Chapter 15 Fresh Chalk on the Teeth

He got back to the mill on the ninth day, on foot, because a man with no posting no longer had a warrant to borrow a horse. The padlock on the headrace gate had been taken off and put back on. That was the first thing he saw from the top of the bank, and it took him ten minutes to see the second, which was that the chain was not fastened the way chain is fastened when a padlock has been opened and shut again. It was fastened, and it was slack by a link, and there was a bright place on the second link where a tool had been put in and turned. Inside, the pit was dry. Nyle stood on the mill floor and looked at it and could not make the two facts sit next to each other. In April the pit had held a foot of black water and the lower half of the wheel had been under. There was now no water and the lower blades were bare and dry and the bottom of the pit had been swept, and the sweep marks were fresh, and the pitch that comes off a sweep-bar was lying in the corners. The wheel had not turned. That was still true. The cockshaft was in the same place and the cockshaft is the thing a wheel cannot turn without, and the oil cups were all full. But the gear was out. The great wheel gear, twenty-two feet of cast teeth that had been under a foot of black water in April, was lying on the mill floor in six sections, cleaned, with fresh white chalk rubbed into the roots of the teeth, and the chalk had not yet had time to be knocked off. There was a new smell on them, oil, and the smell had come off them in a way that said the oil had been applied on a bench and not at the cockshaft. Nobody had turned the mill. Somebody had made it look as though the mill had been taken care of, and had done it well enough to fool anybody who did not know what a swept pit looks like, and they had done it inside a month of a visit from a man with a docket. Nyle went back down the bank at dusk and asked at three doors. The third woman told him what he wanted without being asked it twice. "There was a cart up here on the Tuesday nights. Three nights, near enough." She had a yard and four children and no interest whatsoever in the Hourhouse. "Big wheels. Came up slow because the lane's bad past the weir, and went back down heavy." "And the men?" "Two. One of them spoke." "What did he say?" "He said be off the track at the wall, love." She looked at him. "You want to know whether they were stealing." "I want to know whether they were working." Nyle thanked her and went down to Awn Quay before he thought better of it. The tide was in and there was nobody to ask, so he stood on the bank opposite Awn Quay and looked at the street, and made himself count what he had and what he had done with it. He had a piece of information that would put a lock on the mill, the hoisting gear and the pit pump for a fortnight, and would stop whoever had done it from doing it again in a month. He had a piece of information that would tell him who had been in the pit, and who had paid for the chalk, and who had thought it necessary after an inspector with no post had walked up the north bank. He had a choice, and it was a small one, and he knew that small choices are the whole of it. If he took it to Cray tonight, Cray would seal the mill and lock the town and the equipment would be found inside a week, because Cray had a seal and nine men and no curiosity at all. And the person who had come up the lane on a Tuesday would know by Wednesday that a man had been asking at doors, and would stop asking, and would simply be careful. If he held it for two days, nobody would know, and in two days whoever was doing it might come back. Nyle Threshwick stood on a muddy bank in the dark and did the thing that inspectors are trained to do and that training does not prepare you for, which was to use a fact about somebody's wrongdoing as a piece of leverage on somebody else. He had a piece of information in his pocket and a decision in his hands, and both of them were about a person who had not yet been named and might never be named, and the decision would change the shape of the case. He held it for two days. He wrote it in the notebook with the date and the hour and the name of the woman and the words she used, because a note made at the time and signed by the man who made it is worth more in a review than a note made afterwards, and he was careful, and being careful was how he justified it to himself on the walk home. Two days later the mill had not been entered again. And in those two days he did a second thing, which was to go back up to the north bank in daylight and look at the mill properly, with a note of everything that could have been measured and was not. The chalk on the gear was the only part of it that would have gone into a file as a fact rather than a suspicion. Everything else was gone into a man's memory: the new oil, the swept floor, the slack chain. A chalk mark is a mark. A swept floor is an opinion that a floor was swept. He understood, standing there in the daylight, that the two days had cost him the only piece of physical evidence the mill would ever produce, and he had made that trade knowingly, and he knew exactly which part of the trade was the part he would have to justify to somebody later and which part he would have to justify to himself at three in the morning for the rest of his life. He wrote both of those down as well. On the fourth day after that, the ward clerk of the South Ward sent up a note that made the decision moot and made Nyle feel, in a way he did not examine closely, as though it had been the right one after all. *The guarantee is suspended pending investigation, effective this week. No fuel allotment will be issued to the South Ward until the file is closed.* Sixty-one households had already drawn their six hours for the year and had been paid in coal. The levy said they had six hours. The plates said they had paid twenty-four for a journeyman advance. They had been given coal once, and then charged for it twice. ---