The Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

it, muttering to himself. “Some people,” he was saying. “Some people . . . !”’
    Small in stature, and with a face as brown and wrinkled as a prune, Mrs Gannet had seated herself on the sofa at Chivers’s invitation and regarded them both with a steady, birdlike stare. Unprompted, she had given them a brief description of her late employer.
    â€˜He was a nice gentleman, very quiet, very polite. But he couldn’t be doing with fuss. He hated being bothered. Fishing was what he liked best, I soon learned that. The first thing I’d do when I arrived was fix him his lunch – a sandwich, say, or a cold sausage with a piece of cheese – and he’d take it with him when he went off; and either I’d see him when he got back or I wouldn’t, depending on how late he stayed out.’
    Asked whether there’d been any change in Gibson’s behaviour prior to his death, she had replied in the negative. But when Billy, remembering what Edward Gibson had told them, asked if she thought her employer had had something on his mind, she had surprised both detectives by giving the question what appeared to be long and serious thought.
    â€˜He did have that visitor,’ she had ventured, finally.
    â€˜What visitor?’ Chivers had been the quicker with his question.
    â€˜Don’t know who it was.’ Edna Gannet had shrugged. ‘I never did see. But I heard the front door slam and Mr Gibson’s footsteps when he walked back from the hall to his study. He was going on about something, talking to himself. In a rare state, he was.’
    Further questions had elicited a more coherent account of the episode, which, it turned out, had occurred the previous week – on the Tuesday, Mrs Gannet thought it was. She had arrived at the cottage at her usual hour, which was midday, but via the backyard and the kitchen door, having looked in on a friend who was ailing and whose own cottage lay on the other side of a small orchard at the back of Gibson’s house. As she had entered she had heard the front door slam and her employerreturning to his study. Shortly afterwards, having also heard his subdued mutterings and overcome with curiosity, she had knocked on the door on the pretext of asking him what he wanted for his lunch and had found him sitting at his desk ‘with a look on his face that’d turn milk sour’.
    Later, when she’d returned with the Spam sandwich he’d requested wrapped in greaseproof paper, she had found him busy at the desk writing a letter. He had barely looked up, she said.
    â€˜Yes, but how do you know he’d had a visitor?’ Billy had asked.
    â€˜By the chair, of course.’ To Edna Gannet it had been obvious. ‘See, he had this stamp collection and he kept it on a table in the corner with a chair next to it, so he could sit down there when he wanted to. But the chair had been moved: it was standing in front of the desk, so he must have had a visitor.’ Her glance had been triumphant. ‘Anyway, how did the front door come to slam, and who else could he have been talking about, muttering that way? “Some people . . . some people . . . ”’
    Before leaving, the two detectives had looked in at the study where Edward Gibson was at work, the desk in front of him awash with files and papers, to ask him if his brother had mentioned being upset by a visitor, when they had spoken on the phone.
    â€˜It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ he had told them. ‘Perhaps that was what he wanted to talk to me about.’
    â€˜Mrs Gannet saw him writing a letter afterwards.’ Looking around, Billy had noted the position of the chair she had mentioned. It had been returned to its proper place beside a table in the corner, where a pile of stamp albums lay. On the wall above was a photograph of a young man in military uniform and it took Billy a moment or two before he recognized Oswald