Gently through the Mill

by Alan Hunter

  ‘Killed about midnight Thursday, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s the pathologist’s estimate.’

  ‘Much force used?’

  ‘The usual fracture. Taylor was a little man.’

  ‘Yes … I’ve had to do with him.’

  The assistant commissioner twisted his glasses like a diviner’s twig and appeared to be studying the set of them.

  ‘You know what puzzles me – and it is a puzzle – is what the deuce those fellows were doing in a quiet little place like Lynton. What game were they up to? That’s the star question. It was dangerous enough to get one of them murdered.’

  Gently nodded agreement. ‘Criminals work to a pattern.’

  ‘There’s that again … how did they get on to a different line?’

  ‘It must have seemed worth the risk.’

  ‘True – there’d be money in it. But what goes on at Lynton offering that sort of opening? And even if it did, how did they come to hear about it? There’s your angle of attack for you, Gently. If you can find the racket I think you’ll find your man.’

  Gently grunted as he shuffled the photographs together. There was nobody like the A.C. for making the obvious sound inspiring.

  At the same time he had been overlong in town, and a trip to the country was something he had been wishing himself.

  ‘I’ll have Dutt with me, will I?’

  ‘Certainly, Gently. I know you make a good team.’

  ‘He’s working with Jessop just now.’

  ‘I’ll have him taken off directly.’

  Gently went back to his office feeling that things might be worse in this second-best of all possible worlds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS TEATIME at Lynton when the slow, stopping train from Liverpool Street eventually pulled in at the station. Over a cup of what the British Railways facetiously termed coffee Gently examined the evening paper and grunted his satisfaction. There was yet no mention of the Yard having been called in.

  ‘We’ll check in the cases and stroll across to look at the mill … it may give us some ideas to talk over with the locals.’

  ‘Are we going to have a meal, sir, before we report?’

  ‘I think so, Dutt. Not knowing their canteen.’

  ‘I missed me lunch, sir, that’s why I mention it … got shoved on this job in such a blinking hurry.’

  Outside the station a grey road led them to the narrow streets of the town centre. At this hour they were thronged with workers returning from the big chemical works and other establishments on the town outskirts. Some afoot, many on cycles, they created an unwonted appearance of populousness, and the shops were busy with people making last-moment purchases.

  A small town … what had three petty criminals found to do here which had ended in the death of one of them?

  On a wide square a few brightly awninged stalls were selling off vegetables cheaply. In the distance the quarter chimed from the twin flint-faced towers of St Margaret’s Church.

  As they passed the Abbey Gardens they noticed a group of youths in drainpipe trousers lounging about the gates, opposite to them a few expensive cars parked in front of an old coaching inn called The Roebuck.

  A bit of shop-breaking or rowdyism, that was the style of Lynton. If you got a murder here it would be an amateur job, somebody batting their wife and sticking their head in the gas oven …

  ‘This is Fenway Road, sir.’

  And over there would be the mill, an untidy yet somehow attractive jumble of buildings in a mixture of timber, brick and slate.

  Gently came to a stop while he let the impression of it sink into his mind. It gave one the idea of irrational complexity, as though a simple idea had been carelessly embroidered upon.

  At the front was the bakehouse and shop, a stark rectangular group in pinkish-yellow brick, three storeys high with the baker living over the shop. At the back it dropped a storey and became stores, outhouse, anything.

  Behind this and nearly touching it rose the main block of the mill. It was quite a skyscraper, seven storeys at least. The brick here was dark red beneath blue-black tiles. The numerous square windows looked dusty and obscured, with sacks stuffed into frames which had lost their glass.

  Much lower, but adjoining it, came a tiled and weatherboarded structure on a brick lower storey, and then a similar but higher erection with a shallow gable and an outside hoist.

  A tall brick chimney sprouted from somewhere in the middle, a small office by the gate had low windows directly on to the road.

  ‘A useful place to hide a body, sir!’

  Dutt was also appraising it with a professional eye.

  ‘I’ll bet they don’t use half of it … then look at all those outbuildings and things.’

  ‘There’s a yard or something at the back there, Dutt. You can see the tops of some trees over the roofs of those old cottages.’

  ‘Our geezer was unlucky, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes … it might have been weeks before the corpse turned up.’

  They moved along as far as the café, the sight of which provoked less professional thoughts in the mind of the hungry Dutt.

  Some last few customers were being served in the shop by a talkative, fair-haired woman. In the office a middle-aged man with dark, bushy locks sat staring at some papers on his desk. As they watched a younger woman came through to him and her sudden appearance made him start perceptibly.

  ‘Would that bloke be the miller?’ muttered Dutt.

  ‘It seems a fair bet.’

  ‘Looks as though he’s got something on his mind.’

  ‘So would you have if you were on the wrong end of a homicide investigation …’

  Gently sighed to himself and felt aimlessly about in the pockets of his raincoat. There was nothing suggestive here at all, nothing in the town, nothing in the mill.

  Almost, he began to think, the whole circumstance was accidental … Steinie Taylor had got bumped off in some more promising venue, and his body was dumped at Lynton the more thoroughly to confuse the issue.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s try this café before it closes.’

  But Dutt was already turning the handle of the door.

  Lynton Borough Police H.Q. had been burned down by incendiary bombs during the war and had since arisen, a tribute to contemporary style, from its literal ashes.

  It stood facing the market square where it created no disharmony. The big, frameless windows, pastel brick, and supporting columns of varnished wood blended naturally with the Georgian setting, proving, if it were necessary, that good taste never quarrels with itself.

  The super’s office was in keeping with the architectural promise. It was lofty and light and discreetly furnished with chairs, desk, and filing cabinet in two-toned wood, while the carpet, by police-station standards, was unashamedly vivacious.

  It had the smell of somewhere new: it smelled of linseed and dyed fabrics and fresh cement.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, you know the outline of the case.’

  Superintendent Press was sitting uneasily behind his desk, his hands moving restively as he talked to the Central Office men.

  ‘This fellow Taylor and his associates are nothing to do with Lynton. I don’t mind telling you that in our view the culprit will be found elsewhere.’

  He was a man in his fifties with fleshy, boyish features. He had hard, greyish eyes and a fruity voice.

  ‘Your people think it’s a gang killing, and we have found nothing to suggest that it isn’t. The obvious theory is that he was murdered by his associates. The fact that they have disappeared goes a long way to substantiate it.’

  Gently nodded absent-mindedly and brought out his pipe. After looking round the town he was prepared to concede this theory as being the obvious one.

  ‘As to what they were doing in Lynton, your guess is as good as mine. I understand that these three men were in the habit of frequenting racetracks, but there is nothing closer to Lynton than Newmarket and Lincoln.
The last racing in the vicinity was at Newmarket three weeks ago.’

  In the square below the window a man was feeding the pigeons. The red sky of a fine April evening outlined a satisfying horizon of Georgian roofs and chimneys.

  ‘We’ve got another idea … we think it might be unconnected with racing.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be unlikely?’

  ‘Uncharacteristic, but then, so is murder.’

  The super jiffled with even greater unease.

  ‘What exactly did you have in mind – burglary, something of that sort?’

  No.’ Gently shook his head. ‘That would be too uncharacteristic. Burglary is a specialist crime – you don’t find other criminals casually turning to it. What we should look out for is some sort of a racket, something which has suddenly provided a special opportunity. We’ll suppose that our three men heard about it and came to cash in … then they ran up against some opposition and one of them got killed. The other two, quite naturally, dropped the business like a hot brick.’

  ‘And all this in Lynton?’

  ‘We can’t be quite certain.’

  ‘You can be certain enough of that one thing, Inspector. There are no rackets being operated in Lynton.’

  A big diesel truck crossed the square and sent the pigeons momentarily fluttering. The man who was feeding them threw his last fragment and crumpled the bag into a ball.

  ‘You have some docks here, haven’t you?’

  Gently blew a quiet little smoke-ring.

  ‘Yes … in a small way. Only light-draught vessels can come through the estuary.’

  ‘Any continental traffic?’

  ‘A few timber boats from Germany and Scandinavia. There’s a Dutch ship, I believe, which carries on a coal trade.’

  ‘There might be something there.’

  The super frowned at his fingernails.

  ‘As a matter of fact we did have a case … but no stretch of imagination could make a racket of it. Inspector Griffin, you handled that business. Perhaps you can give Chief Inspector Gently an account of it.’

  Inspector Griffin sat up a little straighter. He was a lean, fit-looking man with a severe moustache and a severe manner.

  ‘February the twenty-third, I think, sir. On information received I detained a German seaman named Grossmann as he was leaving the cargo-vessel Mitzi, arrived from Bremen with a cargo of machine-spares. He became violent and I was forced to restrain him. On being searched he was found to be carrying a package containing several thousand grains of heroin, and more was discovered in his sea-chest. We obtained a conviction, sir.’

  ‘And that, I think, is our only serious case of smuggling, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, sir. For as long as I’ve been on the Force.’

  The super extended an exonerated hand. ‘You see? A single case involving a solitary individual.’

  ‘Mmn.’ Gently puffed steadily. ‘And the person he was going to sell it to?’

  ‘He’d got no contact, sir.’

  Griffin came in like a bullet.

  ‘He was a rather stupid and uneducated man with no knowledge of what he was doing. Apparently he was under the impression that he could sell heroin to the nearest chemist or doctor. It was obviously the first time he had attempted anything of the sort.’

  Gently shrugged and struck himself a fresh light. At all events he was trying to get straw to make some bricks from …

  ‘There’s nothing else you can think of?’

  He was looking towards the super, but his question was addressed to Griffin. The super, he felt, had present visions of a shining, crime-free Lynton.

  ‘We have our quota of petty crime, but nothing at all out of the way.’

  ‘No forgeries, defalcations, outbreaks of armed assault – that sort of thing?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort has come to our notice lately.’

  They were on the defensive, both of them. The super had a stubborn expression on his fleshy face and Griffin was intent, ready to throw up his guard.

  You had only to suggest for one moment that there might be undiscovered crimes lurking in the district …

  ‘Well, we’d better leave that angle and get down to brass tacks. Who have we got at the mill, and what have they got to say for themselves?’

  Immediately the atmosphere relaxed. The super, opening a drawer, produced a box of cigarettes and offered them around, irrespective of rank. Inspector Griffin picked up a file he had brought with him and rustled the sheets in it with an air of confidence.

  ‘First there’s the people who live on the premises … Henry Thomas Blythely, the baker, and Clara Dorothy Blythely, his wife. And you have to count the assistant, Edward John Jimpson. He was working in the bakehouse during the time the crime was committed.’

  It had been a busy night, the one preceding Good Friday. Unlike his fellows Blythely baked the hot cross buns to be fresh on the day. The addition of these to his regular quota had meant an early start, and both his assistant and himself were in the bakehouse by ten p.m. on the Thursday evening.

  ‘And that’s their alibi – they worked right through together. At seven in the morning they knocked off for a couple of hours, Blythely taking a nap on his bed and Jimpson on a shake-down at the back of the shop. But the latest time the pathologist gives for the killing is two or three a.m.’

  ‘And the earliest?’ interrupted Gently.

  ‘Ten or eleven p.m. on the previous evening.’

  Nothing was known to the demerit of either Blythely or his assistant. The baker’s wife, by her own account, had retired to bed soon after her husband had gone down to the bakehouse, and had been wakened by him at seven in order to open the shop at half past.

  ‘Now we come to the mill people, though it seems unlikely that they would have had anything to do with it.’

  First the miller, Harry Ernest Fuller. He had locked up the mill at six p.m. on the Thursday and gone home to have tea with his wife and two young children. It was the night of the annual stag party given by his golf club. He had arrived at this – it was held in a pavilion attached to The Spreadeagle public house – at eight p.m., and left it again at approximately three a.m. on the Friday morning, the time being vouched for by his wife and an employee at the establishment.

  Griffin paused before he continued.

  ‘This may be irrelevant, sir, but I think I ought to mention it. Fuller impressed me unfavourably in the way he answered my questions. I didn’t attach much importance to it because the man had just had a bad shock, but I feel that the chief inspector ought to have all the facts.’

  Gently nodded his compliments and puffed on at his pipe. It didn’t take long to sum up Griffin as a conscientious officer. He’d lost his case, it had been given to the Yard, but that wouldn’t stop him handing over what might be of assistance.

  ‘There are a foreman and six hands employed at the mill, and two drivers who deliver and pick up grain.’

  Griffin had questioned each one and checked on his story. No fish was too small for the C.I.D. man’s painstaking net. This one had been in a pub, that one at the cinema. Blacker, the foreman, had had to admit a night with a woman of the town. But they were all accounted for, even Miss Playford, Fuller’s clerk.

  None of them could be truthfully described as suspects, and all of them had reasonable alibis.

  ‘Any bad hats amongst them?’

  It seemed that there were not. Blacker, perhaps, had a taste for low company, but it had never run him into any cognizable trouble.

  ‘Fuller for instance … has he got any money troubles?’

  Another blank there – the miller was mildly prosperous.

  The super was listening to it all with an expression of benignity. His man had done a good job and the rider was self-evident.

  ‘I think you’ll have to admit, Inspector, that Taylor’s associates are your men. There’s nobody here who even knew the fellow, let alone had a motive.’

  Yes, it was getting plain enough. The more yo
u listened, the more you probed, the less probable did it seem that Lynton had any more than a proprietary interest in the crime which had been fathered on it.

  On the roof where they had retired the pigeons cooed their complacent innocence.

  ‘Fuller and Blythely were the only ones with keys?’

  ‘Yes, but several ground-floor windows are broken.’

  ‘You checked them, of course?’

  ‘I was unable to come to any definite conclusion.’

  ‘Who knew that the hopper of sour flour might go undisturbed for a week or two?’

  ‘Almost everyone … it was an odd job which would get done only when the routine work was held up.’

  Back and forward went the shuttlecock, with Griffin never at a loss for his reply. He had thought of it all and checked it all; one could picture him going his rounds, quiet, alert and ruthlessly pertinacious. He had wanted the facts and he had got them; where Griffin had been, Scotland Yard must follow suit.

  ‘And there’s no trace of any of these three having stayed in the town?’

  As the conference progressed Gently was hunching ever deeper into his comfortable chair.

  ‘We’ve talked to all the lodging-houses and cheap hotels. A man disappeared on that date from one address, but we managed to trace him and he was only bilking his landlady.’

  ‘What about the other hotels?’

  ‘Would these men be likely to stay in them?’

  ‘Not in the usual way, but it’s just possible that they were in the money.’

  Griffin hesitated and for once looked put out. But he quickly recovered his stride.

  ‘We are always informed, of course, if anything irregular has occurred. Nobody could disappear from a hotel in the town without us hearing about it.’

  ‘His pals might have paid his bill.’

  Griffin looked as though he thought it were unlikely. Gently thought so too, but he lingered over the point. It was the only time he had caught the efficient inspector napping …

  Outside the shadows were lengthening in the square. A few knots of people had emerged from the Corn Exchange, where a concert was in progress. They were spending the interval talking and smoking cigarettes.