‘No, sir. It ain’t been like our other jobs, really.’
Gently took careful aim with his screwed-up peppermint cream bag and dropped it neatly on the barge-skipper’s peaked cap.
‘Well, Dutt, it was the donkeys.’
‘The donkeys, sir?’ queried Dutt.
Gently nodded and raised his hand in salute to the barge-skipper. ‘They’ve done away with them, Dutt. There isn’t one on the beach. If you’d known Starmouth when I knew Starmouth it would make you feel older … but something like that goes on all the time, doesn’t it?’
About the Author
Alan Hunter was born in Hoveton, Norfolk in 1922. He left school at the age of fourteen to work on his father’s farm, spending his spare time sailing on the Norfolk Broads and writing nature notes for the Eastern Evening News. He also wrote poetry, some of which was published while he was in the RAF during the Second World War. By 1950, he was running his own bookshop in Norwich and in 1955, the first of what would become a series of forty-six George Gently novels was published. He died in 2005, aged eighty-two.
The Inspector George Gently series
Gently Does It
Gently by the Shore
Gently Down the Stream
Landed Gently
Gently Through the Mill
Gently in the Sun
Copyright
3 The Lanchesters
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This paperback edition published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010
Copyright Alan Hunter 1956, 2010
The right of Alan Hunter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–84901–787–9