Gently through the Mill

by Alan Hunter

  * * *

  ‘Henry … forgive me, Henry!’

  The actors had been moved, but the situation was continuing. Lit by the rosy sunset, Blythely’s parlour had an angry, melodramatic appearance. It might have been a special stage-set for just such a scene as this.

  Blythely, erect by the window, had his face darkened by the weird light behind him. On the dumpy settee Clara Blythely lay prostrate, by accident in a pose which would have pleased a producing eye.

  ‘I’m so ashamed, Henry … so ashamed!’

  Who could mistake the purport of the scene? It was classic in its simplicity, its principals were typecast. The pity of it was that Griffin wasn’t here to enjoy the triumph of his acuteness.

  ‘I was mad – you’ve got to believe me! I wasn’t myself … it was somebody else!’

  There was the Husband, there the Wife – hamming it, if anything; a good producer would have toned it down a little.

  Wearily Gently seated himself and sought the consolation of his pipe. Had it been so simple, then, the crucial problem of Taylor’s demise? The rest, that didn’t concern him. It was a mystery, and it could stay so. This was the compass of the brief he held and here, apparently, the inconsequential answer!

  Did it even matter who else knew what, guiltily or cunningly, according to their nature?

  ‘You followed her out there, didn’t you?’

  On the screen of his mind he could project the whole picture, complete in time as in space.

  ‘You saw them go in … you waited in the shadows. When she came out you let her go. To save her face—’

  Mrs Blythely’s tears came in a storm. She, at all events, was past equivocation. The baker, with head unbowed, still obstinately stared at nothing – yet he must have appreciated the endorsement given by his wife’s lamentations.

  ‘For him you couldn’t wait. Once she was gone, you went in after him. Of course, he was unprepared, but even if he hadn’t been—’

  ‘I didn’t go into the loft.’

  It was the baker’s first response for a good five minutes. His tone, like his expression, hadn’t altered by one iota.

  ‘Then how did this cross get there?’

  ‘I told you it wasn’t mine.’

  ‘You mean that it belonged to Taylor?’

  ‘How can one tell when there’s nothing on it?’

  The stupid repetition of this evasion irritated Gently. Surely by now the fellow could see …! But a moment later his wife settled the question finally.

  ‘It’s mine … he gave it to me … oh God, it was a wedding present! Twenty years …’

  Her tears smothered the rest.

  ‘So – now we’re getting somewhere!’

  Gently took a long pull at his pipe.

  ‘You jumped him as he came out, did you – took him completely by surprise! Did you know that we could tell that it was done from behind? But then you had to find a place for him, and not having much time—’

  ‘I didn’t kill that man.’

  ‘Let me finish what I’m saying! Not having much time, you had to hide him about the premises – somewhere that was safe, with luck for a week or two. And what better place than that hopper of flour? Even the smell wouldn’t notice very much! Furthermore, you might be able to fish him up later – if you could get him to the docks, an ebb tide would do the rest for you …’

  ‘But I was not the one who killed him.’

  ‘Listen – you can make a statement later! You had the keys in your pocket, didn’t you? It was easy to slip in there. Taylor wasn’t a heavy man, and you were strong and desperate. So up the steps he went on your back – one set, two sets, three sets, four sets: and then across the floor and into the hopper, where he disappeared as though he had never been.

  ‘That was a bad moment – that was where you stopped to think! You wiped the sweat and listened to the silence, and you realized you had done what could never be undone.

  ‘But Jimpson was in the bakehouse, already surprised by your absence – and what was more those buns had to be baked, if you were going to avoid comment. So down you went again, down those four sets of steps. The door was locked, you washed your hands, and all that remained was to get through the night – a task made the easier from having Jimpson to vent your nerves on!

  ‘Can you deny on your oath that that’s roughly what happened?’

  The baker shook his head – a grand concession to Gently’s rhetoric! – and hesitated cautiously before he replied:

  ‘I was hard on the boy – I’ve got to admit that. But all flesh is as grass when the Lord humbles our pride.’

  ‘And that’s all you’ve got to say?’

  Gently felt like hitting him.

  ‘Don’t you realize where you stand – hasn’t it penetrated at all?’

  Apparently it hadn’t. Blythely went on dumbly standing there. Like one of the grim flint towers of his native county, he was not to be moved by the storms that burst about his head.

  On her settee his wife cried softly as though her grief were tiring itself out. She, too, seemed to have got into a world of her own, outside the influence of mere verbal formulae.

  ‘I’ve tried to show you the construction—’

  ‘I didn’t kill that man.’

  ‘But you were there at the time it happened …!’

  ‘So you tell me, but I didn’t see it.’

  ‘Then you don’t deny being there?’

  ‘I haven’t admitted it.’

  ‘Following your wife to her rendezvous?’

  ‘Has she said anything about a rendezvous?’

  It was bordering on the farcical. In a moment, he would be denying that he had ever left the bakehouse. The effect of his prevarication was like that of a smokescreen, growing thicker and more confusing the further one pressed the pursuit.

  ‘You, ma’am – you don’t deny a rendezvous!’

  Gently turned on the weaker vessel.

  ‘You agree that the cross is yours – that ties you to the loft. And your conduct since you learned that your husband left the bakehouse leaves no doubt of a guilty secret – something you hoped he didn’t know about!

  ‘So perhaps you would like to be a little more articulate?’

  Mrs Blythely moaned and covered her face, which certainly was not at its best just then.

  ‘You don’t have to get on to Clara.’

  Blythely stirred from his monumental attitude.

  ‘She can’t tell you anything, so why upset her? It doesn’t concern you – it lies between her and her Maker.’

  His wife dropped her hands, as though unable to believe what she had heard. For a second or so she stared wildly at the baker, then she sprang up from the settee and threw herself sobbing on to his bosom. He made no move in recognition of her action.

  ‘That’s all very well—!’

  ‘It doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll judge for myself!’

  ‘Judge not lest ye be judged, says the Good Book.’

  What the devil could one do? Gently had rarely been so baffled by the manoeuvres of an opponent. And in addition to his evasiveness the baker had a strange and formidable air of authority – when he made a statement it sounded, ipso facto, final.

  ‘Go up to your room, Clara.’

  Now he was even taking charge of the proceedings!

  ‘The chief inspector and me’ve got a few things to talk over. You wait upstairs. I shan’t be long.’

  ‘Oh Henry … help me, Henry!’

  ‘Go up to your room. Ask help of Him who has it in His Power.’

  On the point of intervening, Gently decided to hold his peace. Running contra to the baker was a losing game, but if one gave him a good measure of rope, perhaps …

  Mrs Blythely left the room without another word. The baker, as soon as the door closed, took a chair opposite to Gently and seated himself in his peculiarly stiff way.

  ‘I haven’t much to tell you, but it may
be of some use.’

  The foxy eyes rested upon him steadily for a moment.

  ‘But first I say to you, meddle not with the Lord’s business. He has seen fit to lay a burden on two of His children, and neither you nor any man has the right to increase that burden. Revenge is Mine, saith the Lord, it belongeth to no man.’

  ‘At the same time, Mr Blythely—’

  ‘I will hear no worldly equivocations.’

  Gently gave him a long look before silently shrugging.

  ‘For the rest, I don’t mind helping you as far as I can. It’s true that I was round the back watching the stable.’

  ‘You followed your wife?’

  ‘If she had gone there I may have done.’

  ‘Please, Mr Blythely!’

  ‘It’s true that I watched the stable.’

  Gently heaved a deep sigh. ‘Very well – you watched the stable!’

  The baker nodded impassively, well aware of the points he was scoring.

  ‘You’ve seen that convenience there? I was standing inside it. In there you can see the stable, though you can’t see the yard. Well, I heard several people go by during the time I was in there – two of them met in the passage and had a few words together.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘I wasn’t able to hear. And another thing, I don’t remember hearing them go away again. But just after that somebody else came down the yard. He stopped a bit in the passage and then came back again in a hurry.’

  ‘How do you mean – in a hurry?’

  ‘It sounded as though he was running.’

  ‘Was anyone chasing him?’

  ‘I only heard the one. Then ten minutes later there were steps from the passage again. Somebody went up and out of the yard, and that’s all I remember hearing.’

  ‘And Taylor – what about him?’

  ‘I told you, I couldn’t see anyone.’

  ‘Not entering or leaving the stable?’

  ‘I never set eyes on Taylor.’

  Half an hour later Gently was out in the street with precisely that information and no more. The most his arts had availed him was to get a rough sort of timetable, as inaccurate, probably, as these things usually were.

  And how much could he believe, of all that puzzling interview? Was it in good faith, or partly so, or had even Clara Blythely’s act been an inspired piece of misdirection?

  He shook his head at the sunset-outlined building as he turned away towards the town. His third card had gone, not unprofitably, it was true, but the trick he had won was perhaps more tantalizing than the two which had just escaped him.

  Griffin, he was sure, would have clapped the baker behind bars directly …

  CHAPTER TEN

  GENTLY SLEPT BADLY that night in spite of the blandishments of the sprung mattress with which the management of the St George had furnished him. He couldn’t get the baker out of his mind. The wretched fellow haunted his dreams all night long. Now he would wake up arguing with him, chewing away desperately at some perfectly obvious proposition which Blythely was simply staring out of existence; now the situation appeared in symbols, with Blythely as a towering cliff and Gently’s logic the waves beating helplessly against it.

  The baker had got the better of him, that was the whole trouble. For once in a way he had met somebody who was a match for him. He had never got hold of the initiative. It had always lain with Blythely. The baker’s wife had given Gently weapons, but they had glanced aside from her husband’s head. Blythely had told him just as much as he wanted to, no more and no less, and the defeat rankled in a thousand uneasy images.

  Because, after all, hadn’t Gently pierced the defences of a score of antagonists more redoubtable than this small-town provincial tradesman? Professionals, some of them had been! – men who had known every twist and pressure of the interrogator’s art.

  Yet here he had been checkmated, firmly and unhesitatingly.

  The baker was wearing an armour more impregnable than guile.

  A clatter of bells penetrated the troubled caverns of his sleep, shattering, insistent, not to be denied. Gently groaned and opened his eyes. The telephone on his bedside table was ringing. A grey, unfriendly light suggested that the hour was unseasonable. He couldn’t quite see whether his watch pointed to five or six.

  ‘Yes … Chief Inspector Gently?’

  In the courtyard below his window somebody was having trouble starting a car.

  ‘Inspector Griffin here … sorry to wake you up. We think we’ve got a line on one of those two men.’

  ‘Ames and Roscoe, you mean?’

  Gently sat up with a rush.

  ‘Yes, but he’s dead. The county police have pulled him out of the river a couple of miles upstream. They think he’s Ames and we’re sending our print man. I thought you’d like to get out straight away.’

  He could see his watch now. It was seven minutes past five. The car outside was firing jerkily, probably on only three cylinders.

  ‘What happened … how did he die?’

  ‘They think he was stabbed.’

  ‘Send round for me, will you? I’ll be ready in five minutes.’

  Automatically he dropped the receiver and began feeling for his clothes. Another one of that fated trio – dead, and making sixes and sevens!

  For the moment he couldn’t react to the information, it was so unexpected and cataclysmic. He pulled on his clothes stupidly, entirely forgetting his collar and tie.

  Down below he found a sleepy-eyed maid and got from her a strong, sweet cup of tea. The refractory car, an ancient Morris, got going just in time to make an incoming police Wolseley pull up with a squeak of tyres.

  Gently was never at his best at that hour in the morning. Now, huddled into his clothes without washing or shaving, he felt somehow out of things, as though he were being dragged along as a spectator.

  Griffin, on the other hand, was looking particularly smart and sharp. He had both washed and shaved and his hair was sleek with brilliantine smelling of eau de Cologne. Also, he was wearing a clean shirt. Out in the country, Gently had to make a shirt go a couple of days.

  ‘I was riding on my beat from Cuffley to Morton, taking in Long Lane and Five Mile Drain.’

  The constable who had landed the body was young and hard-eyed. He was obviously enjoying being the centre of attraction.

  ‘I arrived here at the sluice at three minutes to three a.m., when I was accosted by William Harmer, by profession a drainage maintenance inspector. He informed me as how he was making his customary round when he caught sight of something white down in the water by the sluice-gate. On directing his torch upon this object he came to the conclusion that it was a human body …’

  If it was bleak and dismal now, at half past five, what had it been like at three minutes to three o’clock! The rain was spitting on the slow-flowing surface of the wide, muddy stream and darkening the brickwork of the lonely little pump-house.

  Across the marshes one could just see Lynton, a gloomy stain against the reluctantly lightening sky. Apart from this nothing broke the monotonous flatness except the river reaches and the improbable straightness of the drain. Drawn to infinity, it exercised a curious fascination on the eye.

  But at three minutes to three one wouldn’t have seen much of that …

  ‘I approached the sluice-gate and looked where Harmer showed me. Being in no doubt that it was a human body, I requested Harmer to fetch the grapnels which are kept in the pump-house, and with his assistance embarked in the rowing-boat which is moored here.’

  It was still moored there, in the relief channel beside the sluice. A weathered double-ender, it could have done with a bail with the chipped enamel saucepan lying in the bows.

  ‘After several attempts we succeeded in catching hold of its shirt and getting it up into the boat. Leaving Harmer in charge of it, I proceeded to the nearest telephone at Coldharbour Farm and reported the occurrence.’

  That was all, in official parlance, but
one could easily imagine the rest. It had been raining steadily at three o’clock and the constable was probably wet through. And how long had Harmer had to wait with the corpse at that desolate spot, smoking perhaps, watching eagerly for a light on the lonely fen lane?

  Gently glanced towards him with curiosity. A tough, leathery-looking little marshman, he had probably been on these vigils before …

  The Lynton police surgeon came out of the pump-house where the corpse had been deposited.

  ‘He was stabbed all right – a proper amateur’s job. Sixteen stab-wounds scattered about the left side of the back and three ribs fractured. Only about two of the stabs would have done for him directly. Nothing elsewhere and there doesn’t seem to have been a fight.’

  ‘When was he killed?’

  ‘Not long ago, taking into account the low temperature of the water. About midnight, I’d say, or a little before.’

  ‘What about the weapon?’

  The police surgeon shrugged.

  ‘I’ll tell you more about that after I’ve had him on the slab. Guessing roughly, I’d say it was an ordinary sheath knife. The blade would be about an inch in width.’

  Gently was asking the questions, but he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he was somehow supernumerary. If only he’d remembered to put on his collar and tie! Of the group on the riverbank he felt nearest akin to Harmer. The marshman, sopping wet in a shapeless old coat of Derby tweed, looked as though he had never been near a collar and tie in his life.

  ‘We’d better take a look at his clothes.’

  They followed him into the pump-house. Inside there was very little room, except that taken up by the machinery. A couple of hurricane lamps, impressed from the farm, were beginning to grow pale in the dull light of day.

  The body lay on the floor, a tarpaulin sheet pulled over it. A pile of clothing beside it consisted only of trousers, shirt and underclothes. Gently stirred them up disinterestedly.

  ‘New – no markings. Was there anything in the pockets?’

  One of them was turned inside out, and a frayed edge showed where a maker’s label had been torn away. The shirt was of a popular make which might have been bought anywhere.

  ‘That ties it in.’