‘They’re robbing us blind, you know, Inspector. They don’t care about the workers, they’d throw us all out on the scrapheap tomorrow. We might not have jobs this time next week, while that pair swan in and out of there in that bloody massive car of theirs…’ his thoughts though were left unfinished as the group found their way out, Grey left with the impression though that the man had said slightly more than he’d meant to.
‘They don’t even care about us. They just don’t care!’ concurred the young drunk from the street as the doors closed, leaving the other two men — silent throughout — to help carry him home.
‘What’s it coming to?’ muttered Bill as, stoical to the last, he returned to his place behind the bar and began wiping glasses with a cloth in automatic ritual.
‘“In drink,”’ uttered Grey.
‘Sorry?’ asked Bill?
‘Do people still use that term, “In drink”?’
‘I don’t know, but it would serve to tell of that lad if they did.’
Grey was bamboozled, reeling from the encounter, affronted by the men’s different tones; the younger lad clearly ‘in drink’ whether people still used the term or not, but as for the other fellow, he had been wound up like a clockwork toy, sprung like a jack-in-the-box. Grey hadn’t enjoyed dealing with him at all.
‘Never seen him like that though,’ Bill mentioned as an aside, clarifying at Grey’s insistence: ‘The young one — he’s in here sometimes, but I’ve never seen him that bad. I should have stopped serving them earlier I suppose.’
Grey shook his head at it all, ‘I’ll give them a couple of minutes and be off myself.’
‘Maybe there is something in it?’
‘I hadn’t heard anything.’
‘But then there’s always rumours around the plant,’ conceded Bill, echoing Grey’s earlier thought.
‘So,’ continued Bill, ‘perhaps they should eat, drink and be merry, while they can still afford to?’
Grey, nodding his regards, and wholly unconvinced by it all, pushed his drained glass across the bar and was off.
It was, he pondered as the cooling air of evening hit him, the night now as dark as it would get, a sign of age to recognise how often the antics of youth are seen by the rump of society not as rebellious or fearful but merely course and insulting; you might even say pitiful. A young man barely able to stand while issuing insults — where is the rebellion in that?
Even as he thought these words Grey recognised how crustily old they made him sound. He didn’t really believe such sentiments, he just seemed to get the kids of today less and less; which was perhaps the whole point, and exactly the effect they wished to achieve with each new fad and fancy took up to horrify their parents. It was a phase we all went through he realised, just hoping the current young didn’t wreck themselves permanently as a result, as the horror stories from the conference echoed in his mind.
But what had the encounter told him?
Aubrey Electricals had been one of the town’s biggest employers for years, operating from a factory on the outskirts of the town centre. They had taken up where the old factories that had build bombers in the war had left off, and the plant was built on land formerly occupied by the airfield and aerodrome. They specialised in precision cutting, assembled parts, and latterly, small electronic devices for larger appliances. The chances were a part of your fridge or microwave had passed thought the Aubrey production line.
In his minds eye, the four men in their green overalls represented several hundred fellows, many more counting casuals. Yet while as prone to union dispute as any large organisation, they were in practice as benign a group of men as any of that size could be expected to be. He summed it up thus: that although in the course of his duties over the years he had most surely dealt with men — for they were almost all men — who worked there, it was never because they worked there. This seemed an important distinction.
However, as he walked along lit streets and past darkened houses, across the rooftops Grey caught the strain of voices. He guessed they were those of men from the pub, for he had seen few other souls along his walk home; yet where before they had been seething and surly, what he heard now was… singing, yes singing, as if the men, far from cursing lost jobs were instead returning from a victorious sporting occasion.
Were these the sounds of celebration, or at least of lamentation, of one last toast being raised before going their own ways home? And Grey thought he understood now, that what he had seen in the Prince Hal Bar might not only have been a protest or venting of anger, but also a wake: a sending off of the jobs and lives the men had known, a last hurrah on the eve of God-knew-what… and he had called time on it.
Sad to have that understood (as he caught one last hollered refrain) yet proud of the town he lived in, where he hoped a man facing disaster could still look it in the eye, he thought about what the men had been saying and took their late-night notions at face value — for what would it matter, if these rumours of job cuts turned out to be just rumours? Grey strode though the almost-empty streets as if a soldier through a battlefield on the eve of war. All around him, in lit flats and curtained houses, were men, women, families, getting ready for their beds if not already in them; and he wondered how many would have joined these men in song had they only known what may be coming in the following weeks?
But these thoughts and images were just surface froth, the flotsam of an active mind running over as he found his way home, final daydreams minutes before authentic sleep, and would surely be forgotten by the morning.
Chapter 2 — Missing Persons
Wednesday
Grey woke to sunlight and no birdsong, he having left the alarm off in error, but noting to himself quickly before panic had a grasp, that he had nowhere but the office to be that morning, and that the catching up of paperwork he had planned for the day could be as easily completed from ten till six as from nine till five. His reporting back of the finding from the conference had gone well yesterday; but it would have been optimistic to expect for such a disheartening theme to have roused more then the professional interest it did. And anyway, it wasn’t as if an overriding concern for the lost souls of their town was something his team did not already have as instinct.
As for today though it was back to the paperwork; and he hoped also, if he had the chance, to be able to some make further light enquiries around the edges of the issue raised the evening before last, or even to identify if there was anything to enquire after. Indeed, nothing involving Aubrey’s had caught his eye yesterday when looking at the records of minor activities occurring in the region, or at what had turned up that day on the uniform staff’s duty roster. Not that he expected to see much there, however helpfully the staff Constables had enquired as to whether there was anything they could do to assist, and how if he’d only point them in the right direction then they may be able to help him find whatever it was that occupied him?
The evening had faired little better, it seeing his efforts to find out Bill at the Prince Hal Tavern founder on the rocks of his having been out of town that night visiting a sick sister — nothing serious Grey was relieved to hear from the barmaid, though he felt in no mood to stay for a beer.
But, despite his lack of anything to back his feeling of Monday night up, as Grey sat there pondering later that Wednesday morning, his sense of something imminent in those drunken men’s words of two nights before seemed destined to brood within him, at least for the time being. He couldn’t shake the impression of there being some looming object beneath them, and set any day to break the surface of the town’s placid waters. And this he thought on as his more than able Sergeant’s head appeared around the door, to interrupt the paperwork he was at that point, now approaching lunchtime, still working through.