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Makin said. ‘That’s about it. That’s how the Chief Inspector will see it.’

‘So now knock it down for me,’ Gently said.

Makin hesitated. ‘Knock it down, sir?’

‘Knock it down,’ Gently said. ‘We’re short of proof. You said so yourself.’

Makin hesitated again, looked at Gently. Makin had tired, retriever-like eyes. He had a mouth that drooped and the certainty of jowls. He picked up a paperweight with ungainly fingers.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, chivvying the paperweight. ‘Maybe a point or two did occur to me.’

‘They did to me, too,’ Gently said. ‘I like to know I’m not alone.’

‘There are these others here,’ Makin said, indicating the list. ‘I know they don’t live in London. But they could come here, might have friends here. One of them could be in the reckoning.’

‘Good,’ Gently said. ‘Though perhaps unlikely.’

‘Perhaps unlikely,’ Makin said. ‘But possible, sir. Then there’s Taylor, he doesn’t fit in. He had his own motive, and it was his knife. I know you’re going to say, sir, that if Taylor did it, then Grey wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have gone for an alibi. But it could just be that Grey did know, and that his fingering Taylor is genuine.’

‘Well,’ Gently said.

Makin worked the paperweight.

‘Here’s another thing that puzzles me, sir,’ he said. ‘What we found at the flat. I can’t quite figure it. What went on there after the killing. We’ll say that Sadie Sunshine killed him. Does she dress fast and get to hell out of it? No. She clears out her dresses, her shoes, her knick-knacks, and does it so well that we don’t find a thing. That takes a good bit of swallowing, sir. We didn’t find a single woman’s thing in the flat. Not an old hair-curler or a button or a dud lipstick. All she left behind was a pong.’

‘That’s excellent,’ Gently said. ‘But there could be an explanation.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Makin said. ‘She could have cleared her stuff out in advance. Maybe breaking it off with Blackburn was part of the plan, so she had opportunity to cover her tracks. But if that’s so, why did she leave the knife, which there was a chance of us tracing to her? And why did she wipe the handle of the knife but leave her dabs all over the flat?’

‘Murderers do make mistakes,’ Gently said. ‘Straight after a killing they aren’t too logical. It may be the guilt makes a block in their minds, compels them to leave a clue behind.’

‘But,’ Makin said, ‘it didn’t have to be after the killing. She could have wiped the flat over when she took her gear. And after the killing she was cool enough to wipe the knife-handle, so why wasn’t she cool enough to take the knife? And there’s this too.’

He pulled open a drawer, took the photographs of Sadie Sunshine from a file.

‘Just forget what we know, sir, and look at these. Do they strike you as photographs of a cold-blooded killer?’

Gently shrugged. ‘For what it’s worth, no.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Makin said. ‘It has to be worth something, sir. I never saw a picture of a murderer yet that didn’t show two or three characteristic features. The commonest one is a prominent jaw. Ninety-nine per cent of killers have it. Then there’s the deep upper lip, strongly indented, the fixed mouth, the withdrawn eyes.’

‘You’ve been doing homework,’ Gently said.

‘I’ve made it my subject, sir,’ Makin said. ‘And what I’m saying is this girl doesn’t have those features, in a line-up of killers you could pick her out directly. She’s fine-jawed, average upper lip, has an expressive mouth, her eyes are with you. She’s warm. You want to know her. The smile wasn’t put on for the camera.’

‘Of course, she’s black,’ Gently said.

‘That’s a lot of bosh,’ Makin said impatiently. ‘I’ve had plenty of experience with the immigrant community, sir, and what goes for white people goes for them. They’ve got their ration of villains, naturally, and some of them are pretty crude and roughneck. But then you’ve said it. I live next door to some. If I needed a friend, I’d know where to go.’

‘All right,’ Gently said. ‘Established, then: Sadie Sunshine doesn’t look like a killer. Anything else?’

Makin spun the paperweight.

‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can think of.’

‘You’ve done well,’ Gently said. ‘We had a case a moment ago. Now you’ve about knocked it flat.’

He puffed a few times.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you can salvage me something out of the pieces.’

Makin laid down the paperweight. He looked more perky, his brown eyes less tired.

‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I think it stands out a mile. This Sadie Sunshine isn’t the killer. She was there with Blackburn, that’s pretty sure, and she may have, probably did, witness the killing. But she wasn’t any part of it, or setting it up, though somebody may have made use of her being there.’

‘So why didn’t she come to us?’ Gently said.

‘Maybe the killer threatened her,’ Makin said.

‘He could have killed her,’ Gently said. ‘But he didn’t kill her. And she doesn’t come to us. She hides.’

‘That’s it,’ Makin said. ‘That’s it, sir. He didn’t kill her, and she didn’t inform on him. It has to be someone close, a relative. The brother. Taylor. One of them.’

‘Taylor was there,’ Gently said. ‘And it was his knife. Sharkey could have been there, could have had the knife.’

‘The brother,’ Makin said, pointing to the list. ‘He had the strong motive. It’s there.’

Gently grinned round his pipe. ‘We should tackle other cases together,’ he said. ‘I came back here to talk to Grey. Now you’ve convinced me I should talk to Sharkey.’

‘Well, it’s all theory, sir,’ Makin said, flushing.

‘Another good point,’ Gently said. ‘So we’ll get back to facts. Who’s checking Osgood’s alibi?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘Fine,’ Gently said. ‘See if you can break it.’

Paradise Street, Brickfields, was busier at 4 p.m. than at 12 noon. Men with sacking over their shoulders were unloading furniture into the depository. Gently halted by them, dropped a window.

‘Will you be here much longer?’ he asked one of the men.

The man cast away a sodden cigarette-end, stared at Gently, at the car.

‘You going to leave that here, mate?’ he said.

‘That’s the idea.’

‘We’ll be here another hour.’

Gently slipped him five bob, parked the Sceptre, went on up to the Coconut Grove.

The doors were locked, but there was a bell-push. It was Sharkey who drew back the bolts and admitted him.

‘I sure was expecting you, man,’ he greeted him. ‘I knew you’d be back, whoever else wasn’t.’

‘Oh,’ Gently said. ‘Why was that?’

Sharkey winked. ‘Just the way you behaved, man. Letting Mr Trouble ask all the questions, then you coming back to bowl the spinners. Ain’t that the way now?’

Gently shrugged. ‘Why is the club closed?’ he asked.

‘Afternoons, we just close, Sharkey said. ‘There sure ain’t nothing sinister ’bout that.’

He led Gently through the club to the room behind the bar. There on a kitchen table Sarah Sunshine was deftly slicing stacks of sandwiches. She gave Gently a nervous smile. On a big electric range a coffee-percolator was bubbling. The room was brightly painted, brightly lit, looked, smelled clinically clean.

‘You take a seat, man,’ Sharkey said. ‘Don’t you stand on any ceremony.’

He took cups and saucers from a painted dresser and poured three cups of coffee. He was wearing a striped apron and had his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows. A partly sliced sausage on a board on the table had probably been the job from which Gently’s ring had summoned him.

He handed Gently his coffee and a bowl of demerara sugar. They sat. Sarah Sunshine continued slicing the stacks of sandwiches. On top of the dresser, Gently noticed, a black guitar was lying. Sharkey saw where he was looking, chuckled, rose, took down the guitar.

‘You ain’t come to hear music, man,’ he said.

‘I haven’t come to drink coffee,’ Gently said, drinking.

‘Surest thing,’ Sharkey said, dragging a string. ‘You wouldn’t want to hear my brandest new calypso.’

‘Sharkey,’ Sarah Sunshine said. ‘You be sensible.’

‘Oh, you woman, don’t fuss,’ Sharkey said. ‘This here man ain’t like Mr Trouble. He ain’t going to bust this guitar over my head.’

‘So don’t you bug him with it,’ Sarah Sunshine said.

‘You woman, you woman,’ Sharkey said. ‘This gentleman’s hip. This gentleman’s cool. He’s going to love old Sharkey’s nonsense.’

He sprang a sudden liquid phrase from the guitar. It suggested a dancer jumping into an arena. Then he launched with powerful physical impact into the verse of a calypso.

That old white man come around here,

Think we all should drop dead with fear—

He bang his fist upon the table

And he shout out as loud as he is able—

Man I don’t like your colour,

You had a whore for a mother—

‘Just you stop it!’ Sarah Sunshine exclaimed. ‘That ain’t no song to go singing right now.’

‘Woman, I’m with it,’ Sharkey laughed at her. ‘You keep cutting those sandwiches, and you listen.’

He played a ringing phrase and went on singing.

That old white man got a red face,

He’s the most coloured of any race—

He got hair that ’most always drops out,

Yellow teeth and a cutaway snout

He’s a very funny man,

You keep a straight face if you can;

He’s the lord of the universe,

He go to heaven in a Rolls-Royce

hearse—

Here he played a rippling voluntary, throwing his head back in a gust of laughter.

I don’t know man what we do with him,

He such a long way out on a limb—

Maybe we dress him in silks and sateens,

Call him King of the Barbareens—

The song ended in a shout, underlined with a drum-roll and a clashing chord.

Sarah Sunshine, the sandwich-knife shaking in her hand, cowered away from her triumphant husband.

‘Man, ain’t that music?’ Sharkey demanded of Gently. ‘You going to tell me that ain’t music?’

‘That’s music,’ Gently shrugged. ‘You’re good. You’re wasting your talent here in Brickfields.’

‘I am the mostest,’ Sharkey laughed. ‘Not Muham-med Ali is more mostest than me. But I don’t waste my talent, man. We got a very select audience at the Coconut Grove.’

‘They’ll appreciate that song,’ Gently said.

‘Oh, man, it ain’t serious,’ Sharkey said, putting up the guitar. ‘Only when we get men like Mr Trouble come around, we surely have to find some way to laugh him off.’

‘That ain’t no song to go singing,’ Sarah Sunshine quavered. ‘You just don’t care, Sharkey. You got a wild streak.’

‘Sure I got a wild streak, you woman,’ Sharkey said. ‘Why else are you loving me all this time?’

‘Well, who said I’m loving you?’ Sarah Sunshine said.

‘I says it, you woman,’ Sharkey said with a rolling chuckle.

He picked up his coffee, drank it quickly.

‘But you don’t say a lot, man,’ he said to Gently. ‘Maybe you’s weighing us up, Sarah and me. You’s getting ready with the fast ones.’

‘Are you expecting fast ones?’ Gently asked.

‘All round the wicket,’ Sharkey said. ‘Seamers, googlies, loose ones, fast ones. Like you’s Laker and Trueman put together.’

‘You’re fond of cricket?’ Gently said.

‘I didn’t miss a Test yet,’ Sharkey said.

‘Back in Kingston,’ Gently said.

‘Oh yes, you bet. Back in Kingston.’

‘With your kid brother,’ Gently said. ‘He was fond of cricket too?’

Sharkey’s eyes squeezed shut.

‘Man,’ he said thickly. ‘You got through me with that one.’

Gently took the Immigration Department list from his wallet, unfolded it, handed it to Sharkey. Sarah Sunshine glided behind her husband, read over his shoulder with frightened eyes. She moaned, hid her face in his shoulder. Sharkey’s mouth trembled, twitched.

‘Yeh man,’ he said at last. ‘That’s mighty official.’

He handed the list back to Gently.

* * *

‘Of course, you wouldn’t have seen him,’ Gently said, ‘since you left Jamaica. How old was he then? About fifteen?’

Sharkey shook off his wife. He sat down. Sarah Sunshine slunk behind the table.

‘He’d perhaps have left school,’ Gently said. ‘Be running wild. Down at the harbour. On the beaches. He’d be a swimmer.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Sharkey said. ‘Don’t man, don’t. You worse than Mr Tallent. Why cain’t you hit me?’

‘Was he a swimmer?’ Gently said.

Sharkey jammed his fists into his eyes.

‘Was he?’ Gently continued.

Sharkey groaned. ‘Yeh. A good swimmer. He’d keep swimming.’

‘If he had a chance,’ Gently said. ‘The ship going down might suck him under.’

Sharkey sobbed.

‘Perhaps it would be the better way,’ Gently said. ‘Quicker. Better than him swimming around, not giving up.’

‘Oh you devil, you devil,’ Sharkey sobbed.

‘Not that you cared very much, did you?’ Gently said.

‘You ain’t safe, man,’ Sharkey sobbed. ‘I’ll kill you.’