Essex Poison

by Ian Sansom

  It was the sight of Morley, oddly, in the hotel’s breakfast room that kept me from going under entirely. The sight of him, bolt upright, tucked away in the corner, tapping away at his beloved Hermes Featherweight, his cup of strong black tea trembling beside him, as though registering the movement of his soul. It occurred to me, seeing him there, that he too was alone, that he too was waiting and was lost. Besides, I had nowhere to go without him.

  After a perfunctory breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes for me and the usual bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and fresh-minted pronunciamentoes for Morley – reflections on the meaning of life and its relation to the meaning of architecture, on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, and the trouble with Oscar Wilde, the future of the BBC – we went to Willett’s garage to collect the Lagonda.

  ‘I’m sure Miriam will be joining us later,’ said Morley.

  I wasn’t so sure. I thought she was – actually, even now I don’t like to think what it was I thought. To distract myself I asked Morley if he had managed to solve the puzzle of the death of Arthur Marden. I was surprised by his answer.

  ‘We shall leave Essex defeated, I fear,’ he said.

  It was one of the only times during all my years with Morley that I heard him admit to the prospect of defeat. Essex, it seemed, had beaten us all.

  Over the door of its workshop and garage Willett’s advertised itself with a sign promising ‘Prompt, Efficient and Economical Service that Always Leaves Our Customers Satisfied’, a proud boast but one that might easily have been replaced with a more accurate sign promising, ‘Pompous, Condescending and Supercilious Service that Always Leaves Our Customers Feeling Foolish’, the true boast of all self-respecting car showrooms and repair workshops the length and breadth of England. We handed the keys to the Cadillac over to Mr Willett, who silently examined the vehicle for signs of damage, before handing us back the keys to the Lagonda. It was good to see the old girl: over the years the Lagonda, like the family dog or a stout pair of shoes, became a reliable friend. Without the Lagonda there would undoubtedly have been something missing in our lives; and as for me, the Lagonda was just about the closest thing I had to a trusty companion.

  Mr Willett examined the summary of repairs provided to him by his mechanics, a summary consisting of several sheets of closely typed onionskin paper.

  ‘So it was giving you a rough ride, is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘Losing power?’

  ‘Not noticeably,’ I said – but that was because Miriam was driving the car far beyond its capacities.

  ‘Poor fuel consumption?’

  ‘Yes. We had to stop a couple of times.’

  ‘Surges and stalls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This interrogation went on for some time, until I decided I would answer no more.

  ‘I think you have all the details, Mr Willett,’ I said, rather impatiently. ‘The only question is – is it fixed?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Willett. ‘It’s fixed.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, and was ready to leave it at that.

  ‘And what was the problem?’ asked Morley.

  ‘Dirt,’ said Mr Willett.

  ‘Dirt?’

  ‘Yes. You see you get these tiny little specks of dirt that build up on your filter and prevent the flow of air into the carburettor, and they can disrupt the ratio of fuel to air – it’s like the engine is choking on dirt.’

  ‘Exactly as I suspected!’ said Morley. ‘Choking on dirt! Exactly.’ He was absolutely thrilled. Even if he couldn’t solve a problem Morley always liked to think that he knew how he would solve a problem, if only he knew how – and so he discussed the problem of dirt in engines and details of the repairs for what seemed like an eternity with Mr Willett, while I refamiliarised myself with the Lagonda. The walnut dash. The rear wing curves. The big chromium-plated exhaust pipes on the side. It was a beauty. I could understand the fascination. But for me the main thing was that they had fixed it: for Morley, the conversation about how they had fixed it was just as important, if not more so.

  ‘Any time you’re back in Colchester, be sure to visit us again,’ said Mr Willett, once we had agreed to pay a king’s ransom for the work and the hire of the Cadillac. Morley of course didn’t care about the money. I cared a lot: the cost of the repairs alone would have made a significant dent in my debt to Delaney.

  ‘So, Mr Morley,’ I said, as we drove away from the workshop. ‘That’s us then? We can go?’

  ‘Well, actually, there is just one more thing,’ said Morley.

  ‘One more thing what?’

  ‘You remember Mr Dunbar yesterday mentioning something about the High Sheriff Ken Cowley having been at loggerheads with Marden about the electrification of the town?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, very vaguely. ‘Very vaguely.’

  ‘Well, I’ve arranged for us to pay a visit to Mr Cowley, just in case.’

  ‘Just in case?’

  ‘Just in case there’s something we’ve missed.’

  ‘What about Miriam?’ I asked.

  ‘We can pick her up when we’ve finished, Sefton. She’ll be fine, I’m sure. We must allow her to have her beauty sleep. She’s clearly exhausted.’

  Indeed.

  Cowley’s Mill is just outside Colchester, on the Hythe, on the River Colne. The mill itself is an industrial-agricultural style of building, of the kind that’s now familiar throughout the country, but which back then was still rather unusual outside dock areas and factories; it was basically a big corrugated-iron hut, built around a steel frame, a building of no architectural merit whatsoever beyond its simple practical purpose. A boiler house and a water tower were bolted on the side and some small cranes stood looming out the back.

  ‘Not so much dark Satanic mill,’ said Morley, ‘more corrugated Satanic shed, eh?’

  There were a couple of very smart-looking vans lined up outside the mill, which proclaimed that Cowley’s Mill provided ‘Oil, Polish, Paraffin, Lamp Glasses, Lamps and Wicks for Business and Domestic Use’.

  ‘Tidy little business,’ said Morley. ‘Lux mundi, eh?’

  Having announced ourselves to the site foreman we were shown into Ken Cowley’s office, which sat above and within the big metal hut like a captain’s cabin overlooking a ship: set up high on metal girders and accessed via a narrow metal staircase, with windows half tilted lengthways, it granted a perfect view of the dozen or so people toiling away in the building below. The place was freezing – cold, damp and humid all at once. On Cowley’s desk sat piles of paper, which riffled slightly in the breeze from the mill and the river outside. When we entered, Cowley was speaking loudly on the telephone and vigorously smoking. He waved us in and indicated for us to sit down on two thin metal chairs in front of his desk. He was a man with an oversized belly and a too-loud voice who glistened rather under the office lights; indeed, he had all the appearance of having at some stage actually been dipped in oil. After he had finished his conversation he slammed the phone down and pointed to us.

  ‘Tea?’ he asked Morley.

  ‘Tea?’ he asked me, before Morley had replied.

  ‘Three teas,’ he told the foreman, who was hovering by the door, and who immediately departed.

  ‘You can’t get the staff, can you, eh?’

  ‘Quite,’ agreed Morley, who as far as I was aware had no staff problems at all: he had Miriam running his day-to-day affairs, me to assist, Mr Humphrey his occasional butler, Mrs Brittain his ‘Maid of all Work’, his cook Mrs Christie, gardener and estate manager Mr Henry, and plenty of people from the village for all other purposes in times of need. There was no staffing crisis back at St George’s.

  ‘Now, how can I help you gentlemen?’ asked Ken Cowley, grinning widely and looking at us properly for the first time, at which his face instantly clouded and darkened and his grin vanished. ‘Hold on, weren’t you at the council meeting on Friday?’

  ‘Were we?’ said Morley, caught
momentarily off-guard.

  ‘Yes, you were. I remember the pair of you. You were causing all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Morley. ‘That was us, Mr Cowley. Yes, of course. We are …’ He looked across to me to dig him out of yet another hole. I considered for a moment allowing us to be ejected from Cowley’s Mill so that we could get out of Essex as quickly as possible. Then again, Morley was my employer, and I needed the work.

  ‘We are writing a book about the magnificent and majestic workings of English local democracy,’ I said, without conviction, ‘renowned throughout the world from the time of Gladstone.’

  ‘That’s it!’ said Morley. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And we’re interested in speaking to those people who are involved in running the local council.’

  ‘I see,’ said Cowley, flattered, as everyone is always flattered, by the prospect of appearing in a book – until, that is, they actually appear in a book. (At any given time Morley was usually fighting at least one case of libel, defamation or slander. Serious matters of course were left to his lawyers in London but Miriam and I often had to deal with the everyday disgruntled, irritated and annoyed. One man, a shopkeeper in Cumbria who shall remain nameless but whose premises Morley had described in print as ‘rather grimy’ – which they were – demanded a written apology, which Morley duly provided, along with the gift of a mop, a bucket and a stiff-bristled broom.)

  We drank our tea – served, grudgingly, by the foreman – and Morley wasted some time asking Cowley pointless questions about the functioning of the council and the role of the High Sheriff, until eventually he brought matters round to the death of Arthur Marden.

  ‘Very unfortunate,’ said Mr Cowley. ‘Great loss, great loss.’

  ‘I understand that you and Mr Marden didn’t always see eye to eye,’ said Morley.

  ‘I don’t know who told you that,’ said Cowley.

  ‘Just council titter-tatter, I suppose,’ said Morley.

  ‘Well, local politics, Mr Morley. Can be a messy business.’

  ‘And things were messy between you and Mr Marden?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say messy, no. We had our differences, certainly.’

  ‘Differences?’

  Cowley leaned back in his chair. He seemed to glisten ever more brightly under the lights. ‘You’re a businessman, Mr Morley, are you?’

  ‘I am a writer and journalist, sir.’

  ‘But you work for yourself or you work for someone else?’

  ‘I work for myself, sir, and always have done.’

  ‘So basically you manufacture and supply goods or services to others, yes?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it, yes,’ agreed Morley. ‘If we understand words as goods or services.’

  ‘So you’ll understand me.’

  ‘I always do my best, sir.’

  ‘Well, the situation is this, Mr Morley: I’m running a business here and I want to protect my business, just the same as you want to protect your business, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I do, yes.’

  ‘So if someone came to you, say, and they said – let’s imagine – they were going to replace all the books and newspapers in the world with some other form of communication, I don’t know what it would be …’

  ‘Radio waves?’ said Morley. ‘Telephones? Electromechanical machines—’

  ‘Whatever. You would try to protect your career as a writer of books, would you not?’

  ‘I’m sure I would, yes. Or I might learn to adapt to the new—’

  ‘Because if you don’t protect your business, who is going to?’ said Cowley.

  ‘No one?’

  ‘Correct, Mr Morley. No one.’

  ‘So you felt that Marden presented a threat to your business interests?’

  ‘I did, Mr Morley, I did, I’ll be honest with you. But it wasn’t just about the business; and to be clear, I had no argument with the mayor himself. I enjoyed good relations with him over the years. I simply felt that he was going too fast for the town. Pushing things forward that really require a lot more time and reflection.’

  ‘You wanted to slow it up, the electrification?’

  ‘Yes. I think that’s what a town council is for, Mr Morley. It’s to put the brakes on schemes that have maybe got out of control. To act as a fail-safe mechanism.’

  ‘You are in fact describing the healthy functioning of democratic and accountable government, sir!’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Cowley. ‘Which is why I was always … agitating – behind the scenes, you understand – or encouraging, you might say, a more considered approach. There are very big issues at stake here, Mr Morley, not just in Colchester, but throughout the country, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

  ‘Just remind me of the big issues at stake?’ I asked, having just about kept up with this fascinating conversation.

  ‘What I mean is, gentlemen, we have gas lamps and oil lamps everywhere being converted to electricity but we still don’t know if it’s safe! Does that seem sensible to you?’

  ‘Electricity?’ asked Morley.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not safe?’ said Morley. ‘I think you’ll find—’

  ‘I think you’ll find, Mr Morley,’ said Cowley, raising a hand, ‘that nobody really knows if electricity is safe or not.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But oil, on the other hand, has stood the test of time. The Romans used oil—’

  ‘The Chinese,’ said Morley.

  ‘I’m sure. An ancient fuel. A safe fuel. And yet in Colchester alone we’ve already replaced most of the old oil lamps that used to light the town – and we’ve no more than maybe a dozen or so lamplighters left. One day soon if we’re not careful there’ll be none.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of local employment and safety, rather than your own business interests?’ said Morley.

  ‘As well as my own business interests, Mr Morley. That’s right, yes. That’s exactly right.’

  ‘So it’s a big mistake then, the electrification of the town?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And now that Marden’s gone?’

  ‘It makes no difference, I’m afraid. You’ve seen what they’re doing to the roads, Mr Morley. It’s all under way now. The damage has been done.’

  This rather low note concluded, thank goodness, our discussion of the electrification of Colchester. I thought we’d escaped.

  ‘Now, while you’re here I’m sure you’d like to see the process?’ offered Mr Cowley.

  ‘We should really—’ I began.

  ‘Of course,’ said Morley. ‘That would be fascinating.’

  In fairness, it was mildly – but only mildly – interesting. Cowley took us down and showed us around the mill. Touring factories, foundries, mills and other places of work was one of the great privileges of working with Morley – like being in one’s own never-ending Pathé Gazette – as well as one of the great disadvantages. I have no doubt that if society were to collapse tomorrow and everything had to be re-invented and redesigned and built and manufactured that Morley would have had all the skills and knowledge to be able to rebuild civilisation pretty much by himself and entirely from scratch. Alas, I seemed to forget how to make a rivet or a typewriter ribbon almost as soon as I was shown how.

  ‘It’s a simple process,’ said Cowley; but that’s what they all said, and it never was.

  For future reference, the process of manufacturing oil for street lamps in Essex in 1937 went something like this.

  The very rear of the building backs on to the river. This is where the barges come, and where sacks of seeds and nuts are unloaded onto a rattling conveyor belt that brings them into the mill, where they are then run through heavy metal rollers, and heated by steam in vast vats, which are covered with what I assumed was canvas but which Cowley assured us were in fact special woollen sheets, before being placed into a hydraulic press, where the oil begins to flow into the metal pipework that runs eventually in
to wooden barrels and steel vats.

  ‘And there’s your street lighting,’ said Cowley, pointing to the barrels.

  ‘And the residue?’ asked Morley.

  ‘Is made into oilseed cake which is cut into blocks and allowed to cool’ – Cowley pointed over to racks where what looked like yellow blocks of fat were being stored – ‘and which is then sold to farmers for cattle feed.’

  ‘Pretty efficient, then?’ said Morley.

  ‘This business is all about efficiency, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Morley, ‘excellent.’

  Bear all this in mind, in case of catastrophe and the collapse of the pylons.

  We left the mill with a couple of slabs of complimentary seedcake for Morley’s animals back at St George’s, but despite this generous gift, which Morley would normally have been delighted to receive – I’d known him to write letters of thanks to farmers for gifts of windfall, to children who sent him scribbles and drawings, and to lady admirers who sent him poems and monogrammed handkerchiefs – he seemed despondent.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘Cowley.’

  ‘He seemed like a—’

  ‘Decent enough sort of businessman, would you say, Sefton?’

  I was going to say something else, but was keen to get away and so thought it better to agree.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He seemed decent enough.’

  ‘Yes. Did he strike you as the sort of chap likely to murder a rival?’

  ‘You never can tell with these things, Mr Morley,’ I said.

  ‘No, of course. But on balance?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Shame.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it means we’re no closer to discovering Marden’s fate.’

  CHAPTER 25

  IN THE TRENCHES

  ON OUR WAY BACK into Colchester we were once again held up in the town’s gridlocked streets. Armed with forks, shovels and pickaxes, gangs of men were slowly trenching their way through the town. Policemen were on point duty at the top of North Hill and Headgate Corner.