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
