Gently through the Mill (16 page)

‘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 naïve 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.

‘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.

S
O, 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.’

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.

‘Do you know the place he came from? Is it anything like Lynton?’

Oddly enough, it wasn’t, except …

‘There’s a similar sort of atmosphere. You get it in all places of about the same size.’

‘Ah, that accounts for it!’

‘That, and the fact that Lynton is the width of England away from Bristol, and rather cut off.’

‘It was a risk, though, wasn’t it?’

‘Not as much as you might think.’

‘But going racing – what about that?’

‘I understand he didn’t start again until after the war, by which time, being so well secured …’

Even so, ten years had elapsed before that fatal day at Newmarket. Nobody who had once known the showy bank clerk had happened on, or recognized, the distinguished frequenter of Tattersall’s with his horsey wife and gleaming Bentley. Until a little Stepney spiv with a memory sharpened by malpractice …

‘He sees him first by the paddock.’ Roscoe had joined Blacker in a desire to provide Queen’s Evidence. ‘“Here,” he says, “that geezer’s dial strikes me as familiar. Now where was it I see
him
before?”’

He hadn’t remembered at once – it had been many a long year! – but during the course of the day he probed back into his memory. Twice more they had seen Pershore, the second time as he was leaving, and it was then that the spark of recognition fell.

‘Cor blimey O’Riley!’

Taylor had been thunderstruck by his discovery. Could it really be … after all this time … flourishing on his ill-gotten wealth …?

‘Ask any of them what had to do with Steinie – he never forgot the face of a client. Got a gift that way, he had, it was what made him so useful. If Steinie recognized a bloke that was good enough for Jimmy Roscoe.’

A few inquiries amongst the fraternity gave them the name by which Palmer was known. Armed with this, they obtained his address from the nearest telephone directory – phoning, at the same time, for reservations at the Lynton Roebuck.

‘I wrote the letter – no names, of course! We made it five thou the first go, just to see how the charlie took it. He came up with it like a bird, no bother at all. Steinie collected it from the convenience near the docks.’

So then, naturally, they doubled it, and after Steinie had been strangled—

‘The sky was the flipping limit, and who the hell could blame us?’

As with morality, in turpitude there were degrees.

‘The C.C. got a cable from his wife. Tomorrow night she’s flying back.’

‘Has she money of her own?’

‘I believe so, fortunately.’

‘It’s an interesting point, but with the devaluation since 1934 …’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if they found his assets …’

At last the super seemed to have talked himself out of the subject. For a long time he sat silently staring into his current coffee cup, which was empty. Then, as Gently made signs of rising:

‘Do you think he’ll hang, or is it genuine?’

Gently’s shoulders lifted in his familiar gesture.

‘“Regression” they’ll call it … it’s up to the judge. If he sums up against him nine juries out of ten …’

‘But in your opinion?’

The spring weather was probably a flash in the pan, but nobody in Lynton was troubling his head about that. Sports shirts and summer dresses had come out in earnest, and in the Abbey Gardens people were sitting on the grass to eat their sandwiches.

Gently, waiting for the fast train, had been mooching about the town doing nothing in particular. Now he was gazing in a tobacconist’s window, now, though he had had his lunch, at the pies in a pork butcher’s.

If one was there long enough, did one grow to like Lynton? He hadn’t formulated the question, but that was what was passing through his mind. Certainly the place had grown on him, little by little; the streets no longer seemed petty and so depressingly parochial.

Was it the sun, cutting shadows and making the pigeons sleek their feathers?

But he remembered the rain, and before that, the east wind! – he had seen the worst of Lynton and been miserable and out of sorts in it. At one time he had loathed it, as one only loathes a place with which one is out of sympathy.

Yet now, about to leave it …

Had he come to understand the place?

‘Don’t buy that muck – try some of mine!’

He turned to find Blythely, of all people, standing just behind him. He was wearing his black shapeless suit and
a cheap tie dragged out of shape – no concession, obviously, to the rising thermometer.

‘You don’t know what they put in them – a bit of horse, it wouldn’t surprise me. Mine are solid pork and a proper piece of pastry round it.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of buying any …’

‘I’ve been in touch with the bank.’

He made an awkward motion as though for Gently to accompany him, and without giving it a thought the man from the Central Office fell into step. Side by side, they made their way along the chequered pavements in the direction of Fenway Road.

‘It’ll be a takeover, won’t it?’

‘Undoubtedly the bank will have a major voice.’

‘I’ve put in an offer for it, lock, stock and barrel. I know what it’s worth down to the last farthing.’

‘You mean the bakehouse?’

‘No, the whole lot.’

What was the point of being surprised by anything Blythely did? To begin with, you wouldn’t have thought he had a penny with which to bless himself. And then again, looking at that porous, sallow face …

‘What about Fuller?’

‘He hasn’t got the money.’

‘You’ll turn him out?’

‘Why? He’s a tradesman.’

‘I was simply thinking …’

Surely Blythely must understand! Already it was bad enough while he was the miller’s subtenant – reverse the situation, and the thing became impossible.

Blythely, expressionless as always, was apparently refusing to see it.

‘He came to have a talk with me – I don’t know what it was all about!’

They were going round by Cosford Street, a way slightly longer than that by the Gardens and The Roebuck.

‘He’d got something worrying him, but I couldn’t get it clear. I told him to pray if he was in trouble. I doubt whether he did, but Godly advice is never wasted – his conscience seemed clearer after we had spoken
together
.’

The baker glanced sidelong at Gently as though to canvass his views. They had turned the corner near the crossroads and were approaching the passage to the drying-ground.

‘They tell me you’re a fisherman.’

Was there no fathoming the man?

‘If you want to know where to get some bream, just listen to what I say. A couple of hundred yards below the sluice – the one where they pulled the body out …

‘Get some groundbait from the mill and use a number twelve hook with a French float. Paste, mind you – I’ll give you a special loaf – and if you don’t pull a couple of stone out you can’t call yourself a fisherman.

‘On a good feeding day I’ve had four or five.’

‘Why not come along and show me?’

Gently halted at the top of the passage.

‘In the season we could make a day of it – I could give you a ring in advance.’

‘As a rule I fish alone …’

For once the baker was hesitant. To cover his indecision he pulled out his gold half-hunter and pretended to consult it.

‘I don’t know but what for once in a while …’

‘And while we’re at it, why not ask Fuller?’

Blythely’s foxy eyes jumped suddenly from the watch to Gently. For a long, long moment he seemed unable to drag them away.

‘Hmn – I’ll have to think about it … did you say you’d ring me?’