Gently Sinking

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 Inspector George Gently series

Gently Does It

Gently by the Shore

Gently Down the Stream

Landed Gently

Gently Through the Mill

Gently in the Sun

Gently with the Painters

Gently to the Summit

Gently Go Man

Gently Where the Roads Go

Gently Floating

Gently Sahib

Gently with the Ladies

Gently North-West

Gently Continental

Gently at a Gallop

Gently in Trees

Gently French

Gently Where She Lay

Gently Sinking

Gently Sinking

Alan Hunter

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Cassell & Company Ltd, 1969

This paperback edition published by C&R Crime,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014

Copyright © Alan Hunter 1969

The right of Alan Hunter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78033-944-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-47210-462-5 (ebook)

Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

Printed and bound in the UK

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cover design by
JoeRoberts.co.uk

The characters and events in this book are fictitious; the locale is sketched from life.

Now I ain’t no more than a little girl,
I hear the sea and I want to cry.

Sarah’s Calypso

When the SS
Naxos Island
, a floating sieve on charter to one Thomas Blackburn of London and homeward bound from Kingston, Jamaica, went to the bottom of the Channel, she took a few tons of sugar with her. But not everything sinks so easily; and some things pay better than sugar. Quite soon the bodies started coming ashore – twenty-two illegal immigrants. At £250 a head. Tax free.

Thomas Blackburn got away with it, briefly. Two weeks later he was dead, with a cheap sheath knife stuck in his back. He was in bed, and he hadn’t been alone. A very ordinary, very sordid little murder – but for the
Naxos Island
incident. The Chief Inspector on the spot was Tallent, and he was good. But rough. He called a spade a spade, and in the West Indian colony in west London where Blackburn had lived that was a very dirty word. If Tallent raised his voice that would be brutality, racial discrimination, the end of a valuable career. The Yard wanted a super-policeman to clear this mess up: an angel of tact, patience and tolerance, with a mind like a razor. Chief Superintendent Gently.

T
HE SS
NAXOS ISLAND
was a cargo vessel of 3,500 tons. She was built on the Tyne in 1921. She was owned by a Greek shipping company called Europa Maritime. She was registered in Panama. She had a German captain, Greek officers and a Portuguese crew of eight. She was on charter to a London import-export agency run by one Thomas Blackburn. She was plying between Kingston, Jamaica, and West India Dock, London. She carried sugar to London and mixed cargoes to Kingston. She made ten to twelve trips annually. She could be represented as seaworthy.

On 1 October 1967 the Bergen Line MS
Venus
, returning from an autumn cruise to the Canary Islands, was proceeding up-Channel in a full SW gale. At 0217 hours she picked up distress signals from a vessel identifying herself as the
Naxos Island
and giving a position 25 miles SSE of Start Point. The
Venus
was 40 miles SW of Start Point and running at reduced speed because of heavy seas. She put out a general call. The call was received by two vessels in the near neighbourhood of the
Naxos Island.
One of these, the Jason Line MS
Matilda,
was within seven miles of the given position. She altered course immediately. She saw a number of distress rockets. When she reached the position she encountered oil and floating wreckage and discovered a waterlogged lifeboat. She picked up a survivor from the lifeboat. He gave his name as Soloman Lord Roberts of Kingston, Jamaica. He was black. He was not of the known complement of the
Naxos Island.
Three other bodies, presumed to come from the wreck, were washed ashore during the week following at Beesands and Strete, in Start Bay. One was identified as the Captain, Carl Ritter. The other two were Afro-Caribbean.

Soloman Lord Roberts was landed at Plymouth and met there by the immigration authorities. As a result of his interrogation police action was taken in both Kingston, Jamaica, and London. In Kingston, Jamaica, police raided the office of Hamish McClure, Thomas Blackburn’s corresponding agent, finding nothing but meticulous records of legitimate trading activity. In London they raided Blackburn’s office in Hale Street, Poplar. There they found records exactly corresponding to Hamish McClure’s. McClure and Blackburn, and Blackburn’s two partners, James Osgood and Frederick Grey, emphatically denied all knowledge of illegal immigrant traffic. Blackburn suggested Ritter was responsible. Ritter’s character was known to be equivocal. Soloman Lord Roberts confirmed that Ritter had been one of his contacts in Kingston.

Meanwhile Europa Maritime claimed insurance and Blackburn negotiated a fresh charter.

On 18 October he was found dead in his flat in Chiswick. A cheap sheath-knife had been thrust in his back. There were no prints on the handle.

The body was naked and lay on the bed. A short while before death he’d been with a woman.

The case interested the Home Office.

They suggested Gently should be put in charge.

‘You stay, Gently.’

The Assistant Commissioner (Crime) poked a finger at the chair from which Gently was rising. It was the morning conference of 19 October, and Gently had chosen a seat next to the door. Nine times out of ten he’d have slipped through that door before the AC spotted him . . . today, he’d guessed it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t. Slowly, he sat again.

Outside it was raining. Through the huge, naked window one looked down at faintly gleaming roofs. From the AC’s new office you could still see the Thames, though no longer the cliffs of County Hall.

The Thames was ebbing, fast and yellow, shouldering by the piers of the bridges. A dark police-launch with a dragging pennant was sliding over the tide upstream. The same Thames as at Whitehall, yet here . . . more distant.

Inside, the office smelt of new paint and new furnishings, while the AC still hadn’t got round to unpacking his college photographs. The window was too large, you looked down too far. People below in the streets were computer dots, the cars dashes.

And of course . . . rain. London, England, 19 October.

‘You’ve done your homework?’ the AC asked, when the door closed behind the last policeman.

‘Yes.’ Gently touched his file.

‘Good. Then you’ll know what I’m going to ask you.’

‘I’ve an idea.’

‘We have to check, that’s pretty obvious in the circs. And the truth, mind. No black mark if you’re pulled off the case for being honest.’

Gently stared empty-faced at yellow-grey sky over Bankside.

‘Because everyone’s so certain—’

‘The Home Office is – and so am I.’

‘White people also use knives.’

‘So do chefs and Boy Scouts. But get it out of your head, if it was ever there, that Blackburn was killed by a white person. He was running that racket. A score of immigrants, maybe more, went down in his ship. The
Naxos Island
was rotten. She wasn’t properly insured. Blackburn knew about that. And we couldn’t touch him. So the immigrants fixed it – and between ourselves, not much grief.’

Gently shrugged. ‘Simple.’

‘Oh, it’s simple,’ the AC said. ‘The way a race riot is simple, and lynching parties. All straightforward. Drop a man into this case with simple feelings about colour and all of a sudden a big step forward. We’ll have caught up with the States.’

Gently hesitated. ‘Are you suggesting . . .?’

The AC shook his head. ‘MI5 have a listening-post. This isn’t political. Yet. Of course, they clapped a D-notice on it and every paper killed the story, but we can’t wrap it up for keeps. Not without a Star Chamber. The best we can do is soft-pedal it, play it down, stick with the book. Then grit our bloody teeth and hope. Still, I suppose we’re used to that.’

Down by the Pool a tug was hooting, mournfully cheery through the rain.

‘Why pick me?’ Gently said. ‘I’ve no great experience with the black community.’

‘Aha,’ the AC said. ‘Our well-known humanist. You were picked from on high. Angel needed, send for Gently. Somebody up there loves you.’

‘I’m not that sort of angel,’ Gently said.

‘So you’re the fool who’s going to rush in.’

‘I don’t know how I’d shape with black suspects.’

‘Say one raped your wife. Try that.’

The AC pulled off his glasses and stared small-eyed at Gently. Though a panel at the top of the big window stood ajar it still felt close in the office. On a cabinet near Gently stood a stack of reference books, their new plastic bindings smelling sour. Behind the plastic-smell lingered the paint-smell and a faint odour from the composition floor.

‘I’m not married.’

‘Oh God! Your sister.’

‘I don’t think my sister—’

‘You have a girl-friend.’

The AC swung his glasses at Gently, thrusting, determined to pin him down.

‘I’d be angry, of course.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘Boiling angry . . . that’s natural. But I can’t see the colour of his skin making it different . . . whoever did it, I’d be angry.’

‘He’s here illegally. A black immigrant.’

‘A rapist. They come all colours.’

‘He’s living on state handouts. Never worked in his life.’

‘Plenty of white criminals of that description.’

‘But this one’s black and violent. And your girlfriend hurt. Screaming for you.’

Gently grinned. ‘You’re hamming it,’ he said.

‘You’d strangle that bastard.’

‘Just arrest him. I might even feel sorry for him, the way you tell it.’