Elegy for Eddie (5 page)

“Deft change of subject, Maisie. But seeing as you’ve asked, let’s try that pudding.”

Maisie looked around, to see if Simmonds might be waiting outside the door.

“You can use the bell behind you to summon Simmonds—that new electric system cost a fortune to put in,” said James.

Maisie avoided his eyes. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back in a minute.”

James sighed and half-threw his napkin on the table as he pushed back his chair. He stepped past Maisie and pressed a button on the wall, which was situated within easy reach of her place.

“There, that wasn’t too hard, was it, Maisie?”

The door opened and Maisie smiled at Simmonds as he entered. A footman cleared the plates and cutlery from the table.

“We’d love some of the pudding, please, Simmonds.” She was still flushed from James’ rebuke.

“Of course, mu’um. ‘Pavlova,’ cook calls it—and it looks very good indeed.”

“Lovely. Thank you.”

As Simmonds turned and left the room, James placed his hand on Maisie’s. She smiled in return, but felt a pressure upon her chest, almost as if she could not breathe. And she knew that if she were sitting with dear Maurice, he might have asked her, “What happens when a person cannot breathe?” And she would have had to reply, “They suffocate.”

Chapter Three

T
he Bookhams paper factory was located close to the Albert Embankment in Lambeth, between Salamanca Street and Glasshouse Lane. Not for the first time in recent weeks the MG had failed to start, which meant that Maisie risked being late. In the past, Sandra’s husband had been her mechanic; however, since his death, after which his employer had eventually closed up shop, she had not taken the car for regular servicing and repair—and there always seemed to be something under the bonnet to attend to. Now the MG remained in the mews behind Ebury Place while she used the underground railway. As she made her way past the warehouses on Salamanca Street, Maisie was annoyed at the motor car, and annoyed with herself. She wanted to go back to her own flat this evening, and now it seemed she would be spending another night at Ebury Place. And she realized her annoyance came, not as a result of any serious discord in her relationship with James, but from a thwarted desire to be back under her own roof where she did not have to face—
endure
would be a good word, she thought—the rituals of life in the mansion as its de facto mistress. The MG’s refusal to start—she suspected it might have a corroded plug—demanded she face up to the fact that if the courtship continued as those in their circle thought it would, her life would be dominated by the household’s rituals from dawn until dusk, and in truth she wasn’t sure she could warm to it, though she enjoyed being with James. Most of the time.

“Watch out, love—you want to be careful creeping round ’ere!” A husky voice called out to her, and at once she saw a bale of old rags being winched up from the back of a lorry towards a door high above the ground. “If that thing goes, you’d be squashed like a fly, make no mistake. Look where you’re going.”

Maisie stepped back and walked to the other side of the road. “Sorry.” She could hardly make herself heard over the screech of the winch. “I was—”

“Daydreaming,” the man interrupted her. “You was daydreaming. Can’t do that near the factory, or you’ll be in trouble.”

“Can you tell me where the entrance to the office is?”

The man waved towards an alley some yards along the street. “Go down there. Door on the right, says ‘Office.’ Ask for Mr. Mills.”

Maisie nodded her thanks and went on down the street, turned into the cobblestone alley, and found the entrance to the offices of Bookhams Paper. She rang the bell to the right of the door and waited, looking through a window of frosted glass threaded with wire to see if anyone was there. Soon a young woman came down the stairs and opened the door.

“Can I help you?” She was about thirty years of age, dressed in a pleated navy-blue woolen skirt that skimmed the top of her calves, a white blouse with a loose bow at the point of a V-neck, and a long woolen cardigan. Her hair was pulled back in a low bun, and she wore round spectacles.

“Thank you, Miss—”

“Miss Marchant. I’m the secretary here. Are you here to see Mr. Mills?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Your name, please?”

“Miss Maisie Dobbs. Here’s my card,” said Maisie, taking a card from her pocket and handing it to the woman.

Marchant glanced at the card, then looked Maisie up and down, from her plain navy-blue court shoes to the robin’s-egg-blue hat with a navy band and bow at the side and the matching blue gloves with dark pearled buttons at the wrist.

“Hmmm, he never said he was expecting anyone. Anyway, come with me—and be careful to shut that door behind you; it sometimes comes open again and there’s a nasty smell wafting in from the river, what with this warm weather taking us all by surprise this year.”

Maisie closed the door and rattled the handle to make sure it was closed, then followed the woman up stone steps impregnated with the smell of disinfectant. The walls were painted in a cream gloss, and at the landing a large sign informed visitors that they had entered
“Bookhams Paper, Serving the Printing, Publishing and Sanitary Industries.”

The landing opened out onto a large office, at the center of which was a small typing pool surrounded by several other private offices, each with a frosted-glass door framed with heavy oak. Miss Marchant instructed Maisie to wait. There were no seats for visitors, so she stood by the wall, facing the backs of three young women whose fingers danced over their typewriter keys. The secretary knocked on a door with a sign in gold lettering: “Mr. Bernard Mills, General Manager, Bookhams Paper.” And underneath, again the legend,
“Serving the Printing, Publishing and Sanitary Industries.”

With the secretary now standing in the open doorway, Maisie saw Bernard Mills look up from his desk in her direction. He shrugged his shoulders, then nodded. Maisie feigned interest in the notice board behind her, which bore a sheet of paper entitled “Milk Roster,” followed by a list of employee names. According to the schedule, today it was the turn of Miss Cheryl Beekin to fetch milk for tea.

“Mr. Mills will see you,” said Miss Marchant as she approached Maisie. “He’s only got about a quarter of an hour to spare—we’ve important visitors coming to the factory later on this morning, so we’re busy.”

“That’s perfectly all right. Fifteen minutes is all I’ll need today.”

The secretary looked at Maisie as she said “today,” but said nothing as she led her to the manager’s office. After introducing the visitor, Miss Marchant left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

Mills was a man of average height, possibly only two inches taller than Maisie, who was considered tall for a woman. The top of his head was bald in a perfect circle, surrounded by thick black hair threaded with gray, which led Maisie to think he would need only dark brown robes to take on the persona of a monk. The sleeves of his white shirt were held up with gaiters above the elbow, and he wore pin-striped trousers and waistcoat. He seemed surprised when Maisie extended her hand in greeting.

“Good morning, it’s very good of you to see me, Mr. Mills.”

“Hmmm.” He cleared his throat as he took her hand to shake while holding her card with his other hand. “Not at all, not at all, Miss Dobbs. Sit yourself down.”

The office was on the small side, only about twelve feet square, but against each wall there were filing cabinets and bookcases with ledgers and catalogs of paper samples. A pile of paper samples teetered on the desk, surrounded by open files and an array of pens and pencils.

Once seated, Mills checked the time on his pocket watch and looked up at Maisie. With his left hand he rolled the end of his waxed mustache as he spoke.

“Now, what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Mills, I am a friend of Mrs. Maud Pettit, who as you probably know is the mother of Mr. Edwin Pettit, who lost his life in a recent accident here.”

Mills sucked in his breath, looked down, and shook his head as he put both hands on the desk and pushed back his chair.

“Oh, no, I can’t talk about that. Orders from above. Lawyers, and all that. Can’t discuss it at all—and certainly not with a—” He looked at her card again. “Investigator.”

Maisie remained seated. “I’m not here to question you in a way that would compromise your position, Mr. Mills. Rather, I want to bring some degree of peace to a grieving mother—I am sure you understand.”

“Well, of course. We all feel very sorry for her, and as you know—” He looked up at Maisie, as if to ensure she
did
know. “We had a collection for her here at the factory, to help cover her costs at the Co-op, with the funeral and what have you.”

“And very much appreciated it was, too. But I wonder if you can help me, Mr. Mills, to get a picture in my mind of what took place on the day Mr. Pettit died. I’ll obviously be careful in terms of how I recount the story to Mrs. Pettit, but—how did the accident happen?”

Mills shook his head. “I don’t know, truly I don’t know. If the guv’nor finds out I’ve talked to you, I’ll lose my job.”

“Then we’ll pretend I’m a prospective customer. Could you show me where it happened? It would really help Mrs. Pettit very much to learn more—she worked here herself as a girl, you know, before it was taken over by Mr. Otterburn.”

“All right then. Look, come with me and I’ll take you along the corridor—there’s a window overlooking part of the shop floor where the accident happened.”

Maisie followed Mills along a corridor which she could see ended at a staircase leading down to the main factory floor.

“The pulping is done next door; we’ve got about fifty women in there shredding rags for boiling in the vats, and we also take paper that’s already been used—it pulps down again. The quality of the paper needed dictates the rag and timber content of the materials used—for example, the newsprint has a lot of wood in it. But we also produce high-quality papers for stationers and what have you as well as the rolls for the print industry.”

“And they come off the conveyor over there.” Maisie pointed to the rear of the factory.

“They’re checked on the belt, then straight out onto the loading ramp for delivery—either to Fleet Street or the stations for newspapers up north and down in the West Country.”

“Where did Eddie come into the factory—from that door over there?”

Mills nodded. “He usually stopped to see the ladies first, to see if there was anything they wanted him to go out for. He would come in with a tray he’d made up, like one of them usherettes at the picture house. There’d be smokes, sweets, that sort of thing, and he would make a bit of money on them. And then he’d run the errands—he never had to write anything down you know. I could never get over it, how a dim soul like him could remember all that, but he did.”

“Really?” said Maisie. “Then when he was done, would he leave the same way?”

Mills shook his head. “No, as a rule he’d leave through those doors to the loading ramp. You see, once you’re through there, you only have to walk across the courtyard and you’re in the stables. It’s not full these days, on account of the lorry deliveries, but we still keep a few, just in case. You never know when one of them engines will go. Mind you, I reckon they’ll get rid of the horses any day now, have ’em put down.”

“Put them down? Why?”

“The owner says it’s time to move into the modern age completely, rather than hanging on to the past—exact words, mind. In fact, the brass are expected soon. Factory’s going to be brought up-to-date, so they all want to sniff round. It was on the cards anyway, doing away with the horses, but the accident has chivvied things along.”

“Can’t something be done? I mean, you can’t just kill a working horse.”

“There’s many who think the same way as you, Miss Dobbs, myself included. But it won’t just be us, you know—all the big factories are doing away with horses, and it’ll be the railways next, mark my words. The horse is a thing of the past—and there’s so many of them, all over London, you can’t put them all out in fields, so they have to be done away with. But Eddie made their day when he went out there. He always had a treat for them, you know.”

Maisie was thoughtful as she looked at the workers scurrying back and forth, at the magnitude of machinery before her—iron girders and scaffolding supporting pulleys and wheels, with ladders going up and down, and a gantry above, for the men to check load and balance. At once a siren was sounded, reminding Maisie of the foghorns that called, one after the other, up and down the river in the dead of a pea-souper night. Workers stood back, and soon a conveyor belt at one end of the factory began moving; clunking and screeching as if there weren’t enough oil in the world to silence each turn of the cogs underneath. Maisie thought it looked and sounded like a giant bicycle chain straining against the pull of a steep incline, and tried to imagine what might have happened on the day of the accident. The conveyor seemed solid enough, but she could see how even the smallest locking of the cogs could jolt it out of true, so that the rolls of paper became unbalanced, perhaps causing one to lift up and eventually fall. She had not seen such machinery before, but it looked to her as if the whole contraption had been designed for smaller bales and should perhaps have been replaced to accommodate a heavier, more cumbersome load. She wondered if profits from larger bales had been so attractive that new investment had been delayed in the interests of the owner’s accumulation of wealth.

She covered her ears, and in time rolls of paper with a diameter the height of a man began to shunt along towards the loading ramp, where they seemed to lumber onto the waiting lorries like animals to slaughter. She looked at her watch.

“Was this about the same time that the accident happened? Eddie would come in about now, wouldn’t he?”

The man nodded. “Yes, it was about this time.” He did not look at Maisie, keeping his eyes on the moving rolls of paper. Two men stood on the gantry looking down upon the paper rolls as they moved along the conveyor belt; more were watching from below. In an instant one of the men above waved to a man by the wall, who pulled a lever; the belt shuddered to a halt. The men clambered from the gantry down onto the belt and, using long iron poles, together levered one of the rolls, then climbed back to their places.

“What happened? Why did they stop the rolls of paper?”

“One of them was slightly off, so they manipulate the belt to get it on track again. It’s an easy job, and it’s the rules that no one goes down onto the belt while it’s moving.”

“I see.” She paused as the machine lurched into life again and the rolls of paper continued on their way. “I’ve been trying to imagine how one of those rolls came down.”

“Freak accident, Miss Dobbs.” Mills turned away from the window, and held out his hand for her to return along the corridor towards his office. “The belt buckled, reared up off the cogs, is what we believe, then it snapped back into place again, so we couldn’t find anything wrong with it when it was checked—and it was looked at thoroughly, mind you.”

“Hmmm. But with those men down below, I’m surprised no one could have pushed Eddie out of danger or alerted him in some way.”

“That’s a new procedure, on account of the accident. Everyone not directly involved in making sure the paper is on the belt has to keep away now, as soon as that horn goes off.”