Gently with the Innocents Read Free Page B

I don’t think the Doctor ever visited him.’
    ‘And he didn’t have any neighbours,’ Boyland said. ‘He was the only resident in Frenze Street. It’s the livestock market down there, and Hampton’s warehouse, and some other old properties.’
    Gently drank some more nut-brown. Almost, you felt, they were trying to be unhelpful! If there was a murderer going loose, they didn’t want him pinned to the comfortable, crime-free town of Cross. Whereas young Peachment . . .
    ‘Where’s the PM report?’
    Boyland slid off the desk and fetched it for him. It listed twenty-seven separate bruises on different parts of Peachment’s body. They were indifferently distributed about arms, legs, body, face, and only two were described as severe. The fractured skull presumably came from the stairs.
    ‘Anything strike you about this?’
    Boyland’s stare was non-committal.
    ‘I saw the corpse, sir,’ Gissing said. ‘There were too many bruises there for a tumble.’
    ‘But the bruises themselves?’
    ‘Well . . . all over him, sir. Only light bruises, most of them.’
    ‘If a man were being beaten to extract information would you expect bruising like that?’
    Gissing’s eyes went blank. Then he slowly shook his head.
    ‘You’d expect them more . . . localized, sir,’ he said. ‘And more severe?’
    ‘Yes, sir. More severe. I don’t think he was duffed up to make him talk.’
    ‘Then why was he beaten?’
    Gissing’s head kept shaking. ‘It struck me as queer at the time, sir. Maybe revenge . . . something like that. All I know is they weren’t an accident.’
    ‘Maybe a nutter,’ Boyland said.
    ‘You have any nutters?’ Gently asked.
    Boyland shrugged his plump shoulders. Clearly he wasn’t going to admit that!
    About the legend of the gold hoard they were derisive. It was going around when Boyland was a kid. Wasn’t there always a tale of that sort about old houses like Harrisons? A queer old house, a queer old man – to the kids, he’d never be less than a miser. Gissing, who’d poked about the place pretty thoroughly, discounted the notion of a secret hiding-place.
    ‘You went through the book-room when you were there?’
    ‘Yes, sir. At least, there’s a room with books in it.’
    ‘Young Peachment says the medal was in a drawer in the book-room.’
    ‘Well, sir . . . actually, I was looking for a blunt instrument.’
    ‘What about the drawer?’
    There were a couple of drawers. Gissing had glanced in and seen old papers. He had rustled them with his hand, found nothing sinister, closed the drawers and passed on.
    ‘So the medal might have been there?’
    Yes, it might have been, folded away in its manila envelope. Which envelope Gently had sent down to the lab and had received a report on that left him no wiser.
    He told them about the medal. He’d taken it back to Seaby’s, who of course remembered young Peachment bringing it in. As soon as Peachment had gone they’d done their own checking – none of the known Innocent III medals was missing. Two were in museums, in London and New York; the third belonged to a Greek millionaire. Gently had nailed them down to a valuation of fourteen hundred, though in an auction it might go higher.
    ‘And this is it.’
    He laid the medal on the desk. They gazed at its heavy disc in silence.
    That was what had been under the old bills, and what Gissing had nearly put his hand on . . .
    ‘Any coin-collectors in the town?’
    He knew that would be a forlorn hope.
    ‘There’s Bressingham . . . he keeps an antique shop. But he wouldn’t stock anything like this.’
    ‘I’ll talk to him. He might know something.’
    ‘This knocks me all of a heap,’ Boyland said. ‘If old Peachment had one of these, why not a dozen, or a score?’
    ‘The hoard of gold, sir,’ Gissing said.
    ‘Meanwhile,’ Gently said, ‘this one. If there’s nothing else you can think of to tell me, I’d like to go along and look at the house.’
    They watched with the