There's Trouble Brewing

by Nicholas Blake

  Nigel noticed that Sorn was quite a different person inside the brewery. Last night he had been prickly, argumentative, very much on his poetic dignity, self-conscious: here he seemed more at home, more sure of himself, easier to get on with, but possibly less interesting. Clearly he kept the surrealist poet and the brewer’s pupil in two separate compartments, and the latter was much more interested in his work than the former would have cared to admit.

  ‘I expected that Bunnett would be here to give me the dope on the Truffles case,’ said Nigel.

  ‘Oh, he’ll probably turn up soon,’ said Sorn unconcernedly.

  ‘Hasn’t been around at all today, has he?’ said Mr Barnes.

  ‘No. What of it? Do you like him hanging about? Count your blessings, Mr Head Brewer.’

  Gabriel’s voice sounded unnecessarily irritable.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Barnes uncomfortably—torn, no doubt, between loyalty to his employer and his own feelings of relief.

  ‘Hanging about is one of old Bunface’s most repulsive characteristics,’ Sorn went on. ‘He has to be standing over his workmen all the time. He’d wear carpet slippers, only there’s such a racket in here he doesn’t need them.’

  ‘Steady on, Mr Sorn! You shouldn’t say that,’ remonstrated the head brewer, his black eyebrows rising half-way up to his forehead and giving him a fleeting resemblance to George Robey. Sorn’s lower lip jutted out pugnaciously. Nigel was worried again by the young man’s likeness to—who could it be, now?

  ‘Well, what about Ed Parsons?’ Sorn demanded truculently.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mr Barnes, ‘he was feeling poorly that day, see. That’s what it was—he was ailing.’

  ‘Bunk!’ Sorn turned to Nigel. ‘Ed Parsons is the chap in charge of the lorry-loading. Well, one day he was out there and Bunnett came along and stood behind him. Ed knew he was there, but he wasn’t going to look round. Bunnett just stood there, staring at Ed with those beady little reptile eyes of his, saying nothing. Ed couldn’t stand it after a bit—he was sick on the spot, vomited, threw up—that’s Mr Eustace Bunnett for you.’ Sorn’s voice had become almost shrill.

  ‘There ain’t no sense raking up past history, Mr Sorn,’ said the head brewer: ‘let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what I say. Anyways, we’ll maybe not be having the governor here much longer.’

  ‘What’s that? What the devil do you mean?’ exclaimed Sorn sharply.

  ‘Rumours has come to my ears,’ replied Mr Barnes darkly. ‘I will not specify my informant, but rumours has come to my ears that there may be an amalgamation. A big Midland firm, whose name I will not mention, is desirous of buying out Mr Bunnett.’

  ‘You don’t say?’ Gabriel Sorn’s voice was insouciant, but Nigel noticed a sort of twinge pass over his face; the young man swallowed hard, before he said:

  ‘Well, Strangeways, if you’re ready, we’ll have a look round.’

  Nigel was supplied with one of the long white coats, since a tour of the brewery was apt to leave its mark on one’s clothes.

  They left Mr Barnes meditatively pouring out another glass of beer, and climbed down from his eyrie. Along a passage, up another ladder, and they were standing on a platform beside two vessels. One was like an enormous washtub, the other was a copper sphere resembling nothing so much as the body of a stratosphere balloon. Sorn pointed to the latter.

  ‘The pressure copper,’ he said; ‘the malt extract and the hops are boiled up together in it. We’re extra busy just now. Three separate boilings today—the process takes almost two and a half hours. This copper’s only been put in lately—the pride of the brewery. Joe had the hell of a fight with Eustace to get it installed.’

  He turned to the enormous washtub. ‘This is the old open copper. Much more wastage here—evaporation. This is the one Truffles got slung into.’

  So Nigel was now on the scene of the crime. He could only just see into the open copper by standing on his toes. It certainly didn’t look as if an elderly dog of sedentary habits could have jumped in.

  ‘They’ll be drawing off soon. At five o’clock they clean the pressure copper.’

  Nigel wondered how anyone could get into that copper orb; then he noticed a manhole high up in the side of it.

  Gabriel Sorn led him right through the different processes, talking technicalities which Nigel made little attempt to take in. Not being of a mechanical mind, he was less impressed by scientific marvels than by odd, irrelevant details, such as the great, woolly dollops of foam scattered over the floor in one place, the pungent smells he encountered—steam, hops, yeast, malt, and heaven knew what besides, the eerie atmosphere of the whitewashed vaults below the brewery, with hundreds of barrels lying side by side on the sandy floor, one or two occasionally fizzing quietly to each other. In an alcove here there was a rusty iron gate.

  ‘That’s the well, through that gate. It was sunk soon after they built the brewery. The town water supply didn’t make good beer. The chemical quality of the water makes an enormous difference.’

  Sorn dropped a stone in. One—two—three—plop. Nigel counted. A good place to get rid of a person, he thought. The same thing, though, occurred to him several times during their tour. In fact the whole brewery seemed a series of temptations to anyone murderously inclined. There were the vats for rejected beer, left unattended for months: a beautiful way of disposing of the body. Or the fermenting vessels. Sorn clambered over the rail of a staircase on to a huge circular wooden platform, and beckoned Nigel to follow him.

  ‘This is one of the fermenting vessels under our feet. If you slide back the lid and peer into it, you will pass out in thirty second. It’s full of CO2.’

  Nigel intimated that he would take Sorn’s word for it.

  Pipes, pipes, pipes. The whole brewery seemed as full of complicated intestinal tubes as the human body; writhing sinuously round corners, disappearing into the ceiling, tripping you up—and all, no doubt, gurgling with lovely beer.

  ‘Decent,’ thought Nigel.

  The heat in some of the processes was terrific. After visiting the boiler-room Nigel began to wish that he had some of the lovely beer gurgling inside himself. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.

  ‘Want to cool off?’ said Sorn. ‘Follow me.’

  They went up and down some more of the ubiquitous ladders, through a room stocked with enormous one-and-a-half-hundredweight sacks, till they reached a very solid-looking door. Before opening it, Sorn pressed a switch at the side.

  ‘The emergency bell,’ he explained. ‘A chap locked himself in here one evening by mistake. He just managed to keep alive by running up and down. After that, Bunnett had to get a safety-device installed.’

  When the solid door swung aside, Nigel soon understood why. They were in the cold-storage room. The cold did not strike you in the face as you entered, for there was no draught; but after a few moments, you began to feel it insidiously creeping into your bones. Glittering with frost, the cold-storage tanks stood white and monstrous. Sorn had shut the door behind them, and the silence, after the confused roaring of machinery with which Nigel was still dazed, was like the frozen silence of the Ice Cap. Nigel found himself talking in a whisper. Sorn was explaining the method of regulating the temperature, and Nigel—who felt he could not really compete with any more scientific data—was running his finger idly up and down a frosted groove in the tank nearest the door, when it encountered a small, solid object at the base of this groove. There was a little pocket of deep frost there, Nigel’s eye registered, and the object lay on top of it—its surface was a little frosted, but it was not buried. Almost unconsciously he took up this object, and presently dropped it into his pocket, where it was destined to lie forgotten for several days—and thus to add materially to the difficulties of the grotesque problem that even now awaited Nigel outside the cold-storage-room door.

  While he had been showing Nigel round, Sorn’s manner had been efficient and impersonal; obviously he was accustomed to functioning as a
guide—the descriptive phrases came fluently, absent-mindedly almost, off his tongue, like runs from the bat of a Wally Hammond when he has passed his fifty. But Nigel got the impression that, behind this mechanical flow of details, Sorn’s mind was engaged upon some quite different matter Once or twice he seemed to surprise in the young man’s eyes a look of—fear, was it? Anguish? Or some more complex battle of emotions? Nigel wondered suddenly whether it was not Sorn who had killed Bunnett’s dog. He said:

  ‘Well, I suppose I ought to be doing something to earn my fee.’

  ‘What? Oh, Truffles. Yes,’ said Sorn absently.

  ‘On the other hand, I can’t do much till Mr Bunnett tells me some more of the facts.’

  ‘No. I can show you the—er—the scene of the disappearance, if you like,’ said Sorn, opening the solid door and standing aside to let Nigel pass. ‘We’ll go up to Eustace’s room. He may have turned up by now.’

  But they did not, as it happened, go up to Eustace’s room. While Sorn was locking the door behind them, they heard a muffled shouting somewhere away to the right. It made Nigel realise that the roar of machinery had dwindled to a mild hum. He looked automatically at his watch: three minutes past five; work must be nearly over for the day. A wild-eyed man rushed up to Gabriel Sorn, said something breathlessly, of which Nigel could only hear the last two words—‘pressure copper’, and hurried away again with Sorn at his heels. Nigel followed. A few seconds later he was climbing again on to the platform where the coppers stood. Mr Barnes was already there, blasphemously addressing a small knot of men below who had been trying to get up on to the platform. Beside him stood another man, whose dirty blue dungarees accentuated the pallor of his face. The manhole of the pressure copper was open. Mr Barnes jerked his finger at it. Sorn clambered up and looked in. Nigel could see him stiffen, recoil, and sway as if he was about to faint. They helped him down, and Nigel took his place.

  The inside of the copper was dark, but not so dark that Nigel could not see the livid thing that smirked up at him. It was a half-disjointed skeleton: but not, this time, the skeleton of a dog. What was left of the skeleton was wearing the soaked and tattered remnants of a dinner-jacket and boiled shirt.

  Nigel dragged his eyes away from the unpleasing spectacle, and jumped back on to the platform. Mr Barnes and the cleaner were staring at him with the helpless, rather pathetic look of people faced by an emergency outside their normal experience.

  ‘Have you phoned for the police and a doctor?’ asked Nigel, realising as soon as he had said it that no one could stand in less need of a doctor than that man of bone inside the copper.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the head brewer, ‘I just told Percy to——’

  ‘Look here, we must get him out, we can’t——’ Sorn was very near to hysterics. Nigel took him by the shoulders and shook him hard.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ he ordered.

  Sorn passed a hand wearily over his forehead; then stared strangely at Nigel, his body going rigid again. He whispered, with the over-deliberate, unnatural seriousness of a drunken man:

  ‘Do you know who that is in there?’

  ‘No,’ said Nigel, ‘but we may be able to find out.’

  He stood irresolutely for a moment. Then, muttering to himself, ‘No point waiting for the police,’ told the cleaner to get an electric torch and search inside the copper for any articles that might be lying about. ‘Don’t disturb the—er—body, but if there’s anything in the pockets you can fetch it out. And put on these gloves before you go in, we don’t want to multiply the fingerprints on the outside of the copper.’

  ‘Fingerprints,’ said Mr Barnes dubiously, scratching his chin. ‘You mean this here is murder, like?’

  ‘No one got through that manhole by accident, and you don’t suppose anyone would commit suicide in such a fantastic way, do you?’ replied Nigel a little irritably.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Barnes.

  ‘Shall I send a man to look in the hop-back?’ he added.

  ‘The hop-back?’ asked Nigel mystified.

  ‘That’s right. Where the wort drains into. Any small articles would slip through the outlet pipe when the wort was drained off, see?’

  ‘Right. No, on second thoughts, you’d better not.’ Nigel realised that any clues which might be found had better be found under his own eye.

  A hollow, booming sound proceeded from the copper as the cleaner moved about inside. The watchers heard a stifled gasp. The lethargic Mr Barnes sprang with unexpected alacrity to the manhole. The cleaner passed up an object to him.

  ‘Look here, Mr Barnes, this is the governor’s watch—fastened in his waistcoat, it was.’ He spoke in an urgent whisper, but somehow it reached the ears of the men below, and was taken up in hoarse mutterings—

  ‘The guv’nor.’

  ‘The guv’nor!’

  ‘It’s the guv’nor in there.’

  ‘They’ve found ’is watch.’

  ‘Someone chucked the guv’nor into the pressure copper!’

  ‘Oo d’yer say chucked ’im in?’

  Nigel studied the faces of his companions. The head brewer seemed bemused, his brain trying to catch up with things. Gabriel Sorn looked as if he was working out a calculation on which his life depended.

  The cleaner scrambled through the manhole, blinked a little, then drew from his deep overall pockets a fountain-pen, a pair of pince-nez with most of the glass missing, some loose change, and an electric torch. Nigel made him lay them on the floor in a row.

  Mr Barnes reached down his hand towards the pince-nez; then drew it slowly back, as though the pince-nez were a dog of uncertain temper.

  ‘Those are Mr Bunnett’s spectacles, I’d swear to it,’ he said. ‘And that’s his fountain-pen, too—a Waterman. That proves it.’

  ‘I’m afraid it isn’t so simply proved as all that,’ said Nigel. He realised that his companions were badly shocked. Particularly for a nervous type like Sorn, repression would be dangerous. Nigel started talking in a dispassionate lecturer’s voice:

  ‘To establish identity, it is necessary——’

  But his fidgeting audience did not have to listen long. A tramp of feet was heard. A large, pale-faced police inspector advanced with unhurried stride; beside him was a sergeant; and close behind, to Nigel’s surprise, Dr Cammison. The inspector climbed cumbrously up the ladder, fixing the little group with suspicious, irritable eyes. Nigel suddenly knew that the inspector was going to say, ‘Now then, what’s all this about?’ Sure enough, the inspector did. No one else seemed prepared to answer this fairly simple question, so Nigel did.

  ‘A body in the copper.’

  The inspector glared balefully at Nigel; then, baffled by his serious expression, said:

  ‘A body, eh? Well, we’ll come to that.’ He produced a notebook and asked in louder, bullying tones:

  ‘Who found it?’

  The cleaner gulped and replied, ‘Me, sir.’

  ‘Name?’

  His name and address were taken, then Sorn’s and the head brewer’s. The inspector turned, with a look of crafty suspicion, to Nigel.

  ‘And your name, sir?’

  ‘Nigel Strangeways.’

  ‘One of the employees here?’

  ‘No, I——’

  ‘Ah, I thought not. And may I ask what is your business here?’

  Nettled by the man’s pompous, aggressive voice, Nigel replied solemnly:

  ‘Well, I came to see a man about a dog.’

  As the inspector’s jaw dropped and an angry flush appeared in his face, Nigel could not resist adding:

  ‘But it seems that, in the words of the poet, the man it was who died.’

  III

  July 17, 5.15–7.50 p.m.

  When shall this slough of sense be cast,

  This dust of thoughts be laid at last,

  The man of flesh and soul be slain

  And the man of bone remain?

  A. E. HOUSMAN

  ‘
YOU CAME TO see a man about a dog?’ said the inspector when he had recovered his powers of speech. ‘Do you expect me to take that seriously, or are you being humorous at my expense?’

  The pedantry of the phrase made the inspector seem really dangerous for a moment. Nigel was annoyed with himself for falling to the temptation of pulling his leg.

  ‘No, quite serious. I oughtn’t perhaps, to have put it like that.’ Nigel proceeded briefly to explain the commission that Mr Bunnett had given him.

  ‘Mr Strangeways is a private inquiry agent. He has assisted the police on several occasions. His uncle is an Assistant Commissioner,’ explained Dr Cammison, who had been watching the proceedings with the very faintest occasional twitch of a muscle in his impassive face.

  ‘Very well,’ said the inspector coldly. ‘We’d better get to work. My name is Tyler, by the way, and this is Sergeant Tollworthy. Who is the deceased?’

  ‘The body is unidentifiable—at least as far as I can tell,’ Nigel said. ‘But certain articles have been found in the copper that Mr Barnes has identified as belonging to Mr Eustace Bunnett. There they are.’

  When the name of Bunnett was mentioned, Sergeant Tollworthy was heard to ejaculate a wish that the Deity should strike him pink, and even the inspector seemed a little shaken. He soon recovered himself, though.

  ‘These articles shouldn’t have been touched,’ he said, looking censoriously at Nigel. ‘Who removed them?’

  ‘The cleaner,’ said Nigel quickly. ‘I take full responsibility for that.’

  The inspector turned brusquely to the cleaner, and addressed him in the loud, hectoring voice that he apparently reserved for members of the working-class.

  ‘You did, eh? Describe their positions.’

  The cleaner licked his lips nervously and said:

  ‘Well, sir, they was like this. The watch chain was fastened through ’is waistcoat button-hole; the watch was dangling at the end of it. The money was in his trouser pocket and the electric torch in his coat pocket. Fountain-pen clipped on inside pocket. The spectacles had got caught by that thing that goes round your ear—caught in the side of his head, sir, see?’