Gently through the Mill csg-5

by Alan Hunter

  ‘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.’

  ‘Flip
ping “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.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  So, in effect, it was only the beginning of a case: a case which sent the Fraud Squad delving back twenty-five years. By the time they had finished their reports covered several hundred typewritten sheets, with no prospect whatever of a conviction at the end of it.

  But a portrait emerged from their onerous labour, a portrait somehow pathetic as well as sinister. George William Palmer, alias Geoffrey Wallace Pershore, seemed a character belonging to another era.

  He was the son of a chauffeur in a small town in Somerset, they had elicited that through Somerset House. By an odd coincidence he had been born on 18th February, 1902; the coincidence being that on that day Thomas Peterson Goudie, whose practices on the Bank of Liverpool might have furnished Palmer with a blueprint, was brought to trial in the Central Criminal Court.

  His mother died when he was five. His father — could this have been quite irrelevant? — was in the employ of a rich glove-manufacturer who was a leading citizen and had been mayor of the town in 1909. When Palmer was ten his father was sacked, apparently unjustly, though the chauffeur had immediately got another situation with the widow of a coal-merchant. With her assistance, Palmer was sent to the local grammar school, and by her good graces he was received into the employ of the City and Western Bank at Bristol when his schooldays were ended.

  There, for ten years, he was a model employee.

  ‘He was punctual and efficient’ — so ran a statement — ‘and thoroughly reliable in all his duties. He had a somewhat negative character and appeared to be rather lonely. He seemed to lack initiative and personal ambition.’

  Are bank managers among the world’s keenest observers?

  ‘Blimey, I knew Palmer!’ — this was from another source. ‘Always saw him at Bath and the meetings round that way. Quiet sort of a cove, though he dressed up to the nines. Many’s the fiver I’ve took off him on a sure thing what come unstuck.’

  And from a respectable publican’s wife with five grown-up children: ‘He was always such a toff… that was before I met Albert, mind you!’

  So there had been two sides to Palmer in those distant days. There was the official face, so to speak, and the racecourse dandy. And like Goudie before him, he found that one did not adequately support the other, and like Goudie again, it occurred to him that certain loopholes existed…

  ‘The earliest discrepancy occurs on 23rd May, 1930. A cheque debited to Henry Askew, of the Bristol shipowning company, is shown as cleared in the A-D clearance book. The journal is ticked to indicate that the account was posted, but in fact it was never entered in the ledger nor the cheque filed.’

  It was Goudie all over again, using the tried and trusted method. Askew, the shipping magnate, had taken the place of Hudson, the soap millionaire. At the weekly audit a Mr Brownlow was shown to be a hundred pounds below his real wealth, but the matter was generously readjusted on the next day after…

  ‘For nine months there is no record of further discrepancies.’

  This was where Goudie and Palmer parted company. Racing dominated the Scot and drove him from indiscretion to indiscretion, but Palmer, once out of his jam, took care never to get into another one. Quite other ideas had been occurring to the chauffeur’s son… from now on, he was going to be nobody’s mug!

  ‘On 15th March, 1931 a cheque drawn for two thousand pounds in favour of a “D. S. Lane” is shown as cleared and posted, but was not entered in the ledger or filed.’

  How that same D. S. Lane was going to bedevil the Fraud Squad investigators through acres of dusty bank-sheets!

  ‘On 30th March a similar sum, and thereafter until the end of the financial year in April 1932…’

  Palmer’s procedure was simple. It followed the classic line at all points. His current account with the bank supplied him with their cheques, and as the A-D ledger clerk he was painfully familiar with Askew’s signature. Then, when the forged cheques came back, they disappeared conveniently down the staff WC…

  ‘By 10th June, 1934 there was a deficit of exactly two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’
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  The danger was, as with Goudie, that some accident might involve the journal and the ledger being compared; but once more fortune seemed to be favouring the bold. As for the audits, they could be got round, though the procedure was growing increasingly complex.

  ‘From that date until his resignation took effect in August Palmer seems to have ceased his operations.’

  Always a tidy man, he had wound up his scheme on arriving at a round figure.

  ‘The interval appears to have been spent in the manipulations of his assets, which were dispersed in a number of accounts at various banks. These we believe to have been redeposited, probably in London, but a very full enquiry has failed to elicit…’

  Palmer, in fact, had successfully covered his tracks, and it remained for him gracefully to disappear from Bristol. His resignation was accepted. He was given excellent references. On 17th August, 1934 he departed on the London express, having just, and for the last time, carried his accounts through the weekly audit.

  Six days later the storm broke.

  And Palmer, with a quarter of a million pounds, had vanished into the blue.

  At that time a sergeant and only recently attached to the Yard, Gently could remember the excitement and clamour of those humid August days. A friend of his, Tebbut, belonged to the Fraud Squad, and he recalled the young man’s enthusiasm slowly evaporating into depression — coupled, perhaps, with some grudging admiration for Palmer’s magnificent effrontery. At first they were going to get him inside the week — nobody got away with that sort of thing! Then, possibly, it would take a little longer, since by that time it was obvious that chummy had got abroad…

  And now, finally, twenty-odd years after, it was Gently who was going to fill up the picture… the picture of a Palmer suffering a sea-change in Africa, and turning up, as Pershore, to become a leading citizen in another small town.

  Had he really been surprised, once, that Pershore drove the Bentley himself?

  ‘I suppose he felt at home here.’

  Superintendent Press wanted to talk endlessly about the case. He kept ordering cups of coffee and having to make journeys down the corridor. Each time he came back quickly, as though fearing that Gently would have taken the opportunity to escape.