Chapter 17 The Night at the Kilns

He had not gone far, because a man like Barnaby Skell does not run; he arranges. He had gone to ground in a maltings on the canal that belonged to his brother-in-law, and when they found him, three days after the warrant, he had spent the whole of the time doing what he had always done, which was arithmetic, and he had a bag with two hundred pounds in it and a set of papers he had not been able to bring himself to burn, because a man who has kept the society's books for eleven years cannot easily put a match to his own writing. They found him because of Coombes. The visitor had come to the chapel on the second morning to collect the week's baskets as usual and had found the door open and the office stripped and the man gone, and Coombes had stood there in the empty office the way a man stands in a house after a death, and then he had walked to Bellhouse Lane and stood on the step until Prudence opened the door, and he had said, with his cap wrung in his hands, that he had carried the cordial to the sick for eight years and had never once thought about it, and that the wax on the bottles had been his wax, and that when Mr. Skell had come on the rounds certain Fridays, it had been Skell who had stoppered the bottles and written the day, and that there was a basket of paper twists in the lean-to that had never been accounted for in the making, and that he had known, in the way a man knows a thing he will not let himself know, and had said nothing, and had gone home at night and washed his hands, and could not wash them clean anymore. He gave them the address of the maltings, and Prudence took it to Sergeant Rounce, and Rounce took it to the magistrate, and on the Wednesday night Ephraim Cope and Sergeant Rounce and two constables and, because he would not be left behind, Obadiah Sneed, went down the towpath to the maltings with a lantern and a warrant. Prudence did not go with them. Rounce would not have her, and Ephraim would not have her, and Sneed said flatly that a woman at a man's arrest was a woman to be talked about for a year and that she had been talked about enough; so she stayed in the weighing room with the second lamp lit and the box in the drawer and the balance in front of her, and did the only useful thing left to her, which was to write out again, clean, in her own hand, the whole account of the cordial from the first bottle to the last, so that whatever came of the night there would be a paper in the world that said what she had done and why, in the order she had done it. It was three pages when she had finished. She sealed it and wrote on the outside the names of the four men who had gone to the towpath and the hour at which they had gone, and then she sat and waited, and the waiting was worse than the grave and worse than the inquest and worse than the brick through the window, because there is nothing a chemist can weigh while she waits, and there is no reagent for that. She was still waiting when the sky over the cut went the colour of a lamp, and then she put on her coat and went out with half the town, because a fire in Cinderthorpe was the one thing that could bring every soul in the lower end into the street at midnight, and because she would not sit in a locked room and let other men find out what had become of her case. The night at the kilns ran like this, and she heard it afterward from three mouths and saw the end of it with her own eyes. They came on the maltings from the water side, in the fog, and saw the light in the upper room where the grain is dried, and went up the outside stair quietly, and found the door open, which was the first wrong thing. Skell was sitting at a table in the middle of the drying floor with the papers in front of him and the bag of money under his chair and a lamp at his elbow, and when the four men came through the door he set down his pen and looked at them with a very small, very tired, very courteous smile, and he said that they had been quicker than he expected, and asked whether he might finish a letter, and Rounce, who was not a clever man and was not fooled, told him to put his hands on the table. Then the second wrong thing happened, which was the fire. There was a kiln at the end of the floor, a little grain kiln, and in it a fire had been burning all evening, and on the floor beside it stood a basket of the society's own papers, and Skell had got rid of four casks of cordial that same afternoon by the simple means of pouring them into the canal, and he had meant, before the constables came, to feed the papers to the kiln and vanish. What he had not meant was for the fire to take the floor. A spark got into the chaff that lay across the boards, and the chaff caught, and the drying floor, which had been built half a century before out of timber seasoned like tinder, went up as though it had been waiting all its life for a lantern. Ephraim dragged the table and the papers out onto the landing; Sneed, who had come with a sack over his shoulder for the papers and found himself carrying a man, took Skell by the collar and hustled him down the outside stair; Rounce and the constables got the money out and the rest of the papers and the basket with the twists, and the last of it came down the stair just as the upper floor collapsed into the kiln room in a shower of burning grain that lit the whole length of the canal and brought out half the town to watch the maltings burn to the waterline. Prudence came up the towpath with the crowd and stood at the edge of the light. They put Skell in the lock-up in his coat and his clean collar, and it was Prudence, standing on the towpath in the light of the burning maltings, who noticed that he had not struggled and had not spoken and had not once looked at the fire; and when Sergeant Rounce brought him past her, he stopped, and looked at her for a moment with that courteous, arithmetic face, and said, in the tone of a man correcting a sum, "You understand that the cordial was sound. The additions were mine, and the additions were for particular persons, and the rest of the town drank nothing that was not good for it. I killed eleven people. I did not poison a town. There is a difference, and it is the difference between a man in his trade and a madman, and I would be glad if, when you write it down, you write it down plainly." "I keep a plain account," Prudence said. "It is the only kind I know how to keep." "Then keep it plainly," said Barnaby Skell, "because I should not like the world to think I had been careless," and he went up into the lock-up between the two constables, and the maltings burned behind him all night, and the smell of it hung over Cinderthorpe for three days. ---