‘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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
So, 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
