Later on, the super had resigned himself to the calamity which had fallen jointly on himself and Lynton. After Blacker went he sat a long time brooding darkly over his two-tone desk.
Not that Blacker, though he had talked, had proved entirely satisfactory. His evidence was of the type which a defence counsel such as Pershore could brief would tear into fine shreds.
‘There was a car standing in Cosford Road which looked like a Bentley… no, it wasn’t stood under a light, nor I couldn’t see the colour…
‘Of course I saw him go down the yard… looked familiar, I thought
… the little bloke, too… I didn’t hear any struggle.
‘Then I tumbled to it, when I heard whose the money was. That was Pershore all right, and I don’t mind swearing to it.
‘If I put it to them straight, are you going to get me off the other…?’
Blacker had done some brooding of his own, sitting three hours in a cell with the smell of new cement in his nostrils.
But it was testimony that convinced the super, however vulnerable it might be to forensic corrosives. Gently’s reconstruction was being corroborated every time the foreman opened his mouth. And behind it all loomed Roscoe, the man no counsel could shrug aside.
‘Are you suggesting we make the arrest?’
He was trying to keep the bitterness out of his tone. The fish-and-chip saloon had departed for pastures new, and a clean, bright spring moon was climbing over the Georgian roofs and chimneys. Once or twice, from high overhead, they had distinctly heard the piping calls of migrant birds coming in from the sea.
‘No… not yet. The case isn’t foolproof.’
‘You want to dig up his past?’
‘Most of all I want Roscoe.’
‘Aren’t we doing all we can about him?’
‘We’ll have to take a risk.’
The super flashed a look at Gently, not quite understanding him. The man from the Central Office wore a stubborn expression which Dutt could have interpreted. His pipe, unlighted, stuck out of his mouth at an angle.
‘Tomorrow I’d like Blacker remanded on that charge, but I don’t want the money referred to. Have a word with the magistrate — it shouldn’t be difficult. Substitute “stolen property” or something like that.
‘And naturally, you’ll fob off the coroner about Ames.’
‘The press will be awkward.’
‘Try and clamp down on them! They’ll usually cooperate if it’s in a good cause. Then I’d like Inspector Griffin to keep investigating that robbery — any sort of play-acting to keep Pershore happy.
‘If he can get his prints we’ll send them up to Records, and perhaps you’ve got a man who can do some quiet digging. That Upcher deal will bear looking into — it should hardly fit Pershore’s story as neatly as he pretends it does.’
‘And meanwhile, you think that Roscoe…?’
‘He’ll get in touch with Pershore somehow.’
‘We could check his mail and tap the phone.’
Gently shook his head.
‘Look at it from Roscoe’s angle — and he was the brains of the bunch. If he talks he’s admitting blackmail. If he doesn’t we have to prove it. And besides admitting blackmail, he’ll be kissing goodbye to a gold mine.
‘Unless we can catch the pair of them red-handed, we shan’t have the benefit of Roscoe’s evidence.’
‘But Pershore will try to kill Roscoe!’
‘That’s our trump card — and we’ve got to play it.’
The super looked grave.
‘It’s a terrible risk, Gently…’
‘Of course, I shall be prepared to take full responsibility.’
He got to his feet, the cold pipe still lolling from the corner of his mouth. How could he tell them that he could see the whole pattern of it, as surely as though even now it was written up in a report?
‘You don’t have to worry… just keep Pershore from being suspicious. You’ll find it’ll work out. It isn’t the first time…’
‘If he succeeds in killing Roscoe-’
‘We could probably establish method! Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be turning in.’
The super did mind, but he could think of nothing to advance against it. He watched Gently go in helpless silence. When the door closed behind the bulky back his eyes met those of Griffin’s. Suddenly, as though both men were thinking the same thought, each of them shrugged his shoulders.
The car Gently had was the super’s Humber, and it was warranted to do better than a hundred m.p.h. Since Prideaux Manor lay at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was a simple matter to cover it by concealing the Humber in a side-turn at a safe distance.
Twice, during the morning, he and Dutt had seen Griffin go by in a police Wolseley. Agreeable to instructions, the Lynton inspector was doing his best to make a show of proceeding with his investigation. As he returned from his second journey he slowed and pulled into the side-turning.
‘It could be this afternoon — he says he’s got some business to see to.’
‘Business that would take him out?’
‘He didn’t say, and I thought I’d better not ask him. This morning at a quarter past eleven he had a telephone conversation, but he ordered me out of the study, so I don’t know who it was with.’
‘You’re doing a good job.’
Griffin coloured and let in his clutch.
It was an almost perfect day following the miserable one which preceded it. Gently had been prevailed on to remove his jacket, and sat smoking in his shirtsleeves with the door of the Humber ajar. The sky, at first washed clear, was now chequered with small, fleecy clouds. In the plantation which flanked the lane a blackbird was singing; larks rose continuously from the field of young wheat beyond the hedge opposite.
‘What a day for a blinking picnic!’
Dutt, like all cockneys, had a note of mute poetry in his soul.
‘If I had the missus here… can’t you see the nippers rousing around in them trees?’
From the radio they had had a bulletin from headquarters which told them little enough. Upcher, the yacht-owner, had been contacted and given an account of his deal. The price demanded for his craft had been twelve thousand five hundred and not ten, as Pershore had claimed, but the difference could easily be explained as a hoped-for compromise for immediate cash.
Of Pershore’s past there was nothing to relate. After twenty meritorious years at Lynton the trail had vanished into unsubstantial rumour. Griffin had got his prints, and that might lead to something, but failing this it rested solely with Roscoe — a Roscoe picked up alive and communicative.
‘Do you reckon it will be this afternoon, sir?’
Gently knew it would, with the irrational conviction that at times came to him. In every case there was a point when his vision seemed to border on the uncanny. Some people called him lucky, but in fact it went further than that.
‘We might as well have our lunch.’
The St George had put them up a wicker basket of provisions. Undone, it displayed a truly old-fashioned lavishness: there was cold chicken and salad, apple turnover, biscuits, cheese, fruit, and four thermoses of hot coffee. ‘Between you and me, sir, I reckon this Roscoe won’t be such a mug as the other two charlies.’
‘No… but he’s up against a dangerous man.’
‘He could lay for him, sir, and maybe put a bullet in him.’
‘Not Roscoe, Dutt. He’s a professional through and through.’
‘All the same, he’s in a rum position.’
They ate in silence, the countryside about them seeming to drowse in its peacefulness. Nothing passed along their lane or the road leading to the Manor. An early sulphur-yellow butterfly, unsteady in the brilliant sun, was the only moving thing to come their way.
Gently glanced at his watch, which showed twenty minutes to two. If lunch at the Manor was at one, it shouldn’t be long before Pershore and the green Bentley…
He finished his coffee and screwed up the thermos. Just to test his intuition he would have the engine running! Dutt, taking the hint, packed the plates away in the basket. It was as though they had suddenly received a message that the quarry was on his way.
‘If he sees us do you think we can hold him, sir?’
Gently pulled the door shut with a grunted reply. If Griffin had played his part properly Pershore should have no suspicion; if he had, well, there were the patrol cars to reckon with!
It was ten minutes to two when the Bentley swept past the lane-end. Pershore, sitting relaxedly at the wheel, had no eyes for the Humber lying half hidden behind the bend. Gently gave him plenty of rope. The Bentley was not being driven fast. The road from Prideaux to West Lyng, where it joined the main Norchester road, was fairly open and passed few side-turnings.
‘Of course it might be like he says, sir, just a business trip or something.’
It might, of course… the chances were even.
‘He don’t seem in no hurry — hardly doing forty.’
Was Dutt deliberately setting out to be annoying?
At West Lyng Gently almost held his breath, waiting for Pershore to choose his direction. If it were left, the man was simply going into Lynton; he had, after all, plenty of business to see to there.
But Pershore turned right, swinging his big car round leisurely through a gap in the traffic. Wherever he was heading it was not for Lynton. Gently, breathing again, pressed harder on the accelerator. On the busy main road he needed to be closer to his game.
Shimmering under the spring sun, the dark surface extended ribbon-like across the rough heathland of West Northshire. For some miles there were no hedges, and the string of traffic ahead was firmly in view. Pershore made no effort to increase his pace. He seemed quite content to hold his niche between a Zephyr and a red-and-black Velox. If he had any idea that he was being followed, he was giving not the smallest indication of it.
‘Got any idea where his nibs is off to, sir?’
Dutt, as usual, was beginning to puzzle away at it.
‘I doubt whether it’s Norchester.’
‘More like the country, sir?’
‘It could be anywhere, and that’s the truth!’
Dutt pulled out a road map and began to frown over it. In his imagination Gently was already exploring the road ahead. Apart from odd villages the next place was Swardham, then East Cheapham, which was larger, and so to the city. All of them were equally likely or unlikely — you could get to any of them by rail from Ely.
Swardham was coming up now, a straggling, charming country town with a great flint-and-freestone church tower. The main road turned left across the top of a triangular plain, and then twisted downwards past a T-junction with traffic lights.
‘Gawd, we’re going to lose him!’
Gently sensed the danger and trod on the accelerator. The traffic lights blinked red but the road was clear, and the Humber soared through like an angry tiger. On the far side there was an S-bend ending in a murderous corner, and Gently, tempting providence, passed three vehicles while negotiating it. Then the road stretched away clear again up a long incline; once more they had the traffic ahead under surveillance.
‘He’s blinking gone and lost us, sir!’
It was woefully apparent. There was nothing now lying between the red-and-black car and the Zephyr.
‘He may have opened her out…’
Gently kept the Humber sailing, but at the top of the rise, from which a long stretch was visible, there was still no sign of the majestic green Bentley.
Viciously Gently braked and reversed into a fieldgate.
‘Get on to headquarters — tell them to put a net round Swardham!’
‘He didn’t turn into the town, sir…’
‘I know — which leaves two directions. Either he went south by that by-road we’ve passed or north at the T-junction — we take our pick!’
‘After the lights I never saw him again.’
‘We’ll take a chance and try the T-junction.’
Again he had to shoot the lights, this time creating no little chaos. A constable came running and waving his hands, but subsided into a breathless salute as he recognized the car.
The junction road led to Fosterham and contained very light traffic. Gently set his foot down and saw the speedometer needle straying over ninety. On either side flashed by stony fields reclaimed from heathy breckland; a plantation in the distance loomed a long time against the sky.
Then they came to a fork, right beside the plantation. The Fosterham road continued to the right, to the left a minor road extended to Castle Ashton.
‘Here — you over the hedge!’
The luck of good detectives was with him. A farm-worker had halted his team and drill to take a swig from a bottle of cold tea.
‘Have you seen a green Bentley go past this way?’
‘A big ole car-?’
‘Yes, that’d be it.’
‘Come by a coupla minutes ago — slowed to look at the signpost.’
‘Which way did it go?’
‘W’ up there to Ash’n Castle.’
The Humber ripped away in a flurry of gear-changes. Ahead the inevitable square church-tower rose proudly from a long, high ridge of land. On the left, surprising and spectral, stood a group of remains of some ecclesiastical building; opposite to them, appended to the ridge, brooded massive and bosky earthworks. Between the two lay the village, lifting embattled up the slope.
They crossed a stream which might have served as a moat and swung up through the houses of mellowed local brick. At the top was a flint gateway and beyond it the village green. Parked there, but empty, stood Pershore’s handsome car.
‘Where can I find the owner of this car?’
Here there were several informants, two of them women stood gossiping with their prams.
‘Didn’t he go up that way… towards the castle?’
‘That’s right, mister. That’s where you’ll find him.’
From the green a narrow lane led between a brick chapel and the wall of a private garden. Twisting over a bank, it plunged suddenly into the tree- and bush-choked castle ditch, some seventy feet deep, and could be seen fretting its way up the huge mound on the other side.
‘Quiet now — listen!’
Pershore couldn’t be very far ahead. At the most, he would just have had time to climb the earthwork, and might now be amongst the bushes and fragments of masonry which crowned it. Distantly, from further round the mound, came the bleating of tethered goats.
‘Follow me now — but keep it quiet!’
He went down the path half-walking, half-sliding. At the bottom it was curiously silent and airless, as though they had got to the bottom of a well. Going up the mound it was impossible not to make some noise. In places it was almost perpendicular, and one had to pull oneself along by the bushes and scrub.
Then, at the top, they were faced by the remains of a flint-rubble wall, with a fissure running through it just wide enough to scrape past. His head poking round it, Gently froze to a standstill. Either they were too early… or else they were too late!
From his vantage point he commanded the whole interior of the mound, a hollow amphitheatre sunk some thirty feet below the perimeter. To the south it fell away in a steep, bush-filled ravine, being protected at a lower level by outworks and the river. The wall which topped the perimeter was in places still substantial, and inside it ran a rough path a few feet in width. It was on this path that Pershore was standing only a short distance from the fissure; near him, but not too near, stood the elusive James Roscoe… a German Army-pattern Mauser sitting snugly in his hand.
‘You don’t have to look surprised, cock!’
Roscoe was a big man in his forties with a swarthy complexion and greasy dark-brown hair. He was wearing a green mixture Harris-tweed suit the jacket of which seemed tight across his shoulders.
‘Cor luvvus — what did you expect, after knocking off Punchy and Steinie? This is the way I trust you, matey, wiv the safety catch off and one up the spout! And if I let me finger slip it’s only taking bread from the hangman.’
He’d got the whip hand and he knew it, but he wasn’t going to let the knowledge betray him into an indiscretion.
‘Steinie, he was easy, wasn’t he? Never even took a razor wiv him, poor little bastard! Then there was Punchy, big but stupid — he could handle you, Punchy could!
‘But now it’s me, who’s big but not stupid, and what’s more, I’ve brought a little clincher wiv me. So this time it’s a deal, and you can thank your lucky stars — because if the bogeys ever gets me, matey, your number is up just as sure as Mick the Miller.
‘You’re not going to sit here stewing in lolly while Jimmy Roscoe rots in Wandsworth!’
‘There’s no need to be offensive, my man.’
It was almost a shock to hear Pershore being so coolly himself in such a situation. His back was turned to Gently, but his attitude was unmistakable; it was that of a leading citizen forced into distasteful conversation.
‘You’re no cleverer than your friends, as I think you’re going to find. And just be good enough to remember who it is you’re talking to.’
‘Who I’m flipping talking to!’
Roscoe sounded as though he couldn’t believe his ears.
‘That’s what I said. You’re talking to the next Mayor of Lynton. However smart you think you’re being, you’ll kindly bear that in mind.’
Was it shrewdness on Pershore’s part or couldn’t he really help it? Roscoe, his eyes narrowing, obviously thought the latter.
‘Oh, no you don’t, old cock!’
The Mauser prodded forward.
‘It’ll take a better man than you-’
‘Say “sir” when you speak to me.’
‘For your own good I’m telling you-’
‘I will have a proper respect!’
It was either madness or a naive form of cunning. Roscoe now was wavering, uncertain which to believe.
‘Cut it out, will you — let’s get down to business!’
‘First, my man, you will acknowledge who you’re doing it with.’
‘Get this straight, cocker, you’re not getting Jimmy Roscoe’s rag out. That flipping horse ain’t going to run here-’
‘Unless you cease to be offensive I shan’t hand you a penny.’
For all his sharpness, Roscoe was baffled. This was outside anything he had prepared himself to expect. As a tactical manoeuvre he could readily understand it, but the trouble was that Pershore had the veritable ring of conviction…
‘All right, then, old guv’nor, if that’s how you wants it-’
‘“Sir”, if you don’t mind.’
‘Flipping “sir”, then!’
‘And please don’t forget.’
Pershore visibly unbent a little. In his mind’s eye, Gently could see the complacency stealing over the mayor-elect’s heavy features.
Wasn’t it a blend of both, that pose… a mixture of childishness and cunning? Wasn’t puerility, perhaps, the key to the man’s strange make-up?
He had stayed a child…
‘Just because we have a transaction to make there is no need for you to presume upon it. This is simply a form of business like other forms of business. Our stations remain exactly the same as before.’
Their stations remained-! No wonder Roscoe was beginning to grin. The geezer was a screw loose, that’s what he was thinking. He’d croaked Steinie and then Punchy — was that the behaviour of a charlie with all his marbles? — and now, stowed in a corner, he was beginning to show his trouble.
Broadmoor was where he was heading… if he escaped the eight o’clock walk!
‘I think your price was fifty thousand pounds?’
Roscoe gulped. He had to play his part!
‘That’s right, old guvnor — sir, I mean to say! And I hopes you’ve got it safe and sound in that suitcase there.’
‘You will realize that I had some difficulty in obtaining that amount of money. Fortunately I am a stockbroker myself and was able to raise it without attracting attention. In twenty-pound notes…’
‘Here! I told you in fivers!’
‘They would have been too bulky, Mr Roscoe.’
‘You give me that suitcase!’
‘A twenty-pound note is, I assure you, perfectly current.’
Sedately, Pershore laid the suitcase on the path and stepped back to enable the other to examine it. Roscoe, still with the Mauser trained, dropped to a crouch and snapped the catches with his left hand. Something like sweat was glistening on Gently’s forehead…
‘But this here ain’t-!’
Roscoe got no further. Pershore was on him like a cat. With a nodule of flint he had held concealed in his hand, he was smashing incessantly at the bookmaker’s head. The gun crashed harmlessly and rolled smoking down the slope. Roscoe, dazed by a blow which had found him, was trying to cover up from the murderous attack.
‘This is how it’s done, my man!’
There was something frightening about Pershore’s terrible assurance.
‘It’s no use having a gun — this is the way I do them!’
In another moment he would have got the blow that counted past the bookmaker’s drooping defence.
‘Take him, Dutt!’
Gently hurled himself through the fissure. Dutt, following behind, rushed up to throw a strangling arm round the neck of the man his senior was grappling with. It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Pershore, choking and gasping, lay struggling with the handcuffs which had suddenly been clamped on his wrists. Roscoe, blood streaming from his head, was clutching at it and trying to stagger to his feet.
‘Who is this man?’
Mercilessly Gently stood over him.
‘He’s a bloody murderer-!’
‘But what’s his proper name?’
Roscoe dragged himself upright. The intervention had come none too soon. Not only was blood rippling down from head wounds but it was soaking through his jacket from gashes on his arms.
‘You got to help me-’
‘Who is this man?’
‘Get me to a sodding doctor!’
‘Just as soon as you answer my question.’
Dashing the blood from his eyes, Roscoe stood wavering for a second. Dutt thought he’d never seen a more ghastly-looking figure. Then the bookmaker spat with all his remaining strength, spat at Pershore, spat at the policemen.
‘He’s Palmer if you want to know… the joker what took the City and Western Bank!’
And before Gently could catch him he collapsed on the bloodied grass.