‘Give yourself up!’ Gently shouted.
‘Like I’m too valuable,’ Deeming replied. ‘But I’m sorry you can’t be here behind me. Do your best, screw. Keep close.’
He pushed off, smoothed his throttle, began to sail away fast. Brewer didn’t need telling. He was itching to let the Wolseley go. Gently sat deep in his seat, his eyes narrow, gone blank. Setters was leaning forward between them. He was breathing like a bloodhound. Still Deeming was going away from them.
‘It’s no good, sir,’ Brewer clipped. ‘He must have twenty miles an hour on us.’
‘Keep at him,’ Gently snapped.
The speedometer needle was pushing three figures.
There was traffic on the road. Deeming didn’t care about traffic. He arrowed through it with little sways, kept near the centre of the road. Brewer had to notice the traffic. It pulled him down several times. Deeming got smaller and smaller ahead, a black atom of ferocious energy.
‘Christ, to lose him like this!’ Setters swore, dragging down on the seat backs. ‘Playing with us all that time, then getting away like this. I could kick myself for it, I could bash my head on the wall.’
‘Yes,’ Gently muttered. ‘We’ve lost him. He’s beaten us.’
‘He’ll turn off,’ Setters groaned. ‘There’s side-turns, plenty of them.’
‘He won’t turn off,’ Gently said. ‘He isn’t going as far as a side-turn.’
Setters chewed on it for a moment. They were hitting the slight incline to the ridge. Brewer was hanging on to three figures though his engine laboured and shook.
‘Come again with that?’ Setters said.
‘He’s going to hit the tree,’ Gently said. ‘That’s why he hasn’t bothered to ditch us. We’re going to be there to see it.’
‘Hell,’ Setters said. He stopped dragging, sank back on his seat. Brewer had heard what Gently said, his mouth thinned to a tight seam.
Setters came back, angling his face.
‘You’re serious about that?’ he said.
Gently nodded. ‘He’s going to do it. He’s had it in mind from the start.’
‘But crying hell!’ Setters said.
Gently said: ‘I had the preview. He showed me just what he was going to do. He wanted to make sure I understood it.’
‘Hell,’ Setters said a third time.
‘And we can’t stop him,’ Gently said. ‘There he goes. A free man. He’s beaten us all along the line.’
He was a long way off now, just a speck high up the road, weaving slightly and disappearing behind crawling, flashing cars. But the Gallows Tree was growing higher, was spreading its bare raven branches. The sky showed silver-white behind it, left it stark, hard, etched.
‘He doesn’t have to do it,’ Setters said hoarsely. ‘He’s clear away. He could dodge us.’
Gently didn’t say anything. Brewer kept murdering the engine.
‘Maybe there’s a case,’ Setters said. ‘He isn’t normal. You can’t call him normal.’
The tree stretched out massively, a dark, upward-rising torch.
It wasn’t sensational. It was as though someone had thrown a bag of sweets at the tree. The sweets scattered, a few large ones, but most of them small. Only there’d been a firework in the bag and it shot up a yellowish pillar of flame, and off the top of the pillar lifted black smoke, going up straight in the still air.
He’d been half a minute ahead of them, enough to collect a jam of traffic. Brewer drove in hooting frenziedly, squealed the Wolseley to a stop. They jumped out, ran across. A white-faced man was using an extinguisher. Another was lugging at a riding-boot. It came away. He collapsed in a faint. The body was tangled with the frame of the bike, it was being burned. The tree was burning.
‘Get away, all of you!’ Gently ordered. ‘You can’t do any good here. Leave the rest of this to us — on your way, on your way!’
‘He was laughing,’ said the man with the extinguisher. ‘That’s my car… I saw him do it. I could see his teeth. He was laughing. You won’t believe me. But he was laughing.’
‘Drive on a bit,’ Gently said. ‘We’ll talk to you later, drive on a bit.’
‘I saw him laughing,’ the man said. ‘I know that nobody’s going to believe me.’
The tree was catching all the way up, it was useless attacking it with extinguishers. Brewer was back with the R.T. summoning an ambulance and a fire engine. There was no dispersing the gapers. Even the smell wasn’t shifting them. The smoke had puffed up to a great height, it must have been visible for many miles.
‘What a way to do it,’ Setters was babbling. ‘Oh, my God, what a way to do it.’
The flames were snarling and becoming redder, smuts dropped out of the noisome smoke.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It wasn’t their job to pick up the pieces. They left when the firemen had doused the flames. The tree was still standing, though badly charred; it was obviously a danger and would have to come down. But just now it continued to stand there, spectre-like, laced with foam. From the end of the Drove it had a piebald look as though it were stricken with a leprous disease.
They ate at H.Q., another scrappy sandwich meal. Setters got some wheels turning and fixed the inquest for the morrow. Elton had been taken to the hospital — one more casualty; but he had only bruises and a scalp contusion and he wasn’t detained. He came back to make a short statement. The statement was confirmatory. He told them how Deeming had searched Lister’s wrecked bike for the box of reefers. Sergeant Ralphs had revisited Shuck’s Graves, had removed from them eight thousand reefers. He brought back the spanner Deeming had dropped. It had blood and some hairs adhering to it.
‘So nobody gets hung,’ Setters said, weighing the spanner in his hand. ‘Bixley can wriggle out of this one, less a few years in Norwich clink.’
‘They’re experimenting at Norwich,’ Gently said. ‘They’re trying to rehabilitate their prisoners.’
‘Fine,’ Setters said, ‘fine. They’ve got some bonza material coming.’
He studied the spanner for some moments, solemnly, before he locked it away in his desk; lit his umpteenth cigarette and let it hang on his lip.
‘I feel I’ve been through it,’ he said. ‘You ever get that feeling?’
Gently nodded. ‘Violence isn’t very funny,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Setters said. ‘That’s it. Violence isn’t very funny. It reads well, doesn’t act. You can’t play it for a laugh. And what makes you so sick is you can’t get rid of it. It’s there, we’ve all got it. That’s what makes you so sick.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Gently said. ‘I don’t have any answer. You can’t hang it, you can’t flog it, and you can’t lock it up.’
‘You just live with it,’ Setters said. ‘It goes on, and you live with it. You can’t preach it away neither. We don’t know a damn thing.’
‘Perhaps we’re misusing it,’ Gently suggested. ‘Perhaps there’s a channel for it somewhere. It’s a bit of nature we’ve inherited and don’t understand.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ Setters said. ‘I thought I did up till now. But I get pretty close to Bixley. I could bust out too.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s shut the door.’
MOTORCYCLIST DIES ESCAPING SUSPECTED OF LISTER MURDER TIE-UP WITH BIG DOPE SEIZURES
After an exciting chase after an exciting chase after an exciting chase after an exciting chase after an exciting chase
So this big-shot screw came down from the Smoke, started making with the action like he could figure the whole deal. There were some sticks going about, he latched hard on them, man. Threw a curve they were the
