Dying in the Wool (18 page)

Then it was a new type of gas-fired machine for close-cropping the cloth, only the gas bottle wouldn’t supply the right amount. It would come out a useless trickle or a destructive blast. Next came the printing roller, where the fabric rolled over it instead of it rolling over the fabric. Only Braithwaites weren’t doing patterns. He’d taken his model to the mill office, but to no avail.

‘Damn Braithwaite! He let me explain every angle before he said no!’

That was when Lizzie found out about Paul’s nasty side. She gave as good as she got. Took the broom to him.

‘Paul, Paul, calm yourself, man. We’ll never have a bairn if we’re like fire and oil.’

Being married to a genius, especially an unrecognised genius, was no easy matter.

She took him to bed. After they had made love she read
his palm and saw that the future would bring him better fortune. That was the night she conceived, but the baby did not come to term.

He never knew about the baby.

He joined up in 1914, angry that nowt had materialised from all his grand ideas.

Lizzie took in a lodger, Agnes, a bonnie weaver who kept her company. Agnes kept her counsel over Lizzie losing the bairn.

Paul was back from the front within the year, missing part of his left arm, and with a claw sticking out of his cuff where his hand should be. She thought that would be an end of the inventions but it was only the beginning. He set his heart on making his fortune, so as to retire to Morecambe. It would take just one grand idea.

So Lizzie lost her lodger. Agnes cried when she left, took herself off to Bradford, to be somewhere no one knew her.

Paul went to enquire about his old job.

When he came back, he bubbled up inside – not with his usual indignation. Lizzie thought at first he’d had the nod about one of his inventions.

He took a bar of Sunlight soap with him to the public baths.

On Monday, he dressed in his suit.

‘I’m going on the road.’

‘Doing what?’ She imagined him with a pick and shovel, digging ditches. Then tramping, knocking on doors, begging for bread. That’s what on the road meant to her.

‘Selling. I’m going on the road selling.’

‘Selling what?’

‘You see it did pay to come up with all them inventions. Because you have to learn to silver tongue in order to explain them. Me and my silver tongue are going on the road.’

‘Selling what?’ she asked again.

He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Best you don’t know. That’s between me and my employer …’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t ask. It’s all above board. But if anyone at the mill enquires, you know nowt.’

He’d come home from his selling, spread notes and sovereigns on the table. When he went down to the cellar to stash his loot, she warned him, ‘That cellar floods.’

After that he kept the money in a locked chest under the bed.

‘We’ll buy a place in Morecambe. Neither of us will ever work again.’

They took the train and explored. It was Heysham they fell in love with. Dreams of a life of ease sent them into raptures. A house on the cliff top – nothing less would do.

But the money was never enough. Always he wanted just a few quid more.

When the selling stopped, he didn’t want to go back to the dyehouse. He took a job as an orderly in the hospital.

‘Just a few quid more. Besides, there’s clever men will be coming to that hospital. Officers. One of them might have the imagination to develop a gas-fired cropping machine.’

When the war ended, she thought they would go to Heysham then, though it would be a wrench to leave the place she had lived all her life for the wilds of the coast. It would be bleak in winter. Perhaps he felt the same, not ready to leave this village and everyone he knew. Not ready to reach for the dream in case it dissolved and left only a green stain in his imagination.

Just a few quid more.

Back to the dyehouse.

Just a few quid more.

Roving: The combed tops from thick slivers of wool, from which yarn is spun.

I kicked myself that neither I nor Sykes had spoken to Kellett about his time ‘on the road’ with the dyewares, making money for Braithwaite. If any of the Braithwaites Mill workforce would have an out of the ordinary connection with Braithwaite, it would be Kellett. And now he had met his death in a most shocking way.

Better get Sykes back over here. Taking paper and an envelope from my writing case, I wrote him a note. It was still early enough for him to receive the letter by second post. I would take it to the box myself, and hope that he would not be too perturbed by where and when I asked him to meet me.

I put on my navy pea jacket, beret and gloves, slipping the letter into my pocket. The sky looked fine enough when I stepped outside, but there was a chill in the air.

Tabitha waited for me on the humpback bridge. We would pay our condolences to Lizzie together. From the bridge, we saw one of Lizzie’s workmates entering her cottage.

‘When you told me that your father was found by the stepping stones, how did you know?’

I was curious as to whether, in spite of Hector’s secrecy, she had realised that he was one of the ‘rescuers’.

‘I can’t remember how I know.’ She sounded miserable, as if she had failed a test.

‘Constable Mitchell said it was by the waterfall.’

‘Then I don’t know why I thought of the stepping stones.’

‘Is there any reason he would have come to the beck? Is it on the way to or from somewhere? A short cut?’

She thought for a moment. ‘It’s a special spot, where Edmund and I used to play.’

We walked down the bank and sat on a flat rock.

‘I think I told you that Dad once did a painting of the two of us, playing just there by the bridge. He dashed it off in no time. You see he didn’t have much opportunity for that sort of palaver, as he called it, once he took over the mill. He was a younger son and hadn’t expected to have the responsibility, but his older brother wanted none of it and went off to South Africa, so father had no choice.’

I didn’t want to hear about an older brother in South Africa. My immediate, suspicious response was to imagine the chap returning secretly, slaughtering his kith and kin and waiting in the wings to leap on his rightful inheritance.

‘This uncle, is he still alive and well in South Africa?’

‘Oh no. The poor man died in a typhoid epidemic.’

I sent up a silent prayer of thanks at not having a complicating factor in the investigation.

Tabitha plucked a blade of grass and slid it from its stem.

I did what I usually do when at a loss for words – set up my field camera to take a photograph of the scene. It would be good to have an image of the location where Joshua Braithwaite went missing.

‘I wonder you don’t tire of carrying all that camera stuff around with you,’ Tabitha said, pushing her hands deeper in her pockets.

‘Let me take your picture, Tabitha. By the bridge, here, then further along.’ I did not say, By the waterfall.

‘I don’t feel like having my picture taken. Mrs Kellett might look out and see us. It would look heartless.’

‘You’re right.’ All the same, I looked down into the reflector finder. She frowned as I photographed the stepping stones. Next, the waterfall became my focus.

There was a mystery here and I hoped the beck would surrender its secret.

When I concentrate hard, the world turns silent. Blinkers shut out what I do not need to see. When the concentration stops, the world roars back, taking me by surprise. As I looked again at the beck, it had streaked with brown, from the discharge of effluent upstream. Had Braithwaite objected to being rescued? Perhaps he had just slipped and the boy scouts were over-zealous. One hears jokes about boy scouts assisting old ladies across a road, whether they want to be on the other side or not.

As we left the spot, I noticed the tracery effect on the water’s surface – sunlight filtering through the leaves. There was so much in the world to photograph, so much to experience.

Mrs Kellett’s visitors left the cottage. Tabitha and I walked along the path to the Kelletts’ gate. I was determined that after we had paid our visit, Tabitha would walk me round all the places that meant something to her and her father. If the secret of his disappearance lay in the landscape, I would find it.

Lizzie Kellett was sitting in her bentwood chair, her shawl pulled round her, the black cat on her lap. It arched its back as we went in, not at us but at Mrs Wilson’s gigantic dog that meandered from under the table to greet us.

I patted its head ingratiatingly. ‘Good dog, Charlie.’

Marjorie Wilson sat in the smaller chair. She had a pinched and tired look. I wanted to ask was she feeling better after last night but she made no sign of remembering
that I had escorted her home so I said nothing.

Cat and dog locked eyes.

‘Corner, Charlie!’ Mrs Wilson ordered.

Charlie ducked under the table and lay down. The cat relaxed, but kept a watchful pose.

Tabitha said. ‘We just wanted to say how very sorry we are for your loss, Mrs Kellett.’

Mrs Kellett looked as if she would never get up again. She was slumped like an old woman, her mouth turned down, her hands on the cat as if it would breathe for her.

We perched ourselves on buffets. The dog sniffed at my ankles.

‘I didn’t know your husband, but I did take a photograph of him outside the dyehouse, with his workmates.’

I would make a print for her. It would be easy to cut the other workers off.

She stroked the cat’s head. ‘He shouldn’t’ve died. He was too good at his job for that to happen. Summat went amiss.’

Tabitha took a sharp gulp of breath. If machinery or equipment had failed, then it would be the Braithwaites’ responsibility.

‘He never made mistakes.’ Mrs Kellett looked directly at Tabitha. ‘Summat went wrong.’

‘What might have gone wrong, do you think?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know. Summat, that’s for sure. It shouldn’t’ve happened.’

Tabitha gulped. ‘It’ll be looked into, Mrs Kellett,’ she said in a worried voice. ‘The coroner will investigate. I expect the factory inspectors will be going over everything.’

Lizzie snorted. ‘Factory inspectors! What will they know?’

‘Uncle Neville says the dyehouse will be out of action now, and we’ll …’ Tabitha’s voice trailed off as if she wished she had not begun this line of thought ‘… contract the work out.’

Mrs Kellett began to weep silently. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and pummelled it in her hand. For a moment, the four of us sat in silence. The room had shrunk.

Mrs Wilson gave a keen look at Tabitha, and then at Mrs Kellett. Then she took her leave, saying she would come back later. The dog ambled after her sniffing at my camera bag. I felt suddenly embarrassed at having brought it. Force of habit.

There was a loaf and seed cake on the table, and a pot of stew on the hob by the fire. Mrs Kellett’s previous visitors had proved more practical than Tabitha and me. I was about to break the awkward silence by asking whether there was anything I could do.

Mrs Kellett got there first.

‘Paul only had a jug of beer and a sandwich. Someone must’ve slipped summat in it. He wasn’t one to let an accident happen. Accidents don’t happen, they’re caused – that’s what he always said.’

‘Why would someone do that?’ Tabitha asked, her eyes wide with surprise. The colour drained from her face. Out of pity, or because of the implications for the mill?

‘Why? Jealousy, that’s why. Jealous of what he’d made of hisself. Jealous of what he’d got. Jealous of what we planned.’

‘What did you plan, Mrs Kellett?’ I asked. I remembered Sykes telling me of the money put aside from war-time profiteering in dyewares, the dream of a cottage by the sea.

She sniffed and wiped her nose. ‘A new life, that’s what. And now there’s no life at all. They knew he’d summat put by. Only he never got to enjoy it.’

‘Who knew?’ I asked gently.

‘They all knew,’ she said vaguely, spreading her hands with such a violent motion that the cat abandoned her. It leaped on the table and sniffed disdainfully at the bread
and cake. ‘Everyone in the dyeworks knew. He’d invited ’em all to come and visit. In his imagination he were already walking on the beach, watching the sunset over Morecambe Bay.’

Tabitha began to cry.

I felt utterly helpless, and somehow at fault. I did not see how there could be a connection between Kellett’s death and Braithwaite’s disappearance, or my investigation of it, but now it was too late. Would one of the dyeworkers have had a motive for wanting to see Kellett dead, I wondered. But perhaps Mrs Kellett simply could not accept that her husband could be taken from her in such an arbitrary way, a way that reflected badly on his workmanship, his expertise in his job. ‘Did you mention these suspicions to the constable?’