‘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
