Alan Hunter - Gently Go Man

‘You keep quiet, you bastard,’ Leach snapped.

‘You better look in that coffee machine,’ the navvy said.

Leach came off the stool in a whirlwind of fists. Gently caught him, heaved, sent him crashing among the tables. He went to the coffee machine, the lid of which was awry. He looked inside. In the bubbling black coffee floated a green-covered notebook. He fished it out with a fork.

‘Blimey!’ said the navvy, looking at Leach.

‘Nice work,’ Gently said. ‘We could use your sort in the Force.’

He separated some pages of the sodden notebook. It contained dates, figures, and some notes of money. And on the inside of the cover appeared a telephone number with a London code prefixed to it.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a little careless, Joe.’

Leach kept sitting on the floor. He said a number of things that were not nice.

Gently hung on at Castlebridge while the local police were in action, but neither Leach nor the blonde seemed inclined to be more helpful. Two other counter assistants arrived at the milk bar during the morning, but on interrogation it was soon apparent that they knew nothing of the trade in reefers. A considerable haul was made in the cellar. Leach had concealed his store under the planking of the dais. It consisted of fifteen sauce-bottle cartons each containing a thousand reefers, while another three thousand were found packed in the boxes of chocolates.

The local inspector, Cartwright, was dubiously cordial towards Gently, at times was plainly miffed by this discovery in his area. When he elicited that Gently had wasted no time in talking to the Yard about the matter he became respectfully frigid and held himself at a distance.

Gently’s call had been to Pagram, his opposite number in the Central Office, giving him the telephone number he had found in Leach’s notebook.

‘Is this helping your case?’ Pagram had asked him.

Gently didn’t know himself. ‘If it takes you Bethnal way,’ he’d said, ‘I shall like to know about that. A lot of the overspill population has come to Latchford from Bethnal. You know we’ve got Sid Bixley here. Keep his name where you can see it.’

Pagram’d chuckled. ‘Is he your bunnie?’

‘I’m interested,’ Gently had said. ‘He’s got an alibi that seems to cover him, but it’s only sixty per cent proof.’

The trouble was there was no way of bringing Bixley’s alibi to proof. That he’d left the milk bar fifteen minutes after Lister had been established by fairly reliable witnesses. Some Castlebridge acquaintances who knew them both had seen Lister leaving early, they’d invited him to have one for the road and had been surprised by his abrupt refusal. Then fifteen minutes had elapsed while they drank that last shake, and when they left they had been accompanied by Bixley and Anne Wicks. In between Elton had left. He’d been seen leaving soon after Lister. Yet it was possible that this order had been changed over the twenty or so miles to the scene of the crash. Lister might have ridden the first part slowly, Elton might have lost some time, say, at Oldmarket. The alibi was a good one but it didn’t completely exclude Bixley.

In a quiet corner of the milk bar Gently had interrogated the pensioner. His name was Edwin Jukes. He badly wanted to be helpful. He recounted carefully how he’d met the ‘young man’ as he was skirting along the car park, and how he’d been saluted as ‘Dad’ and offered the ten shillings to fetch the chocolates.

‘How old would this young man be?’ Gently asked.

‘That I couldn’t say,’ Jukes quavered.

‘Twenty? Thirty?’ Gently suggested.

‘Oh, he was a youngster all right,’ Jukes said.

‘What colour were his hair and eyes?’ asked Gently.

‘Well,’ Jukes said, ‘he was wearing a hat thing. I didn’t notice his eyes. I don’t see very grand. I’m nigh on eighty if I live to see Christmas.’

‘Was he tall?’ Gently asked.

‘He was taller than I am,’ Jukes said. ‘And I’m five foot seven, if that’s any help.’

‘Did he speak like a local boy?’

Jukes was baffled by that one. ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘say he did, nor I can’t say he didn’t.’

He was able however to confirm Gently’s impression that the youth was dressed all in black: black helmet, black leathers, black boots, and black gloves. He’d produced the envelope from a breast pocket without removing the gloves and had promised to pay the ten shillings when Jukes returned with the chocolates. The person he wished to avoid, he said, was the blonde at the counter.

‘There’s nothing else at all you can tell me about him?’ Gently asked.

‘Why yes,’ said Jukes. ‘He was a very familiar young man.’

‘You mean you’ve seen him before?’ Gently asked. ‘Oh, no, no,’ Jukes said. ‘But he called me Dad, and I’m not partial to that.’

Gently had lunch at the Copper Kettle, then called back at the Castlebridge H.Q., but the prints on the envelope, which he’d asked to have processed, were only those of Jukes and the blonde. Inspector Cartwright was obsequious.

‘I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll have better luck with the Yard.’

‘Yeah,’ Gently said. ‘And thanks.’

After lunch it had turned cloudy. He was stuck with traffic as far as Oldmarket. An R.A.F. trailer carrying a bomber fuselage was holding his line of traffic in check. At the top of Oldmarket High it turned right and brought everything to a standstill, spreading itself in little jerks till it was clear across both lanes. Past Oldmarket things improved and he was able to cruise in the sixes. People were still at lunch, maybe, they weren’t yet cluttering up the roads. He was beyond Barford Mills and watching for a sight of the Gallows Tree when he first noticed in his mirror the two motorcycles behind him.

Side by side they were riding, around a quarter of a mile behind him, linked together so closely that for a moment he took them for a small car. He watched them corner. It was a precision movement, the two bikes leaning over in concert. And even at the distance of a quarter of a mile he could see that the riders were clad in black.

He gave the 75 some gas, let her press up into the eights. For a while he lost his twin pursuers behind a truck and a double bend. Then he saw them again, closing in slightly, cutting the distance by a hundred yards. They settled down at that distance. They were obviously stalking him.

Gently shrugged, kept the 75 skimming along at eight and a half. They could chase him if they wanted to, but there was no percentage in that. It would take more than motorcyclists to stop him, if they had any such intention, and on a frequented main road it would be foolish to attempt it in any case. All the same he was very curious about those two black-leathered riders. He found himself wishing he was in a squad car with radio contact with the local patrols.

The Gallows Tree rose on his left and he crested the ridge into Five Mile Drove. The road lay dully stretching ahead under the grey cloak of October wrack. There was little on it. He pressed the 75 harder. She began to labour at the top of her compass. With the slope assisting she drifted into the nines and held it there, several short of the century. He glanced in his mirror. They were still coming. More, they were closing the distance again. They were bettering his speed by a sizable margin, ten, maybe fifteen miles an hour. And this time they weren’t settling behind him: they were coming up to pass.

He eased the 75 slightly to give himself a margin of acceleration, watched them leaping now towards him, their handlebars pretty well touching. They wore goggles and black scarves which covered the bottom halves of their faces, their bikes appeared to be sheeted in some way: he could see the black plastic flapping. And still they came, straight behind him, making no move to pull out. It was as though they intended to ride flush into the rear of the 75.