Retired police detective Seymour Staines lives a quiet life as an ice cream man driving around the small Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy in his Mr Whippy truck. One night he gets a mysterious call from his friend Rigby Pemberton who manages the o...
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Wharram Percy was a small town, more a village really, that lay nestled in the rolling green hills of eastern Yorkshire. In any given year the population of tourists out-numbered the natives three-to-one, but the tourists trickled in throughout the seasons allowing the town to keep its rural charm. As with most Yorkshire towns, it had a claim to fame. For Wharram Percy this was the old mill, which staked its claim as the birthplace of hydroelectric power. But that didn't interest Seymour Staines much.
He'd grown up in the coastal city of Hull where his nosey nature allowed him to make a name for himself as a detective on the force — before it got him kicked off twenty-seven years later. Too old to retrain, too stubborn to remarry, he'd wandered God's Own Country doing odd jobs and keeping busy until he fell in love with Wharram Percy and its slow, peaceful lifestyle. They'd asked him to be the law but he didn't think the town needed it, so he rode point on a Mr Whippy ice cream truck as he made his regular weekly rounds. It didn't keep him as fit as walking a beat might — a few too many liberties taken with the stock had noticeably increased his girth — but people opened up more to a sweet treat vendor than they did to a uniform of authority, so the trade-off was worth it.
Yes, Wharram Percy had become his town and he'd come to know all the goings-on in it as he made his regular rounds. Which was why this trip was so strange. He wasn't scheduled to visit the mill today, but old Rigby Pemberton had seemed adamant. So Seymour had made time to come 'round after his rounds to see what was what.
Rigby was a huge chap with long grey hair who managed the ticket booth at the mill. He'd been compared to a hippy version of Lurch from the Addams Family on more than one occasion. Like Lurch, he was as gentle as the Andrex puppy. Unlike Lurch, Rigby liked wearing a monocle. No one could figure out why, as he didn't dress the rest of the part.
By the time Seymour found time to make it to the mill, the early autumn sun had begun to set and the shadows were stretching long across the ground. The site was already looking like something out of an American Halloween special, despite the relatively newly adopted celebration still being over a month away.
As he pulled into the gravel parking area, Seymour noticed the old mill lamp was conspicuous in its absence that evening. Being as dependable as the sunrise, it was taken for granted, a barely-noticed fixture of the small town. For the first time in his memory, it wasn't lit.
Suspicion aroused and senses alert, Seymour took a bottle of chocolate sauce in one hand, tucked a bottle of strawberry sauce in his belt as a backup weapon and climbed down from the truck, leaving the engine idling to keep the fridges running. Footfalls masked by the noise of the engine, he made his way as quietly as he could to the door of the mill.
In truth, he had no idea what he thought he'd find. It wasn't like Wharram Percy was a hotbed of crime, the home of international drug syndicates or people trafficking rings or some-such. But something was wrong nonetheless. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled the way they used to all those years ago on the force and he never ignored his neck hairs.
The front door was closed and locked so he crept around the back, ears attentive for any movement but there was nothing apart from the soft rumble of his truck's engine and the growing howl of the strengthening wind as the storm predicted for yesterday began to build in the northwestern sky.
Seymour found the back door already open, dangling askew as one of the hinges was torn off the door frame. Chocolate sauce at the ready, he crept carefully through the entrance and into the working part of the mill, where he stopped and listened.
He breathed a sigh of relief. It was quiet. There were no threatening voices, maniacal laughs, or desperate pleas for mercy. In fact, there was nothing. No whirring spindles of the famous water wheel, no footfalls or gentle mutterings from Rigby, no sounds of any kind save a dull, repetitive thud.
Throwing caution to the wind, Seymour eased around the wall to the light switches and turned them on, illuminating the entire interior. The place was a mess with an overturned table near the wall and tourist brochures scattered everywhere. Pictures had even been torn from the wall and flung to the floor where the glass had shattered.
"Rigby?" he yelled, deciding that any ner-do-wells had already left and his priority was to find the proprietor. There was no answer.
"Rigby!" he yelled again with a similar result.
A new kind of desperation filled him. The kind where one feared learning they were too late to prevent a tragedy. Seymour raced through the side rooms, finding nothing but more reckless vandalism, before finally venturing out into the wheel room and across the thick glass floor that had been installed to show tourists the operation of the horizontal water wheel down below.
Now it lay still, with a dark shape obscuring the wooden slats. he looked away and pinned his attention to the still trunk of the water-wheel spindle, ignoring a tingle passing up his spine. Suddenly it was clear, the pieces of the puzzle had come together to form a grizzly picture. The lamp's power cut. The silenced water wheel. The dark shape blocking its progress.
Seymour hesitated, attempting to steady himself. He didn't want his worst fears confirmed. He knew something horrible would be waiting to stare up at him from beneath the glass floor. Something that had once been a dear someone. The squirt bottle of chocolate sauce dropped from his hand as he finally stared down into the dead, drowned eyes of poor old Rigby, his monocle swimming in and out of his long grey hair, joining the bubbles in the stream.
