Gently in the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

scalding sand. Still that silent face was haunting him, charging every step with its presence. Hadn’t she come this way, perhaps, not much more than thirty-six hours ago? When the sand, now hot, was already cold, and the dew falling chill on the sere of the marram?
    He had propped the photograph against his mirror and kept his eyes on it while he was dressing. After reading Dyson’s report he had been certain that the face would tell him something. Several things might have happened. It depended upon the type of woman. Once you had settled that, then you could begin to see your way.
    Only the face had told him nothing of those things he wanted to know. The obvious thing was unimportant . Even Dyson could hardly have missed it.
    ‘There’s Mixer over there now.’
    They had got to the top of the hills. Below them, a steep slide, lay the silvery-fawn beach, the tiniest of combers sending white washes along its margin. The sea looked heavy and drunken with sun. Its dark acres were mottled with purple and green patches. At the tideline the children paddled and screamed, theirdumpy bodies showing through their sagging swimsuits . Higher up sat the parents, some of them beneath sunshades.
    ‘He’s watching us, you bet.’
    Could it even have been that passion …?
    ‘You see? He’s getting up.’
    Or the body, would that tell him?
    He turned impatiently in the direction which Dyson was indicating. One hadn’t had to ask the county man where his suspicions lay. Alfred Joseph Mixer – he was the candidate! The ‘company promoter’ with his cash and cockney accent: who, in all probability, had outsmarted Dyson.
    ‘He’s expecting us to tackle him.’
    Gently was only confirming impressions. In his twenty years with the Central Office he had met a lot of Mixers, and this one seemed to follow the general pattern. A biggish man of about forty with something of a stomach. Thinned hair, a large nose, and small, hard eyes. He had been sitting under a sunshade and was wearing shiny black bathing trunks. Now he was standing up apprehensively, twisting his sunglasses as he watched the three policemen.
    ‘Don’t you think perhaps?’
    ‘What makes you so sure he did it?’
    ‘The evidence … well … one forms an impression .’
    ‘He’s done time for embezzlement.’
    ‘There – I was certain!’
    ‘At the same time, there’s nothing about violence on his record.’
    Gently dug in his heels and went skidding down through the loose sand. At the moment he hadn’t got time for Mixer. A little higher up the beach he could see the boats and the fishermen, and above them, on the hill, somebody painting at an easel. Two days ago hadn’t she looked on this same scene?
    At this point the shore was very slightly convex, but one could see at least a mile of beach in either direction. At quarter-mile intervals pillboxes had been built, a few of which remained poised drunkenly above the beach. On the nearest one of these some youths were performing acrobatics.
    ‘What sort of fish do they catch?’
    In the shallows a child with tucked-up skirt was pushing a shrimp net and looking the picture of earnestness. ‘Soles … plaice … I don’t know.’
    Another, a little boy, was trying his best to fly a kite.
    They came up with the boats, still a centre of interest. The reporter and his colleague were in conversation with the fishermen. One of the latter was showing the photographer where the body had lain; another, a freckled-faced youngster, was sweating over an engine.
    ‘Any statement for us yet?’
    ‘It was probably a man who did it.’
    ‘You told us that before.’
    ‘It could have been a woman.’
    The reporter touched his photographer’s shoulder. It wasn’t often that one got a present like this! Gently, apparently unconscious of his picturesque qualities, continued his unhurried survey of the group of boats.
    Of the seven, six were gaily painted and one alone was white. This was the boat in which the freckled