Alan Hunter - Gently through the Mill

He was a man in his fifties with fleshy, boyish features. He had hard, greyish eyes and a fruity voice.

‘Your people think it’s a gang killing, and we have found nothing to suggest that it isn’t. The obvious theory is that he was murdered by his associates. The fact that they have disappeared goes a long way to substantiate it.’

Gently nodded absent-mindedly and brought out his pipe. After looking round the town he was prepared to concede this theory as being the obvious one.

‘As to what they were doing in Lynton, your guess is as good as mine. I understand that these three men were in the habit of frequenting racetracks, but there is nothing closer to Lynton than Newmarket and Lincoln. The last racing in the vicinity was at Newmarket three weeks ago.’

In the square below the window a man was feeding the pigeons. The red sky of a fine April evening outlined a satisfying horizon of Georgian roofs and chimneys.

‘We’ve got another idea… we think it might be unconnected with racing.’

‘Wouldn’t that be unlikely?’

‘Uncharacteristic, but then, so is murder.’

The super jiffled with even greater unease.

‘What exactly did you have in mind — burglary, something of that sort?’

No.’ Gently shook his head. ‘That would be too uncharacteristic. Burglary is a specialist crime — you don’t find other criminals casually turning to it. What we should look out for is some sort of a racket, something which has suddenly provided a special opportunity. We’ll suppose that our three men heard about it and came to cash in… then they ran up against some opposition and one of them got killed. The other two, quite naturally, dropped the business like a hot brick.’

‘And all this in Lynton?’

‘We can’t be quite certain.’

‘You can be certain enough of that one thing, Inspector. There are no rackets being operated in Lynton.’

A big diesel truck crossed the square and sent the pigeons momentarily fluttering. The man who was feeding them threw his last fragment and crumpled the bag into a ball.

‘You have some docks here, haven’t you?’

Gently blew a quiet little smoke-ring.

‘Yes… in a small way. Only light-draught vessels can come through the estuary.’

‘Any continental traffic?’

‘A few timber boats from Germany and Scandinavia. There’s a Dutch ship, I believe, which carries on a coal trade.’

‘There might be something there.’

The super frowned at his fingernails.

‘As a matter of fact we did have a case… but no stretch of imagination could make a racket of it. Inspector Griffin, you handled that business. Perhaps you can give Chief Inspector Gently an account of it.’

Inspector Griffin sat up a little straighter. He was a lean, fit-looking man with a severe moustache and a severe manner.

‘February the twenty-third, I think, sir. On information received I detained a German seaman named Grossmann as he was leaving the cargo-vessel Mitzi, arrived from Bremen with a cargo of machine-spares. He became violent and I was forced to restrain him. On being searched he was found to be carrying a package containing several thousand grains of heroin, and more was discovered in his sea-chest. We obtained a conviction, sir.’

‘And that, I think, is our only serious case of smuggling, Inspector?’

‘Yes, sir. For as long as I’ve been on the Force.’

The super extended an exonerated hand. ‘You see? A single case involving a solitary individual.’

‘Mmn.’ Gently puffed steadily. ‘And the person he was going to sell it to?’

‘He’d got no contact, sir.’

Griffin came in like a bullet.

‘He was a rather stupid and uneducated man with no knowledge of what he was doing. Apparently he was under the impression that he could sell heroin to the nearest chemist or doctor. It was obviously the first time he had attempted anything of the sort.’

Gently shrugged and struck himself a fresh light. At all events he was trying to get straw to make some bricks from…

‘There’s nothing else you can think of?’

He was looking towards the super, but his question was addressed to Griffin. The super, he felt, had present visions of a shining, crime-free Lynton.

‘We have our quota of petty crime, but nothing at all out of the way.’

‘No forgeries, defalcations, outbreaks of armed assault — that sort of thing?’

‘Nothing of the sort has come to our notice lately.’

They were on the defensive, both of them. The super had a stubborn expression on his fleshy face and Griffin was intent, ready to throw up his guard.

You had only to suggest for one moment that there might be undiscovered crimes lurking in the district…

‘Well, we’d better leave that angle and get down to brass tacks. Who have we got at the mill, and what have they got to say for themselves?’

Immediately the atmosphere relaxed. The super, opening a drawer, produced a box of cigarettes and offered them around, irrespective of rank. Inspector Griffin picked up a file he had brought with him and rustled the sheets in it with an air of confidence.

‘First there’s the people who live on the premises… Henry Thomas Blythely, the baker, and Clara Dorothy Blythely, his wife. And you have to count the assistant, Edward John Jimpson. He was working in the bakehouse during the time the crime was committed.’

It had been a busy night, the one preceding Good Friday. Unlike his fellows Blythely baked the hot cross buns to be fresh on the day. The addition of these to his regular quota had meant an early start, and both his assistant and himself were in the bakehouse by ten p.m. on the Thursday evening.

‘And that’s their alibi — they worked right through together. At seven in the morning they knocked off for a couple of hours, Blythely taking a nap on his bed and Jimpson on a shake-down at the back of the shop. But the latest time the pathologist gives for the killing is two or three a.m.’

‘And the earliest?’ interrupted Gently.

‘Ten or eleven p.m. on the previous evening.’

Nothing was known to the demerit of either Blythely or his assistant. The baker’s wife, by her own account, had retired to bed soon after her husband had gone down to the bakehouse, and had been wakened by him at seven in order to open the shop at half past.

‘Now we come to the mill people, though it seems unlikely that they would have had anything to do with it.’

First the miller, Harry Ernest Fuller. He had locked up the mill at six p.m. on the Thursday and gone home to have tea with his wife and two young children. It was the night of the annual stag party given by his golf club. He had arrived at this — it was held in a pavilion attached to The Spreadeagle public house — at eight p.m., and left it again at approximately three a.m. on the Friday morning, the time being vouched for by his wife and an employee at the establishment.

Griffin paused before he continued.

‘This may be irrelevant, sir, but I think I ought to mention it. Fuller impressed me unfavourably in the way he answered my questions. I didn’t attach much importance to it because the man had just had a bad shock, but I feel that the chief inspector ought to have all the facts.’

Gently nodded his compliments and puffed on at his pipe. It didn’t take long to sum up Griffin as a conscientious officer. He’d lost his case, it had been given to the Yard, but that wouldn’t stop him handing over what might be of assistance.

‘There are a foreman and six hands employed at the mill, and two drivers who deliver and pick up grain.’

Griffin had questioned each one and checked on his story. No fish was too small for the C.I.D. man’s painstaking net. This one had been in a pub, that one at the cinema. Blacker, the foreman, had had to admit a night with a woman of the town. But they were all accounted for, even Miss Playford, Fuller’s clerk.