‘Mosley afraid?’
‘I have a strong feeling that he is in control, sir. I had the pleasure of helping him tune a piano, earlier in the day.’
For an instant Grimshaw looked at Beamish as if he suspected that he was being conned. Then he appeared to shrug off the thought.
‘Look at this first, then we’ll talk about Mosley.’
Grimshaw brought Janie Goodwin’s letter out of a drawer and passed it across the table.
My Dear Jane,
What you say may be no more than I deserve. But to tell you the truth, I don’t much care what I deserve. And you know me well enough, I think, to believe that I don’t care.
What matters more – in fact all that matters – is that we have a common interest that transcends all other considerations. I may have got one or two things wrong about you in my time, but I would be surprised if you have not remained a realist.
It would be on the late side now to change time or place. But if you do want to get in touch with me, B knows how to reach me.
Yrs,
H
‘So it looks as if she had an appointment,’ Grimshaw said.
‘Yes, sir. But was she keeping it or dodging it?’
Grimshaw gave Beamish another of his crafty looks. Within the last few minutes, his reactions to the young Sergeant had run through their entire gamut of possibilities. He was beginning to understand much more clearly now why some of his narrower-minded colleagues regarded working with Beamish as an assignment to disaster. As far as he himself was concerned, he believed that collaboration was feasible; but only because of the wisdom and magnanimity that came from his experience. Grimshaw looked at his watch. Time was pressing. They were not really achieving anything, sitting here.
‘If this were your case, Beamish –’ not asked as by a man picking brains. Grimshaw’s tone was brisk: the kindly old veteran testing a novice. ‘– what would your next move be?’
‘Forget everything else and concentrate on the missing child.’
‘And the missing young woman.’
‘I would hope to find her in the course of the same operation.’
‘Ah, yes – but what operation?’
And to Grimshaw’s surprise, Beamish answered without hesitation. ‘I would want another talk with Mosley before making my mind up on that.’
‘Ah, yes – we must not forget Mosley. I take it you’ve spent a fair amount of time with him? What is his part in all this?’
‘Inactive, I would say – but not inert. He describes himself as a catalyst.’
‘He said that, did he?’
‘Sir.’
A Grimshaw silence, in which he seemed to have retreated into a spiritual distance.
‘My blood runs cold to hear you say that, Sergeant Beamish.’
Beamish waited with what looked like puerile expectancy.
‘Do you know why my blood runs cold when you say that, Beamish?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Because I have heard Mosley say it before. It is a term not unfamiliar on his lips. It is when he considers that he is acting as a catalyst …’
The Detective-Superintendent did not finish the thought. His associations were apparently too terrible. He looked like a schoolmaster debating within himself whether to set Mosley five hundred lines: I am not a catalyst.
‘And where precisely is our domesticated catalyst hanging out at this moment?’
‘Precisely, sir, I could not say. But I do not doubt that I can find him. I think, sir, that the news of the missing child is going to shake him. I am sure that is something that he had not reckoned with.’
‘I’m glad you think so. You see what can come of dabbling, Beamish. This is not the first time that Mosley’s catalysis has got out of hand.’
‘But I’m sure that his ultimate aim, sir …’ Beamish began, not entirely abandoning his loyalty to Mosley, ‘I mean, he has pulled things off in his time, hasn’t he?’
‘Sometimes he has had luck on his side. Beamish – how long do you think it would take you to find Mosley?’
‘I think I ought to allow myself a couple of hours, sir. And sir?’
‘What, Beamish?’
‘I would like to have a look at that sawmill first.’
‘It will be too dark to see anything, of course.’
Grimshaw suddenly started thundering. ‘You think you’re on to something, then have to spend half the night getting your back wheels out of a ditch. You lose your men, who are wandering about in circles.’
Night operations for Grimshaw seemed to be the final realization of hell upon earth.
Beamish waited with exemplary patience for him to subside.
Chapter Thirteen
Mavis Cooke, the girl who roomed with Penny Evans, was an unknown quantity to Brakeshaft. But Penny knew her as an amateur do-gooder, a moral narcissist, a wearer of a slim-line silver crucifix in the hollow of her neck. She was also a firm believer in the purgative effect on society of mischief stirred up behind the scenes. She was a quiet, unsmiling wrecker of people’s peace. And she was the last person on earth whom one would think of asking to alter her room-sharing arrangements in an obvious cause. Instead of relieving each other’s nervous tension, therefore, Brakeshaft and Penny were building up frustration. Penny’s other life, back in Bradburn, was not entirely uncomplicated. She would rather, in fact, have brushed off Brakeshaft altogether, than take any risk with the longer-term arrangements that she had at home.
But Brakeshaft had other ideas, and he could be persuasive: there was a strong pull that he operated when he was laying an ambush for one of his own students. He had already sampled her suppleness on a pile of old sacks in a farm shed: enough to know what she would be like in a real bed. And he had discovered an old summerhouse in the grounds of the Field Studies Centre that, like the plate-layer’s hut, had afforded privacy to previous love-makers. Indeed, whoever had been the last to use it had left it more than minimally equipped. It had an old divan, even an Aladdin oil heater with a half-inch or so of fuel still swilling about in its container.
Penny Evans had done her best to keep out of Brakeshaft’s reach at going-to-bed-time; she was a girl, she prided herself, who could take it or leave it, and she knew when to bow out to tactical considerations. But Brakeshaft fell in step with her as she was leaving the scrubbed-bare utility of the students’common room.
‘I’ve found just the place.’
‘I’ve told you, Stanley – it’s not on.’
‘Next term’s internal exams, are, though, aren’t they?’
‘Why bring them up?’
Then suddenly she saw why; and she was a girl who could switch to a broad smile at will.
‘That’s how it’s done, is it?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything particularly wicked – just an hour or two’s extra tuition beforehand. Though of course, I shall know what’s going to be in the paper, because I’ll have set it.’
‘It’s all very well – I still don’t trust her.’
She jerked her head in the direction of the stairs.
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s not stop out all night. You can surely cover up getting in a bit late.’
So she went with him to the summerhouse – but it wasn’t as it had been this morning. She rocked with him, but she gave him nothing. She had been better on the sacks than she was on the divan. And afterwards, when he was still trying to persuade her to stay, she would have none of it. He knew he would not be making love to her again – and that there would be no extra tutorials. It was about a quarter to midnight when she left him and he told himself that he would smoke one cigarette before following her out through the night. A minute and a half later he had crushed three quarters of the king-size into an old tin lid and his eyelids were drooping.
When he woke, it was cold and it took him some moments to put together where he was. He flicked his lighter to look round himself and was nauseated by a squalor of which he had not really been awar
e last night. He lit another cigarette and wiped the film of moisture from the glass of the window with his fingertips.
The summerhouse was set at the end of a neglected lawn that had perhaps been used formerly for croquet. Beyond that lawn he saw something for which he could think of no immediate explanation.
A car had been parked on the single-track dirt road that ran through the small park. It was an old-fashioned car, a vintage Daimler, large, black and square. Four people had got out of it, and even in his present sluggish state of mind, he could see that they too were unusual. None of them was young, but one of them in particular looked as if she belonged to a forgotten epoch. She had on a large, heavily ornamented hat and skirts so shapelessly full that it was difficult to imagine that there were limbs under them.
Brakeshaft was not an imaginative man, nor did he ever pay much attention to any detail of his environment that was not his immediate material concern. Yesterday, he knew, they had been hunting for the corpse of an old lady from the village. But he had joined in no talk about her, and had picked up nothing about her habits, reputation or description. He therefore had no reason to connect the woman out there with Miss Goodwin.
But he could not fail to pay attention to her now, for she began to conduct herself in a most peculiar way, prancing about, running up and down the shallow banks that edged the lawn, standing on one leg on a hummock as if she were improvising a clumsy ballet.
It seemed at first as if the others were taking hardly any heed of her. Two of them were women, seemingly of the same generation as herself but dressed – and not casually, either – in clothes of the present age. Then the man in the party, formally opulent in a beige-coloured coat with leather buttons, seemed to notice for the first time how she was behaving. He said something to her which Brakeshaft could not hear, and which made her run down the hillock and swing round to give the man a view of her back and shoulders. It looked like a piece of badly hammed petulance.
The man walked back to the car, opened the rear door wider and leaned inside it with the upper half of his body. The skittish old woman then swung round again, saw where he had gone, ran after him, shouldered him out of the way and herself bent into the car, apparently doing something, Brakeshaft could not see what, to an object on the back seat.
A moment later, she took a step backwards, holding someone by the hand. It was a small child, a girl, wearing a red and white anorak, and the woman helped her out on to the side of the road. This time, Brakeshaft was in no doubt as to whom he was looking at. Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw had rapidly and widely circulated a vivid description of the vivid Brenda Shuttleworth. Brakeshaft’s reaction was to step smartly back from the summerhouse window so as not to be seen. The child seemed perfectly happy with the company that she was in, but her best friend among the adults was evidently the woman in the outlandish garb, whose hand she held as they set out together towards the big house.
Brakeshaft now had to start flogging his brains. It needed no great judgement to know that this was something that had to be reported – and without delay; but he had no intention of revealing to anyone where he had spent the night. Would it make sense to claim that he had seen what he had seen from one of the windows of the house? Hardly, he thought: that would mean bringing yet someone else’s bedroom into the story.
He looked at his watch: it was a quarter past six. Five minutes after she had left the group, the woman in the ancient skirts came back from the house – without the child. Did that mean that she had returned her to her quarters in the Centre?
Brakeshaft felt a surge of relief. He had been let out. There was no need for him to tell anyone anything of what he had seen.
Chapter Fourteen
From the diary of Georgina Crane for Sunday, 10 April
Elizabeth Stirrup came back this morning. It was ten minutes past five, and I doubt whether I had had more than a couple of hours’sleep myself. I thought I heard the door-knocker, but it was a very feeble effort that she was making, and God knows how many times she had had to try before she woke me.
She was almost in a faint before I could get her across the doormat, and she was quite unable to tell me anything that made continuous sense – just a few disjointed words, images, nightmare impressions: something about a gun, and God knew what they had done with the child. She would not touch alcohol. I tried to get hot soup into her, but she kept falling asleep, had hardly the strength to lift the spoon.
I practically carried her upstairs and rang Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw.
Last night Grimshaw had driven them down to the sawmill, and they had arrived just as his other two officers were about to come away in their squad car. Grimshaw made them turn back, and wasted a lot of time trying to get them to park their vehicle so that its headlamps would light up the various sectors of their search. The very thing happened that Grimshaw had spoken of less than an hour ago; they backed a rear wheel over the lip of a ditch, with a sound of metallic destruction that suggested a fractured half-shaft. That meant getting on the radio to try to drum up breakdown gear – at that time of night! – and because that task devolved – abortively – on Beamish’s shoulders – he was able to play very little part in the search itself. He was in fact even unable to satisfy himself that it had been carried out efficiently.
One thing stood in no doubt: they found nothing. The sawmill had not been in use for some years. Its owner had died. His heirs – with no thought of working it for themselves – had been unable to dispose of it in its derelict state, which had been made no better by a series of nasty winters and windy springs. The windows were all broken, the doors were off their hinges and a botanist’s wealth of fungus had taken over timber-stocks and load-bearing joists alike. Such light as they could bring to play on the scene revealed no relic of Brenda Shuttleworth. In vain did Grimshaw’s two men try to explain to him that they had been over every square yard that he insisted on going over for himself. In vain did Beamish try to make the point that it was not the sawmill at all that ought to be interesting them. Brenda Shuttleworth, he tried to remind his superior, had simply crossed the sawmill site to get from where her own class was lunching to go and talk to some of her friends in another field. It was somewhere along that route that she had been sidetracked. It was therefore that route that they ought to be examining, not rotting stocks in sheds open to the elements. But it was absolutely hopeless trying to search along that route now. That would be to risk destroying such evidence as there might be.
Grimshaw started to become bad-tempered at being told all this. His mind was so fully occupied with his own ideas that little access was left for anyone else’s. Beamish was on the brink of asking him whether he hoped to find the Assistant Chief Constable’s rabbit-skin somewhere among the lumber, but he resisted – and determined that first thing in the morning, on his way out to locate Mosley, he would come back here alone and do justice to what needed justice.
At first light he was back at the sawmill. It was one of those mornings when treacherous April had put on a misleading allure. After yesterday’s continuous rain, the skies had cleared, and though the vegetation was sodden and the earth spongy in places, there was a breath of the new season’s vigour that enlivened Beamish’s lungs. He went straight to where Brenda’s class had eaten their sandwiches and found nothing. If they had achieved nothing else from their day, these kids had had a practical drilling in the Country Code. There was not a paper, button or thread to record their passing.
Brenda must have passed through the grounds of the mill to reach the next field. Beamish took that path, looked into one or two odd corners that he had been aching to look into last night, and again found nothing relevant.
It was easy to see where Brenda’s other friends had eaten their al fresco meal. The teacher in charge of that contingent had not been alive to the day’s potential object lessons. Beamish picked up a squashed Smarties tube, two 7 Up tins and a single green sock. How the hell did a child come to part company with one gree
n sock – and in what discomfort had she spent the rest of her day?
He was not going to find anything vital here. He had gleaned from the notes of the gabbled and overlapping accounts of the other children that no one in this other class had any memory of Brenda’s arrival. Therefore it was between the sawmill and this second field that she must have been taken. Beamish found a narrow footpath, so close in under a hedge that anyone treading it would have been out of sight to the other parties for some fifty yards or so. Beamish followed that footpath. And what he found there made his private expedition worthwhile.
It was a plaited leather button of the sort worn on the superior thick overcoats worn by some army officers.
Beamish retained a very clear picture of the coat that that button had come off. Elizabeth Stirrup had been walking very close beside it, her shoulder almost tucked into its wearer’s armpit. So it was Camel-hair Coat who had abducted Brenda Shuttleworth, too? For what possible reason? What wrong could a child possibly have done him? There could be only one answer: she had seen him.
And Mosley would know who Camel-hair Coat was.
Beamish came back up from the sawmill to the road with wet grasses clinging to his ankles. He must hurry to Mosley. But first, he thought, he would make a slight detour and drive slowly through Barker’s Clough, to see if there were any surface indications to suggest another brief visit to the farmhouse. The more he thought about the events of yesterday morning, the more he thought that Mrs Rawlings’s home must hold the key to what was going on: his conviction that someone else had been in and about the building while he was there; and Mosley’s peculiar statement that they must have got her away in good time.
Barker’s Clough was lifeless in Sunday-morning somnolence, except that he could tell that the village shop, where he had bought biscuits, was open. As he passed, an elderly man came out of its door, reading the News of the World. Beamish drove slowly through the Clough, waiting for the severe façade of Mrs Rawlings’s farm to come into view.
Mosley Went to Mow Page 11