‘And, you know, piano-tuning is damned pricey these days. A professional job, I mean.’
He knocked the peg through another few degrees. A string of the B flat below middle C snapped with a crack like a starting-pistol.
‘Bloody hell!’ Mosley said.
‘Actually, I do have another pressing engagement this morning, Mr Mosley.’
‘You’d do better to stick with me, laddie. You’re going to learn something. Mrs Foley was the wife of a man who was a gardener at Hempshaw Hall in the time of the Goodwins. She knows a thing or two that the Fraud Squad would have given their ears to find out about at one time.’
Mosley was silent for at least a minute and appeared to be applying his best attention to the piano. But Beamish noticed that his plan of attack had changed. He was making a lot of noise, occasionally testing it with very simple tunes (he really was a pretty awful pianist) and actually doing very little to the strings. Maybe he had taken fright at the single wire that had snapped so far, and his main effort now was going in to making Mrs Foley think that he really was tuning the thing. Did he so badly want to ingratiate himself with her?
‘Do you know,’ Mosley said, ‘that when John Foley came into a small family legacy in the late 1940s – it was about £400 – Wilson Goodwin got to know about it and actually borrowed £250 from him?’
‘And did he ever get it back?’
‘That is one of the things that I aim to find out from Mrs Foley.’
Mosley played a few bars of ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’, following it up with a badly executed chromatic scale down three and a half octaves.
‘I’m pretty sure he got at least some of it back. What interests me is the circumstances in which it came to be repaid. Was Wilson Goodwin suddenly affluent?’
‘Home, Sweet Home’ – did Mosley know how to play anything that wasn’t in the first ‘Tutor’that he had had as a child? There was something slightly revolting in the thought of Mosley as a child.
‘I went to hang Mrs Rawlings’s curtains as you told me to,’ Beamish said.
‘Oh, aye?’
‘They were already hung.’
‘I hoped they might be.’
Mosley executed a scale in octaves in the key of C major.
‘And Mrs Rawlings was not there.’
‘Good. They got her away in good time, then.’
‘Got her away?’
Mosley made some impressively technical adjustment to one of the dampers. A large pinch of moth-eaten felt came away under his thumb.
‘Mr Mosley – are you listening to me?’
Mosley stopped what he was doing, stretched his fingers over the keyboard and turned to look at Beamish, all attention.
‘Something very peculiar indeed was going on at Barker’s Clough,’ Beamish said. ‘I got the feeling that I was not alone in the place. Somebody had been burning paper in the grate just before I went into the house. I heard footsteps inside and out, but whoever it was was able to vanish round corners. It’s a maze of a place, an absolute gift to anybody trying to hide from one man. Mr Mosley – what’s going on?’
‘It’ll all come out in the wash.’
‘Is that all you’re prepared to tell me?’
Mosley tinkled a few more notes, as a cover for a moment’s thinking.
‘You know what’s going on. Aren’t you going to put me in the picture?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t put that sort of pressure on me,’ Mosley said.
‘But I have my position to consider.’
‘That thought is uppermost in my mind.’
‘I don’t mean that I’m spying on behalf of Grimshaw – though I’m supposed to be. But I’m not all that keen on undermining what chances I have in the force.’
‘Quite rightly. I’d hate you to think that I’m doing anything unprofessional.’
‘I wouldn’t for a moment.’
This, Beamish reflected, was hypocrisy superbly refined: Mosley looking up from the keyboard of an instrument that he hadn’t a clue how to deal with; himself pretending a naïve confidence in the man’s innocence.
‘Just as long as it’s nothing illegal –’ Beamish said.
‘I’m doing nothing illegal. In fact, I’m doing practically nothing at all. A natural process is taking place, Sergeant Beamish. An issue that needed justice is about to be justly resolved. And by justice I don’t mean wigs, gowns and the Law Society taxing solicitors’ dishonest accounts. Nor am I taking any active part in this process. I’m what the chemists would call a catalyst. I speed up reactions without taking part in them. What I’m doing is in no way unprofessional – but I can quite see that a mind as narrow as Grimshaw’s might find it so.’
He played the opening strain of ‘Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers?’
‘And it’s not only justice that I can see being served. There is such a thing as self-fulfilment. As a rule, there is little that an outsider can do about that. But it has to be noted too that there are times when self-fulfilment would never happen without outside influence.’
‘You know you can rely on me to be with you in anything like that.’
Mosley did a five-finger exercise at the lower end of the keyboard.
‘I know that. That’s the only reason you are here this morning, helping me to do this. But what you don’t know, you can’t be called to account for.’
‘We went over all this once before.’
‘That was only over a simple case of burglary. There are jacks-in-office who would get terribly hot under the collar over present events as I see them.’
‘Have it your own way. I’ve just remembered something else.’ It was remarkable, Beamish thought, how ordinary mental processes seemed to break down when Mosley was about. ‘The Widow Rawlings had a neatly stacked gallows in one of her sheds.’
‘That I didn’t know.’
Nor did he seem particularly moved by the intelligence. There were some old ladies who had their own gallows, there were some who didn’t. It was a matter of basic indifference to Mosley.
‘She can be a bit of a virago. I can see that,’ Beamish said, ‘but I can’t quite see her topping anybody single-handed.’
‘I dare say she never will.’
Mosley was becoming more and more laconic as the piano absorbed him.
‘I can understand Grimshaw feeling uneasy at having these things up and down the county.’
‘Any number of people have been getting on the bandwagon,’ Mosley said. ‘It’s only to be expected.’
‘Bandwagon?’
Mosley stopped work for the sake of making a definite statement. ‘It’s just like our head office, isn’t it? It’s three or four months since Billy Birkin put his apparatus on the market. A newspaper cutting gets stuck to a paper-clip in somebody’s in-tray, and it’s weeks before anyone picks it up. Then they want action at panic speed. The last thing I heard was that Billy was going to let it go to the women who wanted it for charity shows. That’s just like Billy. He’s no more head for business than he has for topping a dummy. He’s made a word-of-mouth agreement with these women, and he regards that as binding. But it’s anybody’s guess what offers he’s had from outsiders. I’ve heard about a few of them. Old Noll Cromwell made the thing for Billy’s mother for a tenner. Now there’s a holiday camp offering £500 for it to put it in a sideshow. At least two Third World countries want it for its original purpose. A waxworks on Bognor seafront wants it. The Castle Museum at York wants it. The BBC Drama Department want it as a stage property. And Billy Birkin isn’t the man to keep all this to himself. Everybody’s heard. So Noll Cromwell has gone into gallows-production on the grand scale. He’s working overtime at his bench. Fifty quid, that’s the inflated price, with an effigy thrown in as a free gift for cash payment. Everybody wants one as an investment.’
‘I see.’
‘Mind you, I’m not all that happy about it. You know what people are. When they’ve spent money on something, they start hankering to try it
out.’
‘That’s what Grimshaw feels.’
‘Well, I’m always happy to see Grimshaw occupied. It helps to keep him off my neck. But now you must let me get on with this. We can talk later. It isn’t that Ma Foley is an uncooperative woman, she does suffer from a misplaced sense of loyalty: a very sentimental woman. She knows as well as anyone else – a damned sight more realistically than most – what sort of a turd Wilson Goodwin was. But her husband was employed on the estate, and she has an old-fashioned esprit de corps. But you wait till she sees what I’ve done with her joanna. I shall be on the receiving end of a very powerful sense of obligation.’
So for the next hour he sat making what he judged to be the right range of sound-effects, interrupting the labour now and then for a short flight into melody: Handel’s ‘March in Scipio’and even Beethoven’s ‘Minuet in G’. Then he got Beamish to help him put the front-board back into position, and he called in Mrs Foley to witness the results of his handiwork. It was a very old waltz-song that he played for her, with a bold accompaniment of two thumped-out chords in the left hand.
Bluebells I’ve gathered,
Keep them and be true.
When I’m a man,
My plan
Will be to marry you.
The corners of Mrs Foley’s eyes were moist. ‘Oh, you are a beautiful player. Mr Mosley. Do you know, nobody’s played a note on that piano since the war?’
Chapter Twelve
Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw was distinctly despondent when Sergeant Beamish called on him as ordered at the end of the day. He looked grey. His eyes were as sagging and pathetic as a bloodhound’s. His hands were resting limply on the desk in front of him, his wrists extending from his beautifully starched and linked cuffs. Between his hands lay the Churchillian single sheet of paper, on one side of which he had tried to marshal the tasks that were crowding in on him.
Seeing his master’s dejection, Beamish felt that it behoved him to spread a little cheer and general optimism. Grimshaw looked at him as if another man’s smile was the last straw in his payload. He motioned Beamish to sit down. Beamish did so, at the same time doing his best to read Grimshaw’s notes as well as he could upside down. Grimshaw noted this, twisted the paper round and slid it under Beamish’s eyes.
(i)
Brenda Shuttleworth
(ii)
Elizabeth Stirrup
(iii)
Underwear
(iv)
Bloody rabbit
(v)
Gallows
(vi)
Jane Goodwin’s letter
‘Who,’ Beamish asked him, ‘is Brenda Shuttleworth?’
‘She is nine years old. She was last seen wearing a red and white knitted hat, and a red and white anorak with sewn-on badges from Blackpool, Morecambe, Southport, Scarborough, Whitby and Windermere. I am sure she presents a striking picture, because she is also wearing white slacks and red ankle-socks. Both her upper eye-teeth are missing and so is she.’
‘Ah!’
‘She is missing because a fool of a Detective-Superintendent chose to employ a class of juveniles to hunt for a corpse.’
‘I did wonder at the time about the wisdom of that,’ Beamish said, seldom the man to wrap up his opinions. He was saved from petrification only because the Detective-Superintendent chose not to acknowledge the remark.
‘I may say,’ Grimshaw said, ‘that though that is what the press will undoubtedly say, it is not precisely how it happened.’
Beamish was silent.
‘She went missing by a sawmill. Piper and Reynolds are at that sawmill at the moment. You and I will join them presently.’
‘And why is Elizabeth Stirrup’s name on the list?’
‘She’s missing too.’
‘Ah!’
‘Don’t keep saying that, Sergeant Beamish. You don’t advance matters by behaving as if you had inside information.’
‘In this case I think that I may have, sir.’
Grimshaw looked at him as if he resented being teased with false hopes.
‘I think that we are looking for a hatless man in late middle-age wearing a camel-hair coat.’
Beamish remembered the couple walking down from the schoolhouse as he was driving out of Hempshaw End. He remembered how Elizabeth Stirrup had glowered at him when he had waved to her. He remembered how closely they had been walking together – unnaturally close, it now seemed to him – as close as a couple might be if one were holding a muzzle of a pistol against the other’s ribs.
Grimshaw was looking at him not so much in amazement, as with the beginnings of anger. ‘What do you know, Sergeant Beamish? Kindly don’t treat this as if it were some sort of charade.’
‘Sir – this is the first –’
‘I know, I know, I know.’
There was one thing about Grimshaw’s unjust rages: they were always quick to subside.
‘It is a pity you didn’t stop to investigate.’
‘Sir – would you have done, do you honestly think?’
Grimshaw avoided the question. ‘You might as well go down the whole list while you’re about it, Sergeant.’
‘Underwear,’ Beamish read aloud.
‘There was a great deal of it, almost antique, and in first-class condition, scattered all over the landscape.’
‘Yes, sir. And what’s this about a rabbit?’
‘That’s an obsession of the Assistant Chief Constable. You know what it’s like when he’s suffering from an idea.’
Beamish did not, actually. In his present position in the force, he heard very little top office gossip.
‘Until we close this file,’ Grimshaw said, ‘we are going to be asked at frequent intervals whether we have found that bloody rabbit.’
‘I, of course, have yet to hear about the creature,’ Beamish said.
So Grimshaw told him what Forensic had had to say about the blood on the kitchen matting and the bottle.
‘Ah, well, I can see the reason for that,’ Beamish said.
‘You can, can you? Would you have any objection to sharing your theories with me, Sergeant?’
‘Somebody wanted us to think she’d been killed, sir.’
‘Ah, yes – but who? I am sorry to nag you about trivialities, Sergeant …’
An answer had suddenly occurred to Beamish, remembering something that Mosley had said. The fish: Mosley had predicted that Grimshaw would be misled by the fish in the window. Mosley had made feeble jokes about it, because he had guessed – if not known – that Janie Goodwin had herself put that fish in her window – after she had wrecked her own room. An image had come into his mind of Mosley watching it happen: from Janie Goodwin’s garden, where he had accidentally dropped his pipe.
‘I think she did it herself, sir,’ Beamish said.
‘There’s no evidence for such a statement.’
‘There’s the drawing of the fish, sir. Only she can have put it there. The intruder would hardly have drawn attention to his own handiwork, would he?’
‘You may have a point there.’
‘Which suggests that Miss Goodwin – Mrs Cromwell – wanted to make sure that it was not too long before the chaos was discovered.’
Give Grimshaw his due: he was capable of imagination – especially when stimulated as Beamish was stimulating him.
‘But she had no need to do that, had she? She knew that the Meals on Wheels would be coming.’
‘With respect, I think not, sir.’
‘Why not? It was Friday.’
‘Yes, sir – and the schools have already started their Easter holiday. She may not have known that the dinner was going to be cooked at the dye works. If you remember, Miss Crane told us that Cromwell didn’t. He had already settled down to a plate of bread and butter when she called. Which suggests that the arrangement hadn’t happened before.’
‘All right, Sergeant, I don’t feel as certain about it as you do. But we’ll bear the possibility in mind. Now
what about all this unworn clothing all over the place?’
Grimshaw nodded at the wall-map on which he had plotted the finding of the garments. ‘I can’t see any underlying pattern, can you, Beamish?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you propose to keep it to yourself?’
‘Two things, I think, sir. First, the garments were picked up in the order in which they had been taken off.’
‘I think I should tell you that I have come to the firm conclusion, Sergeant, that they had never been on.’
‘Perhaps not, sir. So, let’s say, in the order in which they would have been taken off.’
‘And why should anyone do that?’
‘I come to my second point, sir. Someone was wanting to lead us in a certain direction – one must assume in the wrong direction.’
‘But if someone, whether Miss Goodwin herself or not, wanted us to think her dead, why not have a few gruesome touches about her lingerie?’
‘I admit that that is a paradox.’
‘Not your most useful remark of the day.’
‘At one moment a bloody death is suggested. Then we get what may be a hint that she is unharmed.’
‘That doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.’
‘Why not, sir? Suppose she had two people to impress. She wants one of them to think she has been killed. She wants to reassure the other.’
‘You are moving dangerously near to a plane of fantasy, Sergeant. May we move on to Item Five?’
‘Gallows – what is the plural of gallows, Beamish? Gallowses? There are gallowses all over the place.’
‘That at least is an easy one, sir.’
Beamish told him all he had learned from Mosley on the subject: the eruption of commercial interest inspired by Billy Birkin’s advertisement.
‘Do you mean to say, Sergeant, that this is a separate file – and that we might actually be able to close it?’
‘Inspector Mosley feels uneasy about this proliferation of gallowses, sir.’
‘Ah, yes – Mosley. We must talk about Mosley.’
‘I think that Mosley is afraid that if someone is up to no good, it might be unfortunate if he came across a convenient gallows.’
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