Gently North-West Read online

  Alan Hunter was born in Hoveton, Norfolk in 1922. He left school at the age of fourteen to work on his father’s farm, spending his spare time sailing on the Norfolk Broads and writing nature notes for the Eastern Evening News. He also wrote poetry, some of which was published while he was in the RAF during the Second World War. By 1950, he was running his own bookshop in Norwich. In 1955, the first of what would become a series of forty-six George Gently novels was published. He died in 2005, aged eighty-two.

  The Inspector George Gently series

  Gently Does It

  Gently by the Shore

  Gently Down the Stream

  Landed Gently

  Gently Through the Mill

  Gently in the Sun

  Gently with the Painters

  Gently to the Summit

  Gently Go Man

  Gently Where the Roads Go

  Gently Floating

  Gently Sahib

  Gently with the Ladies

  Gently North-West

  Gently Continental

  Gently North-West

  Alan Hunter

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Cassell & Company Ltd, 1967

  This paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Alan Hunter, 1967

  The right of Alan Hunter to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-78033-940-5 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-78033-941-2 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  In memory of my mother, Isabella Hunter, née Andrews, formerly of Newton Lodge, Culsalmond, Aberdeenshire, who, in the short time permitted her, and among the flats and barbarians of East Norfolk, contrived to possess her son with an indelible prejudice for the land of heroes and poets. Rest her well where she lies, and greetings to my unknown Scottish cousins.

  Norwich, 1966

  Mr Fred Urquhart undertook the labour of vetting my Scots and vainly attempted to argue me out of three parts of it. I am to blame, he is scatheless. My best thanks are due to him for his generous endeavours.

  A.H.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pick up yer stick, Donald,

  Pu’ on yer bonnet—

  The North Road’s a lang ane

  Wi’ queer cattle on it.

  Later Border Minstrelsy, ed. McWheeble

  THE TWO CARS, both Humbers, one a blue Hawk IV, one a bronze-and-black Sceptre, approached Tally Ho Corner by Ballards Lane and there joined the Great North Road.

  Like all good journeys, this one had begun very early in the morning. Bridget, Gently’s sister, and her husband, Geoffrey Kelling, had arrived at Finchley from Somerset the evening before. Brenda Merryn had slept in Kensington, where she had a late surgery to take, but her green 1100 had slunk into Elphinstone Road shortly after 5.30 a.m. Gently, sprucely dressed in thorn-proof tweed, had answered her ring. He beheld Brenda elegant in a tailored suit and a discreet blouse with a ruffled front. She sent a look past Gently before she kissed him. She smelt like a bouquet of lilac.

  ‘Are your sinister relatives about . . . ?’

  ‘Naturally. They’re going to eat you for breakfast.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, George – you’re a swine!’

  Gently grinned and drew her into the hall.

  Bridget and Geoffrey were already in the breakfast-room, which was warm with the odours of coffee and hot bacon. Bridget was very like her brother but she had grey eyes and her chin was less blunt. Geoffrey had a thin, ascetic face and surprisingly merry brown eyes. They both rose to take Brenda by the hand.

  ‘My dear, you’re not quite a stranger,’ Bridget told her. ‘We live only a few miles from Bristol, you know, and Geoff has met your father in court.’

  ‘Yes,’ Geoffrey nodded, ‘to my utter confusion. He bowled over a respected client of mine. Taunton Assizes, ’63. If you’re a chip off old Eric I must watch my step.’

  Gently winked at Bridget over Brenda’s shoulder, but Bridget firmly avoided his eye.

  Mrs Jarvis, wearing a flowered dressing-gown which Gently had given her at Easter, served the sort of breakfast which in her view was de rigueur for intending travellers to Scotland. Because it was so early there were no papers and no radio noises in the background, and the meal proceeded with gay briskness from porridge to toast and marmalade.

  Gently, finishing first, went out to switch Brenda’s luggage to the Sceptre; then he brought the Sceptre to the curb behind the Hawk and shunted the 1100 into the garage.

  About him the morning air was cool. Slaty shadows lay along the road. And beyond that road was another road, and another road, and at last . . . Scotland! A whole fortnight of peaks and heather lay at the end of Elphinstone Road, waiting the twist of an ignition key, the surge of the Sceptre’s sweet engine . . .

  Gently glanced at his watch: 6.10. He could hear Brenda laughing in the house; and suddenly London felt like a prison from which he could scarcely wait to break free. With a fierce longing he wanted those mountains purpling in the rainy wrack, the flowery glens, the brabbling streams, the grey, wind-wrinkled lochs. Otterburn and the North! And Brenda to go by his side. Until that moment, standing by the cars, he hadn’t guessed how much he wanted this trip.

  Brenda came out of the house smiling and threw him a mock salute with two fingers.

  ‘We’re on time, O Highness,’ she said. ‘Take-off isn’t till 6.15.’

  ‘Being early won’t hurt us,’ Gently grumbled ungraciously. ‘What’s my sister forgotten this time?’

  Bridget had forgotten her toilet-bag, as usual, and in fact they were two minutes late getting away.

  Traffic was blissfully light when they first struck the A1. After Hatfield, they were drifting along at a steady, murmurous sixty-five, the Hawk leading, the Sceptre a precise thirty yards behind. Some early commuter traffic was meeting them but their own lane was thinly sown, and they were comfortably improving on the average which Gently had estimated in his travel-plan.

  He drove relaxedly, his hands lying light on the wheel, his left thumb hooked in the perforated spoke, his right hand extended along the rim. When he made a straight-through change it was a wrist- and not an arm-movement and the revs swelled or levelled to an imperceptible take-up. The Sceptre had been serviced two days before and she was handling like silk. She’d also been polished, vacuumed and valeted, and had her tyres upped three p.s.i.

  They cleared the Stevenage motorway and bored on towards Baldock. The sun was standing up on their right in the blue fire of a June sky. Early June had been wet, following a cold, late spring, but since the beginning of the week the weather had turned brilliant.

  ‘Ah,’ Brenda sighed. �
�This is the life for a jaded receptionist.’

  Gently smiled without turning his head. ‘It’ll rain when we get to Scotland,’ he said.

  ‘Not in my Scotland it won’t,’ Brenda said. ‘It may rain in yours, but not in mine. There’ll be sun on the bens and the glens. I crossed a gypsy’s palm with silver.’

  ‘There’ll be mist, there’ll be rain,’ Gently said. ‘Then the brightest sun of all. Then the longest and softest evening. Then the rain and the rain and the rain.’

  ‘Hm,’ Brenda said. ‘Gently the Rain King. You’re a romantic, that’s your trouble. But I’m a realist, I dabble in magic. I’ve witched the weather and it shan’t rain.’

  They reached the limits at Baldock and Gently closed up on the slowing Hawk. A big transporter was hammering towards them, leaving a trail of smoke along the street. His eyes on this, Gently failed to notice a car come shooting up in his mirror, and a moment later a dark blue Cortina cut across in front of him with squealing tyres. He hit the brakes. The polite Sceptre ducked and obeyed. Smoke, fumes and the thunder of the transporter broke over and around them. Through a grimy mist Gently saw the Cortina swing out past the Hawk and pull away, then they were through the blackest of the smoke and coasting into slightly dimmed Baldock.

  ‘Well, the bloody swine!’ Brenda exclaimed, her green eyes flashing. ‘Did you ever see such an exhibition – and breaking the speed limit on top! Did you get his number, George?’

  Gently shook his head. ‘Too busy.’

  ‘But you’re not going to let him get away with it?’

  ‘What do you suggest – that I chase him?’

  ‘Yes – something!’ Brenda stormed. ‘Good Lord, he’s a menace, he’ll kill someone. And you, you’re a policeman, George – it’s up to you to do something!’

  Gently cocked a grin at her. ‘Cool down,’ he said. ‘I’m just a Whitehall copper on his holidays. If I went chasing every firebrand on the A1 I’d never make it to the Border.’

  ‘But he might have smashed us.’

  ‘Not him. He knew I’d reach for my anchors.’

  ‘And he was breaking the speed limit.’

  ‘Very naughty. I hope they catch him and sting him for it.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ Brenda cried. ‘But you didn’t see him, and I did. He had long red hair and a red beard, and he looked the most conceited man in the world.’

  ‘He probably travels in hair-restorer,’ Gently said. ‘That would account for the chip on his shoulder.’

  ‘He’s a devil,’ Brenda said. ‘I think he’s a bank-bandit. And you’re just letting him slip through your fingers.’

  She jerked a cigarette from a tin on the shelf, put the lighter to it and puffed smoke meanly. She glared at Gently. Gently winked, sent the Sceptre gliding through the lights after Geoffrey.

  They strode on again northwards, by Biggleswade, Sandy, St Neots. Gently pointed out a lay-by where had occurred a vicious killing he had investigated. The victim, an R.A.F. warrant officer, had been brought there in a van; then his body had been cut to ribbons with Sten-gun fire to confuse identity and suggest a revenge motive.

  ‘You know such nice people,’ Brenda commented. ‘You’re such a status-making acquaintance. Did you catch the murderer?’

  ‘No, he escaped. He was a Pole. His countrymen got him.’

  ‘What did they do to him?’

  ‘Oh, gassed him one night.’

  ‘I see. What you’d call a happy ending.’

  ‘It was an amusing case,’ Gently said. ‘There was a woman in it. She got strangled.’

  Then on by Huntingdon and Alconbury, where the A1 took the line of Ermine Street, and by Stamford, Grantham and Newark, crossing the cantle-cutting Trent. Names were different, houses were different, with more of stone and less of brick; a drystone wall or a strange poster told of the miles they’d left behind. London, the south, were slipping away, their soft grain and prim surface; and the north was coming down to meet them, ruder, franker, more elemental. Even the A1, the unchanging A1, uniform in surface, sign and traffic, choosing always the featureless line of country, couldn’t quite conceal the tang of the North.

  By 10.15 they’d arrived at the south end of the Doncaster Motorway, and here Gently’s travel-plan allowed for a stop for coffee and petrol. The two cars pulled into the service station and parked with bumpers to the low parapet. Their crews tumbled out, stretching, sniffing, a little bemused by the quietness and non-movement.

  ‘It’s inside, I think,’ Brenda said to Bridget. ‘Did you notice that pig in the blue Cortina?’

  ‘Bridgy wouldn’t notice anything,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She’s one of those lucky people who can sleep in cars.’

  ‘Well,’ Brenda said, ‘you’d have noticed him. He passed you in the speed limit at Baldock.’

  ‘May have done, my dear,’ Geoffrey smiled. ‘But then, we were crawling through Baldock in any case.’

  ‘Oh,’ Brenda said. ‘You’re worse than George.’ And she went off with her nose tilted, towing Bridget after her.

  They met again in the station’s large, comfortably fitted restaurant, which framed, with a range of huge windows, the sweeping view to the north-west. There, drinking your coffee, you apparently looked out into an animated industrial painting, in which the motorway, advancing from a roundabout in the foreground, led the eye to a majestic spoil-tip in the middle distance.

  ‘Perfect Lowry,’ Geoffrey apostrophized. ‘Though he was using somebody else’s palette. To see Ruskin justified like this is enough to make an artist hang himself.’

  ‘Of course, Geoff’s brought his paints along,’ Bridget said. ‘We’ll see some Monarchs of the Glen à la Doyly John.’

  ‘Well, there are deer at Strathtudlem,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, Maclaren swore there were when he offered me the cottage.’

  ‘And you believed him,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Yes – he was sober enough at the time. And he vouches for wild-cats in Strathtudlem Forest, and a golden eagle if we’re lucky.’

  ‘Did he vouch for Red MacGregors?’ Brenda asked.

  ‘Red MacGregors?’

  Brenda nodded. ‘Who scour the roads in blue Cortinas – then sit down to coffee with their victims.’

  She pointed along the line of booths, in one of which they were sitting. Above the back of the last of them they could see projecting a head of fiery red hair.

  ‘That’s your man, Superintendent,’ she said to Gently. ‘You’d better slip along and put the cuffs on him.’

  ‘What makes you so certain it’s him?’ Gently asked.

  ‘Intuition, O Highness. But I’m willing to check.’

  She slid out of the booth and marched down the aisle to the booth occupied by the red hair. Attached to the wall near the booth was a vending machine and at this she paused, as though examining its wares. Then she turned to stare accusingly at the owner of the hair. Then she marched back and resumed her seat by Gently.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s him. Redbeard in person. He’s up to some devil’s work with papers and a notebook – most likely checking his score of probables.’

  ‘Pooh,’ Gently said. ‘He’s only a traveller getting his programme worked out.’

  ‘If you say so. But I’ll tell you one thing: he’s as Scotch as Wullie Wallace. He’s got one of those mighty and mournful faces they use on tins of shortbread, and a big agate pin stuck in his tie, and a tartan waistcoat with silver buttons.’

  ‘Is that a crime?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to meet him around Bannockburn. Are you going to run him in?’

  Gently chuckled. ‘Not my day for it,’ he said.

  ‘I think his name’s MacLandru,’ Brenda said. ‘Or else he’s the Son of Rob Roy.’

  When they rose to go the Cortina-driver was still sitting in his booth. Outside Brenda spotted his car. It was a G.T. model, much stained with travel.

  The motorway took them into West Riding and the long, long Yorkshire miles,
with Boroughbridge apparently receding before them and Leeds for ever riding their flank. The Sceptre had taken over the lead and was thrusting ahead through plentiful traffic, slipping tall trucks, frisky caravans, transporters loaded with bright new cars. Gently’s pipe hung dead in his mouth and his eyes were distant and dreamy. The pattern of traffic seemed always to unfold for him, move from him, give him road. Leeds was weathered at last and Borough-bridge erased from the signs. Ripon, Thirsk and Northallerton ceased to offer invitation. Then they were passing Catterick Camp with its long ranks of khaki trucks, and pointing up the straight to the great divide of Scotch Corner.

  Gently glanced at his watch as he slowed for the roundabout.

  ‘Well?’ Brenda asked.

  ‘Good going. I think we’ll press on to Brough for lunch.’

  ‘I’m hungry now,’ Brenda yawned. ‘And when do we get to some scenery?’

  ‘Stay with it,’ Gently said. ‘We’ll perhaps have lunch and scenery together.’

  He turned left onto the A66, checking that Geoffrey had turned behind him. At once the anonymity of the A1 was broken and they began climbing into hilly country. At Bowes they reached the 1000-foot contour and were still climbing across Bowes moor, with a great width of raw Pennine fells stretching beside and beyond them. They stopped short of Brough and lunched at a roadhouse at the highest point of the road. Photographs on the wall showed arctic-like snow scenes, taken when the roadhouse had been cut off in a recent winter. Behind them the moors peaked in Boldoo Hill, before them stretched to Bastifell, Tan Hill, Water Crag; while down the road which the legions had trod appeared the first blue promise of the lakeland mountains.

  ‘Oh,’ Bridget exclaimed, as they stood in the car-park and took photographs like other tourists, ‘why go any farther than this – what can Scotland have to beat it?’

  ‘It’s certainly a stunner,’ Geoffrey agreed. ‘I don’t know – what’s Scotland got, George?’

  ‘Scotland is bigger,’ Gently said. ‘That’s the important point about Scotland.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What can being bigger have to do with it?’