Leaming’s car stood stood in the corner of the timber-yard, a crouched glowing presence in the gathering dusk. One of the sliding doors of the machine shop stood ajar, sufficient to show a gleam of light in the office at the far end, and Gently, who was long-sighted, could make out the dark figure of the manager bent over his desk. Gently was in no hurry. He ambled over to the car and examined the doors, which were locked. Then he quietly raised the bonnet and removed a small item from the engine.
Leaming was so intent on his work that he failed to notice Gently’s approach until warned by the creak of an opening door. But then he spun round and to his feet in one crisp movement. ‘You!’ he exclaimed, his dark eyes sharp and thrusting, ‘what do you want?’
Gently shrugged and closed the glass-panelled door behind him. ‘I’ve been to the football match,’ he said, ‘I thought you might like to hear about it.’ He moved round from the door to Leaming’s desk and peered disinterestedly at the open ledger. Leaming watched him closely. Gently felt in his pocket and produced two peppermint creams, which he placed on the desk, pushing one towards Leaming with a stubby finger. ‘Have one,’ he said.
Leaming remained tense, watching.
Gently pulled up a little chair and sat down weightily. ‘It wasn’t a very good match. It was a bit end-of-the-season. And the people! I think it must have been near the ground record… forty-two thousand, isn’t it?’ His green eyes rose questioningly.
‘A little more than that.’
‘A little more?’ Gently looked disappointed. ‘I thought you would have been able to give me the exact figure… I know how precise you are about football matters.’
Leaming bit his lip. ‘What does it matter, anyhow?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t, not really… but I thought you would have known.’
‘It’s forty-three thousand one hundred and twenty-one.’
‘Ah!’ Gently beamed at him. ‘I was sure you could tell me. And wasn’t that at the cup-tie with Pompey a couple of seasons ago… when Pompey won two-nought?’
Leaming came a step forward. ‘See here,’ he snapped, ‘I don’t know what you’re after, and I don’t care. But I’ve got work to do… we’ve got the accountants coming on Monday.’
‘And you’ve got the “Straight Grain” books to prepare and make plausible before then… haven’t you?’
Leaming seized the ledger on the desk, jerked it round and shoved it across to Gently. ‘There!’ he jeered. ‘Have a look at it — see what you can find out.’
Gently shook his head. ‘It isn’t my job. We’ll get a fraud man down to go through it.’
‘A fraud man? Who’s charging me with fraud?’
‘Nobody… and as a matter of fact, I don’t think anybody will.’
‘Then what’s this talk of getting a fraud man down?’
Gently continued to shake his head, slowly, woodenly. ‘They’ll want to know all about it in court, you know… the prosecution for the Crown will go into it with great thoroughness.’
There was a dead silence. Leaming stood immobile, his handsome face drained of all colour. Against the unnatural paleness his dark eyes seemed larger, darker, more penetrating than ever. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked huskily.
Gently turned away and said, speaking quickly: ‘I’ve got the last piece of evidence I needed against you. There was a mistake in the account of the match which appeared in the Football News last Saturday. The same mistake appears in an answer you gave to one of my questions on Sunday… a record of it is in the files at police headquarters.’
‘You found that out… today?’
‘A short time ago. I overheard a scrap of conversation at the match this afternoon which led me to check with the Press office. I also checked your account in the police files.’
Leaming went back a pace, his hands grasping involuntarily. ‘You’re not lying?’ he demanded suddenly.
‘No, I’m not lying… why should I?’
‘Suppose I said I wasn’t at the match, but I was somewhere else?’
‘No.’ Gently shook his head again. ‘It won’t do. You’d have to prove it… and you can’t prove it.’
‘But you can’t base a murder charge on that alone!’
Gently reached out for his peppermint cream, slow and deliberate. ‘I can show that you had the motive,’ he said. ‘I can show that you could have hidden in the summer-house while Peter and his father were quarrelling. I can show that Fisher was watching what took place. I can show that Fisher blackmailed you first for Susan and then for the money. I can show that Fisher was murdered and he was murdered just when I had got sufficient evidence to make him speak — which you had grounds to suspect. I can show points of similarity between the two murders. I can show that you can prove no alibi at the time of Fisher’s murder. I can show you were seen at the scene of the crime carrying a bag which subsequently became blood-stained and was destroyed here, where it is logical to suppose you would destroy it. I can show that the key which locked the door of Fisher’s flat after the murder was found with it. And finally, I can now show that the alibi you gave for the time of the Huysmann murder was deliberately fabricated and completely false.’
‘It’s not enough — I’ll get a defence to tear it to tatters!’
Gently bit into the peppermint cream. ‘You might have done before today,’ he said smoothly.
‘It can’t make all that difference… I won’t believe it!’
‘It was the one thing necessary.’
Leaming came forward again and leaned on the desk with both hands. ‘Listen, Gently, listen — you can’t go through with this. I’m talking to you now as a man, not as a police officer. All right, I admit it — I killed them both, Huysmann and Fisher, and you’ll say I should be punished for it. But think a minute — there’s a difference! Huysmann died, never knowing what had happened, and so did Fisher, instantaneously. They were both killed in hot blood, Gently. They were killed in the way of life, by their enemy, one man killing another to survive, Huysmann a vicious old man, Fisher a rat who asked for what he got. But you are after something different with me. If you go through with this, I shan’t be killed that way. I’ll be taken in cold blood, taken bound, taken with every man’s hand against me, not a fight, not a chance, just taken and slaughtered in that death-pit of yours. That’s the difference — that’s what it amounts to! And I say to you as a man that you can’t do it. You wouldn’t match a killing of that sort with a killing of my sort, and clear your conscience by calling it justice!’
Gently stirred uneasily in his chair. ‘I didn’t make the laws — you knew the penalty that went with killing.’
‘But it only goes with killing when a man’s convicted — and I’m not convicted, and except for you I never would be!’
‘I’m sorry, Leaming… it doesn’t rest with me.’
‘But it does rest with you — the local police are satisfied to let it go at the inquest verdict. They must know what you know… you work together. And they’re satisfied, so why aren’t you?’
‘They don’t know I’ve broken your alibi yet.’
‘But they know the rest — and they’re doing nothing about it.’
Gently turned away from him, his face looking tired. ‘It’s no good, Leaming… I’ve got to do it. When a man begins to kill it gets easier and easier for him, and it has to be stopped. I’m the person whose duty it is to stop him. And I’ve got to stop you.’
‘Even if you have to deliver me to a state killing party?’
‘I’m a policeman, not a lawgiver.’
‘But you’re a man as well!’
‘Not while I’m a policeman… we’re not permitted to have thoughts like that. The law allows me only one way to stop killing… it’s not my way, but it’s the only way.’
‘Then you’re going through with it?’
‘Yes, I’m going through with it.’
Leaming drew back from the desk, as far as the closed door. ‘Then you leave me no option but to kill you too, Gently,’ he said.
Gently looked up at him with unmoved green eyes. ‘I realized it would come to that, of course… but it won’t be easy for you.’
Leaming felt casually in his pocket and produced a small automatic. ‘It will be as easy as this,’ he said. The colour had come back into his cheeks now and something of the old jauntiness to his manner. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Gently. I didn’t want to do any more killing… whatever you may think about killing getting easier, I assure you it’s something one would rather not do. And I don’t want to kill you, because I admire you. But I have a duty to myself, just as you have a duty to the state.’
Gently said: ‘It won’t help you to kill me. They’ll come straight to you for it.’
Leaming said: ‘But they won’t find anything… and I don’t care what they suspect. I shall tip your body into the incinerator at Hellston Tofts and the gun after you. It isn’t traceable… I bought it on the black market.’
‘What about the noise of the shot?’
Leaming smiled frostily. ‘Nobody’s going to hear that. I shall shoot you here, in the shop.’
‘But it’s perfectly quiet?’
‘It won’t be when I shoot you. I shall have all the saws running — the people round here are used to hearing that. We sometimes run them after hours for test purposes.’
Gently reached out for the second peppermint cream. ‘When I’m missing they’ll come straight to you,’ he repeated. ‘Hansom knows there’s something vital in that answer of yours in the records. He doesn’t know what it is, but he’ll find out, and the fact that I’m missing will clinch the case for him. Suppose you stop killing and start thinking about your defence?’
Leaming shook his head briefly. ‘I’ll risk that,’ he said, ‘now come along with me while I switch the saws on.’ He made a movement with his gun.
Gently hung on, mechanically chewing at the peppermint cream. If he refused to go, Leaming was faced with the prospect of shooting him where he sat and thus rousing the neighbourhood. But the rousing of the neighbourhood would be ill-appreciated by a dead Gently. He got up and shambled over to the door.
Leaming switched on the lights as they passed them, flooding the huge, wide sheds with fluorescent glare. He kept Gently walking three paces ahead. The first of the saws broke into life with a snatching whirr, quickly rising, becoming a loud, shuddering drone. Leaming said: ‘We must find one with a piece of timber in the feed… if I put that through at the appropriate moment I should be all right.’ Saw by saw they worked round the shop. The still air became virulent with the high, pulsating drone, throbbing and writhing in waves of vicious power, naked and potential. It made Gently feel sick. It was as though a vast, anti-human power were building up, as though it were rising towards a peak at which his organism would disintegrate, would tear apart, smashed into its component atoms. Leaming set off some band-saws. Their whining shriek imposed itself on the roar of the circulars like a theme of madness twisting through chaos, a sharp, demonic ecstasy of destruction. ‘How’s that?’ bawled Leaming. ‘Do you think they’ll hear a shot through this lot?’ Gently said nothing, would not look back at him.
They went to the centre saws now, moving back towards the sliding doors. Near the further end was a little wooden booth, perhaps for a time-keeper, glass-panelled at the top. Gently kept his eye on it. Slowly they drew closer, moving between pauses while Leaming set going the saws at each side. They drew abreast of it, Leaming going first to the saw on his left, then stepping across to the one on his right.
The noise in the shop was so deafening that the crash of the falling booth was scarcely audible. But Gently heard the riposte of the gun. He didn’t stay to argue. A second shot followed the first like an echo and a whiff of white dust sprang up at his feet. He leaped sideways, bending low to get cover from the saws, and made towards the gaping doorway. But Leaming had anticipated the move and sprinted like the wind to cut him off. A bullet out of nowhere warned Gently that he wouldn’t get out of the doors.
Zig-zagging, still keeping cover behind the saws, Gently worked back towards the office and the switchboard. If he could put the lights out for a moment… But once again Leaming sensed his objective and rushed to cut him off. A fourth bullet smacked into a baulk of wood a couple of feet away. He dodged away behind the tearing saws.
He was getting cornered now, driven back towards the band-saws. Up there it was a dead-end, no door, no windows, and the band-saws didn’t give cover like the circulars did. Desperately he tried to double out of the trap, but the agile Leaming beat him each time. He wasn’t shooting now at every glimpse — he was holding his last two bullets. And slowly, almost leisurely, he was herding Gently towards the dead-end, where the outcome was inevitable.
With the scream of the band-saws ripping at his ear-drums Gently hung on behind the last circular. Leaming was coming across diagonally towards it, gun low, stooping, like a predatory animal moving in to the kill. Gently saw him past the rippling steel blade, intent, remorseless, moving in. He also saw something else. It was a jack-wrench lying on the saw-bench. His clumsy hand rose up over the edge of the bench and fastened on the handle. On came Leaming, aware of his presence, gun at the ready now. Gently crouched further back along the saw. He saw the face loom up with the look of the kill in its dark eyes, the arm move from the shoulder to fire over the saw-bench… then he hurled the jack-wrench squarely into the thundering circle of burnished steel.
Flat on the floor, he never knew quite what happened after that. His next coherent impression was of a sudden slackening of the fearful noise, a dying away, combined with complete darkness and the sickening smell of burned-out cable. Trembling, he got to his feet and fumbled for his lighter. Its tiny flame snapped dazzlingly before his eyes. The first thing he saw was Leaming’s gun, lying quite close to him. Instinctively he checked a movement to grab it, pulled out his handkerchief, picked up the gun by the end of its still-warm muzzle.
With ears buzzing he picked his way towards the office and the phone. He put out his lighter and dialled by touch. ‘Super there? Put me through to him… Chief Inspector Gently.’ There was practically no pause at all before the super’s voice came on with a barrage of questions. Gently covered the receiver wearily. ‘Listen,’ he said. There was a silence and presumably the super was listening. ‘I’m in the office of Huysmann’s yard. I’d like you to come along now for a bit of routine work… you’ll need an ambulance amongst other things, and bring plenty of torches because I’ve wrecked the electrics hereabouts…’ He paused and held the instrument away from him while the super reacted. ‘Yes, I have got Leaming here… I broke his alibi and he confessed… then he pulled a gun and took a few shots at me, but he isn’t all that good at shooting… he’s a bit off-colour just now, though he should be in shape for a trial by the autumn.’
Gently clamped down the receiver and sat quite still for a moment or two. His ears still buzzed with the pounding they had taken, his hands were still trembling and he felt unutterably tired. Outside in the shop a great silence prevailed, a thick, dark silence, like the inside of the pyramids. Somewhere on the surface of it he could hear a car passing down Queen Street, very distant, a sound from another world. And then came the far-away clamour of a bell which was the ambulance, probably as it shot the lights at Grove Lane.