Alan Hunter - Gently through the Mill

It was a chink, but a narrow one. Fuller could easily have got to the mill and back. But with only twenty minutes to spare — his account checked well with Griffin’s findings — he would need to have been lucky to have murdered and disposed of Taylor.

‘The waiter thinks it was later than midnight when he served you with the tonic water.’

‘I didn’t say it was midnight — that’s what you tell me.’

‘We know you went outside after the dinner, but not when you came back.’

‘If the dinner ended at eleven thirty then I was back by midnight.’

Like Griffin, he found that the chink wouldn’t open. He was getting all the same replies, and it was long odds that they were true.

Unless Fuller had a motive, what was the significance of opportunity? He might have been at Newmarket, but who could swear that Taylor had been there?

As for the vomit, Griffin had duly inspected the yard and noted some…

‘You went home at three a.m., didn’t you?’

‘So the wife says. I went home when it broke up.’

‘You walked, I believe?’

‘In that condition I would hardly have driven.’

‘There are taxis, Mr Fuller.’

‘At that hour in Lynton it’s simpler to walk.’

‘Why did you empty the hopper the next morning?’

About that he talked freely. It had clearly no anxieties for him. Omitting nothing in the report, he described how the consignment of grain had been delayed, how he had put the men on the hopper, and how one of them, Fred Salmon, had fetched him out of the office.

‘We thought it was an accident… a long time ago the same thing had happened. What we couldn’t make out was who the bloke was and what he’d been doing in the mill.’

‘Did anyone act queerly?’

‘We didn’t none of us think much of it. There were a few pale gills about, but what were you going to expect?’

Just that of course, and no other. The phrase summed it up consummately. One saw the silent group of mill workers standing near their grim discovery, the un-reckoned danger of the flour-hoppers brought suddenly and unanswerably home to them.

But for the grace of God…

‘What did they say?’

‘It was me who did the talking.’

‘You’re sure nobody recognized him?’

‘I asked them and that’s what they told me.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I had him put in the sack-store out of the way. Then I phoned the police and sat trying to figure out what he’d been after in the mill. The men knocked off for a cup of tea. I didn’t find them another job until they came back after lunch.’

Now Fuller seemed uneasy again, though heavens knew why he should be. As though the straightforward discovery of the body was a little island of blame-free certitude in an anxious sea.

‘I still thought it was an accident, of course. It wasn’t till later they came in…’

‘It must have been a grave shock, Mr Fuller.’

The brown eyes jumped up to him. ‘Yes… but in a way…’

They remained looking at each other for a long moment, the miller unable to disengage from the treacherous rapport he had established.

‘You understand… I’d been thinking! There are two ways, and naturally…’

‘You mean that you suspected foul play?’

‘No! But it was so odd, his being there. We didn’t know him, we’d never seen him… his clothes and everything. It simply wasn’t natural. I couldn’t help feeling…’

Gently held his eyes mercilessly and let him stumble on.

‘It was a premonition, don’t you see? I suddenly felt I was in… no, not that… but it was going to make trouble. Mr Pershore wouldn’t like it, you see? He hates any scandal! And then the reputation… wouldn’t do the business any good. Altogether I had an idea… you understand me?’

He faltered to a stop, and Gently hunched a careless shoulder. So it hadn’t been a shock to Fuller when he had heard that Taylor was murdered! But then, who wouldn’t have thought about it and had his premonitions? Good Friday, as a matter of interest, had occurred on the thirteenth.

‘You were right, weren’t you? It’s made a bit of trouble.’

Fuller nodded in relief. ‘Yes… that’s what I was trying to say.’

‘Everyone was suspect even though they were in the clear.’

‘God, yes! That’s the feeling. And I could sense it coming on.’

‘But you had seen nothing to substantiate that feeling?’

‘No, not a thing.’

‘You didn’t know Taylor and you’ve never met any of these people?’

Gently displayed half a dozen photographs among which were those of Ames and Roscoe.

Fuller examined them and shook his head.

‘I don’t know any of them from Adam.’

‘Then that’s all for the moment. But now I should like to see over the mill.’

There was no help for it, he was plodding in Griffin’s footsteps. He hadn’t got an inch further than the Lynton man’s report. Fuller had roused both their interests only to lull them both to sleep again. He impressed one unfavourably, but on the balance one could attach no importance to it.

‘That’s the sack-store in there if you want to take a look at it.’

The surface of the mill yard was uneven and broken by decades of lorries. A dozen plump pigeons ran on it — Lynton was a great place for pigeons.

‘The engine-room doesn’t connect with anywhere. As I told you, we keep it locked.’

An elderly man in oil-stained dungarees came to the door, wiping his hands. Behind him the huge fly-wheel quivered as it spun. A smaller wheel drove the strap which connected to some overhead shafting. A twirling governor kept the whole amazing contraption in order.

‘The kids come and look at it — they take a short cut through the drying-ground. If you go down the passage there you’ll see what I mean.’

The passage was the division between the biggest mill building and the bakehouse block. The layout was a rough square of which the passage opened an inside corner.

Between the two blocks ran a narrow bridge at first-floor level, beneath which was one of the doors to the mill.

‘Does Mr Blythely have the key of the door across the bridge?’

‘That’s right, we both have one. I use the back of his place as a store. The blokes keep their bikes in the room underneath — Inspector Griffin went over it, but I don’t think he found anything.’

He didn’t, it was in his report. He had ransacked the entire premises and found nothing except flour dust.

‘What’s this drying-ground you talk about?’

‘Keep going and you’ll come to it.’

The passage turned a corner and then ended in an open space hemmed in by a high wall and the backs of uninhabited cottages. It was about sixty yards by fifty, part cinder, part grass, with two or three overgrown pear trees grouped at one spot. A few old posts for drying-lines still formed a triangle in the middle. At the corner against the bakehouse stood a dilapidated stable with a hayloft over it.

‘There’s a blasted right-of-way through here… you come in from Cosford Street by that other passage in the far corner. It’s not a short cut at all, but the kids always use it. And of course they make this a playground… that’s how our windows get broken.’

‘It looks ideal for kids.’

‘They’re into everywhere.’

‘Is that stable in use or is it just falling down?’

Fuller looked at it frowningly. ‘It belongs to Blythely… he hasn’t used it for years. I keep some hay in the loft to sell to odd customers.’

‘And the kids romp in there?’

‘Yes — I suppose so.’

Gently’s eyebrow lifted imperceptibly at the abruptness in the other’s tone. Fuller looked discomposed and was feeling for a cigarette.