Landed Gently

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‘ Come in, Dutt.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘Grab yourself one of Mrs Jarvis’s mince pies and have a warm by the fire.’

‘Don’t mind if I do, sir. It’s perishing cold enough for brass monkeys outside.’

Gratefully the cockney sergeant tugged off his gauntlets and spread his numbed hands before the blaze. There was always a good fire in Gently’s room, he remembered; his senior had picked himself a jewel among landladies. It wasn’t all bunce, being a family man…

Down below the frosty dusk of a December afternoon was settling in the quiet Finchley road. Opposite Gently’s rooms the trees of a public garden made a gloomy and forbidding mass, and the streetlights, old-fashioned and inadequate, seemed to withdraw inside their tear-shaped globes. Another dose of fog on the way, no doubt. Up here you didn’t notice it so much, but as soon as you got down to St John’s Wood or a bit further in that direction… Dutt shivered and sank his teeth into one of the still hot mince pies.

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