Chapter 5 The Mill Gate

Wexford Mill stood half a mile out of town where the Noke slowed and widened before turning under the road, and it had been out of work since before Verity could remember, a long low building of brick and weatherboard with a chimney that leaned like a drunk uncle and a wheel that had stopped with its buckets full of a summer nobody had finished. The gate was padlocked, as it had been for years, and the padlock was hanging open, and the hasp above it had been cut through with something quick and sharp. Rufus looked at it with the particular pleasure of a boy being shown his trade in the wild. "Bolt croppers," he said. "Or a grinder. No burr, so likely a grinder with a good disc, which means they brought power or they didn't care about the noise." Verity pushed the gate in and it swung, complaining, on hinges that had not been oiled since the last royal wedding. Inside, the yard was a sea of nettles and wet grass and the rusted carcasses of things that had once had names. The mill house itself was boarded at the windows but not at the door, and the door had been opened, and had been left open, and whoever had opened it had not bothered to be tidy about it. "Stay behind me," Verity said. "Boss, if there's somebody in there—" "Then I'd rather be in front. I've got the torch." The air inside was cold and still and smelled of water and old flour, and their footsteps turned the dust over and set it drifting in the beam. Verity walked the length of the ground floor with her torch low, the way she had been taught to walk into a strange building, checking the floor before the walls. The old milling machinery stood along one side under sheets that had gone grey with age. The office was at the end, a small room with a window onto the wheel, and the office was the only part of the building that looked disturbed. The desk had been pulled out from the wall. A cupboard stood open, empty. The floorboards in front of the desk had been lifted and laid back, badly, and in the hole beneath them the earth was loose and turned and shallow, as though something had been taken up and not put back. "Someone's been looking for something," Rufus said. "Someone's been finding it," Verity said. She crouched by the hole. The soil was dry on the top and damp beneath, which meant it had been opened days ago, not hours, and the person who opened it had known exactly where to dig. Nobody digs a random hole under a random floorboard. That was the whole trick of the thing. Someone had a map. She stood and turned slowly on the spot with the torch held out at arm's length, and the beam went round the office wall and came back to her, and on the wall beside the chimney breast she found the same pale rectangle she had found in Tabitha's cellar, the same clean-edged ghost where something framed had hung and had not hung for a while. "They took the picture too," Rufus said. "Maybe they took it, maybe they put it back where it came from." She crossed to the desk and pulled the shallow drawer, which had swollen with the damp and fought her the whole way. Inside was a single sheet of paper, an old invoice, ruled and stamped with a name she did not know and a date that was before her time, and she read it twice and put it in her pocket. "Rufus. What's the story of the mill fire, the way your mother tells it?" Rufus shrugged, working his cap round in his hands. "Nobody talks about it. It's just the fire. The mill burned, the family went, the town got a row of houses out of it and a chimney you can see from the bypass." "And who says the family went?" "Everyone." Verity looked at the pale rectangle on the wall and the lifted floorboards and the tidy, purpose-driven hole, and thought about how a story repeated often enough stops being a story and becomes furniture. Everyone in Thistlecote knew that the Wexfords had left. Nobody in Thistlecote, when you pressed them, could tell you which one had left, or when, or where they had gone, or whether they had ever been seen leaving at all. A thing that everyone knows is a thing that nobody has checked. "Right," she said. "We've seen enough. If it's a building site, we're trespassers, and I've got a shop to open." Outside, an engine coughed, and a car came up the track and stopped at the broken gate, and a man got out and stood looking at the two of them through the nettles with his arms folded. Bertram Lampitt was a broad, well-dressed man of the kind that towns like Thistlecote produce once a decade and then talk about for the other nine years. He had bought three shops on Cheaping Lane, the old cinema, and, as of a fortnight ago, the mill, and he had a way of standing that suggested the ground had been put there for his convenience. "That gate was locked," he said. "It isn't now," Verity said. "I can see that. What I'd like to know is whether you opened it." "Did you?" Lampitt's face did something small and careful, the way a man's face does when a question lands a half-inch from where he expected it. "I've got a surveyor coming Monday," he said. "I'd be grateful if the town's locksmith and the town's errand boy weren't wandering about a building site." "Errand boy," said Rufus, with feeling. "We'll go," Verity said. She walked out past Lampitt, who did not move aside. At the edge of the yard, in the wet grass by the gatepost, something caught the light, and she bent and picked it up as though she were tying a shoe. It was a paper tag. Small, rectangular, the sort a jeweller uses for a watch repair, strung on a loop of thin brown cord, and on it, in handwriting she would have known anywhere because it was her father's, were four words and a date. *Mill office. Spare. 1979.* Rufus came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at the tag, and then at her face, and had the sense, for once, to say nothing. "What would you say," Verity said, "if a man's been digging up a floor for something he already knew was there, and the only thing he leaves behind, right where you'd find it, is a tag off a key from a drawer that was locked the whole time?" "I'd say he left it for you." "So would I." She turned the tag over between her fingers. "Which means whoever took the ledger and the mill key has been reading my father's book long enough to know that his tags mean something to me, and left this one where a locksmith would see it, and that is the most polite burglary I have ever heard of." "Or the least polite message." "That too," said Verity, and they walked back down the wet track towards the town, and behind them the mill stood with its leaning chimney and its stopped wheel and its floorboards lifted like a floor waiting to be told what it was for. ---