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?’
‘I’m only a policeman.’
‘Nevertheless…’
‘Do sane people kill?’
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…
