Gently Sahib by Alan Hunter Read Free Book Online

scowling as he got into a car. Shirley Banks had posed brassily for the cameraman.
    ‘What about this one with the little moustache . . . ?’
    ‘Aren’t I telling you? I don’t know them.’
    ‘Give him a topee with a press pass stuck in it . . . sunglasses . . . a linen jacket . . .’
    ‘No!’
    ‘You never met him?’
    ‘If I did I don’t remember.’
    ‘Kenya . . . 1953 . . . ?’
    ‘Who says I did?’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘It’s Shimpling, of course,’ Gently said. ‘I think you must have run across him. He was living here for eighteen months. He’d perhaps want to chat about Kenya . . .’
    Groton shoved the photographs back at Gently.
    ‘Look, I’ve had enough of this palava! If you’ve nothing better to do, get to hell off my farm.’
    Gently nodded.
    ‘I’ll want to talk to your men.’
    ‘Then ruddy talk to them – and get out!’
    Gently nodded again, didn’t say anything.
    Groton snatched up his gun and slammed away across the compound.
    Perkins came forward.
    ‘May I see those photographs . . . ?’
    Dutt was closing his notebook and grinning.
    Where Groton had gone there was a sudden scuffling and snarling, then a chilling, high-pitched whine.
    Perkins said: ‘This fellow here, just getting into the car . . .’
    He made his face of misery.
    ‘I think I know him,’ he said.

CHAPTER FIVE
    B UT THEY GOT little out of the two countrymen who assisted Groton with his animals. They were elderly men who probably found mucking-out cages an easier task than hedging and ditching.
    ‘Don’t ask us how that varmint got out . . . we never had a lot to do with him. Mr Groton, he sees to the big ’uns. You wouldn’t catch us going in there like he do . . .’
    Two easy-going men with placid eyes, strangely similar in feature, reflecting, as though they were mirrors, the sunny fields to which they belonged. Jimma Cook and Harbut Reeves. Growing old with the greenness of country things.
    ‘Do you remember when you left that night?’
    Gently had found them wheeling in litter. Now they stood around in the shade of an elder tree from which the sun drew a pungent odour.
    ‘Ha’past five is our time, less there’s anything want doing. Mr Groton’s a turn nut but he isn’t a bad man to work for.’
    ‘Did anything special happen that day?’
    ‘I don’t recall . . . what do you say, Jimma?’
    ‘Not unless he was fussin’ a bit about getting away to his meeting.’
    ‘How was he fussing?’
    ‘Well, you know. He was a bit niggly to get them all fed.’
    ‘Who fed the tiger?’
    ‘Blast, we didn’t. We never liked getting too close to that.’
    ‘Was the tiger fed that day?’
    ‘I s’pose it was . . . don’t you, Harbut?’
    ‘He fed it in the morning, I know. I watched him. I was kept too busy in the afternune . . .’
    What shone through it all, unexpectedly, was a sort of affection for Groton; he was just the biggest and most intriguing of the animals on the farm. With them, he might have dropped from another planet, so inconceivable was his origin. Jimma and Harbut viewed him uncritically – a rum nut, but not necessarily a bad ’un.
    ‘Did Jimma’s missus go home with you two?’
    ‘No, she’s away at ha’past three. She get his dinner and see to things – we have our dinner in the kitchen with him.’
    ‘Does he have many visitors?’
    ‘No, not him. He don’t like people round the farm. And another thing hangs to it, what’s more – there’s not a lot of people want to come round here.’
    ‘But he has some visitors?’
    ‘Ah, now and then.’
    ‘Such as . . . ?’
    ‘Customers. He’ll have them in.’
    ‘Doesn’t he have any friends here?’
    ‘Not very often.’
    ‘Just take a look at these photographs.’
    They looked at the photographs, as at all else, with an unhurried contemplation; but photographs were not of their world and they returned them at last without comment.
    Harbut remembered a visitor who had looked at the tiger, it may have