‘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.
None of them could be truthfully described as suspects, and all of them had reasonable alibis.
‘Any bad hats amongst them?’
It seemed that there were not. Blacker, perhaps, had a taste for low company, but it had never run him into any cognizable trouble.
‘Fuller for instance… has he got any money troubles?’
Another blank there — the miller was mildly prosperous.
The super was listening to it all with an expression of benignity. His man had done a good job and the rider was self-evident.
‘I think you’ll have to admit, Inspector, that Taylor’s associates are your men. There’s nobody here who even knew the fellow, let alone had a motive.’
Yes, it was getting plain enough. The more you listened, the more you probed, the less probable did it seem that Lynton had any more than a proprietary interest in the crime which had been fathered on it.
On the roof where they had retired the pigeons cooed their complacent innocence.
‘Fuller and Blythely were the only ones with keys?’
‘Yes, but several ground-floor windows are broken.’
‘You checked them, of course?’
‘I was unable to come to any definite conclusion.’
‘Who knew that the hopper of sour flour might go undisturbed for a week or two?’
‘Almost everyone… it was an odd job which would get done only when the routine work was held up.’
Back and forward went the shuttlecock, with Griffin never at a loss for his reply. He had thought of it all and checked it all; one could picture him going his rounds, quiet, alert and ruthlessly pertinacious. He had wanted the facts and he had got them; where Griffin had been, Scotland Yard must follow suit.
‘And there’s no trace of any of these three having stayed in the town?’
As the conference progressed Gently was hunching ever deeper into his comfortable chair.
‘We’ve talked to all the lodging-houses and cheap hotels. A man disappeared on that date from one address, but we managed to trace him and he was only bilking his landlady.’
‘What about the other hotels?’
‘Would these men be likely to stay in them?’
‘Not in the usual way, but it’s just possible that they were in the money.’
Griffin hesitated and for once looked put out. But he quickly recovered his stride.
‘We are always informed, of course, if anything irregular has occurred. Nobody could disappear from a hotel in the town without us hearing about it.’
‘His pals might have paid his bill.’
Griffin looked as though he thought it were unlikely. Gently thought so too, but he lingered over the point. It was the only time he had caught the efficient inspector napping…
Outside the shadows were lengthening in the square. A few knots of people had emerged from the Corn Exchange, where a concert was in progress. They were spending the interval talking and smoking cigarettes.
‘Well, I suppose that covers the case in outline.’
Relief showed in Griffin’s face, and the super could not repress an audible sigh.
‘If you’ll let me have the reports I’ll go through them this evening. Tomorrow, perhaps, we can do a little checking.’
They rose and shook hands, the super now cordial in his expressions of goodwill and offers of cooperation. A car would be at their disposal, an office was set aside for them. The super personally had booked them rooms at the St George Hotel, which they could see across the square.
Gently thanked him and left clutching Griffin’s well-stuffed file. Dutt tagged along behind him, a gloomy expression on his cockney features.
‘They certainly pick them for us, don’t they, sir?’
Gently grunted and tapped out his pipe on his heel.
‘Everythink cut and dried — except they haven’t got the leading suspects. So they calls us in to produce them out of a flipping hat.’
Gently pocketed his pipe and paused in the cobbled centre of the square. Such a quiet, quiet town! The bells of St Margaret’s sounded like a complacent benediction, the pigeons had settled finally to roost on the tower of a little church.
It might have been an artist’s picture of provincial peace and lawfulness.
‘We’ll check the hotels though… you can do it tomorrow. There’s an outside chance of a lead on Ames and Roscoe.’
‘Yessir. But if I don’t find nothink?’
Gently shrugged. ‘You know as well as I do. We’re here to scrape the barrel. After that it’s just a question of waiting for those two to turn up… it’s difficult to hide for ever in a country as small as this.’
