Free Gently Floating by Alan Hunter Page B

said. ‘I have really, you can go and look.’
    ‘Well, get on with your fretwork,’ David Spelton said. ‘I want to talk to this gentleman alone. Maybe we’ve got a boat he can have, I’ll see about it. You finish that wall-bracket.’
    ‘No, we haven’t any boats,’ Vera Spelton said. ‘He’ll have to go to those people.’
    ‘V, just do what I say,’ David Spelton said.
    ‘All right, Dave,’ Vera Spelton said.
    She rose, smiling at neither of them. She glided round her brother. She vanished. David Spelton closed the door, leaned on it.
    ‘I don’t know if there’s a law against it,’ he said. ‘Getting a subnormal person on their own and trying to work on them in that filthy way. But I’m going to find out, you can depend on that. And if it’s an offence, I’m going to prosecute you. You think you’re fireproof because you’re a policeman, but you bloody aren’t fireproof.Not with my sister.’
    ‘It isn’t an offence,’ Gently said. ‘Murder is. Investigating it isn’t.’
    ‘And that covers every dirty little trick,’ David Spelton said. ‘That’s your excuse when you’re caught out.’ He came away from the door, went round the writing-table, leaned on the chair-back, stared. ‘I heard what you were getting at,’ he said. ‘I know how your putrid mind is working.’
    ‘Congratulations,’ Gently said.
    ‘People like you make me sick,’ David Spelton said. ‘Harry French interfering with V. It takes a policeman to think up filth like that. And you get her alone and keep feeding her with it, trying to plant it in her mind. But she isn’t as stupid as that, you know. She’s got her way of protecting herself. Because it’s a lie. A damned lie. The dirty lie of a dirty mind.’
    ‘Is it off your chest?’ Gently said.
    ‘What’s the point of talking to you,’ David Spelton said. ‘Of course you’ve got a skin like a plastic fendoff, you wouldn’t be in your line of business if you hadn’t.’
    ‘I might think you’re afraid of something,’ Gently said.
    ‘Oh of course, of course,’ David Spelton said.
    ‘I didn’t know you had a sister before I came here,’ Gently said. ‘I came to see you. About something quite different.’
    ‘And V just fell into your clutches,’ David Spelton said.
    ‘You weren’t eavesdropping early enough,’ Gently said. ‘She told me some very interesting things which I didn’t know enough to prompt her in. What kept you so long at the yard after you saw me try the doors?’
    David Spelton stared, said nothing.
    ‘And now you’re puzzling me,’ Gently said. ‘Suppose you drop the moral indignation before I find it significant?’
    ‘Oh, very clever,’ David Spelton said.
    ‘What were you afraid I should get out of her?’ Gently said.
    ‘You’ve a thing about me being afraid,’ David Spelton said. ‘I’m not afraid, not of people like you. Only of the injury you might do to my sister. And it’s got to end here, you understand? You’re not shoving that lie at her again. Hawk your filthy ideas around to other people, but let V alone. Or you’ll have me to deal with.’
    ‘Shouldn’t you just have walked in here,’ Gently said, ‘if your motive was to protect your sister from me?’
    ‘I mean what I’m saying,’ David Spelton said. ‘Your being a policeman isn’t going to protect you.’
    ‘Yet you waited to eavesdrop,’ Gently said. ‘Till our interview was over. As though you wanted to hear what I was going to ask her, which you wouldn’t have done if you’d come straight in. And Harry French’s body turned up in your slipway.’
    ‘I’ll forget myself in a minute,’ David Spelton said.
    ‘I think you’ve already forgotten yourself,’ Gently said. ‘Why were you going to knock Harry French down?’
    The knuckles of David Spelton’s hands paled over the carved wood of the chair-back. His stare was less steady. He drew the chair a little towards him. He said:
    ‘You’re trying to build a case