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.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There wasn’t a lot to be made out of the news that the manager of Huysmann’s had been injured at the yard and taken to hospital, even though the police did wait at his bedside until he regained consciousness. The Norchester Press, for instance, was very restrained and non-committal. But the Norchester Press was like that anyway. It didn’t deceive Charlie for one moment. Charlie knew, if nobody else did, that Chief Inspector Gently had been ‘after’ Leaming. Hadn’t he seen Gently there, with his own eyes, playing with Leaming just as, formerly, he had played with Fisher? Then it was Leaming after all who’d knocked the old man off… a man like Gently wasn’t going to be fooled by Fisher cutting his throat. Charlie’s only anxiety was that Leaming wouldn’t pull round. Unless there was a trial, nobody would really know how right Charlie had been.
But he needn’t have worried. They took good care of Leaming at the Norchester and County Hospital and lavished a small fortune of drugs and surgical talent on him. A man must look his best when he’s likely to be hung… also, the trial that followed was magnificent, even by Charlie’s standards.
Peter Huysmann returned home to take over the management of the yard himself, bringing with him his wife and the good wishes of the fair community. Cathy was a little nervous of Gretchen, but Gretchen was only too pleased to have a companion to liven up the gloom of the Huysmann house. Mrs Turner improved the occasion by reading a homily to Susan on taking up with men, especially the managerial classes. It fell a little flat. Susan had already ceased to mourn the loss of Leaming and was viewing with interest the attentions of the brewery executive from up the road.
Hansom’s generosity was rather strained when it came to congratulating Gently a second time. In his private opinion, Gently was an exponent of art for art’s sake. There had been no need to take things further than Fisher… they had ended there very neatly. If Fisher wasn’t exactly responsible for Huysmann’s death, he was as near to it as made no difference, and to go on after that was untidy and a little precious… especially with so little in the way of evidence. But he was a nice type really, was Hansom. At parting, he gave Gently one of his best cigars.
The super said snappishly: ‘I can’t think why the devil you went after him alone, when you might have taken the entire City Police with you. Surely you realized he might be tempted to add you to his other victims?’
Gently shook his head in his wooden way. ‘I had to give him enough rope. If we’d simply pulled him in he’d still have had a pretty good case to argue… he had to be made to do something silly. Of course, I didn’t know he’d got a gun.’
‘Oh! So you didn’t know he’d got a gun! And would it have made any difference if you had known?’
‘No… not really.’
‘Well, it would have done to me — I can tell you that!’ The super sniffed in an aggrieved sort of way. ‘I’ve given up trying to understand you people,’ he said. ‘As far as I can see, you’re either born to homicide or you aren’t, and if you aren’t, you might just as well keep your big mouth shut and pretend your corpses aren’t there. When did you start suspecting Leaming?’
Gently applied a light to his waning pipe. ‘I didn’t suspect anyone. I just kept finding things out till I’d got a pattern.’
‘And why didn’t the pattern fit Fisher?’
‘Oh… I don’t know. He wasn’t clever enough. If he’d done murder and stolen forty thousand he’d have run off with it, not hung around.’
‘And Peter Huysmann?’
‘I saw him riding the Wall of Death… I knew he hadn’t done it.’
‘How about the girl Gretchen — and the maid?’
‘Gretchen wasn’t strong enough to strike the blow that killed Huysmann, and as for the maid-!’ Gently smiled lazily. ‘I had my fun, too… I took Susan to the pictures one night.’
The super’s eyes glinted. ‘That wasn’t professional of you, Gently!’
Gently sighed, and knocked out his pipe.
