‘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 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.