The Overlooker

by Fay Sampson

  ‘Your family would have been OK, then,’ Millie said to Nick. ‘All those Methodists and Baptists.’

  ‘They’re your family too, remember.’

  In the next room, there were giant pivoting wooden hammers.

  ‘The fulling stocks,’ Suzie whispered. ‘To beat the cloth with, instead of using your feet.’

  A small crowd had followed them in response to the guide’s invitation. Nick felt a sense of unease as they were herded together into this smaller space. He looked behind him. The boy and girl he had seen before wriggled to the front. Their oddly matched parents stood next to Nick. The plump-faced man with his pale, angular wife. Surely nothing to be concerned about there. A Japanese couple, or were they Korean? Their cameras were busy. It was stretching credulity to think that they could have anything to do with it. Yet how did he know? The women in Hugh Street had roots far afield.

  His eyes passed over another couple who were probably in their seventies. The woman had permed grey hair, not unlike Thelma’s. Her husband was a taller man, leaning on a stick. They spoke together in a comfortable Lancashire accent. No stretch of Nick’s imagination could associate them with a criminal gang.

  He twisted his head to the other side for a last look, and stiffened. The last man in the group was alone. He was of middle age, with a military bearing. He stood a little behind the others. Nick glimpsed a yellowish moustache in a ruddy face. He carried none of the obvious signs of a sightseer. No camera. No leaflet about the exhibition in his hand. Nick met his eye. A shiver ran through him. What was this man doing here?

  There was no reason why a man like that should not indulge an interest in industrial history.

  Nevertheless, Nick felt unsettled as he turned back to listen to their guide.

  At the end of the room, the old waterwheel loomed blackly in its housing. Even as they watched, it began to turn. Water spilled from its buckets, powering the endless cycle. As it lumbered into motion, the great fulling hammers began to lift and fall. With each strike, they pounded the cloth in its troughs.

  ‘It’s the original wheel,’ their guide explained. ‘And still going strong. Though it does sometimes slip from its bearings, and we have a devil of job hoisting it back.’

  The turning of the wheel and the pounding of the hammers beat a rhythm in Nick’s head. He longed to turn and see if the man behind was still watching him.

  ‘Of course,’ explained the guide, ‘Health and safety means we can’t let you experience the original smell. This place would have been reeking of stale piss.’

  This time Millie joined the children in a delighted cry of ‘Yuck!’

  Suzie caught Nick’s eye and smiled. He felt some of the tension ease out of him.

  He risked another look behind him. The man with the moustache was staring straight in front of him. It was impossible to tell whether he had been watching Nick or the wheel.

  Nick found himself moving closer to Suzie and Millie.

  The water wheel slowed to a halt. Water dripped from the buckets. The demonstration was over.

  The phone in his inside pocket buzzed. Nick started. Slowly, he drew the mobile out. He held it in his palm for a while. He had a strong reluctance to read the text message.

  With a sudden decision he clicked on it.

  It was message from his architect partner, Jeremy, wanting Nick to answer a question from one of his clients.

  He breathed a deep sigh of relief and slipped the phone back inside his leather jacket.

  The guide had left them. The little party dispersed. As they walked away to another part of the mill, Nick looked behind him again. The man was standing at the doorway of the fulling room. His eyes seemed to be following them.

  The Asian couple and the elderly pair took a different exit. The family with the two young children followed the same route as the Fewings. Next time Nick looked round, the man with the moustache was no longer with them.

  They tried their hands at carding wool with teasels from the hedgerows and with combs. They looked at different sorts of loom.

  In one room they came upon a life-size tableau. A girl was combing a hank of wool with a spiky teasel-head. Her mother was turning it into yarn on her spinning wheel and the father was weaving the yarn on his loom.

  As he stood regarding the realistic figures, Nick’s mind flew back to James Bootle, the handloom weaver. This was the sort of domestic scene, the whole family at work, James and his wife had once assumed would be theirs for a lifetime. It had been taken away from them by the building of mills, like the one the Fewings were standing in.

  Unbidden, a thread of thought ran through his mind. Like the illegal sweatshop he thought he had discovered in Hugh Street. Women forced by poverty into working long hours for low wages . . .

  That was before Inspector Heap had suggested it might be something worse still.

  How many young women like James Bootle’s daughters been forced into prostitution as their livelihood was taken away by machines?

  And now his own daughter was in a different danger because of what he had unwittingly discovered.

  Had the man with the military bearing really been here innocently?

  ‘Are you all right, Dad? You keep looking at me strangely all morning.’

  ‘Yes.’ He pulled himself up sharply and put on a smile for her. ‘Yes, of course I am. And why wouldn’t I want to look at my beautiful daughter?’

  They left the fulling mill behind. As the Fewings crossed the yard, Nick was conscious of that other family with children waiting by the doorway. Only when the Fewings had passed them did the round-faced father and his angular wife follow.

  In another part of the building, there were demonstrations of spinning. The equipment changed, from the distaffs women hung on their girdles to work with as they walked, to spinning wheels of various sizes and complexities, and finally to a room filled with rows of Crompton’s Mules. Here again, the two families paused for a demonstration. At a signal, the machines sprang into motion. The moving carriages shot out and raced back, temporarily opening up a gap between the spindles and the roller beams.

  ‘Scavengers had to get under there to clean up the waste that dropped,’ the guide shouted above the noise. ‘They used kids for that. Probably the most dangerous work in the mill. You were working your way up to be a piecer, mending broken threads. But even then you were lucky if your spinner would stop the mule for you. The older ones might take pity on you. But the young men with growing families didn’t want to lose a penny by slowing down. You had to risk life and limb while it was moving.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Dad,’ sighed Millie. ‘That’s what I’d have been doing a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a wonder you had any ancestors left to grow up and have kids.’

  ‘We’re a tough lot, the Fewings,’ Nick laughed. ‘But yes, the mill was a dangerous place.’

  A mobile phone rang. Alarm leaped in Nick’s throat. It took a second or two to realize that it was not his own ringtone.

  He saw the father of the children step back out of earshot to answer it.

  All the same, his heart was thudding. All morning he had been resisting the urge to take out his mobile and check for messages.

  He looked at his watch again.

  ‘We ought to be getting back. Thelma’s doing lunch for us at one. I told her we could look after ourselves, since she’s back at work this morning. But she wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘I suppose she’s always been used to nipping back to see to Uncle Martin at lunchtime,’ Suzie said. ‘She wouldn’t want to leave him alone all day at his age.’

  ‘It’ll be lonely for her when he goes. I think she needs someone to look after.’

  There was no else around in the car park. Nick breathed a sigh of relaxation.

  He drove out of the mill entrance on to the valley road. His stomach lurched sharply. There was a blue Honda parked outside under the trees.

  Someone had followed them to the mill.

  His m
ind flew back to their tour of the galleries. He checked again the people he could remember. He had lost sight of the man with the moustache after the water wheel. Who else had there been? That family with the boy and girl? Hardly. The pair of Japanese tourists with cameras flashing? Could there have been someone else prowling through the mill behind them? Someone unnoticed among the display cases and the tall machinery? Who else might have tracked them here and heard them talking about their movements for the rest of the day?

  He must stop scaring himself. How many blue cars were there, for goodness’ sake? This one need not have been anything to do with the car that had followed them down the dale. And even if it had, it could be just another innocent tourist, come by the same road to visit Belldale Mill.

  He watched his mirror carefully as he drove back to town. Only once did he think he caught a glimpse of the blue car following. Then he lost it. It must, after all, have been his imagination.

  EIGHT

  Midday dinner was nearly ready when they got back to High Bank. Thelma looked flushed from hurrying back from work to cook for them, but refused Suzie’s help. She set Millie to laying the table.

  Nick retired outside, to sit on the bench in the sunshine. There was a slight haze in the valley below, where once it would have been dark with smoke. Riding above it, Skygill Hill stood clear and bright. Nick’s legs longed to be climbing it. It would be good to shed the worries of the last twenty-four hours and feel only the light burden of a knapsack.

  Had he done the right thing, going to the police? The more he thought about it, the more clearly he realized that they were unlikely to catch the ringleaders of a vice ring straight away – if ever. He was increasingly sure it had not been the plump Mr Harrison who had rung him. The voice had been harder, colder.

  And had he done the right thing by not warning Millie to be on her guard? He stirred the gravel at his feet. He and Suzie had not wanted to frighten her. They would make sure that Millie stayed with them, wherever they went.

  Yet how could he protect his family, if he didn’t know what form the threat might take?

  Almost without intending it, he found he had his phone in his hand. It had begun to exercise a horrid fascination over him. On the way home, there had been two more text alerts. He had ignored them. He knew that he was waiting for it to ring. It was the menace in that voice he dreaded.

  The silver mobile lay in his hand, silent. He could no longer resist the impulse to open it up.

  Yes. Two new text messages. Why was he suddenly reluctant to read them?

  But he must.

  The first was also work related. That could wait until he got back.

  There was no number for the caller on the second. The shock took hold of him as he saw the capital letters.

  BAD MOVE.

  He sat staring down at it. He felt momentarily paralyzed.

  It was true. His worst fear. Whoever had warned him not to approach the police knew that he had. He glanced round in alarm. Was someone watching him, even now? It had seemed so peaceful, sitting here in the autumn sun, on his own. Could anyone know he was here at High Bank, at Thelma’s? And had they been followed to the police station? Or had the information come from inside the police? Whatever the answer, someone knew. Someone whose voice had made him feel it was not an idle threat.

  Should he take his family home now? Drive back south as fast as he could?

  It wouldn’t help. But Inspector Heap had made it very clear that anyone who already knew that much about him could find his home address. He felt the sweat on his neck.

  He found the detective inspector’s card among his own business cards, in his inside jacket pocket. He tried to keep his thumb steady as he dialled her number. Her voicemail came on, inviting him to leave a message. It was hard to order his thoughts sensibly.

  ‘He’s just texted me. Sorry! This is Nicholas Fewings. We came to see you this morning. It just says, “bad move”. He knows I’ve been to the police. What do I do?’

  It sounded pathetic, helpless. There must be some way he could take the initiative, put a stop to this.

  He couldn’t think how.

  Nick was halfway through his treacle tart when his phone rang. He was alarmed at the physical shock he felt. There was a different jolt of surprise when he looked anxiously at the screen and found not number withheld but a local number. He breathed more easily. Of course. It was probably Inspector Heap’s landline from police headquarters.

  ‘Excuse me. Do you mind if I take this in the front room?’

  He was right. The inspector’s voice calmed his worst fears.

  ‘Mr Fewings? I’m sorry I missed your call. I said I’d get back to you if there was any news. Look, I’ve got people checking out your complaint. We haven’t gone into the house yet. You understand it’s important we stake it out to get more than the small-time players, like your Mr Harrison. But, if it’s any consolation, from the present signs, we’re pretty much satisfied that it’s not a brothel. There are certainly women coming and going. More than you’d expect, even if the house was legitimately occupied. You could be right about their having broken through to other houses in the street. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but the profile of the women just doesn’t look right for prostitutes.’

  ‘That’s what we tried to tell you,’ Nick tried to intervene.

  The inspector’s voice swept on. ‘And they seem to be coming voluntarily. It’s just not the way those international vice rings operate. The girls are usually virtual prisoners. Their passports are confiscated and they’re not allowed out. No, I think your original guess that this is an undercover sweatshop is probably right.’

  ‘We never thought it was a brothel. That was your idea. But it’s still illegal, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s vice and sex crimes I’m mainly concerned with. I’m handing this over to one of my colleagues. As I said, I shouldn’t think they’ll go in until they’ve got more evidence. But I think you can rest easy that it’s under control.’

  ‘But this threatening text message? I told you. It said “bad move”. Somebody knows I went to the police. And they’re not pleased about it.’

  ‘Let’s keep this in proportion, sir. If I thought we were dealing with a vice ring, I’d be worried. There can be big money involved, and some pretty ugly characters with unpleasant methods of ensuring silence. But I hardly think a sweatshop owner is going to go over the top to track down a member of Joe Public and put the frighteners on him. OK, he’s got your number. He just hopes a couple of scary phone calls will warn you off.’

  ‘But he knows. How does he know we went to the police station? He must be following us. And I’m almost sure there was a car tailing us this morning. All the way down to Belldale. A blue Honda. It was parked outside the textile museum. He must have found out where we’re staying. I can’t think how.’

  ‘Don’t you think you may be jumping to conclusions, sir? What did he say? Bad move? You’ve assumed he meant coming to us. He could just as easily be referring to your visit to Hugh Street yesterday. I understand you’re alarmed. It’s an unpleasant experience, an anonymous threatening call. But it’s more common than you realize. Emails, Facebook, nowadays. Most of the time it’s just words. Cyber bullying.’

  ‘And the rest of the time?’

  ‘Mr Fewings.’ The inspector sounded weary. ‘My colleagues are getting all the evidence they can to put a stop to this practice. Catch the people behind it, if they can. But I really don’t think it calls for twenty-four-hour police protection. You’ve done your citizen’s duty, and I thank you for that. The best thing you can do now is forget those phone calls and enjoy the rest of your holiday.’

  The line went dead.

  Nick was left with a feeling of anticlimax. He stared out of the window, past the potted plant on the sill.

  Was he being over-melodramatic? Would that menacing BAD MOVE have been sent, whether or not he had been to the police station this morning? Was he imagining that the blue H
onda had deliberately followed them to Belldale Mill?

  He was beginning to feel the comforting temptation to let it all slip from his shoulders. To stop looking around for someone watching them. To accept that the goings-on at Hugh Street did not warrant such a life-threatening reaction. Just let the police get on with it, and turn his attention to the purpose of his visit. And Uncle Martin.

  He felt a sharp pang of guilt. He had been so caught up in his own anxieties that he had hardly given a thought to the ninety-three year old lying in hospital.

  He checked his watch. No panic. There was still an hour before they needed to leave for the hospital.

  And tomorrow they would be meeting Tom. Nick’s spirits rose. He suddenly realized how much he was looking forward to seeing his tall, good-looking son again for the first time since he started at university.

  He felt a glow of warmth. The whole family together again. And united with the last of that older generation he thought he had lost when his grandmother died.

  If nothing went wrong. If Uncle Martin, already debilitated by the stroke, made it until tomorrow afternoon.

  When Nick returned to the back room, Thelma was already bustling around, collecting her handbag and car keys, ready to go back to work.

  ‘I’ll have to love you and leave you. Leave the washing up. I’ll do it when I get back.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Suzie told her. ‘We’ll do it, won’t we, Millie? We’ve got plenty of time.’

  Millie murmured a non-committal reply. She looked drawn in on herself.

  Nick felt a spasm of irritation. She had seemed to be getting on so well with Thelma yesterday. She must be still sulking about the hospital visit this afternoon. But it was no good; she would have to come. He could not imagine himself explaining to Uncle Martin that his great-great-niece had simply not wanted to come and see him.

  With the three of them helping, the lunch things were quickly cleared away. Nick checked his watch again.

  ‘Be down here at two o’clock,’ he told Millie. ‘We need to allow time to find a parking space at the hospital.’