Free Gently through the Mill by Alan Hunter

Blythelys were who Griffin was thinking about, and certainly the cap seemed to fit … if Taylor had been a Casanova, and setting aside the subsequent reactions of Ames and Roscoe.
    Press, however, had sat down firmly on this scandalous interpretation of the facts. The mayor-elect had suffered enough without having further enormities fathered on him …
    ‘Waitress, I’d like another cup of coffee!’
    He had drunk the first one at a single gulp and was surprised to find the empty cup in front of him.
    Blythely had come out into the mill yard and was standing staring at the pigeons. A van which momentarily hid the baker from view showed Ted Jimpson shaking his blond head and looking distinctly unhappy. What were they talking about, with their furtive glances at Gently’s broad back?
    Well, then, he had had a long talk over the phone with the assistant commissioner, the latter, no doubt, still twiddling his glasses and peering at the slice of Embankment across the courtyard. There hadn’t been much comfort in that. The A.C. was still nursing his idea of a glorious, gilt-edged racket going on in Lynton.
    ‘Have you thought of the docks, Gently? There’s a lot of dope getting in these days …
    ‘What about that chemical works outside the town? I see in the gazetteer that Lynton produces three per cent of the national supply of commercial sulphuric acid …’
    It was too easy, sitting there in the Yard and turning over maps and reference books. One had to be in the place and get the feel of it … wasn’t a betting system and Griffin’s crime passionel the more likely idea of the two?
    The assistant commissioner’s information had been entirely of the negative variety. The division couldn’t be quite certain when the three men had disappeared from Stepney, and Ames and Roscoe had not returned there. A round-up of likely elements had produced no worthwhile intelligence. There had been a notable silence in the world of narkdom.
    ‘It’s at your end, Gently, whatever it is. I feel sure that if you’ll poke around a little more …’
    ‘Would you like me to send you Simpson, of Anti-narcotics ?’
    He had asked for an all-stations and hung up feeling more depressed than ever. The arrival of an empty-handed Dutt had done no more than set the seal on his mood.
    ‘There wasn’t nothing at the station, sir – nobody didn’t remember them. The bank manager sees Taylor, of course, and the cashiers remember him, but the lolly went to their headquarters and nobody did a check on it.’
    ‘Pound notes was it?’
    ‘Yessir. Sixteen bundles done up with rubber bands.’
    ‘New notes or old?’
    ‘They wouldn’t swear to that, but one of them thinks they might have been new.’
    ‘What about the other two?’
    ‘They don’t seem to have banked theirs, sir. I tried around the town, but there was nothink doing anywhere .’
    After which Gently had sat smoking in the office the super had allotted to him, indulging his blues and trying to pull something out of an empty bag …
    There were two ends to the stick and he seemed to be holding the clean one. The dirty end, Ames and Roscoe, had disappeared like the eternal smoke-rings he was blowing. And the clean end was so very clean! There was scarcely a mark on it anywhere. Fuller’s bare opportunity was the best it could show, coupled withthe fact that the murderer seemed to have known his way about a mill … this mill, if the choice of hoppers was more than an accident.
    Against that, where was the motive? What was Taylor to the Lynton miller?
    They could have met at Newmarket. Taylor might have gypped Fuller … but would Fuller have then seen fit to strangle him, and to have hidden the body in one of his own flour-hoppers?
    He could hardly have supposed that the business would pass as an accident!
    Or put it the other way, to try everything: suppose Fuller had done the gypping. Suppose he had lost the astounding sum of five thousand pounds, and been pursued to Lynton