Alan Hunter - Gently through the Mill

‘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.