Gently through the Mill

by Alan Hunter

  ‘Wring his neck or strangle him – it was one or the other.’

  After breakfast they had been definitely off-colour. The routine of form-checking and bet-laying had gone quite by the board. The dark one had gone out, leaving his friend to bite his nails. When he returned, just at lunchtime, he had with him the noon edition of the evening paper.

  ‘They never had their lunch at all. I saw them sitting in the bar with the paper on the table. They weren’t talking, just sitting there – like as though something had knocked them all of a heap.’

  And then, of course, they had gone, taking a taxi to the station; after paying their bill in one-pound notes, and ensuring that Taylor’s disappearance wouldn’t be prematurely reported.

  Dutt had got hold of a timetable and was checking the afternoon trains. There’d been a London train at two fifteen, though the latest reports said they weren’t back in Stepney.

  ‘Do you do any racing?’

  The manager looked startled.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’

  ‘When was the last meeting at Newmarket?’

  It chimed in exactly. It had been on the day when Taylor and his pals had arrived at The Roebuck. The booking had been phoned in, perhaps from the course; the elapsed time between booking and arrival coincided nicely with the times of the available train-service.

  But what had occurred at Newmarket to send them hotfoot to Lynton … floating, almost, in an ocean of bank notes?

  A mighty day at the races should have seen them carousing at Stepney! Unless, for some reason, Stepney had become suddenly unhealthy for them.

  And since the police hadn’t been looking for them, then it seemed to follow that …

  ‘Ring up Newmarket, Dutt, and see what’s been going on there. We’re looking for a recent theft of bank notes, at or just before the last race meeting.’

  The manager had lit a cigarette with hands which were trembling. One knew what he was going to say almost before he opened his mouth.

  ‘I suppose there’s bound to be publicity, Inspector?’

  Wasn’t that Lynton all over?

  Gently grunted and turned his back on him – as though you could escape publicity in a business like this!

  But there was nothing to be had from Newmarket, or nothing that looked like tying in. An empty house had been burgled a week before the races, a punter had been attacked and robbed as he left the racecourse.

  ‘How much did they get off him?’

  ‘Fifty quid, according to his statement.’

  ‘We’re looking for something bigger – probably several thousands.’

  ‘Sorry, there’s been nothing like that since a post-office van was held up four years ago.’

  ‘Did you recover any of the money?’

  ‘Yes, we got the lot.’

  Yet they had had their money from somewhere … and that day at the races had been a crucial moment in the affair.

  ‘Shall we take a look at his things, sir?’

  Dutt, as always, wanted to be getting down to the practical.

  ‘Yes, after which you’d better go to the station. There’s just one chance in a hundred that somebody will remember where our two birds booked to.’

  * * *

  Taylor had enjoyed the luxury of one of the best rooms on the first floor. It was large and looked across the car park and street to the Abbey Gardens. Adjoining it was a small private bathroom with a shower, and a separate toilet.

  That Taylor’s belongings were still there was a factor made more important by the total absence of effects found on the corpse; while Griffin, for all his efficiency, had been unable to trace the reach-me-down clothes from which the makers’ labels had been ripped.

  ‘They’ve tidied the place up, sir.’

  A lot of junk was lying about, but it had been put in order by the neat-handed chambermaid.

  ‘I’ll bet it was in a flipping mess when that geezer was living here …’

  There was the portable radio, an expensive model with a chromium-plate interior; a table-lighter, a musical cigarette-box, a pair of Zeiss glasses hung carelessly from the bed-rail, a Leica that bore out the bartender’s estimate. The wardrobe was stuffed with clothes of a type likely to appeal to the heart of the little Stepney spiv. On a bedside cabinet lay a pile of magazines featuring pin-up photographs. Two pigskin suitcases, still with labels attached to the handles, stood side by side in a corner.

  ‘Went to town, sir, didn’t he?’

  Gently lifted the lid of the cigarette-box and absently picked out a cigarette. The Russian …

  From the interior of the box tinkled an absurdly slow and fragile rendering of ‘The Banana Boat Song’.

  ‘Here, sir – look at this!’

  Ferreting in the cabinet, Dutt had found a brand new bank book.

  ‘Something new, isn’t it, when these blokes bank their pickings?’

  It was indeed. Gently took it with interest. It was issued by the local branch of the Westminster, three days after Taylor had arrived in Lynton; sixteen hundred pounds had been deposited, though progressive withdrawals had reduced the sum to twelve hundred and eighty.

  A bank account too … could that money really have been come by honestly?

  ‘This is a bit of a facer, Dutt!’

  ‘Yes sir – isn’t it?’

  ‘He couldn’t have been expecting any comeback if he put the stuff in a bank … it wasn’t hot, and nobody was going to ask questions.’

  ‘Like they really was working a system, sir.’

  ‘Yes – only that leaves everything to be explained!’

  In fact, the more one thought about it the less explicable it became. Unless the money were dishonest there had been no need for the trio to bury themselves in Lynton. The divisional police would have been interested and possibly irritating, but Taylor, Ames and Roscoe were no sensitive plants, and they would not have forsaken Stepney merely to avoid attentive policemen.

  Yet who knew better than Taylor not to deposit dishonest money in a bank …?

  It was asking for trouble – almost guaranteeing it!

  ‘Do you think he was going to bunk with it, sir, and the others rumbled him?’

  Gently shook his head regretfully.

  ‘It can’t be that simple. If he were going to do a bunk he would hardly have left his bank book – and can you see the others letting him bank the stuff in his name? Besides’ – he gestured to the scattered belongings – ‘would he have just walked out on this?’

  ‘He might have bought it all for a blind, sir.’

  ‘You’re overrating his intelligence.’

  Taylor wouldn’t have left his toys behind – toys he had spent a good proportion of that sixteen hundred on. ‘There’s a couple of points arising, though.’

  Gently tapped the bank book.

  ‘First there’s the sum itself – what does that suggest to us?’

  ‘Well, sir, it could be a share.’

  ‘Exactly, Dutt. Which gives us the probable sum involved. It was five thousand pounds – Taylor banked sixteen hundred and kept the balance of sixty-six in his wallet. Then there’s the date of the deposit.’

  ‘You mean he didn’t go to the bank the day after he got here, sir.’

  ‘He didn’t … which barely suggests that they didn’t bring the money with them.’

  ‘May I make a third point, sir?’

  Gently shrugged. ‘The floor’s all yours!’

  ‘Well, sir, from the way they was spending it – not to mention what they says to the bartender – it seems to me that they was expecting some more. And that business wiv the list of bets sounds a cert for a system.’

  ‘But it didn’t pay off, Dutt – at least, there’s only one deposit in Taylor’s book.’

  ‘Could’ve been an accumulator, sir, and they never seemed worried about it.’

  Apart from swearing, of course, when a good thing failed to come up …

  They went through the rest of Taylo
r’s effects without fording anything to show for their pains. There were no documents except the bank book and some receipted bills; everything was new and without doubt purchased locally.

  Down in the manager’s office Gently recalled Hayward.

  ‘This spending of money … was it the same all the time?’

  ‘Yes, sir, just the same.’

  ‘Even when they first arrived?’

  Hayward thought for a moment.

  ‘They may not have been quite so flush … the quid tips came later. But they were never close-fisted, I will say that for them.’

  Which might mean that they didn’t have the money or simply that they hadn’t got into the way of spending it …

  A strange business, altogether, and somehow rather a pathetic one. You caught the childish joy of these three rogues and their dream come true: money, safe if not honest, and almost respectability.

  Wasn’t that why Taylor had banked his share? Wasn’t that perhaps his biggest luxury?

  ‘Better take this to the bank and see what you can get from them.’

  Gently handed the bank book to Dutt.

  ‘Until we rope in Ames and Roscoe I can’t see us making much headway … but we’ll just have to keep on going through the motions.’

  ‘Anyway, we’ve got somethink to show them, sir!’ Dutt couldn’t help feeling bucked by his success at The Roebuck. ‘We’ve found out that they stopped here, which is more than the local boys did. And we know about the lolly, sir. We was only guessing before.’

  Gently grunted and hunched his shoulders as they turned a corner into the grey east wind. He had a sensitive nostril for leads, and he couldn’t smell one here.

  What racket worth five thousand a squeeze could ever have taken root in Lynton?

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘COFFEE OR TEA, sir?’

  ‘Coffee!’

  Gently almost growled at the middle-aged waitress, who in turn looked sullen. And to be truthful, there had been nothing to grumble at in either the food or the service.

  He had had onion soup, which he liked, followed by a very good sole with sauce tartare. Then had come apple charlotte, which again he was fond of, and now he was eating Stilton cheese with biscuits. An excellent meal, served deftly and with promptness. Surely a smile should have rewarded the waitress?

  Across the road another sort of lunch was being taken. Four of the mill workers were sitting on the pavement, their backs to the office wall, each with an open tin beside him. Their jaws worked slowly and they watched the passers with a naïve interest. Sometimes one of them would venture a remark, when the others would laugh raucously.

  Earlier, Fuller had gone home in his neat Ford Consul. Then Mrs Blythely had slipped the latch of the shop door, trying it twice before she was satisfied it had caught. Next Blacker had come loping across, giving Gently a queer look, and finally Ted Jimpson, who had finished work for the day.

  Ted had met a girlfriend, a sturdy little country wench. When a car passed Gently could see them reflected in the window-pane where they were sitting behind him. They, too, were glancing at him queerly, and apparently in a close conference together …

  ‘Black or white, sir?’

  ‘White – not too much milk.’

  This time he made up for his surliness with a wink, and the waitress forgave him as far as to smile bleakly.

  ‘Not a very nice day, sir.’

  ‘At least it isn’t raining.’

  ‘Very dull, it’s been, ever since Good Friday.’

  Over the way a mill worker had seen him and was nudging his neighbour. Gently studiously avoided catching any of their eyes. He wanted them to see him, everyone connected with the mill. It never did any harm to let people feel you were still keeping an eye on them.

  Nevertheless, he realized that it fell into the category of ‘going through the motions’ – he wasn’t following a lead, or even, for that matter, a hunch.

  A grudge, perhaps – that was another matter!

  After getting a frozen reception at headquarters when he gave them the news about The Roebuck, he was feeling a perverse desire to hang Taylor’s murder on Lynton’s door.

  They had been so smug, all of them, police and laity alike. And Press, though he hadn’t actually torn him off a strip, had delicately rapped his knuckles for shouldering Pershore aside so roughly.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like, being in a small town like this one …’

  He was wrong. Gently did. But it would have been pointless to have said so.

  ‘In London Mr Pershore might not cut very much ice, but in Lynton I assure you …’

  In Lynton you were a big-shot as soon as you started paying supertax.

  Then there was Griffin, listening intently, and coming up with a cautious theory. ‘Suppose he’d gone out to meet a woman, and her husband happened to find them?’

  The trouble was that it was a tenable theory and one which ought to have crossed Gently’s mind. The Blythelys were who Griffin was thinking about, and certainly the cap seemed to fit … if Taylor had been a Casanova, and setting aside the subsequent reactions of Ames and Roscoe.

  Press, however, had sat down firmly on this scandalous interpretation of the facts. The mayor-elect had suffered enough without having further enormities fathered on him …

  ‘Waitress, I’d like another cup of coffee!’

  He had drunk the first one at a single gulp and was surprised to find the empty cup in front of him.

  Blythely had come out into the mill yard and was standing staring at the pigeons. A van which momentarily hid the baker from view showed Ted Jimpson shaking his blond head and looking distinctly unhappy. What were they talking about, with their furtive glances at Gently’s broad back?

  Well, then, he had had a long talk over the phone with the assistant commissioner, the latter, no doubt, still twiddling his glasses and peering at the slice of Embankment across the courtyard. There hadn’t been much comfort in that. The A.C. was still nursing his idea of a glorious, gilt-edged racket going on in Lynton.

  ‘Have you thought of the docks, Gently? There’s a lot of dope getting in these days …

  ‘What about that chemical works outside the town? I see in the gazetteer that Lynton produces three per cent of the national supply of commercial sulphuric acid …’

  It was too easy, sitting there in the Yard and turning over maps and reference books. One had to be in the place and get the feel of it … wasn’t a betting system and Griffin’s crime passionel the more likely idea of the two?

  The assistant commissioner’s information had been entirely of the negative variety. The division couldn’t be quite certain when the three men had disappeared from Stepney, and Ames and Roscoe had not returned there. A round-up of likely elements had produced no worthwhile intelligence. There had been a notable silence in the world of narkdom.

  ‘It’s at your end, Gently, whatever it is. I feel sure that if you’ll poke around a little more …’

  ‘Would you like me to send you Simpson, of Anti-narcotics?’

  He had asked for an all-stations and hung up feeling more depressed than ever. The arrival of an empty-handed Dutt had done no more than set the seal on his mood.

  ‘There wasn’t nothing at the station, sir – nobody didn’t remember them. The bank manager sees Taylor, of course, and the cashiers remember him, but the lolly went to their headquarters and nobody did a check on it.’

  ‘Pound notes was it?’

  ‘Yessir. Sixteen bundles done up with rubber bands.’

  ‘New notes or old?’

  ‘They wouldn’t swear to that, but one of them thinks they might have been new.’

  ‘What about the other two?’

  ‘They don’t seem to have banked theirs, sir. I tried around the town, but there was nothink doing anywhere.’

  After which Gently had sat smoking in the office the super had allotted to him, indulging his blues and trying to pull something out of an empty bag …
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  There were two ends to the stick and he seemed to be holding the clean one. The dirty end, Ames and Roscoe, had disappeared like the eternal smoke-rings he was blowing. And the clean end was so very clean! There was scarcely a mark on it anywhere. Fuller’s bare opportunity was the best it could show, coupled with the fact that the murderer seemed to have known his way about a mill … this mill, if the choice of hoppers was more than an accident.

  Against that, where was the motive? What was Taylor to the Lynton miller?

  They could have met at Newmarket. Taylor might have gypped Fuller … but would Fuller have then seen fit to strangle him, and to have hidden the body in one of his own flour-hoppers?

  He could hardly have supposed that the business would pass as an accident!

  Or put it the other way, to try everything: suppose Fuller had done the gypping. Suppose he had lost the astounding sum of five thousand pounds, and been pursued to Lynton and badgered for the payment …?

  Gently had shaken his head decisively – such a hypothesis was too fantastic! The miller would never have plunged to such a fabulous extent, or been able to produce such a sum on demand if he had. Moreover, having got it, Taylor and his associates would have departed to the happy haunts of Stepney.

  Finally, there was the old chestnut of a racket. Once again you were dealing with a concept self-evidently academic. What could Fuller be running to produce pay-offs in the five thousand category – and how could Taylor and the others have cottoned on to it, meeting Fuller briefly on the racetrack?

  Beside these extravagant theories Griffin’s idea seemed a breath of sweet reason … it fitted most of the facts and did violence to scarcely any of them.

  Who knew what charms the baker’s wife had discovered in the little, rat-faced cockney?

  Blythely had stopped staring at the pigeons and had come to the gate of the mill. Like the others, he had made out the bulky form of Gently sitting in the café window.

  He said something to the workers, who had fallen silent at his approach; one of them laughed with a touch of self-consciousness, but the others remained serious enough.

  ‘Still snooping around, is he?’ – that would have been it. ‘You want to watch out, together!’ – and one of the workers had laughed.