From somewhere, everywhere it seemed, came the chirrup of a cricket. It was as though the moist, savoury heat were making itself audible. At the same time one doubted if one was really hearing it at all: the note was so high-pitched that a subtler sense seemed called for.
There was only one window to the bakehouse, and that was by the door. For the rest, it was lit by a row of four 150-watt bulbs under plain conical shades.
All the dough was mixed by hand. There were two kneading-troughs of scoured wood in the centre of the room.
Blythely, a spare, balding man with a small pale moustache, was beating up a mixture in an earthenware bowl; his assistant, the blond-haired youth, was extracting flat tins of teacakes from one of the deep wall-ovens.
Both of their faces looked colourless and shone with sweat. A lock of the youngster’s hair hung damp and limp over his forehead.
But most of all it was the heat that one noticed.
You walked into it as into a heavy liquid, surprised by it and temporarily thrown off-balance. For a moment your body stayed quiescent, unable to react. Then it prickled and began to perspire, after which the heat was real and could be accepted.
And the cricket, that was certainly a part of it.
The cricket’s rattle sounded like the taunt of a heat-demon, the more mocking because you were unable to place it.
From everywhere and nowhere it chinked its jeering notes.
Blythely looked up but didn’t cease beating his mixture. Perhaps he had seen Gently with Fuller and had guessed that he was a policeman. The assistant, now alternately sucking and shaking a burned finger, had obviously decided that the intruder was none of his business.
Gently moved deprecatingly down the bakehouse, unfastening his raincoat as he went.
‘This is a hot shop you’ve got in here!’
Blythely sneaked another foxy little glance at him and kept on with his beating. His features were far from being attractive. He had a retrousse nose and a seamed, porous skin; his chin was small, his lips thin and colourless. He had given his age to Griffin as fifty-two, but he might easily have been ten years older.
‘Is it always like this in here?’
‘I should think so — in a bakehouse.’
‘Doesn’t it get you down sometimes?’
‘I’m a baker, not a snowman.’
His voice was high-pitched with a note of querulousness. He spoke into his mixing-bowl, as though he were talking to himself.
‘Anyway, you don’t notice an east wind in here!’ Blythely said nothing.
‘And with the summers we’ve been getting, I’d say you were better off than the next man… there’ll be a lot of volunteer bakers if they keep on with the atom bombs!’
It was labour in vain as far as the baker was concerned. His face wore a fixed, neutral expression which was about as alterable as that of the Sphinx.
One imagined that it was a rare day when Blythely was caught actually smiling.
The assistant came over to enquire after some Madeiras in another oven. Quite unexpectedly the baker was now voluble, even jocose. He was showing off, probably, wanting Gently to notice his expertise — he treated the youngster to quite a sermon on Madeiras before he let him go.
‘Some people don’t realize what makes the difference.’
Gently contented himself with a sympathetic shrug.
‘The average housewife today… well, there you are! It’s no use telling them. They won’t take the trouble. They shake some muck out of a packet with a pretty label, and wonder why their cakes aren’t like mine…’
If beating was the secret, Blythely’s cakes had nothing to fear. With tireless regularity he kept slapping away at his creamy mixture.
‘Are you the one they sent to London after?’
He was prepared to acknowledge Gently, having given the detective a taste of his quality.
‘I saw in the paper that they’d run to the Yard. That’s what I said would happen, right at the start.’
‘There have been some developments which made it inevitable, Mr Blythely.’
‘Which is to say it was London business, and nothing to do with us here.’
London business! The phrase conveyed a whole outlook. There was nothing important about London in Lynton. All that London did was to breed petty criminals, and when they upset Lynton you sent for a London copper.
Gently unbuttoned his jacket and passed a handkerchief over his brow.
The young assistant was pulling out the Madeiras, each with its garnish of peel; the aroma would have seduced an angel, but the heat destroyed any vestige of one’s appetite.
Blythely had reached for a ladle and was beginning to dole out his mixture into paper-collared tins.
‘Trying to find out what the others missed, are you?’
‘That’s roughly the idea…’
‘We didn’t notice anything here, I can soon tell you that.’
‘All the same, you were here when the job was being done.’
‘We were making up the buns. They could have delivered a whole cemetery. As far as I know, there was nothing stirring all night.’
Three ladlefuls went to a tin, and there was scarcely a speck remaining in the bowl. Blythely was still talking to the mixture as though Gently were a mere passing nuisance.
‘I shall have to have more than that, I’m afraid.’
‘Ted! Shove these Vanillas into number three, will you?’
‘If you can spare me half an hour, Mr Blythely…’
Confound it, he was going on his knees to the fellow!
At last the baker condescended to notice his melting visitor. Hands on hips, he regarded him shrewdly with small hazel eyes.
‘I’ve got to interrupt my work, have I?’
‘Yes — if you don’t mind.’
‘You’re wasting my time and yours, but I suppose that’s the way they run things. We’d better go into the house before you turn into a grease-spot.’
The rub of it was that he was making Gently feel he was wasting the baker’s time. Out here in the bakehouse real work was going on…
Blythely’s sitting room over the shop struck a note of nostalgia. It had been furnished in the early thirties but the style was of ten years previous, this being the usual aesthetic gap between London and the provinces.
There were traces of nouveau art about the table and straight-back chairs. The three-piece suite was dumpy and upholstered in leather, the arm-fronts being tacked with big brass-headed nails.
‘Can I offer you something?’
Blythely had left his apron below stairs, seeming to have shed with it a great deal of his cross-grained authority. Up here he appeared awkward and more than ever colourless. The daylight gave a greyish tinge to the pitted skin of his face.
‘No thank you… I’m on duty.’
‘You won’t mind me having a drop. At my trade you get a thirst — not that I ever touch alcohol, mind you.’
He went to the top of the stairs, which descended straight into the shop.
‘Clara, bring me up a glass of that cold tea when you’re at liberty…’
Through the muslin half-curtains Gently could watch the passers-by in Fenway Road. Well wrapped up, they still looked perished; the east wind was sweeping straight along the rather dingy thoroughfare.
‘Take a seat, won’t you?’
Gently turned one of the straight-backed chairs around so that he could straddle it.
‘I realize you’ve got to do this — every man to his job. But the Good Lord knows that I had no hand in the business, nor, I feel certain, did anyone else in these parts…’
Gently made a wry face. ‘That’s what everyone says.’
‘It’s the truth, you’ll find.’
‘I hope you’re right, Mr Blythely.’
The baker sat down stiffly, placing his hands on his knees. Through the open door one could hear his wife chatting amiably to a customer in the shop.
‘Go on — ask me your questions.’
Gently nodded without complying.
‘You want to know when I started work — very well, it was a quarter to ten. Ted, he turned up at a minute or two after.’
‘And you worked through till seven?’
‘We had the bread to bake as well as the buns.’
‘But surely you left the bakehouse once or twice?’
‘The toilet is by the door.’
It was so simple and so convincing. There was nowhere to pick a hole in it. Fuller’s story could be twisted and checked, but Blythely’s was as unassailable as a block of concrete.
And you had to believe it, watching that plain, unemotional, unimaginative face.
Griffin had believed it, so why should not Gently?
‘You’re a chapel-goer, they tell me?’
‘I am, and so is my wife.’
‘You would not approve of horse racing, I feel sure.’
‘It’s an invention of the Devil.’
‘Didn’t you once keep a horse?’
Yes, he had had three. But the last one had been got rid of in 1938, since when the stable had been used as a junk repository.
‘Mr Fuller uses the loft, he tells me.’
Was there just a flicker of reaction to that?
‘I suppose he’s never kept a horse there?’
Only too plainly, this was a wrong track.
Mrs Blythely appeared carrying the cold tea in a beaker. She was a handsome woman, and one wondered how she had come to throw in her lot with such an unpresentable husband.
She had deep golden hair only now beginning to fade, a slightly snubbed nose and lively green eyes. In her youth she must have been a ravishing beauty.
‘Do I know this gentleman?’
Gently came in for a brilliant smile.
‘I can guess who he is — only a policeman could get Henry out of the bakehouse! But he isn’t the man who’s been around such a lot.’
A good skin and an oval face, and a figure which was full but not yet going heavy.
The baker was lucky to have such a wife in his shop.
‘Is the door on the latch?’
‘Yes, my dear. And all the regulars have been.’
‘This is the man from London. No doubt he’s got something to ask you.’
With husbands and wives it was difficult to tell; they had an act to be put on for strangers, and the act was usually expert. Yet here, as with Fuller and his foreman, Gently had the impression of friction. He could scarcely have put his finger on any one spot, but the impression was none the less established.
‘I went to bed soon after tea, Inspector. It’s a long day in the shop — hard on the feet, too! As a rule I sleep like a log till my husband wakes me with a cup of tea. It was the same on Thursday night. I didn’t remember anything after my head touched the pillow.’
Here again one had to believe it — difficult, even, to suggest the stock questions.
‘No, I never get up during the night… the bathroom is next door, on the same floor.
‘Naturally I go out by myself sometimes, but never away from Lynton. The only horse racing I’ve seen is on the newsreel… I entirely agree with what my husband says about it.
‘I didn’t see the — the man, but I’m quite certain that he was a stranger to me. The only Taylors we know are some people who keep a chemist’s shop…’
Two worthy people who had been pursuing their lawful occupations. They had the truth to tell and they were comfortable in the knowledge of it.
‘You sublet these premises from Mr Fuller, I believe?’
‘That’s right — and old Burge before him. I’ve been here twenty-seven years.’
‘You’re on good terms, I suppose?’
‘What do you mean by that exactly?’
‘Just a general enquiry.’
‘We’ve never had a quarrel yet.’
Gently hesitated, catching it again, that subtle essence of something between the lines. Blythely was staring unwinkingly at the street, what was almost a frown had appeared on the face of his wife.
‘By your standards, I suppose, Mr Fuller has rather lax principles?’
‘Nobody has ever heard me criticize my landlord.’
‘He drinks, doesn’t he, and gambles sometimes?’
‘I don’t prescribe rules for him, and I’ll let him know when he interferes with me.’
Oracular utterances, both of them, and pronounced with a degree of inflexible emphasis. Was it a warning to Mrs Blythely that this was the official line? She was compressing her lips as though keeping back an impatient comment.
‘You’re all local people, are you?’
‘We are. Fuller comes from Starmouth.’
‘Well, it’s the same county!’
‘Lynton’s sixty miles from Starmouth.’
‘And you’ve always got on well together?’
‘He’s a straight man of business.’
‘But personally, I mean.’
‘We aren’t close friends, but we’ve never come to blows.’
Gently turned to Mrs Blythely.
‘And you, you’re on good terms, too?’
‘But of course I am, Inspector!’
Yes, she was toeing the official line…
Gently suddenly felt tired of flogging a horse so patently dead. What did their little secrets matter, or even their skeletons, if they had any? Griffin was right, all along the line. He had cleared the way with commendable and faultless efficiency. Taylor was nothing to Lynton or Lynton to Taylor — one might as well face it, and stop annoying innocent people!
Wasn’t the mill on the main through road, and open for every kid to wander around?
‘You knew about the hopper of spoiled flour, didn’t you?’
It was his parting shot, and he could hear its irritability.
‘Ted told me about that. He heard some of the men talking. If Fuller had had his wits about him he would have spotted the diseased grain.’
‘What about the foreman?’
‘They were without one at the time.’
‘Do you think Blacker is a good appointment?’
Blythely’s face twisted into the only attempt at expression that Gently had witnessed.
‘He is a Godless loafer, and conversant with the ways of the Devil.’
‘Thank you, Mr Blythely, and forgive me for having detained you.’
He was not to get off so lightly, however. The fates seemed in a conspiracy to surfeit him with advocates of Lynton’s innocency.
As he stood pondering in the mill yard a green Bentley drew up and out of it stepped a person with an air of considerable self-importance. He came straight across to Gently, his gloved hand outstretched.
‘Chief Inspector Gently?’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘My name is Geoffrey Pershore. I’ve just been talking to Superintendent Press. He told me that you were likely to be here, and I thought I should have a few words with you. I own this property, you understand, and can probably put you right about the characters of my tenants…’
Gently groaned in spirit, but was obliged to stand his ground. Pershore was a bigwig in Lynton, and the super wouldn’t thank Gently for hurting the gentleman’s self-esteem.
‘I expect you’ve come to the same conclusion as our men. This fellow was obviously murdered by his friends, who then hid the body in the mill. Fuller, I dare say, you are prepared to exonerate. Blythely I have known personally for twenty-five years…’
He was the true figure of a provincial ‘great man’, flanked by his Bentley and wearing expensive clothes which just missed being in taste. He would be in his middle fifties, perhaps, with a straight nose and a fleshy face flushed with good living. His blue eyes were watery and a little bloodshot. They had a habit of staring at you with sudden aggression, and then as suddenly swinging away again.
‘Fuller is an excellent judge of character — I wouldn’t seriously question a man he saw fit to employ. In addition to that, you must remember that I take an — ah — patriarchal interest in my investments. I would not allow anything to go on which had the merest breath of scandal attached to it. I have a reputation, Inspector… in confidence, I am expecting to be the mayor of Lynton next year.’
So that was the trouble, was it! Gently had to struggle to stop himself smiling. With the mayoralty in his grasp, Geoffrey Pershore had had the corpse of a racetrack crook planted in his moral mill…
‘You can see the delicacy of my position, Inspector. I am not asking you to scamp your duty — I am a better citizen than that, I hope! But in making statements to the press… that sort of thing. If you could make it clear that the business was purely fortuitous, I would be extremely grateful.
‘Any police charity in which you are interested, for example…’
It was little short of bribery. Gently really had to turn his head. In a moment, no doubt, he would be being promised letters of recommendation to his assistant commissioner and other such blameless favours…
‘You can throw no light on the affair yourself, sir?’
It was a wicked thrust, and the popping eyes of the mayor-presumptive showed that he felt the sting.
‘I… I — Good Lord, I wasn’t even in Lynton at the time!’
‘You have an alibi, have you?’
‘A — a — yes, I suppose I have — if that’s what you choose to call it! Thursday is my theatre night, and I was in Norchester. I arrived back at my house at about half past twelve — it is six miles out, on the Norchester Road. But honestly, Inspector-’
‘I wouldn’t want to scamp my duty.’
‘I was never at any time suggesting-!’
‘We like to clear up all the minor points, sir.’
Pershore goggled at him, his small mouth hanging half-open. He was obviously unused to being snubbed, even by the police; Gently felt almost sorry for the man’s fish-like helplessness.
The situation was saved by the emergence of Fuller from the side door of his office.
‘You’re wanted on the phone… somebody called Dutt is asking for you.’
Gently hastened into the office and picked up the receiver. He seemed not to notice that Fuller and his landlord were closely attending him, and exchanging glances.
‘Hullo, Dutt… what have you found?’
‘Everythink, sir!’ The cockney sergeant’s voice had the childlike ring of excitement it took on when he had made a good killing.
‘I found the place, sir — third flipping time of asking. It’s The Roebuck — that posh place opposite the Abbey Gardens. Been there twelve days they had, spending money like water, then they checked out in a hurry on the Friday after lunch. And this is the cream of it, sir. Taylor’s things are still in his room. They paid his bill in advance till the end of this week, which is the reason why nobody hasn’t posted him as missing.’
Gently laid the receiver back softly on its rest. A faraway look had stolen into his eyes.
‘You — you have had news, Inspector?’ Pershore ventured, curiosity getting the better of affronted pride.
‘Mmn.’ Gently nodded. ‘News I didn’t expect… Lynton being the spotless town it is!’
‘I beg your pardon, Inspector?’
Gently hunched his shoulders. ‘Who knows? We may tie Lynton into it yet…’
When he was gone, he was certain, Pershore would ease his damaged feelings by taking it out on Fuller.