Gently with the Ladies (Inspector George Gently 13)

the Left Bank or in Montmartre? At some special establishment catering for Lesbians? He grunted, put the book away and picked up the one he was currently reading. No more of Fazakerly till the morning! At least, the fellow was sleeping outside a cell.
    But he’d barely sat down in his consecrated chair when the phone rang on his desk. He went to it and jerked it up with loathing, ready to jump down somebody’s throat.
    ‘Is that you, George?’
    The voice was his sister’s.
    ‘George, I can’t talk for very long. Geoffrey didn’t want me to ring you at all, but I felt I must . . . he’s in the study with someone.’
    Gently lapsed into the desk chair. ‘It’s about young Fazakerly, is it?’ he growled.
    ‘Yes, Johnny Fazakerly. We know him, George, he’s a nephew of Aunty May Fazakerly’s. And in the paper tonight . . . well, there were headlines. He’s local, of course. That makes it news.’
    Gently grimaced. ‘It’s news, period.’
    ‘But George, what’s happening? Did he do it?’
    ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’
    ‘George, how terrible. I mean, someone we know . . . actually a relative.’
    Gently swivelled the chair a degree and fixed his gaze on the stuffed pike. He liked his sister, but there were times when dear Bridget jarred with him a little. To her he was still a small boy playing wilful and incomprehensible games . . .
    ‘He gave himself up to me this morning,’ he said.
    ‘What . . . ?’
    ‘Walked into my office. Gave himself up. Said he wanted me to believe in his innocence because the facts were all against him.’
    ‘Poor Johnny! What did you do?’
    ‘Handed him over, what else? He was right about the facts, and I’m not prescient. So over to Chelsea he had to go.’
    ‘But . . . couldn’t you do anything to help him, George?’
    ‘Oh yes. I could pull my rank on the officer in charge. And as a result I’ve gummed-up a perfectly good case and perhaps robbed a deserving spinster of a fortune.’
    ‘But what about Johnny?’
    ‘He’s free as the air. He’s living it up at a swish hotel.’
    ‘You mean you’ve got him off, George?’
    ‘He’s out for the moment.’
    ‘Oh George, that’s wonderful!’
    ‘So happy you think so.’
    He sneered at the pike, which sneered back. It was a twenty-four pounder, caught in Norfolk. Perhaps it didn’t much resemble his sister Bridget, but just now it pleased him to imagine a likeness.
    ‘George?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You didn’t know his wife, did you?’
    ‘I’m getting to know her. Little by little.’
    ‘She was a bitch, George. I don’t like saying it, but she deserved whatever happened to her. You know how she got her money, don’t you?’
    ‘Fazakerly told me.’
    ‘And that isn’t all. She used to have relations with other women. She was expelled from school for that sort of thing.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘You forget she’s local. She went to Ferndale Grammar School with Charlotte Manners. There was a business there with one of the mistresses – another bitch. A Sybil someone.’
    ‘A Sybil someone?’ Gently came alert.
    ‘Yes, Sybil . . . Tremaine, that’s the name. She lost her job, but it didn’t matter. Her family have money and she married well. But Clytie was funny, George, that’s the point. I’m sure poor Johnny went through hell. He was silly to marry her, but she was quite a good-looker, and she was rich, of course. But it wasn’t worth it.’
    ‘I’m sure poor Johnny is agreeing with you. Who did Sybil Tremaine marry?’
    ‘What . . . ? Just a minute, George, let me listen. I think it’s Geoffrey coming out . . .’
    ‘Was it a Fletcher Bannister?’
    ‘Yes, that’s right. He was killed in a road smash, remember? George, I must hang up . . . and George, thank you! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’
    Her phone descended; but not before Gently had heard Geoffrey’s interrogative bass off-stage.
    After the call he sat some minutes still exchanging glances with the pike. So the Fazakerly–Bannister relation went back further than its blossoming at Carlyle Court! Around twenty years ago it must have begun, in that select school near Taunton, which he had once visited with Geoffrey and Bridget to watch their niece receive her prizes. And La Bannister had been a teacher there (yes, that sorted with her bearing!), a young graduate, as she must have been, from one of the senior universities; and Clytie, Clytemnestra, her maiden-name unknown, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen