Gently Go Man (14 page)

They cornered on a rise, went sweeping down a long straight. The block was just past the end of the straight. It was a very efficient block. The two cars were spread across the track, each bumper nested against a tree. The track was narrow and they more than filled it. Behind the cars stood their crews, watching.

Brewer stepped on the gas. They raced to close the gap on Deeming. He was trapped, he was slowing down. The men were running round to grab him. Brewer’s lips were bundled tight, he was set to ram if necessary. But Deeming kept riding straight, didn’t offer to break and double back.

Then his engine roared, he slanted right, dived headlong into the trees: slalomed crazily among the trunks of the tall, close-set pines. His rear wheel showered up dead pine needles, he was belting at full throttle. He jerked and twisted like a maddened animal, crashed through brushwood, reared back on the track. And then he was away, beyond the roadblock, shaking off a couple of pursuers. He cut his throttle, looked over his shoulder, made a mocking salute with five fingers.

The Wolseley skidded to a stop.

‘Get these cars out of the way!’ Gently shouted.

There was a rush for them and some awkward manœuvring before the block could be disentangled.
There was no room to pass: Gently switched cars, taking Brewer and Setters with him. Up the track Deeming sat on his bike, lit a cigarette, and grinningly waited.

They got away. So did Deeming: he performed a little victory roll. Brewer was pale and chewed his lip, made a hash of coming up through his gears.

‘Oughtn’t I to go after him?’ he muttered to Gently.

Gently shook his head. ‘It’s a waste of time. Hold your speed in reserve. You’ll never catch him in a straight run.’

Now only the support patrol waited ahead to try its luck with Deeming. If that failed, and he gained the road, they’d have to start planning afresh. Which way would he point if he reached the road? Away from Latchford, almost certainly. He would need to make for a town like Castlebridge, where he could lose himself in a maze of streets. Gently called control again.

‘Deeming’s got through the block,’ he told them. ‘We’re observing him, but we can’t catch him. I think he’ll make towards Castlebridge.’

‘Any instructions?’ control came back.

‘Yes,’ Gently said. ‘We’ll have to try another block. There’s a country house with park walls just this side of Oldmarket and I want the block at the Oldmarket end of the walls. From wall to wall, you understand? Don’t leave the ditches uncovered. We’ll have three or four cars behind him and should be able to stop him doubling.’

‘Willco,’ control said. ‘We’ll put Oldmarket on this one.’

From the back Setters rasped: ‘You think that’s going to get him?’

Gently grunted. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you have to go through the motions.’

The junction showed ahead, and there a fresh comedy was played. The support patrol saw Deeming, took off, drove steadily towards him. Brewer dutifully launched the Wolseley and the two cars rapidly
converged
on Deeming. Deeming feinted, sent the support car left, slid through right without raising his speed. Once more the track was blocked. For everyone except Deeming.

‘All right!’ Gently bellowed. ‘Don’t talk, just back out.’

The flustered driver of the support car lost his head, stalled his engine. He had to back a hundred yards to unbottle the other cars. It was ludicrous. Deeming might have been several miles on his way. Instead he sat jauntily watching from a position across the main road. If it was any comfort, he was pointed to Castlebridge. It didn’t seem much comfort.

‘Like you’ve got a good driver?’ he shouted to Gently. ‘You reckon he’ll stay with me up here? You better climb on the pillion, screw, you better waltz with Matilda!’

‘Give yourself up!’ Gently shouted.

‘Like I’m too valuable,’ Deeming replied. ‘But I’m sorry you can’t be here behind me. Do your best, screw. Keep close.’

He pushed off, smoothed his throttle, began to sail away fast. Brewer didn’t need telling. He was itching to let the Wolseley go. Gently sat deep in his seat, his eyes narrow, gone blank. Setters was leaning forward
between them. He was breathing like a bloodhound. Still Deeming was going away from them.

‘It’s no good, sir,’ Brewer clipped. ‘He must have twenty miles an hour on us.’

‘Keep at him,’ Gently snapped.

The speedometer needle was pushing three figures.

There was traffic on the road. Deeming didn’t care about traffic. He arrowed through it with little sways, kept near the centre of the road. Brewer had to notice the traffic. It pulled him down several times. Deeming got smaller and smaller ahead, a black atom of ferocious energy.

‘Christ, to lose him like this!’ Setters swore, dragging down on the seat backs. ‘Playing with us all that time, then getting away like this. I could kick myself for it, I could bash my head on the wall.’

‘Yes,’ Gently muttered. ‘We’ve lost him. He’s beaten us.’

‘He’ll turn off,’ Setters groaned. ‘There’s side-turns, plenty of them.’

‘He won’t turn off,’ Gently said. ‘He isn’t going as far as a side-turn.’

Setters chewed on it for a moment. They were hitting the slight incline to the ridge. Brewer was hanging on to three figures though his engine laboured and shook.

‘Come again with that?’ Setters said.

‘He’s going to hit the tree,’ Gently said. ‘That’s why he hasn’t bothered to ditch us. We’re going to be there to see it.’

‘Hell,’ Setters said. He stopped dragging, sank back on his seat. Brewer had heard what Gently said, his mouth thinned to a tight seam.

Setters came back, angling his face.

‘You’re serious about that?’ he said.

Gently nodded. ‘He’s going to do it. He’s had it in mind from the start.’

‘But crying hell!’ Setters said.

Gently said: ‘I had the preview. He showed me just what he was going to do. He wanted to make sure I understood it.’

‘Hell,’ Setters said a third time.

‘And we can’t stop him,’ Gently said. ‘There he goes. A free man. He’s beaten us all along the line.’

He was a long way off now, just a speck high up the road, weaving slightly and disappearing behind
crawling
, flashing cars. But the Gallows Tree was growing higher, was spreading its bare raven branches. The sky showed silver-white behind it, left it stark, hard, etched.

‘He doesn’t have to do it,’ Setters said hoarsely. ‘He’s clear away. He could dodge us.’

Gently didn’t say anything. Brewer kept murdering the engine.

‘Maybe there’s a case,’ Setters said. ‘He isn’t normal. You can’t call him normal.’

The tree stretched out massively, a dark,
upward-rising
torch.

It wasn’t sensational. It was as though someone had thrown a bag of sweets at the tree. The sweets scattered, a few large ones, but most of them small. Only there’d been a firework in the bag and it shot up a yellowish pillar of flame, and off the top of the pillar lifted black smoke, going up straight in the still air.

He’d been half a minute ahead of them, enough to
collect a jam of traffic. Brewer drove in hooting frenziedly, squealed the Wolseley to a stop. They jumped out, ran across. A white-faced man was using an extinguisher. Another was lugging at a riding-boot. It came away. He collapsed in a faint. The body was tangled with the frame of the bike, it was being burned. The tree was burning.

‘Get away, all of you!’ Gently ordered. ‘You can’t do any good here. Leave the rest of this to us – on your way, on your way!’

‘He was laughing,’ said the man with the extinguisher. ‘That’s my car … I saw him do it. I could see his teeth. He was laughing. You won’t believe me. But he was laughing.’

‘Drive on a bit,’ Gently said. ‘We’ll talk to you later, drive on a bit.’

‘I saw him laughing,’ the man said. ‘I know that nobody’s going to believe me.’

The tree was catching all the way up, it was useless attacking it with extinguishers. Brewer was back with the R.T. summoning an ambulance and a fire engine. There was no dispersing the gapers. Even the smell wasn’t shifting them. The smoke had puffed up to a great height, it must have been visible for many miles.

‘What a way to do it,’ Setters was babbling. ‘Oh, my God, what a way to do it.’

The flames were snarling and becoming redder, smuts dropped out of the noisome smoke. 

I
T WASN’T THEIR
job to pick up the pieces. They left when the firemen had doused the flames. The tree was still standing, though badly charred; it was obviously a danger and would have to come down. But just now it continued to stand there, spectre-like, laced with foam. From the end of the Drove it had a piebald look as though it were stricken with a leprous disease.

They ate at H.Q., another scrappy sandwich meal. Setters got some wheels turning and fixed the inquest for the morrow. Elton had been taken to the hospital – one more casualty; but he had only bruises and a scalp contusion and he wasn’t detained. He came back to make a short statement. The statement was
confirmatory
. He told them how Deeming had searched Lister’s wrecked bike for the box of reefers. Sergeant Ralphs had revisited Shuck’s Graves, had removed from them eight thousand reefers. He brought back the spanner Deeming had dropped. It had blood and some hairs adhering to it.

‘So nobody gets hung,’ Setters said, weighing the
spanner in his hand. ‘Bixley can wriggle out of this one, less a few years in Norwich clink.’

‘They’re experimenting at Norwich,’ Gently said. ‘They’re trying to rehabilitate their prisoners.’

‘Fine,’ Setters said, ‘fine. They’ve got some bonza material coming.’

He studied the spanner for some moments, solemnly, before he locked it away in his desk; lit his umpteenth cigarette and let it hang on his lip.

‘I feel I’ve been through it,’ he said. ‘You ever get that feeling?’

Gently nodded. ‘Violence isn’t very funny,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Setters said. ‘That’s it. Violence isn’t very funny. It reads well, doesn’t act. You can’t play it for a laugh. And what makes you so sick is you can’t get rid of it. It’s there, we’ve all got it. That’s what makes you so sick.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Gently said. ‘I don’t have any answer. You can’t hang it, you can’t flog it, and you can’t lock it up.’

‘You just live with it,’ Setters said. ‘It goes on, and you live with it. You can’t preach it away neither. We don’t know a damn thing.’

‘Perhaps we’re misusing it,’ Gently suggested. ‘Perhaps there’s a channel for it somewhere. It’s a bit of nature we’ve inherited and don’t understand.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ Setters said. ‘I thought I did up till now. But I get pretty close to Bixley. I could bust out too.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s shut the door.’

So this big-shot screw came down from the Smoke, started making with the action like he could figure the whole deal. There were some sticks going about, he latched hard on them, man. Threw a curve they were the reason for Johnny Lister taking off. First he hung up Sid Bixley, wild keen he was on Sid. But like Sid was too good for him, he knew the jazz to hand screws. Then this crazy big-shot goes for Dicky, wild, way-out Dicky Deeming, the mostest guy who ever cooled it on a ton plus action. Man, did Dicky give them a ride. Like they’ll never forget about Dicky. One of the jees makes with a ballad about Wild Dicky Deeming.

Came the day when this big-shot reckons he’ll hang Dicky up. Gets him a car with a cool wheel-man and a couple more screws for ballast. Dicky’s right there in the eatery when they decide on the hang-up, but like they never get a finger on him, he walks clear past a pair of them. So they make with the car, man, they cool it big after Dicky. They chase him out to Shuck’s Graves, way over on the heath. And Dicky’s sat there waiting for them. He laughs his lid off at these screws. He rides around playing tag with them, sits ribbing them when they’re puffed.

Then away rides Dicky with the screws chasing after him. He’s too crazy, they can’t fetch him, they buzz a lot more 
screws. So there’s like six or seven of these cars piling up to stop Dicky, and all the screws stood around, they’re going to hang him up for sure. And up Dicky rides, don’t turn a hair at these screws. Like they tumble over their feet to put a grab on Dicky. So Dicky laughs crazy wild, goes dodging around in the trees, and the next thing the screws know he’s way up on the other side of them.

Then the screws are real mad, they’ll do next to anything to hang up Dicky. They buzz the other screws for miles, it’s stiff with screws charging about. And Dicky, he’s leading a whole bunch of them, keeps playing it down to hold them together. He’s getting the wildest kicks, is Dicky. He’s picking up screws all along. So then he has them out on the road, half the screws in the country. Tells them he’s going for the touch, like they can tag along if they want to. And then he twists it man, he goes man, he leaves the screws dragging backwards. He comes to the tree, he keeps going. He touches the real all the way.

You want to know about the curves the screws threw when Dicky touched? Man, they’ve got a curve for everything, like they daren’t not have. They hung up a jee called Elton, pitched him around something rotten, got him sounding off some jazz about Dicky busting into Lister. Yuh, that’s the curve they threw, like somebody ought to believe them. And the army squares cut the tree down. Let on it was dangerous, or some jazz.

But I’ll tell you something, man, and the squares know about it too. There’s a guy called Salmon used to live here and he was riding that road one night. Come back late from a dance, he was, and cooling it wild down the road. And like there was somebody riding beside him. Somebody who didn’t make a
sound. And he was grinning at him, waving him on. And Salmon could see the tree right plain. And he got a smell in his nose like burning mutton and he threw up twice before he could stop.

Yuh, it’s spooky round this scene, I like it daylight when I’m riding. There’s Johnny and Dicky died on the road, and the road gets quiet. I like it daylight.

Brundall, 1960