Dying In The Wool: A Kate Shackleton Mystery

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Dying In The Wool: A Kate Shackleton Mystery Page 13

by Frances Brody


  The dog licked my ear.

  I waited.

  She went inside.

  It was terribly restful to sit in the dark in the back of a car, just waiting.

  ‘She won’t come out again,’ Anthony said cheerfully.

  Charlie growled as Anthony spoke.

  ‘The dog doesn’t like me. But it’s nothing personal. He doesn’t like any men.’

  He opened the door and the dog bounded out, whining at the front door.

  It all seemed too much, as if I had fetched up in a madhouse. Rather than helping Tabitha, if I told her everything I’d probably destroy her. Overhearing Stoddard and Evelyn and now learning about mad Wilson and his invention, there were more motives than I could keep steady in my aching head.

  I only shut my eyes for a moment.

  When I woke, Anthony the chauffeur was opening the car door. There was no sign of Mrs Wilson or her dog. We were in the wrong place – back at the Braithwaites.

  ‘I brought you home, Mrs Shackleton, since you’d fallen asleep. But if you wish to return to the Gawthorpes …’

  ‘No. Please just give my thanks and apologies. Perhaps you could say I had a headache and didn’t want to spoil the party.’

  In the morning, Becky brought me tea. ‘You’ve slept very late, madam.’

  ‘I was with someone … a lady and her dog. Is she all right?’

  ‘Ah yes, you was seeing Mrs Wilson home,’ Becky said tactfully. I felt a little queasy. Too many of Evelyn Braithwaite’s cocktails before we set off probably.

  Tabitha came to see me, bringing Andrews Liver Salts, a glass of water and a pot of tea.

  She looked pale and drawn.

  ‘What’s the matter, Tabitha?’

  She shook her head, biting her lip, reluctant to speak.

  I felt suddenly guilty for having left her in the lurch. Perhaps something terrible happened after I deserted. ‘Was it the party?’

  ‘Not the party. That went all right. There’s been a most dreadful accident. It’s Paul Kellett. He’s dead.’

  10

  Dyehouse fog

  Paul Kellett rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead to shift the sweat. Since half six this morning he’d been hard at it. Standing in the doorway of the dyehouse, he drank in the evening air and took a swig of warm beer.

  Overtime to finish the job, and he was the one to claim it.

  Uniform material, always uniforms. Dyeing black for the police, navy for the conductors, grey for the commissionaires. That’s how they keep us in our place, Kellett knew. Wear this, wear that, tip your cap, show respect. Oh he could do that all right, as long as there was summat in it for number one.

  Where was his Oxo tin and his snap? He took out his sandwich.

  It wasn’t only toffs could take themselves off to Morecambe Bay to live out their days in a cottage by the sea. The working man could do it an’ all, if he set his mind hard enough at the task. If he took care of number one.

  Kellett would surprise them all. There’d be a day when he was washed white. He’d have clean hands, and hair free of the dye, like the time when he wore his suit and went on the road. His chest would clear up too. On that day, he’d breathe free.

  He had picked the spot where his house would be built, in Heysham overlooking the bay, where you had the finest sunsets in the wide world.

  He wouldn’t be a mean bastard neither – he’d invite his dyeing mates over to stop the night. Lizzie would bake a pie. They’d be the proper host and hostess. Mein host. That made him smile. Mein host. Thank you Herr von Hofmann, especially for the crate of permanganate of potash that Mr Bigshot Braithwaite never spotted. That was his entirely, that little lot. Kellett’s only regret, that he could have driven an even harder bargain.

  Not long now for the new start. And it would all be down to cleverness. All down to the fact he knew his job inside out and upside down. He’d experimented with the dyes. He could reduce the process time, but only he knew that. So tonight there’d be one time on his clocking out card, and it wouldn’t include his going over home to wash hisself down and have a bite of supper and a pipe by the fire.

  The trick about pulling in brass was not to be too fussy whether it was a big amount or a little. Oh it was big money in the days he was relabelling and selling the German dyes. Twenty sales for Joshua Braithwaite, one sale for Kellett’s back pocket. He’d liked that life – wearing a suit, having summat to sell that folk would give their eye teeth for.

  Reluctantly, he put down his emptied beer mug and turned back into the dyehouse fog. The boiler was at it full blast. Metal grinding on metal, whistle and squeal, the high bubbling noise, and the low rumble.

  He yawned. Not getting any younger. Bloody tired, weariness seeping through him in waves. Ten yards at thirty-six inches to dye. He’d have it done in no time, no time at all, and out to dry.

  He didn’t notice the silence. It seemed to be inside his head, a sudden stillness that came over him sometimes when he thought of how it would be to live by the sea, looking out over that vast swathe of ridged sands at low tide, imagining the worlds beyond the roaring ocean, and the peace, the sweet peace of never having to set foot in a dyehouse again.

  And then it happened, and he knew it was happening, but somehow his body had gone all slow, like when he had been marched to the front line in a state of exhaustion and putting one foot before the other took such great effort.

  Even as his hand and claw grabbed the valve and he started to turn, and turn, he knew it was too late. Only one hand to turn with, the claw useless for this job. It took ten or fifteen good turns before the valve would shut off the boiler. And …

  He started to sweat. His body told him to run but as he turned his back on the boiler, the dye burst out with an angry rush, hot and black, knocking him to the floor, to the hard setts on the floor of the dyehouse and then it was covering him in black waves and he thought of the sea and how he would take off his shoes and roll up his trousers.

  Somehow he struggled to his feet, hearing human screams as the roof exploded, hearing screams that were his own and his tiredness had gone now but he didn’t know how he moved, fast or slow, only that he moved and one thought pounded through his scalded burning body.

  Water.

  He ran across the mill yard, ran to the low wall, catching sight of his own dye-blackened hand, the sleeve that hung loose, the skin falling from his arm. Screaming, he jumped into the icy water of the canal.

  Someone had heard the explosion. Lizzie ran across the beck, up the bank, past the big bridge, into the mill yard.

  The dyehouse was swamped. Parts of the roof had fallen in, with tiles and bricks on the ground near the wall. A broken beer jug lay among the collapsed bricks in what had been the doorway. Across the yard was a trail of black dye.

  She knew her heart would burst, but kept running, shouting, calling his name, so that when she saw him, she had no breath left to speak, only looked at him there in the water, blackened, flailing, staring at her with terror in his eyes. She began to climb down to him. He shook his head. She saw the redness of his tongue against the black as he tried to speak. Then the canal took him. She ran along the bank towards the weir.

  A fallen branch stopped him. She waded down, to her thighs, to her waist. Paul screamed as she touched him, and then was silent.

  Lizzie’s own scream tore through the air.

  11

  Cropping

  Cropping: Shearing loose fibres or yarns from the surface of the cloth to give it a smooth texture.

  LIZZIE

  Lizzie Luck never saw any need to leave the village. The old people were dead now, parents and gran. Lizzie had inherited her gran’s tarot cards, and her knack for the fortune game.

  Lizzie’s younger sister left to work in the clothing trade in Leeds. Only she was never satisfied. Money, money, money, that was her tune on the harp. Later, she’d gone to work in munitions. Lizzie took the train to Leeds one Bank Holiday Monday to visit. The
sun never shone there, never penetrated the smoky air. If that was the big city, you could keep it.

  Another time, Lizzie took a train to Bradford to see her brother and his wife. What a smoky hole that was! Oh the shops were big and fine, the arcades grand, and the market teemed with everyone and everything, but it was all too much. She only ever went there one other time – to the Spiritualist Church.

  Long before the noisy weaving shed turned her deaf, Lizzie liked the peace and quiet and her bit of a garden to grow potatoes, herbs and whatever else she could coax from the ground when the beck and the canal allowed. She liked the way her house turned its back on the mill and its bowed wall gave the village a cold shoulder. She gazed onto fields where sheep and cattle grazed.

  Living alone suited Lizzie, after growing up with seven and eight in the two-room house. But Paul Kellett blew in from Keighley in 1913, looking for work. He helped her up one icy day when she slipped and came a cropper on the cobbles. He looked down, she looked up. It was as simple as that. She hadn’t expected to find love at the grand old age of thirty. But he was tender, kind and funny. He could imitate bird calls, tell jokes, play the harmonica. They married within the month.

  He took over the entire house with his inventions and experiments. She wondered they weren’t poisoned after he used her pots and pans for God knows what type of dyeing mix. He’d stir the dye stuff in with water, using her wooden spoon, boiling it up to dissolve it, more than once causing an explosion. He claimed the fastest green dye in England. He dyed her grey cape forest green and insisted she wash it. It was her fault when the tub turned emerald.

  Then it was a new type of gas-fired machine for close-cropping the cloth, only the gas bottle wouldn’t supply the right amount. It would come out a useless trickle or a destructive blast. Next came the printing roller, where the fabric rolled over it instead of it rolling over the fabric. Only Braithwaites weren’t doing patterns. He’d taken his model to the mill office, but to no avail.

  ‘Damn Braithwaite! He let me explain every angle before he said no!’

  That was when Lizzie found out about Paul’s nasty side. She gave as good as she got. Took the broom to him.

  ‘Paul, Paul, calm yourself, man. We’ll never have a bairn if we’re like fire and oil.’

  Being married to a genius, especially an unrecognised genius, was no easy matter.

  She took him to bed. After they had made love she read his palm and saw that the future would bring him better fortune. That was the night she conceived, but the baby did not come to term.

  He never knew about the baby.

  He joined up in 1914, angry that nowt had materialised from all his grand ideas.

  Lizzie took in a lodger, Agnes, a bonnie weaver who kept her company. Agnes kept her counsel over Lizzie losing the bairn.

  Paul was back from the front within the year, missing part of his left arm, and with a claw sticking out of his cuff where his hand should be. She thought that would be an end of the inventions but it was only the beginning. He set his heart on making his fortune, so as to retire to Morecambe. It would take just one grand idea.

  So Lizzie lost her lodger. Agnes cried when she left, took herself off to Bradford, to be somewhere no one knew her.

  Paul went to enquire about his old job.

  When he came back, he bubbled up inside – not with his usual indignation. Lizzie thought at first he’d had the nod about one of his inventions.

  He took a bar of Sunlight soap with him to the public baths.

  On Monday, he dressed in his suit.

  ‘I’m going on the road.’

  ‘Doing what?’ She imagined him with a pick and shovel, digging ditches. Then tramping, knocking on doors, begging for bread. That’s what on the road meant to her.

  ‘Selling. I’m going on the road selling.’

  ‘Selling what?’

  ‘You see it did pay to come up with all them inventions. Because you have to learn to silver tongue in order to explain them. Me and my silver tongue are going on the road.’

  ‘Selling what?’ she asked again.

  He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Best you don’t know. That’s between me and my employer …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t ask. It’s all above board. But if anyone at the mill enquires, you know nowt.’

  He’d come home from his selling, spread notes and sovereigns on the table. When he went down to the cellar to stash his loot, she warned him, ‘That cellar floods.’

  After that he kept the money in a locked chest under the bed.

  ‘We’ll buy a place in Morecambe. Neither of us will ever work again.’

  They took the train and explored. It was Heysham they fell in love with. Dreams of a life of ease sent them into raptures. A house on the cliff top – nothing less would do.

  But the money was never enough. Always he wanted just a few quid more.

  When the selling stopped, he didn’t want to go back to the dyehouse. He took a job as an orderly in the hospital.

  ‘Just a few quid more. Besides, there’s clever men will be coming to that hospital. Officers. One of them might have the imagination to develop a gas-fired cropping machine.’

  When the war ended, she thought they would go to Heysham then, though it would be a wrench to leave the place she had lived all her life for the wilds of the coast. It would be bleak in winter. Perhaps he felt the same, not ready to leave this village and everyone he knew. Not ready to reach for the dream in case it dissolved and left only a green stain in his imagination.

  Just a few quid more.

  Back to the dyehouse.

  Just a few quid more.

  12

  Roving

  Roving: The combed tops from thick slivers of wool, from which yarn is spun.

  I kicked myself that neither I nor Sykes had spoken to Kellett about his time ‘on the road’ with the dyewares, making money for Braithwaite. If any of the Braithwaites Mill workforce would have an out of the ordinary connection with Braithwaite, it would be Kellett. And now he had met his death in a most shocking way.

  Better get Sykes back over here. Taking paper and an envelope from my writing case, I wrote him a note. It was still early enough for him to receive the letter by second post. I would take it to the box myself, and hope that he would not be too perturbed by where and when I asked him to meet me.

  I put on my navy pea jacket, beret and gloves, slipping the letter into my pocket. The sky looked fine enough when I stepped outside, but there was a chill in the air.

  Tabitha waited for me on the humpback bridge. We would pay our condolences to Lizzie together. From the bridge, we saw one of Lizzie’s workmates entering her cottage.

  ‘When you told me that your father was found by the stepping stones, how did you know?’

  I was curious as to whether, in spite of Hector’s secrecy, she had realised that he was one of the ‘rescuers’.

  ‘I can’t remember how I know.’ She sounded miserable, as if she had failed a test.

  ‘Constable Mitchell said it was by the waterfall.’

  ‘Then I don’t know why I thought of the stepping stones.’

  ‘Is there any reason he would have come to the beck? Is it on the way to or from somewhere? A short cut?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘It’s a special spot, where Edmund and I used to play.’

  We walked down the bank and sat on a flat rock.

  ‘I think I told you that Dad once did a painting of the two of us, playing just there by the bridge. He dashed it off in no time. You see he didn’t have much opportunity for that sort of palaver, as he called it, once he took over the mill. He was a younger son and hadn’t expected to have the responsibility, but his older brother wanted none of it and went off to South Africa, so father had no choice.’

  I didn’t want to hear about an older brother in South Africa. My immediate, suspicious response was to imagine the chap returning secretly, slaughtering his kith and kin and waiting in t
he wings to leap on his rightful inheritance.

  ‘This uncle, is he still alive and well in South Africa?’

  ‘Oh no. The poor man died in a typhoid epidemic.’

  I sent up a silent prayer of thanks at not having a complicating factor in the investigation.

  Tabitha plucked a blade of grass and slid it from its stem.

  I did what I usually do when at a loss for words – set up my field camera to take a photograph of the scene. It would be good to have an image of the location where Joshua Braithwaite went missing.

  ‘I wonder you don’t tire of carrying all that camera stuff around with you,’ Tabitha said, pushing her hands deeper in her pockets.

  ‘Let me take your picture, Tabitha. By the bridge, here, then further along.’ I did not say, By the waterfall.

  ‘I don’t feel like having my picture taken. Mrs Kellett might look out and see us. It would look heartless.’

  ‘You’re right.’ All the same, I looked down into the reflector finder. She frowned as I photographed the stepping stones. Next, the waterfall became my focus.

  There was a mystery here and I hoped the beck would surrender its secret.

  When I concentrate hard, the world turns silent. Blinkers shut out what I do not need to see. When the concentration stops, the world roars back, taking me by surprise. As I looked again at the beck, it had streaked with brown, from the discharge of effluent upstream. Had Braithwaite objected to being rescued? Perhaps he had just slipped and the boy scouts were over-zealous. One hears jokes about boy scouts assisting old ladies across a road, whether they want to be on the other side or not.

  As we left the spot, I noticed the tracery effect on the water’s surface – sunlight filtering through the leaves. There was so much in the world to photograph, so much to experience.

  Mrs Kellett’s visitors left the cottage. Tabitha and I walked along the path to the Kelletts’ gate. I was determined that after we had paid our visit, Tabitha would walk me round all the places that meant something to her and her father. If the secret of his disappearance lay in the landscape, I would find it.

 

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