Alan Hunter - Gently through the Mill

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…

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.