Dying in the Wool (17 page)

Why did people do it? Why do teetotallers marry inebriates? Why does a halfway decent man like Stoddard fall for a cold, brittle woman like Evelyn Braithwaite?

‘You’re looking into things aren’t you?’ Marjorie Wilson swayed unsteadily, as if trying to bring me into focus.

‘Yes. I’m hoping to find out what happened to Joshua Braithwaite.’

‘You think he was murdered, don’t you?’ she whispered, leaning close to me.

As coolly as I could, I said, ‘It had crossed my mind.’

‘He was thick as thieves with Paul Kellett.’

‘Really?’ It occurred to me that we were a little public for too many confidences. I was about to suggest a walk in the garden when she leaned so close to my ear she shoved me into the wall.

‘You think my husband killed him because of being diddled out of his dues over the lightweight loom picker don’t you?’ When I didn’t answer straightaway, she said, ‘So you don’t know about that? Well never let it be said I put his head in a noose. Only he did say, A poor man doesn’t get his inventions taken up that easy, that they either come to nowt or get robbed by folk who’ve got the brass to turn a plan into reality.’ Mrs Wilson gripped my arm so hard that it hurt. She said, ‘Is he a killer? I look at him sometimes across the table and I think, Is he? Did he do it?’

We looked through into the room. I could not see the
portly Mr Wilson, enemy of women drivers.

‘What makes you think that, Mrs Wilson?’

‘I can’t make up my mind. It’s all a mix-up. He’s violent. He’ll kill me one of these days. He’ll never change. I won’t stay. I won’t let him. You wouldn’t, would you? You wouldn’t stay with a violent man?’

‘No I wouldn’t.’

She swayed unsteadily. ‘I’m going home to pack a bag. If I had a car I would get in it. As it is, I shall go to the railway station.’

I took her arm. The two of us walked with great precision and fairy strides down the stone steps of the terrace into the garden. My borrowed barrel dress did not aid movement.

A massive shape lurched from the shadows towards us, bumping against her and knocking both of us off balance. A great hound of a dog, it then lolloped ahead of us, threatening to trip me, wagging its tail, licking Mrs Wilson’s hand.

She rested a hand on its broad back. ‘Good dog, Charlie. Good dog.’ We swayed towards the line of motor cars. ‘He always follows me. He’s uncanny for knowing my whereabouts.’ She waved at one of the cars. ‘Come on, Kate, you are a modern young woman. You can assist me in this.’

I held my evening bag between the dog’s slobbering jaws and Tabitha’s satin dress, hoping to keep it safe from slaver.

‘Where will you go?’

‘If I go to my daughter, he would come after me. I shall find lodgings. Lizzie said to do it. She had a lodger once, the bonniest lass in the mill.’

A car rolled towards us.

The chauffeur stepped out and opened the door. Marjorie pushed me in. The dog followed. She clambered in herself, helped by the chauffeur.

‘Home, Anthony! And don’t spare the horses.’

‘Very well, Mrs Wilson.’ He gave a long-suffering sigh. In the mirror, I saw him eyeing the dog.

‘Of course,’ she whispered, ‘it would help to know who got to the safe deposit box.’

‘What safe deposit box?’

‘Joshua Braithwaite’s of course. If he got to that, then the bird could have flown. If he didn’t, then that would clip his wings.’

‘Where was this safe deposit box, Marjorie?’

Her eyes had closed. She let out a gentle snore.

We drove along dark narrow lanes to a house where a single light shone in the window.

‘Wait here please, Kate. Wait with Charlie.’

The dog licked my ear.

I waited.

She went inside.

It was terribly restful to sit in the dark in the back of a car, just waiting.

‘She won’t come out again,’ Anthony said cheerfully.

Charlie growled as Anthony spoke.

‘The dog doesn’t like me. But it’s nothing personal. He doesn’t like any men.’

He opened the door and the dog bounded out, whining at the front door.

It all seemed too much, as if I had fetched up in a madhouse. Rather than helping Tabitha, if I told her everything I’d probably destroy her. Overhearing Stoddard and Evelyn and now learning about mad Wilson and his invention, there were more motives than I could keep steady in my aching head.

I only shut my eyes for a moment.

When I woke, Anthony the chauffeur was opening the car door. There was no sign of Mrs Wilson or her dog. We were in the wrong place – back at the Braithwaites.

‘I brought you home, Mrs Shackleton, since you’d fallen asleep. But if you wish to return to the Gawthorpes …’

‘No. Please just give my thanks and apologies. Perhaps you could say I had a headache and didn’t want to spoil the party.’

In the morning, Becky brought me tea. ‘You’ve slept very late, madam.’

‘I was with someone … a lady and her dog. Is she all right?’

‘Ah yes, you was seeing Mrs Wilson home,’ Becky said tactfully. I felt a little queasy. Too many of Evelyn Braithwaite’s cocktails before we set off probably.

Tabitha came to see me, bringing Andrews Liver Salts, a glass of water and a pot of tea.

She looked pale and drawn.

‘What’s the matter, Tabitha?’

She shook her head, biting her lip, reluctant to speak.

I felt suddenly guilty for having left her in the lurch. Perhaps something terrible happened after I deserted. ‘Was it the party?’

‘Not the party. That went all right. There’s been a most dreadful accident. It’s Paul Kellett. He’s dead.’

Paul Kellett rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead to shift the sweat. Since half six this morning he’d been hard at it. Standing in the doorway of the dyehouse, he drank in the evening air and took a swig of warm beer.

Overtime to finish the job, and he was the one to claim it.

Uniform material, always uniforms. Dyeing black for the police, navy for the conductors, grey for the commissionaires. That’s how they keep us in our place, Kellett knew. Wear this, wear that, tip your cap, show respect. Oh he could do that all right, as long as there was summat in it for number one.

Where was his Oxo tin and his snap? He took out his sandwich.

It wasn’t only toffs could take themselves off to Morecambe Bay to live out their days in a cottage by the sea. The working man could do it an’ all, if he set his mind hard enough at the task. If he took care of number one.

Kellett would surprise them all. There’d be a day when he was washed white. He’d have clean hands, and hair free of the dye, like the time when he wore his suit and went on the road. His chest would clear up too. On that day, he’d breathe free.

He had picked the spot where his house would be built, in Heysham overlooking the bay, where you had the finest sunsets in the wide world.

He wouldn’t be a mean bastard neither – he’d invite his
dyeing mates over to stop the night. Lizzie would bake a pie. They’d be the proper host and hostess. Mein host. That made him smile. Mein host. Thank you Herr von Hofmann, especially for the crate of permanganate of potash that Mr Bigshot Braithwaite never spotted. That was his entirely, that little lot. Kellett’s only regret, that he could have driven an even harder bargain.

Not long now for the new start. And it would all be down to cleverness. All down to the fact he knew his job inside out and upside down. He’d experimented with the dyes. He could reduce the process time, but only he knew that. So tonight there’d be one time on his clocking out card, and it wouldn’t include his going over home to wash hisself down and have a bite of supper and a pipe by the fire.

The trick about pulling in brass was not to be too fussy whether it was a big amount or a little. Oh it was big money in the days he was relabelling and selling the German dyes. Twenty sales for Joshua Braithwaite, one sale for Kellett’s back pocket. He’d liked that life – wearing a suit, having summat to sell that folk would give their eye teeth for.

Reluctantly, he put down his emptied beer mug and turned back into the dyehouse fog. The boiler was at it full blast. Metal grinding on metal, whistle and squeal, the high bubbling noise, and the low rumble.

He yawned. Not getting any younger. Bloody tired, weariness seeping through him in waves. Ten yards at thirty-six inches to dye. He’d have it done in no time, no time at all, and out to dry.

He didn’t notice the silence. It seemed to be inside his head, a sudden stillness that came over him sometimes when he thought of how it would be to live by the sea, looking out over that vast swathe of ridged sands at low tide, imagining the worlds beyond the roaring ocean, and the peace, the sweet peace of never having to set foot in a dyehouse again.

And then it happened, and he knew it was happening, but somehow his body had gone all slow, like when he had been marched to the front line in a state of exhaustion and putting one foot before the other took such great effort.

Even as his hand and claw grabbed the valve and he started to turn, and turn, he knew it was too late. Only one hand to turn with, the claw useless for this job. It took ten or fifteen good turns before the valve would shut off the boiler. And …

He started to sweat. His body told him to run but as he turned his back on the boiler, the dye burst out with an angry rush, hot and black, knocking him to the floor, to the hard setts on the floor of the dyehouse and then it was covering him in black waves and he thought of the sea and how he would take off his shoes and roll up his trousers.

Somehow he struggled to his feet, hearing human screams as the roof exploded, hearing screams that were his own and his tiredness had gone now but he didn’t know how he moved, fast or slow, only that he moved and one thought pounded through his scalded burning body.

Water.

He ran across the mill yard, ran to the low wall, catching sight of his own dye-blackened hand, the sleeve that hung loose, the skin falling from his arm. Screaming, he jumped into the icy water of the canal.

Someone had heard the explosion. Lizzie ran across the beck, up the bank, past the big bridge, into the mill yard.

The dyehouse was swamped. Parts of the roof had fallen in, with tiles and bricks on the ground near the wall. A broken beer jug lay among the collapsed bricks in what had been the doorway. Across the yard was a trail of black dye.

She knew her heart would burst, but kept running, shouting, calling his name, so that when she saw him, she had no breath left to speak, only looked at him there in the water, blackened, flailing, staring at her with terror in his
eyes. She began to climb down to him. He shook his head. She saw the redness of his tongue against the black as he tried to speak. Then the canal took him. She ran along the bank towards the weir.

A fallen branch stopped him. She waded down, to her thighs, to her waist. Paul screamed as she touched him, and then was silent.

Lizzie’s own scream tore through the air.

Cropping: Shearing loose fibres or yarns from the surface of the cloth to give it a smooth texture.

LIZZIE

Lizzie Luck never saw any need to leave the village. The old people were dead now, parents and gran. Lizzie had inherited her gran’s tarot cards, and her knack for the fortune game.

Lizzie’s younger sister left to work in the clothing trade in Leeds. Only she was never satisfied. Money, money, money, that was her tune on the harp. Later, she’d gone to work in munitions. Lizzie took the train to Leeds one Bank Holiday Monday to visit. The sun never shone there, never penetrated the smoky air. If that was the big city, you could keep it.

Another time, Lizzie took a train to Bradford to see her brother and his wife. What a smoky hole that was! Oh the shops were big and fine, the arcades grand, and the market teemed with everyone and everything, but it was all too much. She only ever went there one other time – to the Spiritualist Church.

Long before the noisy weaving shed turned her deaf, Lizzie liked the peace and quiet and her bit of a garden to grow potatoes, herbs and whatever else she could coax from the ground when the beck and the canal allowed. She liked the way her house turned its back on the mill and its
bowed wall gave the village a cold shoulder. She gazed onto fields where sheep and cattle grazed.

Living alone suited Lizzie, after growing up with seven and eight in the two-room house. But Paul Kellett blew in from Keighley in 1913, looking for work. He helped her up one icy day when she slipped and came a cropper on the cobbles. He looked down, she looked up. It was as simple as that. She hadn’t expected to find love at the grand old age of thirty. But he was tender, kind and funny. He could imitate bird calls, tell jokes, play the harmonica. They married within the month.

He took over the entire house with his inventions and experiments. She wondered they weren’t poisoned after he used her pots and pans for God knows what type of dyeing mix. He’d stir the dye stuff in with water, using her wooden spoon, boiling it up to dissolve it, more than once causing an explosion. He claimed the fastest green dye in England. He dyed her grey cape forest green and insisted she wash it. It was her fault when the tub turned emerald.