Gently with the Ladies (Inspector George Gently 13)

settee. Those scatter-marks prove it to the hilt: when she was struck she was precisely there.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean Fazakerly couldn’t have done it.’
    ‘It means another hole in the ice. I suppose there’s nothing in the P.M. report to suggest she was knocked out before she was killed?’
    Reynolds shook his head bleakly. ‘Just that one depressed fracture.’
    ‘No broken nails?’
    ‘Nothing of that sort. She was hit once, we think from behind.’
    ‘Well, it could have happened. In the middle of a row she may have sat down on the settee, and she may have ignored Fazakerly going behind her and getting the pin down off the wall. Did the housekeeper handle the pin, by the way?’
    ‘Says she didn’t,’ Reynolds mumbled.
    ‘We’ll suggest the pile of the carpet smeared the prints, and that he changed his grip before throwing it down. Those are the tricky points about the actual commission. We’re lucky to have a good witness in Mrs Bannister.’
    He sorted over some more prints. The last was a portrait which Reynolds had collected. It showed Clytie Fazakerly at full length and wearing nothing but swathes of gauze. She had a curiously round face with large cheek-bones and a squat nose, eyes that seemed to encroach on her forehead, and a chin vanishing beneath pouting lips. A bold, exposed face, resembling the type portrayed in Minoan paintings, having that same quality of belonging to a remote, dawn culture. Her blonde hair was twisted in a turban which accentuated the impression. She had a strong, buoyant body which carried a hint of athleticism.
    ‘Have you contacted her family?’ Gently asked.
    ‘They want nothing to do with it,’ Reynolds shrugged. ‘Her step-father is a solicitor in Bristol. He soon let me know what he thought about her. Then there’s her half-sister living in Kensington, she just wanted her name kept out of the papers. You’d think they’d care about the money, but apparently she smelled too high even for that.’
    ‘Did Fazakerly know where the money was going?’
    ‘No. We’ve got him on that at least. He didn’t know his wife had made a will, so he must have been thinking he was going to collect.’
    Gently smiled frostily. ‘So he may.’ He told Reynolds of Mrs Bannister’s bonfire. The C.I.D. man listened blankly, his eyes rounded at Gently.
    ‘But shouldn’t we pinch her for that?’ he asked at last.
    Gently shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. If you can afford the time Mrs Bannister can afford the expense.’
    ‘But what was she getting at?’
    ‘That’s easy. She seemed to think she was under suspicion.’
    ‘Mrs Bannister . . . ?’
    ‘She had that impression. It may have been something I said to her.’
    ‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Reynolds said.
    ‘Of course Quite ridiculous. She even went on to admit how she might have gone up there after she saw Fazakerly leave. She’d have gone to condole with his wife, of course, and she’d find her sitting on the settee, and she’d know exactly where the pin was kept because it was she who chose the spot for it.’
    ‘But Chief, you can’t—’
    Gently shook his head. ‘That would be too convenient, wouldn’t it?’ he said. ‘Still, there’s a point about it which does interest us.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘It fits.’

     
    But the impression he carried away from Reynolds’ office was of the disturbing face of the dead woman: it was beautiful, but with a beauty of a distant, half-comprehended time. By present standards it was not beautiful, which was why it was disturbing. Yet you knew immediately that in its own age it was radiant and royal. It carried back to a child-like morning, an Olympian youth of culture, pre-Hellenic, beyond the stamp the Greeks had given to female beauty. It set you fumbling for the clues to it, for vague tidings of an infant world, for a glimpse behind the blank veil raised by a thousand incarnations.
    He went down and sat for some moments in his car, just letting that face rest in his mind. Before seeing the photograph he’d begun to picture this woman from what he’d picked up from Fazakerly and Mrs Bannister. But the face altered all his ideas. It had suddenly wiped the record clean. In place of the depraved parasite he had been seeing was this . . . what was it? At the moment, a face!
    A face that excused what the woman had been? Not quite: but a face that helped one understand it. For example, she was amoral, and not immoral: to her, morality would be