Alan Hunter - Gently through the Mill

… wasn’t a betting system and Griffin’s crime passionel the more likely idea of the two?

The assistant commissioner’s information had been entirely of the negative variety. The division couldn’t be quite certain when the three men had disappeared from Stepney, and Ames and Roscoe had not returned there. A round-up of likely elements had produced no worthwhile intelligence. There had been a notable silence in the world of narkdom.

‘It’s at your end, Gently, whatever it is. I feel sure that if you’ll poke around a little more…’

‘Would you like me to send you Simpson, of Anti-narcotics?’

He had asked for an all-stations and hung up feeling more depressed than ever. The arrival of an empty-handed Dutt had done no more than set the seal on his mood.

‘There wasn’t nothing at the station, sir — nobody didn’t remember them. The bank manager sees Taylor, of course, and the cashiers remember him, but the lolly went to their headquarters and nobody did a check on it.’

‘Pound notes was it?’

‘Yessir. Sixteen bundles done up with rubber bands.’

‘New notes or old?’

‘They wouldn’t swear to that, but one of them thinks they might have been new.’

‘What about the other two?’

‘They don’t seem to have banked theirs, sir. I tried around the town, but there was nothink doing anywhere.’

After which Gently had sat smoking in the office the super had allotted to him, indulging his blues and trying to pull something out of an empty bag…

There were two ends to the stick and he seemed to be holding the clean one. The dirty end, Ames and Roscoe, had disappeared like the eternal smoke-rings he was blowing. And the clean end was so very clean! There was scarcely a mark on it anywhere. Fuller’s bare opportunity was the best it could show, coupled with the fact that the murderer seemed to have known his way about a mill… this mill, if the choice of hoppers was more than an accident.

Against that, where was the motive? What was Taylor to the Lynton miller?

They could have met at Newmarket. Taylor might have gypped Fuller

… but would Fuller have then seen fit to strangle him, and to have hidden the body in one of his own flour-hoppers?

He could hardly have supposed that the business would pass as an accident!

Or put it the other way, to try everything: suppose Fuller had done the gypping. Suppose he had lost the astounding sum of five thousand pounds, and been pursued to Lynton and badgered for the payment…?

Gently had shaken his head decisively — such a hypothesis was too fantastic! The miller would never have plunged to such a fabulous extent, or been able to produce such a sum on demand if he had. Moreover, having got it, Taylor and his associates would have departed to the happy haunts of Stepney.

Finally, there was the old chestnut of a racket. Once again you were dealing with a concept self-evidently academic. What could Fuller be running to produce pay-offs in the five thousand category — and how could Taylor and the others have cottoned on to it, meeting Fuller briefly on the racetrack?

Beside these extravagant theories Griffin’s idea seemed a breath of sweet reason… it fitted most of the facts and did violence to scarcely any of them.

Who knew what charms the baker’s wife had discovered in the little, rat-faced cockney?

Blythely had stopped staring at the pigeons and had come to the gate of the mill. Like the others, he had made out the bulky form of Gently sitting in the cafe window.

He said something to the workers, who had fallen silent at his approach; one of them laughed with a touch of self-consciousness, but the others remained serious enough.

‘Still snooping around, is he?’ — that would have been it. ‘You want to watch out, together!’ — and one of the workers had laughed.

Why were they constrained with Blythely — was it that they suspected something?

In the window he could see Ted Jimpson sitting bolt upright, his girlfriend watching him with lips which were compressed. Then somebody switched on the radio and the two of them relaxed their pose. A steel band was playing the calypso which Gently had heard tinkled out by Taylor’s cigarette-box.

‘A-working all night on a drink of rum,

Daylight’s come and I want to go home…’

Gently drained his cup and signalled to the waitress, who was becoming resigned to his periodic refills. The cafe was emptying as the lunch hour wore on. Fuller, probably, would be back by two.

‘You know the miller, do you?’

‘Mr Fuller is often in here.’

‘When was the last time?’

‘He had lunch on Good Friday, the day they found the body.’

‘Did he have a good appetite?’

The waitress obviously took this for a joke.

Now Blythely had turned his back and was going indoors with his jerky, obstinate stride. What would he have done, this man, faced with the situation Griffin had suggested? Was it in his awkward and self-righteous character to have become berserk and to have strangled the adulterer?

To have thrashed him, perhaps — ‘chastisement’ was the word that came to mind! — Taylor might certainly have had to expiate his sin through the flesh.

But strangling, that was another matter altogether. It suggested a fixed and calculated intent rather than a sudden outbreak of wrath. In addition to which he would have his wife to cope with. She might have reason to keep quiet — but dared he risk such a secret with her?

As always, one was brought up by a gross improbability. There weren’t enough facts… that was the long and the short of it!

Gently helped himself to another lump of sugar and gulped down some more coffee. What was the residue of fact which didn’t seem to link with the rest?

Well, there was Blacker and his relations with his master, and possibly the relations between the miller and Blythely. And then there was the stable, apparently a sore point with both the last two… though heaven alone knew how that could fit in.

Blacker, probably, was the most interesting to consider.

Hadn’t he been made up to foreman on the day after the murder — a man antagonistic to his employer, and of doubtful competence?

That suggested pressure — and the timing was strangely coincidental. Blacker might have got a hint of something and put two and two together.

But if Fuller was the man, would he have straightway put the new foreman on emptying the hopper — giving himself, as it were, completely into the fellow’s hands?

If it came to that, would Fuller have put it there at all? He could so easily have disposed of the corpse in some less damning spot.

So you were back where you started, floundering among the improbabilities. Wherever you picked it up the case handed you a non sequitur. It had been that way from the beginning, from the moment Taylor or one of his colleagues had lifted the phone and booked rooms in the stainless town of Lynton…

What could one do, except obstinately watch and wait?

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but Ted…’

Gently looked up to find Jimpson’s girlfriend standing uncertainly by his table. The blush on her rounded cheeks was becoming, and she had an appearance of wholesomeness, like an apple out of a cottage garden.

‘What is it you want?’

‘Ted here… we’ve been talking it over…’

Ted Jimpson had wandered into the background, a hangdog expression on his palish face.

‘Well, sir, we thought he ought to tell you…’

‘Go on, then… I won’t bite!’

‘… he wasn’t there that night — not all the time, that is! He come out to see me home. I was working late shift in the caff.’

Gently sat them down at his table, Jimpson in front of him and the girl to his right. The workers across the way, who had been about to retire into the mill, hesitated to witness this new disposition.