Gently through the Mill csg-5

by Alan Hunter

  Between the two blocks ran a narrow bridge at first-floor level, beneath which was one of the doors to the mill.

  ‘Does Mr Blythely have the key of the door across the bridge?’

  ‘That’s right, we both have one. I use the back of his place as a store. The blokes keep their bikes in the room underneath — Inspector Griffin went over it, but I don’t think he found anything.’

  He didn’t, it was in his report. He had ransacked the entire premises and found nothing except flour dust.

  ‘What’s this drying-ground you talk about?’

  ‘Keep going and you’ll come to it.’

  The passage turned a corner and then ended in an open space hemmed in by a high wall and the backs of uninhabited cottages. It was about sixty yards by fifty, part cinder, part grass, with two or three overgrown pear trees grouped at one spot. A few old posts for drying-lines still formed a triangle in the middle. At the corner against the bakehouse stood a dilapidated stable with a hayloft over it.

  ‘There’s a blasted right-of-way through here… you come in from Cosford Street by that other passage in the far corner. It’s not a short cut at all, but the kids always use it. And of course they make this a playground… that’s how our windows get broken.’

  ‘It looks ideal for kids.’

  ‘They’re into everywhere.’

  ‘Is that stable in use or is it just falling down?’

  Fuller looked at it frowningly. ‘It belongs to Blythely… he hasn’t used it for years. I keep some hay in the loft to sell to odd customers.’

  ‘And the kids romp in there?’

  ‘Yes — I suppose so.’

  Gently’s eyebrow lifted imperceptibly at the abruptness in the other’s tone. Fuller looked discomposed and was feeling for a cigarette.

  ‘Of course, neither of you keeps a horse…?’

  ‘Not since Blythely bought a van — and that was before the war.’

  With a sort of violence Fuller crossed to the stable and threw open the doors. Inside was a collection of rubbish which plainly precluded recent equine occupation. The horse-collars and harness hanging from pegs were gaping and perished with age.

  ‘No horses — you see?’

  Gently nodded gravely.

  ‘I watch them and bet on them, but I was never fool enough to own one… now if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get on with showing you the mill.’

  Gently followed him back into the passage and through the door beneath the bridge. Inside the smell of grain and flour was so strong as to be almost overpowering.

  ‘It’s just shafting down here — watch yourself as you go under! On the next floor are the rollers, then the purifiers. The bolters are right at the top.’

  All the building was a-shudder with the thud of the engine. Hidden machinery murmured and rumbled about them. On a wide wooden floor, polished smooth by the passage of grain, lay a spreading pile of reddish wheat; two men with wooden shovels were feeding it into a shute.

  ‘This stuff’s Canadian.’

  Fuller was having to raise his voice.

  ‘We mix it with the English to get a proper blend. People talk about the home-grown product, but they’d soon complain if they got it unblended.’

  They kept going up by means of heavy wooden steps. It was not until the third floor that they came to the open mouths of the flour-hoppers. Four in line, protected by a single wooden rail, they descended like tapering wells to the sacking-room on the first floor.

  One of them was full, one of them half-full. For a moment the snowy contents amazed one with their innocence…

  ‘Drop anything in there and it simply keeps going. It’s not like water. There’s no support at all.’

  ‘Which one did you find him in?’

  ‘That one at the end. Some diseased grain had gone through, and it turned the whole hopper foisty — we were busy at the time, so I left it just then.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say the person who dropped him in there had some idea about mills?’

  Fuller flushed as he said: ‘He knew where to find the hoppers, didn’t he?’

  They went down past the rolling machinery to the sacking-room with its dust-hazy atmosphere. Here the mouths of the hoppers, each provided with a damper, were extended by sleeves of canvas to a convenient level. Four men were filling sacks from the two charged hoppers. A fifth, a tallish, heavily boned fellow, was leaning against an upright and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘This is Blacker, my foreman.’

  Fuller scowled at the cigarette.

  ‘This is Chief Inspector Gently of the Yard, Blacker. He’s in charge of the case now, so you’ll no doubt be seeing more of him.’

  Blacker eased himself off the upright and slowly stubbed out his cigarette. He had a long, humourless face with green-grey eyes, a wide, weak mouth and stick-out ears. When he spoke his voice sounded harsh and clumsy.

  ‘I thought they’d finished with us…’

  ‘Well, they haven’t, it seems.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think there’s much left here to find out.’

  ‘Let’s hope there isn’t. We’ve had enough trouble.’

  What was it between them, the master and his foreman? Gently sensed it directly, that slight, fraying edginess.

  Blacker stared at him insolently as though he were some odd exhibit. The fellow had an expression of cunning mixed with derision in his eyes. He kept his cigarette in his hand, ready to light it when their backs were turned.

  ‘I want the whole of this lot sacked up before lunch.’

  ‘Daresay you’ll get it if we aren’t held up.’

  ‘After lunch you can start putting the oats through.’

  ‘So you told me when I came in.’

  Fuller turned on his heel and went down the steps into the yard. The pigeons, scattered for a moment, settled again with a soft music of wings.

  At the bakehouse door a blond-haired youngster in a white apron was filling a bucket from a tap. He looked up curiously as the miller went by with Gently.

  ‘Your foreman been with you long?’

  ‘Yes… no, not as a foreman, that is.’

  ‘You mean you’ve just made him up?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Though it was probably a mistake.’

  ‘When would he have been appointed, Mr Fuller?’

  The miller made a gesture of exasperation. ‘Does it really matter? I gave him the job on Good Friday. Some time or other I’d like to forget that day!’

  Gently nodded his mandarin nod and fumbled for his pipe. Fuller was standing by grimly with his hand on the door to the office.

  ‘One point more… touching those hoppers. Did any of the others have flour in them on Thursday night?’

  ‘Number one at this end had flour in.’

  ‘That’s the one nearest the steps?’

  ‘Yes. It was three-quarters full.’

  ‘Thank you for being so helpful, Mr Fuller.’

  The miller banged into his office, letting the door slam behind him. The pigeons made to rise again but then thought better of it. Each one, nevertheless, kept a bright eye fixed on Gently.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  From somewhere, everywhere it seemed, came the chirrup of a cricket. It was as though the moist, savoury heat were making itself audible. At the same time one doubted if one was really hearing it at all: the note was so high-pitched that a subtler sense seemed called for.

  There was only one window to the bakehouse, and that was by the door. For the rest, it was lit by a row of four 150-watt bulbs under plain conical shades.

  All the dough was mixed by hand. There were two kneading-troughs of scoured wood in the centre of the room.

  Blythely, a spare, balding man with a small pale moustache, was beating up a mixture in an earthenware bowl; his assistant, the blond-haired youth, was extracting flat tins of teacakes from one of the deep wall-ovens.

  Both of their faces looked colourless and shone with sweat. A lock of the youngster’s hair
hung damp and limp over his forehead.

  But most of all it was the heat that one noticed.

  You walked into it as into a heavy liquid, surprised by it and temporarily thrown off-balance. For a moment your body stayed quiescent, unable to react. Then it prickled and began to perspire, after which the heat was real and could be accepted.

  And the cricket, that was certainly a part of it.

  The cricket’s rattle sounded like the taunt of a heat-demon, the more mocking because you were unable to place it.

  From everywhere and nowhere it chinked its jeering notes.

  Blythely looked up but didn’t cease beating his mixture. Perhaps he had seen Gently with Fuller and had guessed that he was a policeman. The assistant, now alternately sucking and shaking a burned finger, had obviously decided that the intruder was none of his business.

  Gently moved deprecatingly down the bakehouse, unfastening his raincoat as he went.

  ‘This is a hot shop you’ve got in here!’

  Blythely sneaked another foxy little glance at him and kept on with his beating. His features were far from being attractive. He had a retrousse nose and a seamed, porous skin; his chin was small, his lips thin and colourless. He had given his age to Griffin as fifty-two, but he might easily have been ten years older.

  ‘Is it always like this in here?’

  ‘I should think so — in a bakehouse.’

  ‘Doesn’t it get you down sometimes?’

  ‘I’m a baker, not a snowman.’

  His voice was high-pitched with a note of querulousness. He spoke into his mixing-bowl, as though he were talking to himself.

  ‘Anyway, you don’t notice an east wind in here!’ Blythely said nothing.

  ‘And with the summers we’ve been getting, I’d say you were better off than the next man… there’ll be a lot of volunteer bakers if they keep on with the atom bombs!’

  It was labour in vain as far as the baker was concerned. His face wore a fixed, neutral expression which was about as alterable as that of the Sphinx.

  One imagined that it was a rare day when Blythely was caught actually smiling.

  The assistant came over to enquire after some Madeiras in another oven. Quite unexpectedly the baker was now voluble, even jocose. He was showing off, probably, wanting Gently to notice his expertise — he treated the youngster to quite a sermon on Madeiras before he let him go.

  ‘Some people don’t realize what makes the difference.’

  Gently contented himself with a sympathetic shrug.

  ‘The average housewife today… well, there you are! It’s no use telling them. They won’t take the trouble. They shake some muck out of a packet with a pretty label, and wonder why their cakes aren’t like mine…’

  If beating was the secret, Blythely’s cakes had nothing to fear. With tireless regularity he kept slapping away at his creamy mixture.

  ‘Are you the one they sent to London after?’

  He was prepared to acknowledge Gently, having given the detective a taste of his quality.

  ‘I saw in the paper that they’d run to the Yard. That’s what I said would happen, right at the start.’

  ‘There have been some developments which made it inevitable, Mr Blythely.’

  ‘Which is to say it was London business, and nothing to do with us here.’

  London business! The phrase conveyed a whole outlook. There was nothing important about London in Lynton. All that London did was to breed petty criminals, and when they upset Lynton you sent for a London copper.

  Gently unbuttoned his jacket and passed a handkerchief over his brow.

  The young assistant was pulling out the Madeiras, each with its garnish of peel; the aroma would have seduced an angel, but the heat destroyed any vestige of one’s appetite.

  Blythely had reached for a ladle and was beginning to dole out his mixture into paper-collared tins.

  ‘Trying to find out what the others missed, are you?’

  ‘That’s roughly the idea…’

  ‘We didn’t notice anything here, I can soon tell you that.’

  ‘All the same, you were here when the job was being done.’

  ‘We were making up the buns. They could have delivered a whole cemetery. As far as I know, there was nothing stirring all night.’

  Three ladlefuls went to a tin, and there was scarcely a speck remaining in the bowl. Blythely was still talking to the mixture as though Gently were a mere passing nuisance.

  ‘I shall have to have more than that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ted! Shove these Vanillas into number three, will you?’

  ‘If you can spare me half an hour, Mr Blythely…’

  Confound it, he was going on his knees to the fellow!

  At last the baker condescended to notice his melting visitor. Hands on hips, he regarded him shrewdly with small hazel eyes.

  ‘I’ve got to interrupt my work, have I?’

  ‘Yes — if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re wasting my time and yours, but I suppose that’s the way they run things. We’d better go into the house before you turn into a grease-spot.’

  The rub of it was that he was making Gently feel he was wasting the baker’s time. Out here in the bakehouse real work was going on…

  Blythely’s sitting room over the shop struck a note of nostalgia. It had been furnished in the early thirties but the style was of ten years previous, this being the usual aesthetic gap between London and the provinces.

  There were traces of nouveau art about the table and straight-back chairs. The three-piece suite was dumpy and upholstered in leather, the arm-fronts being tacked with big brass-headed nails.

  ‘Can I offer you something?’

  Blythely had left his apron below stairs, seeming to have shed with it a great deal of his cross-grained authority. Up here he appeared awkward and more than ever colourless. The daylight gave a greyish tinge to the pitted skin of his face.

  ‘No thank you… I’m on duty.’

  ‘You won’t mind me having a drop. At my trade you get a thirst — not that I ever touch alcohol, mind you.’

  He went to the top of the stairs, which descended straight into the shop.

  ‘Clara, bring me up a glass of that cold tea when you’re at liberty…’

  Through the muslin half-curtains Gently could watch the passers-by in Fenway Road. Well wrapped up, they still looked perished; the east wind was sweeping straight along the rather dingy thoroughfare.

  ‘Take a seat, won’t you?’

  Gently turned one of the straight-backed chairs around so that he could straddle it.

  ‘I realize you’ve got to do this — every man to his job. But the Good Lord knows that I had no hand in the business, nor, I feel certain, did anyone else in these parts…’

  Gently made a wry face. ‘That’s what everyone says.’

  ‘It’s the truth, you’ll find.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Mr Blythely.’

  The baker sat down stiffly, placing his hands on his knees. Through the open door one could hear his wife chatting amiably to a customer in the shop.

  ‘Go on — ask me your questions.’

  Gently nodded without complying.

  ‘You want to know when I started work — very well, it was a quarter to ten. Ted, he turned up at a minute or two after.’

  ‘And you worked through till seven?’

  ‘We had the bread to bake as well as the buns.’

  ‘But surely you left the bakehouse once or twice?’

  ‘The toilet is by the door.’

  It was so simple and so convincing. There was nowhere to pick a hole in it. Fuller’s story could be twisted and checked, but Blythely’s was as unassailable as a block of concrete.

  And you had to believe it, watching that plain, unemotional, unimaginative face.

  Griffin had believed it, so why should not Gently?

  ‘You’re a chapel-goer, they tell me?’

  ‘I am, and so is m
y wife.’

  ‘You would not approve of horse racing, I feel sure.’

  ‘It’s an invention of the Devil.’

  ‘Didn’t you once keep a horse?’

  Yes, he had had three. But the last one had been got rid of in 1938, since when the stable had been used as a junk repository.

  ‘Mr Fuller uses the loft, he tells me.’

  Was there just a flicker of reaction to that?

  ‘I suppose he’s never kept a horse there?’

  Only too plainly, this was a wrong track.

  Mrs Blythely appeared carrying the cold tea in a beaker. She was a handsome woman, and one wondered how she had come to throw in her lot with such an unpresentable husband.

  She had deep golden hair only now beginning to fade, a slightly snubbed nose and lively green eyes. In her youth she must have been a ravishing beauty.

  ‘Do I know this gentleman?’

  Gently came in for a brilliant smile.

  ‘I can guess who he is — only a policeman could get Henry out of the bakehouse! But he isn’t the man who’s been around such a lot.’

  A good skin and an oval face, and a figure which was full but not yet going heavy.

  The baker was lucky to have such a wife in his shop.

  ‘Is the door on the latch?’

  ‘Yes, my dear. And all the regulars have been.’

  ‘This is the man from London. No doubt he’s got something to ask you.’

  With husbands and wives it was difficult to tell; they had an act to be put on for strangers, and the act was usually expert. Yet here, as with Fuller and his foreman, Gently had the impression of friction. He could scarcely have put his finger on any one spot, but the impression was none the less established.

  ‘I went to bed soon after tea, Inspector. It’s a long day in the shop — hard on the feet, too! As a rule I sleep like a log till my husband wakes me with a cup of tea. It was the same on Thursday night. I didn’t remember anything after my head touched the pillow.’

  Here again one had to believe it — difficult, even, to suggest the stock questions.

  ‘No, I never get up during the night… the bathroom is next door, on the same floor.

  ‘Naturally I go out by myself sometimes, but never away from Lynton. The only horse racing I’ve seen is on the newsreel… I entirely agree with what my husband says about it.