by Alan Hunter
‘I looked for Betty. I had to look.’
‘Go on,’ Setters said.
‘She wasn’t so far. She’d come off sooner. She was near the place he’d busted off. In some bushes, she was.’
‘And she was still alive,’ Setters said.
‘I didn’t know,’ Elton said. ‘If I’d known I’d have done something. She looked the same. Smashed. Blood. I didn’t go too close to her.’
‘Friend of yours, wasn’t she?’ Setters asked.
‘Yuh. Friend of mine, she was.’
‘So you didn’t check she was alive?’
‘I didn’t want to go close,’ Elton said.
Setters leaned back in his chair. His eyes were hard on Elton.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we’ll hear what the big hero did about this. He finds a crash by the roadside. He finds two of his pals smashed up. What does big hero do? Just keep telling me, Elton.’
Elton shrank a little more.
‘I was scared,’ he said.
‘Scared of what?’ asked Setters. ‘They were dead, you tell me?’
It’s always scary out there at night,’ said Elton. ‘All those trees and rough country. All of a sudden I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t. I’d had enough.’
‘Sounds good,’ Setters said.
‘It’s the level. I’m telling you. I was scared. It hit me sudden. Seemed they were still hanging about there.’
‘So you drove in and told us.’
‘Yuh, I could have done,’ Elton said.
‘But you didn’t. And why didn’t you?’
‘I saw the truck coming,’ Elton said.
‘So what?’ Setters said.
‘I saw it coming,’ Elton repeated. ‘Back there by the tree, I saw its lights come up and over. So I knew it would get reported. I didn’t need to tell you. I ran down back to my bike. I was scared. I went home.’
‘You were scared all right,’ said Setters.
‘I told you I was. I couldn’t take it.’
Setters made a face at Ralphs. Ralphs shrugged his shoulders. Setters rubbed the side of his cheek as though he were testing it for a shave.
‘And you didn’t bust Lister, you say. Nor you didn’t see it done.’
‘No,’ Elton said.
‘Though he pinched your girl.’
‘That wasn’t anything,’ Elton said.
‘You wanted to pitch him for it, didn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t like this,’ Elton said. ‘We’re always pitching. It don’t count. A pitch don’t count for much with us.’
‘You carry a blade, sonny boy?’
‘We don’t go for blades,’ Elton said.
Setters rubbed his cheek again.
‘Would a jury buy it?’ he asked Ralphs.
Ralphs gave another shrug. He doodled a little in the margin of his notebook. Setters kept on rubbing his cheek. At last he pressed the button on his desk. A constable entered. Setters pointed to Elton.
‘Take his lordship back to the cells,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to cogitate on his future.’
When he was gone Setters said to Ralphs: ‘He’s good, that kid. You could almost believe him.’
‘I was believing him mostly,’ Ralphs said.
‘Yeah, mostly,’ said Setters. ‘Just mostly, that’s all.’
He lifted the phone and began to dial.
‘We’ll have the Old Man in on this,’ he said. ‘I had that charge lined up on a hair-trigger, but I’ve got the seconds. I don’t feel like pulling it.’
* * *
FURTHER POLICE APPEAL FOR WITNESSES
WAS JOHN LISTER MURDERED?
ELTON RETURNS HOME
POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING WITNESS
LAURENCE ELTON DISAPPEARS
VANISHES AFTER QUESTIONING
YARD CALLED IN LISTER CASE
SUPT. GENTLY TAKES OVER
NO TRACE OF ELTON
There was a kid killed on that road, man, and the screws made a big deal of it. Threw the curve that one of his pals had busted him off the verge. How square can you get, man. They wouldn’t never understand it. You can’t sit in a screw-shop explaining the touch to the screws. But that jeebie wasn’t busted, you can take it from me, man. He was over the ton when he went, he was getting it, that’s all. A big-shot screw came down from the Smoke to try to make the curve stick, but he didn’t fool nobody, not even himself. Johnny Lister was the kid’s name, man, and he died on the road.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BLACK ROVER 75 was coming up the road from Castlebridge and it slowed by the Gallows Tree and pulled over on to the rough near it. The driver sat for a moment smoking his pipe, a big man with big shoulders, dressed in a casual dark suit and wearing a dull coppery tie. He was in his early fifties, his face was rugged, archetypal. The mouth was full and the jaw squared. The nose was shapely and strong. The eyebrows were heavy, a little greyed. His hair was mid-brown, greying too. His eyes were hazel and had a mild expression. He was Superintendent Gently. He was from Homicide.
He got out of the car and walked over to the tree. It had been a very large ash tree but now it was dead and greyly sere. The ground beneath and round it was bare and was scattered with paper and rubbish, and there were many tyre-marks and signs that meals had been eaten there. It was on the crest of a slight ridge and the view was extensive on all sides. The dark brecklands stretched about it, softly undulating to their horizons. The brecklands were a sandy, stony waste, and they were dark because of the scurfy heath. Their levels were broken by scattered fir trees, sparse, sand-polished, melancholy.
He stroked the bark of the tree, stood looking down the straight road. It was nearly noon of an October day and there was plenty of traffic on the road. Every few moments came the buzz of a car separating itself from the anonymous stream, then dying back into it again to be replaced by another. There were trucks, too, heavy articulateds, groaning by like tall ships. And motorcycles, several of those: he counted eleven in fifteen minutes. All the long five miles the traffic was scuttling and burrowing and glittering. As far as the black line of Latchford Chase. As far as the cross on Setters’ sketch map.
He knocked out his pipe on the tree and glanced back at the road he had travelled. An Austin-Healey was shooting towards him, but after that was a break of half a mile. He got back in the car, started the engine, waited some moments for the road to empty. He eased the clutch, drew away, slid through the gears, gave her the gas. The Healey was well ahead now, too far for him to hope to catch it, but the road behind it was clear and he could let the 75 rip. It went up fast on the downward grade. He was into the eights very quickly. Soon he was flickering into the nines, which the 75 didn’t often reach. Her engine was straining a very little, the slipstream boomed in his ears. She was steering lighter than he liked it, but not enough to cause him worry. It was fast, very fast. She was right up in the nines. The Healey wasn’t losing him now, he was sitting tight at his distance.
Then the Healey slowed for an overtake, came leaping back down the road to him, and he felt a surge of disappointment as he was compelled to ease off. Still, he was drifting along in the sevens, he went through hard on the Healey’s tail. They were gunning again directly and pushing back to the nines. He felt the excitement spark in him, found himself wanting the extra ten. That line of trees was coming too leisurely, he would like it striding along to engulf him. But he sensed the recklessness in the excitement and he thrust it down under his usual phlegm. It wouldn’t do, he was here to register. The excitement was sought as a point of reference.
They came up on a line of traffic and had to kill it, this time for good. The Healey kept bobbing out impatiently but each time it was baulked. Back in the fives and sixes, padding along like town traffic. No more champagne. No more temptation. They reached the trees and passed a lane that came in diagonally from the left. Setters had marked it, and Gently drove now with one eye on the verge. And soon he spotted it: a violent welt that carved acutely through grass and earth, exp
loding into a ripped crater and continuing in dragging gashes and raw weals.
He stopped, reversed, and bumped on to the verge. He relit his pipe. He went to look.
‘What’s your first move?’ Setters asked, dropping sugar lumps in his cup of coffee.
‘I’ll see Elton’s people,’ Gently said. ‘Then I’ll talk to Lister’s mother.’
‘Elton’s people don’t know anything,’ Setters said. ‘I’ve got them covered in case he contacts them.’
‘I’d like to see them all the same.’
‘I’ll take you round,’ Setters said.
They were in the lounge of the old Sun, which was still the best hotel in Latchford. Gently had invited Setters to lunch after their conference at Police H.Q. The conference had lasted two hours and had been attended by the Chief Constable, and Setters had formed the private opinion that the proceedings had bored Gently. He was surprised to be asked to lunch. He didn’t know yet what to think of Gently.
He drank some coffee. ‘We thought the girl would’ve helped us,’ he said. ‘Might’ve remembered some point, like the way chummie was dressed. But no, not a thing she remembers. Only him boring in on them. We’re lucky at that, I suppose. Makes it open and shut when we get him.’
‘You asked her about Elton?’ Gently said.
‘Yes,’ Setters said, ‘I asked her. Seemed to worry her, talking about Elton. Said she’d done him wrong or something. But she won’t have that Elton did it.’
‘And she’d been doping.’ Gently said.
Setters nodded. ‘The doc soon tumbled to it. Reefers. Those damned kids get them from somewhere.’
‘Any other cases of that?’
‘Two. It’s the London kids who do it.’
Setters was a large-boned parrot-faced man with dark grey eyes and a bald, conical crown. He had long, sad lines down each side of his mouth which had no expression. He was sharp as a fish-hook.
‘Have you had much trouble with motorbikes?’ Gently asked.
‘Yes,’ Setters said, ‘since the overspills came. Not much before that. The local kids here are tame enough. You get a wild one now and then. But not the way it is now. Not with jeebies and that stuff.’
‘What’s this jeebie business?’ Gently asked.
Setters said nothing for a moment. ‘I get to hear,’ he said presently. ‘I get to hear what goes on. You know about the Beat Generation?’
Gently shrugged. ‘What I read.’
‘We’ve got it here,’ Setters said. ‘We’ve got the beatsters in Latchford. Only here they call themselves jeebies, don’t ask me what for. The teddy-boy stuff is right out. Now it’s jeebies and chicks.’
‘Yes.’ Gently nodded. ‘There’s a lot of it goes on in town. It was the name that puzzled me.’
‘Guess it’s local,’ said Setters. He lit a cigarette, lifted his head to puff smoke. ‘I’ve run across it a lot,’ he said; ‘it’s what this case is mostly about. And I don’t get it all, that’s a fact. I don’t get above a half of it. It’s not gangs any more, though there’s gang stuff in it. And it’s not them dressing all sloppy, and not washing or cutting their hair. Beards, that sort of caper, that isn’t it either. There’s something funny got into those kids. They just don’t figure like they used to.’
‘There’s still hooliganism,’ Gently said, ‘petty crime, and violence.’
‘Yes,’ Setters said, ‘that too.’ But he sounded as though it didn’t mean much. ‘I’ve talked to most of them,’ he said. ‘All the kids who’ve got bikes. If it wasn’t Elton I’m stuck, or there’s some damned good lying going on. But I don’t think so, that’s my hunch. I think they don’t know much about it. They don’t even believe that Lister was busted off. They think we’re cooking it to make it tough for them.’ He filled his lungs, drove the smoke out. ‘You know the angle they keep giving me? They think that Lister did it on purpose. Just for the kick. What do you make of that?’
‘It could be a smokescreen,’ Gently said.
‘Yes,’ Setters said, ‘it could be. But it isn’t, they really believe it. And they don’t know anything. That’s my hunch. ‘So you’re sticking to Elton,’ Gently said.
‘I’m sticking to him,’ Setters said. ‘Until I hear something different. Elton is chummie number one.’
They collected the 75 from the park and drove into the new town area. It lay south-east of the old town, which was mainly stretched along a narrow High Street. It looked raw and unsettled. It was like an exhibition job; it might have been run up for a season’s stand, not really intended to be lived in. It had all come out of an architect’s sketchbook; it was thrown there, not grown there. Maybe it photographed and took prizes, but it hadn’t character, only design. It was the design that stood out. It looked like ideas without finality. It had come easy, it could go easy, it didn’t mingle or take root. It was using local brick and pantile and making both look anonymous.
Paine Road was a shallow crescent of blocks containing six houses. They were brick built with a plastered first storey and reeded wood panels along their fronts. They had wide upper windows with ugly functional frames. The ground floor was taken up with a garage and a utility room and a dustbin cupboard. They were separated from the road by a narrow grass strip intersected by paths and driveways of concrete.
They parked by number 17. Setters rang. The door opened. Gently saw a stout, middle-aged woman, with a small, sharp nose and a thrusting chin.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you again, is it? Well, he ain’t home yet.’
‘This is Superintendent Gently,’ Setters said. ‘He’d like to talk to you, Mrs Elton.’
She shrugged a plump shoulder, stood back from the door. Setters led the way up some plastic-treaded stairs. At the top, at a small landing, Mrs Elton nudged open a door. They went into a long room with long windows facing the road.
‘Sit down,’ Mrs Elton said. ‘You’ve been in and out enough. I’m just making a cup of tea. S’pose you can do with a cup, can’t you?’
Setters declined. Gently accepted. Mrs Elton went through into her kitchen. All this while some jazz had been playing somewhere up on the next floor. The room they were in was shabbily furnished with a pre-war suite and some painted furniture and was at this end a lounge and at the other a dining room. One of the carpets, however, was new, and there was a new self-tuning television set. There were pottery ducks flying on the wall. The small one had had its head knocked off. In a small painted bookcase inconveniently placed were some newspaper-Dickenses and a pile of magazines.
Mrs Elton slid open a service hatch and pushed through it a tea-tray. Then she re-entered the room. She poured the tea, splashing it noisily. She handed Gently his cup, took her own, sat down on the settee.
‘It’s Maureen,’ she said, jabbing a thumb towards the ceiling. ‘Don’t know what she’s coming to. Worse than the other one, Maureen is.’
‘Maureen’s Elton’s sister,’ Setters explained.
‘Yes, twins they are,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘Blitz babies the pair of them. Born to trouble, were them two. Now what do you want to ask me what I haven’t told you already? I haven’t seen no more of Laurie. Nor I ain’t heard from him neither.’
‘The superintendent,’ said Setters, ‘is from Scotland Yard.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Mrs Elton. She looked at Gently with satisfaction. ‘Me, I’m from Bethnal,’ she said. ‘Harmer’s Buildings, we lived at. My old man was a porter when we was down in Bethnal, but now he’s in the building lark. Doing all right for himself, he is.’
‘And you’ve just two in your family?’ Gently asked.
‘Just two,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘And that’s enough, I can tell you. Two’s enough in these days.’
‘Have you relatives in London?’ Gently asked.
‘Dozens and dozens,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘There’s my two sisters and our old mother and aunts and uncles and nephews and cousins. And I know you’ve been to look them up cause they’ve writ and told me so. And Laurie ai
n’t gone to them. Though maybe he’s with his pals in Bethnal.’
‘What pals?’ Gently asked.
‘Kids,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘Chums. He ran around like the rest of them, he knows the backsides of Bethnal. But I don’t say you’ll find him there. It’s just a guess, that’s all. There’s nowhere much to hide there, and where there is you must have looked. So I keep thinking of Bethnal. Bethnal’s where I’d look myself.’
Gently nodded. ‘What about his pals round here?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Elton, ‘they’re like they are, that’s all I can say. They’re a quieter lot, in some ways. You don’t get none of that fighting in gangs. Maybe there’s only one gang here, I dunno. But they’re quieter.’
‘And his girlfriends?’ Gently asked.
‘Same with them,’ said Mrs Elton.
‘Was he very friendly with Betty Turner?’
‘Was he,’ she said. ‘He was stuck on that one.’
She hoisted herself off the settee and refilled the cups. The jazz upstairs had stopped, instead one heard a mournful wailing.
‘Maureen,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘Gives me the pip that girl does. You should see her room, a proper pickle. And that lazy. Never works for long.’
She sat again, smoothed her skirt.
‘Proper stuck on her,’ she added. ‘I liked her too, she was a decent girl. It’s a shame what’s happened, that’s what I say.’
‘How long were they friends?’ Gently asked.
‘Oh, quite a time,’ said Mrs Elton.
‘When did they stop being friends?’
‘About last Whitsun,’ Mrs Elton said. ‘He’d just got his new motorbike, on the never-never, that is. He was going to take her to Yarmouth, then for some reason she wouldn’t go.’
‘Was he upset?’ Gently asked.
‘Nearly howled,’ said Mrs Elton. ‘Went off somewhere on his own and didn’t come back till early morning. Did him a world of good no doubt, it doesn’t harm them to get the brush-off. I reckon a brush-off is educative. When you’re young, that is.’
Gently drank and put down his cup. ‘And after that?’ he said.
