Gently Sahib

Book 0: George Gently

by Alan Hunter

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

If a tiger mauled a man to death, would he bother burying the corpse?

The tiger that had escaped from a local zoo and had terrorized the little market town of Abbotsham had been shot dead by a police marksman without, it would seem, having caused anything more than a mild panic. It wasn't until a year later that an apparent victim of the rogue tiger was discovered - but the man was neatly buried in his own back garden. With foul play afoot, George Gently is called in to investigate...

Release date: April 19, 2012

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 225

Sample

POLICEMAN SHOOTS TIGERCountry Town Terrorized

Attack On Butcher’s Van

 

IT WAS A small town.

Driving through it, you were annoyed by its complex of streets. At the same time you were impressed by an old-world spaciousness, a clumsy charm.

You drove downhill through the suburb streets then uphill again to the town centre. So you saw a citadel of plastered gable-ends and rusty brick among many dark trees.

That looked peaceful, had repose. Yet actually it was a busy market town.

It contained any number of old-established businesses and had a bustling market on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

There was money in the town, well-to-do people. All around it lay rich farmlands. It was handy for London, though not too close, and you could drive in easily for a day’s shopping or a show.

Also the place had social ‘tone’, for there were two great estates within a few miles of it. Bordering its river stood the remains of a huge abbey and beside the abbey a modest cathedral church.

Yet the ‘tone’ was affable, easy-going, like the old houses with their big doors and bow windows.

Life was busy, but had poise.

This was Abbotsham (pop. 19,023).

For six hours yesterday morning panic reigned in placid Abbotsham. A hungry Bengal tiger roamed the deserted streets. Escaping from the farm of Hugh Groton, an animal importer, it made its way into the sleeping town. A 76-year-old pensioner, Mrs Annie Short, was first to give the alarm.

Annie Short had a daughter living in a village seven miles off. To this village Annie could sometimes get a lift on a fruit-pickers’ bus. The bus left the station yard at six thirty a.m. The old lady was a dairyman’s widow and so was used to early rising.

At five a.m. she rose and washed and put on her best black dress. All was quiet. From across the road she could hear the gentle wheeze of the gasworks.

Her cottage was one of a row in Gas Lane, which was a cul-de-sac off Nelson Street and which had at the end of it a fellmonger’s warehouse which smelled badly in warm weather.

It was warm weather now. She sniffed a little while getting her breakfast.

At six ten a.m. she unbolted her street door.

She saw the tiger standing just outside.

Annie Short, who had handled bulls, didn’t scream or faint; instead she seized the walking stick which stood by the door and thrust it sharply at the tiger’s eyes.

The tiger leaped backwards and showed its teeth in a thundering snarl. It crouched. It stared at Annie and her stick, its empty yellow eyes smouldering.

‘Shoo!’ Annie said. ‘Shoo! Go away, you bad boy.’

Then she calmly bolted the door again and went out at the back to waken her neighbour.

Her neighbour, Mrs Onley, had a phone which her children had installed. Annie Short rang the police and informed them of the tiger.

‘There’s one of them zoo creatures gallivanting in the lane. Hadn’t you better come along and see to it, together?’

‘There’s a what, missus?’

‘A big old tiger thing. I don’t know what you’d call it.’

‘A tiger?’

‘Ah. Something of that sort. Do you send a man round after him.’

The desk sergeant held his hand over the phone.

‘Timmo! Here’s a job for you. Lady reports a tiger in Gas Lane. You keep rabbits at home, don’t you?’

Then to the telephone he said: ‘Right you are, missus, I’m sending a lion tamer.’

‘So I should think,’ Annie Short said.

But when Timmo arrived, the tiger had gone.

Savage with hunger, the great beast attacked a butcher’s van driven by Mr Harry Birdbrook. While it was devouring his meat Mr Birdbrook succeeded in climbing a wall.

Mr Birdbrook also set out early that morning. He had a flourishing round in the nearby villages few of which had butchers shops.

In addition to orders which had been phoned in he carried a supply of dressed meat which, laid out in dishes under a white cloth, was intended to attract casual custom. To make the display effective he had an open-sided van. He drove the van sedately, rarely exceeding thirty miles an hour.

Mr Birdbrook was a massive man and he regarded himself as his best advertisement. He had rolling cheeks that resembled those of the model piglets in his shop window.

When he left the shop in the Buttermarket he drove down Friargate into Station Road.

It was six twenty a.m. by the station clock and fruit-pickers were collecting near a works bus.

Suddenly they scattered, as though Mr Birdbrook were a terrible apparition; he blinked his round eyes at them in amazement. Could they be having him on, or something?

Tilting his nose, he drove past the station and took a side road that led to Firstfield, a narrow road between high hedges which it was time somebody cut. Here he had another surprise. He met a postman cycling towards him.

Almost at once the postman dismounted, or rather fell off his bike, and dived into the hedge.

What was it about? A sudden call of nature? Or were they all in league to make a fool of him?

He frowned as he passed the thrown-down bike, one wheel of which was still spinning.

A hundred yards farther on the road turned sharply to the right and it was here, in his offside mirror, that Mr Birdbrook caught sight of the tiger. He gave a yelp and bounced in his seat and sent the van swerving across the road.

Impossible! Yet it was there, intently loping along behind him.

A tiger at least as big as a carthorse – big enough to swallow him in a couple of gulps!

Mr Birdbrook stabbed at the accelerator. The van picked up to a steady forty. This was its maximum, for it was an old van, but it didn’t seem to discommode the tiger.

Worse, it blew the cloths off the meat, exposing some prime steak and a dish of sausages.

Raising dust, the tiger put on speed. Now it was bounding along level with the van.

Then it sprang. It crashed down into the van with a weight that nearly turned it over. Both the back springs were broken at once and the offside tyre was fouled and blew. Mr Birdbrook bawled, the van swerved over the verge, struck the hedge, heeled, and stopped.

Mr Birdbrook, uninjured, burst out of the cab in a tumult of flailing limbs.

Across the road was a boundary wall which enclosed a plantation belonging to Teyn Lodge. It was a six-foot wall, and in the normal way beyond Mr Birdbrook’s powers to scale.

Now he crossed the road and skipped up the wall in a single convulsive effort, then clawed into the branches of a big oak tree that swept the wall at that point.

Could a tiger climb a tree? He had a horrid idea he’d read it could.

But he was stuck; his bough was isolated. He could only cling to it, his eyes bulging like gooseberries.

Meanwhile the tiger, having made its kill, was settling down to gnaw and tear at the meat. It liked the sausages, drawing out strings of them and severing mouthfuls with a toss of its head.

But when it had finished these hors d’oeuvres?

Mr Birdbrook closed his eyes.

The only sounds were of birds singing and the fearsome tearing noises made by the tiger.

Minutes passed. Then the tearing noises were interrupted by a whimpering snarl.

Mr Birdbrook closed his eyes tighter, began to mumble some prayers he remembered.

Another snarl, then the frightful sound of the tiger jumping down from the van; but also a different sound, a sharp scolding, challenging yelp.

Mr Birdbrook opened an eye.

What he saw he could scarcely credit.

Not twenty yards from the crouched tiger stood Suki, the Teyn Lodge Pekinese.

The Pekinese had its head held back, its button eyes staring indignantly at the tiger, and the latter, flat down and ready to spring, was waving its tail and showing huge yellow teeth.

The Pekinese yelped again. It began stalking towards the tiger. It was about the size of one of the tiger’s forepaws and it strutted without haste on its bow legs.

The tiger gave a whining snarl and shuffled itself backwards a few feet.

The Peke came on.

The tiger retreated farther.

The Peke set up a furious barking.

In a flash, its nerve breaking, the tiger leaped up and began to run.

The Peke, in an ecstasy of indignant barking, shot down the road in pursuit, breaking off only when the tiger, with tail trailing, galloped panic-stricken round the bend.

Then the Peke trotted back again, grumbling and yelping, and stopped to look at Mr Birdbrook.

Mr Birdbrook also looked at the Peke. Though he had probably forgotten it when he talked to the reporters.

Police armed with rifles patrolled a wide area around Firstfield Road. Later the military were called in and a contingent of the RAF Regiment. Nothing was seen of the desperate animal for several hours after the attack on the van.

The trouble was, from the police point of view, that nobody would take the tiger seriously.

Loudspeaker vans were sent round the town warning people to keep off the streets, but that only seemed to bring them out, including the children, who were greatly excited.

Also, it was the Saturday market, which brought in crowds of country people; even if they had wanted to keep off the streets they had nowhere to go except the pubs and shops.

As for the market, it continued as usual. It would take more than a tiger to stop that. The big square of stalls, with lights blazing under striped canopies, was crowded with shoppers from breakfast-time onwards.

The market was entertainment. Cheap-jacks thronged one side of it. Stolid-faced country folk grouped silently round them to be harangued in Cockney and Brummagem accents. Plates were slammed together to show their soundness, rolls of printed cotton went flapping down counters.

One man, styled The Glassware King, smashed a tumbler and ate it at the start of his performance.

And nobody really believed in the tiger – hadn’t it escaped to the fields, anyway?

In the Abbey Gardens children, tired of waiting to see it, improvised a game called ‘Tiger, Tiger’.

And the policemen too felt a little silly, strolling about the streets with rifles from the barracks. Some carried them shouldered, like sentries, some wore them slung, thumb-under-strap.

Groton, the animal dealer who owned the tiger, was cruising about in the back of a police car. He was a huge man in a khaki shirt and jodhpurs and he wore an impressive revolver in a polished leather holster.

‘Don’t shoot unless you have to,’ he’d told the police. ‘I can handle him – that’s my job. I paid seven hundred and fifty for that tigger. I’ve some doped gee-gee waiting in the truck.’

The truck, slightly resembling a Black Maria, was an object of interest on the Abbey Plain car park. Small boys pointed out the little barred windows and fingered the scratches on the two heavy doors.

But only Groton was showing a real concern. Danger seemed so remote from the Saturday market, the busy pavements. If there was in fact a tiger – one remembered the cheetah scare at Blackheath – wouldn’t someone appear with a whip and usher it back to its cage?

Meanwhile there was the shopping to do, shoes for the kids, the old man’s tobacco.

And hour by hour was safely tolled by the clock on the Jew’s House, a resonant chimer.

Then the famished brute appeared again, this time in the crowded Market Place. The police believe it had been lying up in a small yard behind a fish shop. Panic swept through the crowds. They rushed screaming into adjoining streets. A policeman fired at the tiger which darted into cover.

Police Constable Kennet was the man who fired at the tiger. Except for the tiger he would have been playing cricket on the village green at Cockgrave. He was a lean, strong-boned man, a fast bowler and a middling bat. He was patrolling the east side of the Market Place while Police Constable Bulley patrolled the west side.

The tiger appeared opportunely, when Police Constable Kennet had come to the south end of his beat.

A moment before he’d watched Police Constable Bulley slip into the convenience by the Jew’s House.

The tiger emerged with composure. It stood blinking its eyes at the top of an alley. For several moments it went unnoticed and remained peering at the stalls and lazily stretching.

Then it yawned – and one of the cheap-jacks found himself peering into a vast throat.

He gave a wavering sort of yell and overbalanced from the box on which he had been demonstrating butane lighters.

In doing so he upset a case of lighters, which went shimmying around on the flagstones, and made such a commotion that all attention was temporarily centred on himself.

Then he got up and began running and shouting:

‘Get out of here – it’s that blinking tiger!’

And there were screams and other shouts and a sudden rushing and violent scramble.

Yet strangely enough, not everybody ran. Quite half the crowd, after the first scatter, came to a stand again at a little distance. Some were climbing on stalls, others catching up impromptu weapons. It was those at the back who caught the panic and dashed into shops and into side streets.

Only Police Constable Kennet stood his ground, but behind him a semicircle formed.

He could feel them there, tense, watching him, the man who must do something about the tiger.

And the tiger blinked at this sudden confusion and gave a feeble flick of his tail. Then he made to yawn again, thought better of it, d. . .