Read Gently through the Mill Online
Authors: Alan Hunter
Gently through the Mill
the Mill
Alan Hunter
A Broads gaff sloop in the classic tradition, 27ft 6in by 8ft 6in by 2ft 9in. Built at Wroxham in 1913 by Alfred Collins and christened
Windmill
, she has been a thing of beauty about the Broads for nearly a century. Few yachts of her class were faster or sweeter to handle, none could get their shoulders down and drive up into the wind with such power and vivacity. Now she is old, but long may she linger. She enriched the author by two
Thunderbird
summers.
W
HY WAS THE
baker in a temper that morning, shouting so loudly that one might hear him across the mill yard? It wasn’t the way with Blythely, that quiet, chapel-going fisherman; nobody could remember the last time he had been in a temper.
‘Didn’t I tell you not to make a seed-cake mixture!’
It was Ted Jimpson, his young, fair-haired assistant, who was coming in for the full blast of it.
‘We can’t sell seed-cakes at Easter. How many more times have I got to tell you that?’
Sitting in his dusty little office by the mill gate, Fuller, the miller, could imagine the scene in the gloomy, sweating bakehouse. Poor, crestfallen Ted, his limp hair draped over his brow, was mumbling an excuse about the huge bowl of yellow mixture. Blythely would be standing by him, perspiration gleaming on his pale face.
‘
I
said to make it up—!’
A pause while Ted offered his hesitant explanation.
‘That’s what
you
tell me.
I
don’t remember it!’
So Blythely was being forgetful as well as in a temper.
Finally: ‘All right – all right. We’ll call it my mistake and put it in! But another time, young man—!’
Another time!
It was Blythely who had been wrong all along, and now he was too upset to admit it and apologize.
Across the yard the naphtha engine was thumping away in its pit, three small boys hanging round the open doors to watch the huge, half-buried fly-wheel. A big attraction to small boys was the rambling mill. They would love to have explored the many-floored mystery behind the dusty windows, the bridge which joined it to the bakehouse, the inexplicable hoists …
Fuller noticed Sam Blacker come out of the sack-store and make a threatening gesture towards the small boys.
‘Clear out of it, you! Don’t you know it’s dangerous round here?’
The boys took to their heels, but stopped to jeer from a safe distance. Blacker waved his fist at them. Fuller, his lips compressed, turned to pick a letter from the pile his clerk had laid on the desk for him.
In the shop facing the street Blythely’s wife was rushed off her feet by an impatient queue of customers. It was the only bakers in Lynton to open on Good Friday for the sale of hot cross buns, and what was more, they were the best buns in Lynton.
But Mrs Blythely didn’t mind being rushed off her feet. She was a good-natured woman and she smiled at her customers as she handed over the white paper bags redolent of cinnamon.
‘A dozen, Mrs Simmons? Your Ernie come home?’
She was popular with the customers. She was eight years younger than her reserved, straight-faced husband.
The town was awake and busy with people, though most of the shops were closed. Good Friday was an odd sort of day. You never knew who was working and who was not. The builders, for instance, and here at the mill … but other folk were dressed in their Sunday clothes, and some of them planning to attend the local league cup-final in the afternoon.
At seven in the evening there was to be a Procession of Witness led by the Vicar of St Margaret’s. Heading the laity would be the mayor and mayoress, with such Lynton notables as the superintendent of police and Geoffrey Pershore, the affluent owner of the mill property.
The weather was going to be fine for it; Easter was late this year, and the pink blossoms of the ornamental cherries in the Abbey Gardens were already fluffing out.
‘Hullo … is that Mr Brooks?’
Fuller was on the telephone to the grain warehouse by the docks.
‘Look, Mr Brooks, I want that consignment of Canadian … yes, I know, but it’s past ten and I haven’t got a damned thing here to go on with!’
From the corner of his eye he could see the three small boys creeping back to the door of the engine-room.
‘But don’t your men work on Good Friday now?’
Each one was daring the other, their exaggerated stealth had something laughable about it.
‘Well, I must have it this afternoon … two, at the very latest.’
Blacker flew out like an enraged ogre, scattering the three boys as a hawk scatters sparrows. They all dashed back down the narrow passage between the mill and the bakehouse. There, behind the mill, an old drying-ground formed a popular playground … why did the thought of it cause Harry Fuller to compress his lips again?
He hung up and swivelled round in his chair.
‘Mary … get out a letter to Marshall’s to say we’ll be a day late delivering that consignment.’
‘Shall I tell them why, Mr Fuller?’
‘Naturally. Why should we take the blame?’
He got up and went out across the yard. Blythely was shouting again – how that man had lost his temper! In the sack-store Blacker was smoking a cigarette, and he didn’t pretend to be doing anything else.
‘Right – that Canadian stuff won’t be here till this afternoon.’
Blacker shrugged. He was a tall, bony fellow with a humourless face and a weak mouth.
‘We might as well pack up … have a holiday like other people.’
‘I’ll tell you when to pack up!’
Neither of them was looking at the other.
‘That hopper of spoiled flour – now’s the time to clear it out. Leave Tom and Sid to put the last of the oats through, and get the others on the hopper.’
He stalked out, not deigning to watch his order obeyed. Blacker was his new foreman, very new indeed
was Blacker. Behind his back, Fuller knew, his
employees
were criticizing him for promoting such a fellow.
He stood by the mill gate and stared moodily across at the café opposite. To his left the shop bell tinkled prosperously as the customers pushed past each other.
‘You got home all right last night?’
It was Bradshaw, secretary of the golf club, with whom he had been to a stag party which had lasted into the small hours.
‘You must have been the only one who wasn’t blotto … what did the little woman say, eh?’
Fuller managed to grin at him. His wife … as a matter of fact, she had never criticized him because of his annual binge. She was a very sensible woman. Though perhaps there was a limit to that.
He went back into the office and sat idle, listening to the thump of the naphtha engine. Behind him Mary was banging away at her typewriter, glancing at him now and then, no doubt, surprised at his inactivity. At thirty she was not unattractive. He was aware that she had no boyfriend and would probably accept a gesture from him.
‘Are you doing anything for Easter, Mary?’
He half-turned, though without really facing her.
‘Nothing much, Mr Fuller … I’m going on one of those coach trips to Blenheim Palace on the Monday.’
‘Going with someone, are you?’
‘Oh no, Mr Fuller. Just a little outing on my own.’
‘Let me pay for the ticket. It’ll be an Easter egg from the firm.’
Through her pleased expressions of gratitude he was thinking: ‘Now if I’d been sensible, perhaps …’
There was a tap on the door and Fred Salmon, one of his hands, took a hesitating step into the office.
‘Guv’nor …’
He was looking pale, even under the dusting of flour on his greyish features.
‘What is it, Fred?’
‘Guv’nor, you’d better come and see …’
Fuller stared at him a moment and then got quickly to his feet. It was plain from the man’s appearance that something serious had occurred.
‘An accident, is it?’
They were hurrying across the yard.
‘I didn’t like to say … his foot is sticking out of the sleeve.’
‘Who? Who is it?’
‘Christ knows, guv’nor. It isn’t one of us.’
With a sickening feeling in his stomach Fuller bounded up the wooden steps to the sacking-room. It had happened once before, that, when he was serving his apprenticeship. A man had overbalanced and fallen into a hopper of flour. He remembered the terrible casualness of it. The man had simply disappeared into the expressionless white silence. Five minutes later, when they had managed to get a ladder down, the same man had been pulled out … soft, warm, but completely lifeless. For weeks he had been haunted by the horror of those five minutes.
They were standing round the sleeve, which had been
emptying into the wooden hopper-trolley. None of them seemed to know what to do, not even Blacker.
From the mouth of the sleeve protruded that single, terrible foot. It was wearing a cheap stamped-leather shoe and had completely obstructed the flow of sour-smelling flour.
‘One of you … get some tools. You, Charlie – don’t stand there gaping!’
Charlie Savage gulped and ran to go down the steps.
‘Shut the flour off, one of you – Fred, get a ladder. We’ll have to take the sleeve off. We’ll never get him out the other way!’
He was in command, he was dispelling the panic, but the nausea in his stomach continued to grow. The precipice he had felt beginning to yawn at his feet that morning had suddenly opened wide below him. He had a strange impression of not being responsible for himself.
‘Set the ladder against the beam. Sam, get in the trolley with Fred and take the weight of it.’
They went about his orders with a sort of plaintive eagerness, glad to make a show of normality in the business. ‘Ease it down now – ease it! He can’t be all that heavy.’ Dead men were heavy, though. During the air-raids, he remembered …
Reverently they disencumbered the corpse of the canvas sleeve. The stiff foot persisted in sticking in the mouth of it, and Fred Salmon had to unlace the shoe, breathing through his teeth the while. Then they brushed the sour flour off it and laid it on the floor. It
had stiffened in a crouched position and looked tiny and unnatural.
‘Anybody know him?’
They made a pretence of studying the floury features. The man had died with a snarl on his face, showing the teeth like those of a beast.
But no, nobody knew him. In life and death he was a stranger.
‘All right then – carry him down to the sack-store. I’ll get on to the police and see what they make of him.’
Wordlessly they picked it up and went shuffling and clumsy towards the steps.
Fuller remained standing there, aware of the pallor showing beneath his eyes. And he was sweating, too, though it was a day with a chill breeze. Why … how? Why did he feel as though reality were slipping away from him? So some illicit prowler had taken a tumble into a flour-hopper!
He knew the police inspector who came to make enquiries. Griffin, his name was, and they had several times gone round the links together. But now there was a subtle change in the man. He was quieter, more watchful, he had no casual words to exchange.
‘The mill buildings are locked, are they?’
‘I always lock them myself.’
‘Who would have the keys, sir?’
‘I have, naturally … and Mr Blythely.’
‘You wouldn’t have noticed any forced entry, sir?’
‘No … but there are plenty of windows with broken panes.’
There was nothing offensive about him, just a damnable persistence. He kept on asking questions long after a reasonable man would have left off.
‘And you’re sure you don’t know him, sir?’
Three times he had asked that question.
‘And you lock the mill buildings yourself?’
It was as though his mind couldn’t grasp things and so you had endlessly to repeat them.
Fuller usually lunched at home, but today he felt unable to face his wife and the two younger children. On the phone he was cowardly and gave business as an excuse. In effect he joined Mary, who took her lunch across the road.
‘A fine way to start Easter, Mary—!’
He wanted his voice to sound flippant, but he could hear the strained note in it. Neither could he fancy the food offered by the café.
‘I’ve got that bad flour on my stomach …’
Only he knew it wasn’t the flour.
Over in the shop, where the rush had long since ceased, he could see Blythely and his wife in a long and earnest conversation. On a bench in the mill yard Fred Salmon and Sid Neave sat eating their sandwiches and drinking cold tea.
It was more and more like a dream. He wondered how long it would be before he was unable to continue acting the part expected of him.
Mary, for instance … wasn’t she already beginning to look at him a little queerly?
The inspector came back in the middle of the
afternoon. He had with him Geoffrey Pershore, the man who leased Fuller the mill, and a leading light in Lynton society. Pershore had a grave expression on his
self-consequential
features.
‘Hullo, Fuller … could we have the office to ourselves?’
Mary took the hint and said she would go to fetch the tea. Pershore sat himself familiarly on the corner of Fuller’s desk, taking care, however, to hitch up his finely creased trousers.
‘This fellow you pulled out of the flour-hopper, Fuller …’
Fuller nodded automatically from the part of himself that was listening.
‘I’m afraid it’s more serious than it seemed. He didn’t, it appears, die from suffocation in the flour.’
What ought he to do? How should he react?
‘No,’ continued Pershore, staring heavily at the varnished screen. ‘According to the inspector, Fuller, that poor devil was strangled.’
The assistant commissioner was standing by his window when Gently tapped and entered. He might have been watching the courtyard or the segment of Embankment beyond, but Gently knew from experience that this was the A.C.s way of chewing over a problem. He rustled the folder he was carrying and dropped it noisily into the in-tray. The assistant commissioner turned to survey him through heavy tortoiseshell-framed glasses.
‘Ah, there you are, Gently. Is that the report on the Meyerstein business?’
Gently murmured inarticulately, never being one to waste his words.
‘Well, take a pew there, will you?’
The assistant commissioner came slowly over from the window.
‘There’s a curious little matter which has turned up from the country … it’s intriguing me a good deal, and I think it’s right up your street.’
Gently sat as he was bid but with rather less than enthusiasm. Twenty years in the Central Office had taught him to be wary of cases which A.C.s found intriguing …