There's Trouble Brewing

by Nicholas Blake

  The guests, who had been fidgeting a little, were now frozen again. Nigel noticed Dr Cammison standing rigid with a bottle poised above a glass.

  ‘But,’ Nigel stammered at last, ‘but isn’t it much more likely that the dog fell into the open copper by accident, chasing a rat or something.’

  Mr Bunnett raised a censorious hand.

  ‘If you will allow me to tell you the facts. Truffles accompanied me to the brewery every morning. There was a basket for him in my room, and he was attached to the leg of the chair by a strong steel chain. I had occasion to go out for a few minutes that morning. When I returned, I found that the brute was gone. He had not slipped his collar. Someone had unfastened the catch of the lead.’

  ‘Well, granted that was so, you surely don’t suspect one of your employees of deliberately stealing the dog and throwing him into the open copper. No doubt someone unleashed him for a joke and he wandered out and met his death accidentally.’

  ‘The sides of the open copper in which he was found, Mr Strangeways, are six foot high, and Truffles was old and very far from active.’ (No wonder, thought Nigel, after a lifetime on the lead.) ‘I questioned my employees, but could not pin the guilt on anyone.’

  Eustace Bunnett’s voice hushed. His lips scarcely moved as he added:

  ‘I am exceedingly anxious to find out who did it.’

  Nigel was genuinely appalled by his tones. As though seeking to give the brewer an opportunity for justifying them, he said:

  ‘You were very fond of Truffles?’

  ‘The animal was my property, Mr Strangeways.’

  A short silence while the company digested this.

  ‘It seems to me a lot of fuss to make about a dog,’ said Miss Mellors unexpectedly. ‘Why didn’t you call in the police while you were about it?’

  ‘I did,’ replied Mr Bunnett frigidly. ‘They declared themselves unable to take any action. That is why I am asking Mr Strangeways.’

  Nigel surreptitiously pinched himself. Yes, he was awake, incredible as it might seem.

  ‘You wish me to conduct an inquiry?’ he said. ‘But the whole thing is’—he was on the point of saying ‘utterly farcical’, but remembered Sophie’s request that he should not sauce Mr Bunnett again, and amended it to ‘most irregular’.

  Mr Bunnett smiled at him. At least, a sort of twinkle appeared in his eyes, though his mouth remained singularly mirthless.

  ‘I did not imagine a little “irregularity,” as you put it, would be any great obstacle to one who declares himself an admirer of modern poetic metres. I am prepared to give you full facilities for questioning my staff, and a free run of the premises, of course. My little problem should help to keep your hand in till your next big murder case turns up.’

  Mr Bunnett’s request was so bizarre that Nigel felt strongly tempted to take it up. But no, it was all too sickening—this dried-up, vindictive creature with his lust for domination.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, I really can’t——’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake do. None of us will get a moment’s peace till the thing is cleared up.’ It was Gabriel Sorn who had interrupted. Nigel heard a heartfelt appeal beneath his repressed, edgy tones.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said, ‘I’ll take it on. But I assure you, Mr Bunnett, that I am still convinced it was an accident.’

  ‘I shall be happy if you succeed in convincing me,’ replied the brewer. ‘Now, let me see, I shall not be at the brewery tomorrow morning. If you will come along about tea-time, I will meet you and arrange for you to be shown over the place. I don’t know whether you accept fees for this sort of thing: I dare say not, but——’

  ‘Twenty-five guineas retaining fee, and a refresher of five guineas a day is my minimum charge.’

  Mr Bunnett stared at Nigel incredulously, but Nigel’s face was perfectly serious and businesslike.

  ‘Really, Mr Strangeways, that is a bit—I mean, I had thought of a little honorarium, say——’

  ‘I cannot consider anything less, Mr Bunnett.’

  ‘Oh—er, very well then.’

  It was the first time Nigel had seen Eustace Bunnett look disconcerted.

  1 cf. Thou Shell of Death.

  II

  July 17, 8 a.m.–5.15 p.m.

  As he brews, so shall he drink.

  BEN JONSON

  NIGEL AWOKE TO the remorseless chattering of a multitude of sparrows, and the long-drawn notes of the priory clock booming eight. He went to the window and looked out. The roofs of the town stretched downwards away from him, grey-tiled, mossy, sharply-pitched; there was a curious attractiveness in their irrelevant angles, that seemed like a choppy grey-green sea frozen into immobility: their architects, no doubt, had never heard of town planning, but the relationship of house to house was fixed by a sure instinct. Brilliant sunshine blessed the town, while the wooded hills beyond were veiled in mist that promised a scorching noonday. Nigel wondered idly where the brewery was. That brick chimney over there might be it. It was difficult in this fresh sunlight to take seriously either Mr Bunnett or the fantastic problem that he had proposed. Last night Nigel had gone to bed convinced that the brewer was one of the nastiest characters and quite the most dangerous that he had ever met. Now, he attributed this rather hysterical judgement to the unsettling influence of the Maiden Astbury Literary Society. He was thinking up some well-chosen phrases in which to describe this body to Georgia as he came down to breakfast.

  ‘I hope you are quite recovered,’ said Mrs Cammison.

  ‘Recovered? Oh, yes, thank you. The ordeal was not so bad as I expected. But, look here, is it all right—my staying on a few days more? I could easily——’

  ‘Stay as long as you like,’ said Herbert Cammison.

  ‘But are you seriously going to take on this ridiculous business about Truffles?’

  ‘Well, I seem to have let myself in for it. I must have been drunk last night. Still, I’ve always wanted to see over a brewery. “Simple pleasures”, as Oscar Wilde said, “are the last refuge of the complex”—and what simpler pleasures could there be than seeing your Mr Bunnett’s face when I told him my fee?’

  ‘Yes, he doesn’t like paying out money. Half the equipment in the brewery is obsolete, but Mr Bunnett is too old-fashioned and too much of a skinflint to have it replaced. But look here, young Nigel, what do you propose to do if you do find out that someone was responsible for bumping off Truffles?’

  ‘Well, tell Bunnett, I suppose—I mean, it is rather a bad show chucking a harmless beast into an open copper just because you dislike its owner.’

  ‘Wait a minute. You may or may not realise it now, but Bunnett is a thoroughly vindictive man. No one so close with money would consent to pay the exorbitant fee you demanded—just in order to prove a wild suspicion—if he was quite sane. I am telling you, in all seriousness, that Bunnett is not altogether sane. Like other unloved persons who happen to possess almost unlimited power, he has a marked persecution mania. His belief that someone “murdered” his dog is a symptom of that mania. At the same time, he knows he is making a fool of himself—so his motive for finding a victim is even stronger.’

  ‘Yes, I see all that: so what?’

  ‘Do you know what Bunnett will do to anyone you may succeed in pinning the guilt upon?’

  ‘Sack him, I suppose.’

  ‘That will merely be the preliminary,’ said the doctor grimly. ‘He will do his level best to hound the chap out of existence. He will make it impossible for him to get another job, in the first place. And if you think he will let the chap live comfortably on the dole, you’re very much mistaken.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Nigel protested, ‘I can’t really swallow that. It’s too melodramatic even for my sensation-loving mind.’

  For the first time he saw an expression of impatience on Cammison’s face.

  ‘You know as well as I do that people with a lust for power plus a persecution mania live in a world of melodrama. I could tell you things about Bunnett�
�—’

  ‘No horrors at breakfast, please,’ interrupted Sophie in that deceptively neutral voice of hers. It was enough to take the tenseness out of the atmosphere, though. Herbert’s face was impassive again and he spoke more lightly.

  ‘Well, promise me anyway that—if you do find out a culprit—you won’t do anything about it till you’ve had a talk with me.’

  ‘OK. That’s fair enough. I could always hand back Eustace his cheque, if you convinced me that I ought to hold my tongue.’

  ‘I’d convince you all right, young Nigel.’

  Herbert seemed about to amplify this; but a glance from his wife, which Nigel intercepted, silenced him. Gazing noncommittally down his nose, as was his habit when reflecting on the behaviour of present company, Nigel sought to interpret that glance; there was entreaty in it—and something very like panic, too. Oh, well, let it go. But Nigel’s memory was far too retentive to let anything go for good.

  He began asking Herbert about his work in Maiden Astbury. Though a specialist in surgery, Cammison had preferred to take up a general practice. His contempt for the Harley Street type was blistering—‘all spit, polish and pompousness’, he called them; ‘all you need to get on there is a good tailor, a posh-looking butler, and nerve enough to make people pay a hundred guineas for advice that any G.P. could give them for two. Racketeers in tail-coats! The only thing to be said for them is that it is the rich they rob.’

  When Cammison spoke about his own work, which he did without hesitation, complacence or false modesty, his swarthy, impassive face lit up with an expression almost of fanaticism. His eyes seemed to be looking right through Nigel into some vision of the future as he inveighed against social conditions—the under-nutrition of children throughout the industrial areas where he had first worked, the cynical way in which some employers of labour attempted to evade health regulations—‘and you needn’t go to the industrial areas to find that sort of thing. Why, in this very town’—Cammison broke off abruptly: then said, ‘For the price of a few battleships, we could give you a healthy nation. We have the knowledge, the skill, the material resources; but those in power prefer to use them for destroying their competitors and safeguarding their own profits.’

  After breakfast Dr Cammison went off on his rounds and Nigel strolled about the town. Returning at midday, he found his hostess sitting in the little garden at the back of the house: Nigel fetched a deck-chair and sat down beside her.

  ‘Your husband is a remarkable man. He must do a lot of good here.’

  ‘Yes, I think he does. He finds himself up against things, though.’

  Nigel waited for her to amplify this, but she said no more.

  He studied her handsome, ingenuous face; the horn-rimmed spectacles that somehow made her look as though she were playing a part in an extempore charade; the large, capable hands knitting away at a child’s jersey. A baffling creature—it seemed as if nothing could possibly ruffle that humorous maternal composure. Nigel leant back and said quietly:

  ‘Why are you afraid of Mr Bunnett?’

  The large, capable hands paused for a moment, then resumed their knitting. Without turning her head, she replied:

  ‘That would be a long story.’

  Nigel was reminded of what he had said at tea yesterday—‘It is a long and rather discreditable story.’ He asked lightly:

  ‘Not too discreditable, I hope?’

  ‘Some people would think it so,’ Sophie Cammison replied with disarming frankness. She looked straight at him as she added, ‘You wouldn’t.’

  Nigel felt at the same time rebuked and gratified.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ he said. ‘I am incurably inquisitive about other people’s affairs.’

  A little summer breeze fluttered the rambler-roses and swept the lawn with the shadows of overhanging leaves.

  Nigel said, ‘Excuse this harping on old Bunnett, but I can’t imagine him as the owner of a brewery. However does he manage to keep his employees, for one thing?’

  ‘Oh, that’s Joe.’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘His younger brother. He’s the staff-manager. They’d all do anything for him. He really acts as a sort of buffer between the staff and Eustace. He’s always trying to get Eustace to modernise the plant, and so on, but Eustace is terribly conservative.’

  ‘I should say that Eustace would turn down any suggestion merely because it came from someone else.’

  ‘Yes, I expect that’s true.’

  Nigel was conscious again of that guarded note in her voice.

  ‘I should like to meet Joe.’

  ‘He’s just gone off on holiday. He keeps a cabin-cruiser down at Poolhampton. He was going round the Lizard, up the Welsh coast this time, I believe. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to do.’

  ‘A motor-cruiser?’

  ‘Oh, no. Joe despises them. He hasn’t even got an auxiliary engine. He says no sailor worth his salt needs an engine. We’ve often told him it was rather dangerous—without one, I mean.’

  ‘Sounds as if he ought to have been a sailor.’

  ‘He would have liked to. But I believe his brother made him come into the brewery when he was quite young.’

  ‘So Eustace has Joe under his thumb, too?’

  Mrs Cammison considered this.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid he has, a bit. Joe is the hail-fellow-well-met sort—frightfully popular with everyone, and quite brave physically. But I expect he’s a bit of a moral weakling. We’re very fond of him.’

  A very revealing little statement, in more ways than one, thought Nigel. He found himself liking Sophie Cammison more and more.

  At 4 p.m. Nigel was walking with his ostrich stride and preoccupied air through the main gates of the brewery. To his left was a great brick-face, oozing steam here and there, with a few windows set irregularly, high up, their panes not all intact. The familiar smell of malt permeated the air. Farther on there was a raised platform, and backed against it a lorry into which men were rolling barrels. Climbing on to this platform, beyond which was an office with ALL INQUIRIES HERE placarded on it, Nigel could see to his right a long tunnel: barrels were proceeding towards him along this tunnel, moving with the portly, dignified gait of a civic procession. Nigel repressed a strong impulse to take off his hat to them. Lost in admiration, he did not at first hear the shout from the foreman.

  ‘Stand away, sir!’

  Nigel looked up to where the man was pointing, and leapt convulsively aside. A huge crate was descending rapidly towards the spot where he had been standing, twirling round at the end of a chain. The foreman winked.

  ‘Unhealthy spot, this, sir. Tackle broke the other day.’

  ‘And was anyone underneath?’

  ‘Not half there wasn’t. Old George got knocked out. Bust his shoulder, it did, and bleedin’ lucky it wurn’t his head.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you’ve got a new tackle now, after that.’

  ‘Not we. Patched up the old ’un, that’s all. When Mr Joe comes back, though——’

  At that moment the foreman’s attention was distracted, and, after a last glance at the barrels gliding on the conveyor, Nigel went into the office.

  ‘Mr Bunnett?’ said the clerk. ‘I don’t think he’s on the premises now. I will just inquire.’

  ‘He said he would arrange for me to be shown round this afternoon. Perhaps Mr Sorn will know about it.’

  The clerk took up a house-telephone and indulged in some spirited back-chat with a disembodied squeak at the other end of the wire.

  ‘He’s not in, sir. Mr Sorn is coming round to attend to you.’

  The clerk showed no marked inclination to resume work, and regaled Nigel with hot tips, dead certs, and intimate news from the stable. Shortly Gabriel Sorn appeared, looking unexpectedly efficient in a white sort of umpire’s coat. He led Nigel through a variety of passages and swing-doors, the last of these opening into the most hellish din Nigel had ever hear.

  ‘The bottling-r
oom,’ Sorn shouted in his ear.

  Bottles on all sides. Marching sedately along conveyors, turning corners, jerking under the filling and corking apparatus, lying meekly down to have labels stamped on them, the bottles looked at least as human as the slatternly girls who, with sullen, mechanical movements, helped their progress and fed the machine. For a moment Nigel thought of these marching armies of bottles as glass gods, and the girls as devotees performing an endless and uncouth ritual for their worship. Then, half-deafened by the roaring machinery and the rattle-clash of glass, he allowed himself to be led away.

  He followed his guide up a steep ladder into a sort of signal-box, ten feet above the floor of the building. There he was introduced to a tall, lean, despondent-looking man, with the biggest and blackest eyebrows that Nigel had ever seen.

  ‘Mr Barnes, our head brewer.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’

  ‘Well, we might as well have some tea before I conduct you through the inferno,’ said Sorn.

  He handed Nigel a cup of tea and a plate of dry biscuits. Mr Barnes scratched his chin, poured out a glass of beer, scrutinised it with sombre curiosity, as though he had never seen the stuff before, and sipped at it delicately.

  ‘M’m. Turned out nice, this brew,’ he said dreamily: then suddenly tipped the rest down his throat.

  ‘How you can drink that stuff at four o’clock in the afternoon beats me,’ said Sorn.

  ‘Never could fancy tea. Poison, that’s what it is. Turns your insides to leather. A tannin process, as you might say.’

  ‘Joke,’ said Sorn.

  Nigel looked out of the plate-glass window of the signal-box. Two men were sitting on a barrel down below, chatting in a desultory way. Nigel remembered the chattiness of the foreman and the clerk.

  ‘Is this a slack time or something?’ he said. ‘Some of your chaps don’t seem to be bursting themselves with effort.’

  Mr Barnes laid a finger to the side of his nose.

  ‘When the cat’s away——’

  ‘Old Bunface hasn’t turned up to-day,’ amplified Sorn. ‘You’d see them jumping to it all right if he was snooping about.’