Alan Hunter - Gently With the Painters

‘First we must get them away from here — and likewise the cars.’

‘We didn’t ought to shift them…’

‘Suppose that wreck goes up!’

‘Yeah, I see what you mean… right. We’ll use that chunk of wing for a stretcher.’

At a safer distance of seventy yards they parked the two Wolseleys to make a screen, and behind it, assisted by a drooping Stephens, Hansom strapped and bandaged Johnson ’s leg. Before commencing he gave the estate agent a jab from a morphia ampoule, taking care to find the label and to tie it to his patient. It was really a revelation to watch the Chief Inspector at work — he was displaying a side of his surly nature which had rarely come uppermost.

‘That’ll fix you, sonny, till we can get you to a hospital.’

Johnson managed to grin at him from under his immense moustache.

‘But Anne… what about…?’ His eyes flickered glazedly to the limp figure.

‘Don’t worry about her. She was only knocked out cold.’

Just then, when they had given up expecting it to happen; a sudden woof of flame sprang up from the wreckage; in moments it had turned into a roaring, wolfish pillar, and a great jet of black smoke puffed into the sky above it. There was nothing they could do — their car extinguishers were futile. One might as well have tackled it with a glass of water. Stephens, back in his car, was trying to raise Fosterham, their own control being now out of range.

Miss Butters stirred and her eyes fell open, vacantly; then, at the snarling sound of the flames, they jumped wide in fear. Johnson’s lids were closed and he was murmuring thickly to himself:

‘… Christ… Christ… I wasn’t meant to die that way…’

Stephens eventually contacted the control at Lynton, but they phoned through to Fosterham as being the nearest to Rawton Aerodrome. Some half an hour later quite a cavalcade appeared, its component vehicles rocking and pitching as they negotiated the frightful surface. First came two mounted police, who had been acting as pathfinders, and now fanned out impatiently as they came to the scene of the crash. They were followed by a police car and a bobbing white ambulance, and finally by an RAF fire tender, hastily summoned from the nearest camp.

The latter drove across to the wreck and began to engulf it in white foam, though there was little now left of it except the engine and bearers. From the ambulance jumped down a pair of overalled attendants. They carried a rolled-up stretcher which they silently unbuckled.

‘Inspector Vincent, County Police… pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.’

All of a sudden the place seemed to be alive with awkward policemen. They had really nothing to do except to stand about watching — only the ambulancemen and the fire tender had jobs to keep them busy.

Anne Butters, though pale and shaken, seemed little the worse for her experience. She drank coffee from somebody ’s flask but didn’t stray far from Johnson’s side.

‘He’ll be all right… his leg is all right…?’

She was putting a brave, a correct ‘county’ face on it; one could almost imagine that this was a hunting mishap, and that the Master would shortly ride up to make inquiries. With Gently she would have nothing whatever to do. She ignored him with the ferocious disdain of ‘county’ protocol. Hansom, too, was cold-shouldered, though oddly enough, not Stephens; in reality she was near a breakdown, and would have burst into tears if they had turned their backs.

‘That’s a nasty bump on your forehead, miss…’

‘It’s all right, I tell you! They’ve put some stuff on it.’

‘Well, we’ll give you a run over when we get you to the hospital …’

‘No, I’m all right! It’s Derek… it’s Derek…’

Here she had to break off and bite her lips together, but immediately she turned fiercely on the hovering Stephens:

‘Now, I suppose, they’re going to charge Derek with something or other!’

Stephens blushed and mumbled confusedly, but she didn’t wait to hear his reply.

Gently rapidly explained the situation to Vincent; he didn’t want to be delayed when the ambulance set off. In the name of mercy he had refrained from stopping Hansom using the morphia, but there were crucial questions of which he wanted the answers from Johnson. He grabbed one of the attendants.

‘They’re not to dope him before I’ve talked to him… you’ve seen that label — he shouldn’t need any more for a bit.’

The attendant shrugged. ‘I can’t promise you anything, sir. You’ll have to come to the hospital and talk to them there.’

This time he drove himself, in Stephens’s Wolseley. Hansom, who hadn’t been saying much, followed erratically in their rear. Stephens was also rather quiet, but there was nothing surprising in that: his exploit in stopping Johnson must have given him plenty to think about.

‘That was a damn silly thing to do…!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Stephens drooped his head. Gently had no need to specify the subject of his remark.

‘There’ll be times enough to play the hero without your cooking any up — suppose the fellow had got away, how far do you think he could have gone?’

‘Well, sir, considering his known abilities-’

‘Considering my foot! He might have got to the Continent, or perhaps to Eire. He’s without professional contacts, and he was tagging a woman along with him — and we could have followed him with radar — maybe chivvied him down with fighters.

‘Yet you go and risk your neck in a bit of Dick Barton foolery — risked the life of the girl, too, not to mention the ratepayers’ property!’

‘I didn’t mean to smash him, sir.’

‘What the devil else could you have done?’

‘I just wanted to block his take-off… then… well, it all happened so fast.’

‘Huh!’ Gently’s grunt was in the Hansom tradition, but he could easily visualize what had taken place. Petrified by the oncoming plane, Stephens had simply hung on and prayed: his reflexes had been paralysed by the speed of what had happened. With his foot hard down he had rushed fascinated towards disaster…

‘You’re lucky that Johnson didn’t lose his head, too.’

‘Yes, sir, I realize that. I think he was expecting me to pull out.’

‘And those shots were at your tyres?’

‘Yes, sir. They weren’t at me. He must have guessed what I intended to do, and tried to put my car out of action.’

From the way his young colleague spoke it was apparent that Johnson had won an admirer. The estate agent was no longer a middle-aged curio, a fossilized relic of some pre-atomic war. He had displayed his ‘known abilities’ in a way that was unforgettable, and Stephens, who had found himself wanting, was a little guiltily impressed.

‘Anyway, it took guts…’ Gently purposely left that vague; but he noticed that Stephens tilted his chin up and stole a glance towards his senior.

‘Car ex-two calling car ex-seven…’

In his driving mirror he could see Hansom, the microphone in his hand.

‘What do you know about Johnson… are we going to make the pinch?’

Coming from Hansom, this surely had to be admiration too!

‘Car ex-seven calling car ex-two… considering all the circumstances, what do you recommend?’

‘Calling car ex-seven… you’d better pinch him, I suppose, though if the evidence wasn’t so one-track… damnation, you’ve got to pinch him!’

Even Hansom had his moments of intuition, it seemed, when the hard grain of logic met the steel edge of conviction. They were few and they were tardy, but he was not completely without them: against his settled inclination, he occasionally had a hunch…

‘Calling car ex-seven… he pulled that kite over deliberately. I had a look at the runway — it’s got a good surface just there.’