Free Gently through the Mill by Alan Hunter Page A

and badgered for the payment …?
    Gently had shaken his head decisively – such a hypothesis was too fantastic! The miller would never have plunged to such a fabulous extent, or been able to produce such a sum on demand if he had. Moreover, having got it, Taylor and his associates would have departed to the happy haunts of Stepney.
    Finally, there was the old chestnut of a racket. Once again you were dealing with a concept self-evidently academic. What could Fuller be running to produce pay-offs in the five thousand category – and how could Taylor and the others have cottoned on to it, meeting Fuller briefly on the racetrack?
    Beside these extravagant theories Griffin’s idea seemed a breath of sweet reason … it fitted most of the facts and did violence to scarcely any of them.
    Who knew what charms the baker’s wife had discovered in the little, rat-faced cockney?
    Blythely had stopped staring at the pigeons and had come to the gate of the mill. Like the others, he had made out the bulky form of Gently sitting in the café window.
    He said something to the workers, who had fallen silent at his approach; one of them laughed with a touch of self-consciousness, but the others remained serious enough.
    ‘Still snooping around, is he?’ – that would have been it. ‘You want to watch out, together!’ – and one of the workers had laughed.
    Why were they constrained with Blythely – was it that they suspected something?
    In the window he could see Ted Jimpson sitting bolt upright, his girlfriend watching him with lips which were compressed. Then somebody switched on the radio and the two of them relaxed their pose. A steel band was playing the calypso which Gently had heard tinkled out by Taylor’s cigarette-box.
    ‘A-working all night on a drink of rum,
    Daylight’s come and I want to go home …’
    Gently drained his cup and signalled to the waitress, who was becoming resigned to his periodic refills. The café was emptying as the lunch hour wore on. Fuller, probably, would be back by two.
    ‘You know the miller, do you?’
    ‘Mr Fuller is often in here.’
    ‘When was the last time?’
    ‘He had lunch on Good Friday, the day they found the body.’
    ‘Did he have a good appetite?’
    The waitress obviously took this for a joke.
    Now Blythely had turned his back and was going indoors with his jerky, obstinate stride. What would he have done, this man, faced with the situation Griffin had suggested? Was it in his awkward and self-righteous character to have become berserk and to have strangled the adulterer?
    To have thrashed him, perhaps – ‘chastisement’ was the word that came to mind! – Taylor might certainly have had to expiate his sin through the flesh.
    But strangling, that was another matter altogether. It suggested a fixed and calculated intent rather than a sudden outbreak of wrath. In addition to which he would have his wife to cope with. She might have reason to keep quiet – but dared he risk such a secret with her?
    As always, one was brought up by a gross improbability . There weren’t enough facts … that was the long and the short of it!
    Gently helped himself to another lump of sugar and gulped down some more coffee. What was the residue of fact which didn’t seem to link with the rest?
    Well, there was Blacker and his relations with his master, and possibly the relations between the miller and Blythely. And then there was the stable, apparently asore point with both the last two … though heaven alone knew how that could fit in.
    Blacker, probably, was the most interesting to consider .
    Hadn’t he been made up to foreman on the day after the murder – a man antagonistic to his employer, and of doubtful competence?
    That suggested pressure – and the timing was strangely coincidental. Blacker might have got a hint of something and put two and two together.
    But if Fuller was the man, would he have straightway put the new foreman on emptying the hopper – giving himself, as