It was a grim, introspective façade – and evocative. The moment he saw it, even at several hundred yards’distance, he seemed to smell again its cold, stale interior. Moreover, there was white smoke rising abundantly from one of its chimneys, and the curtains that Mosley had washed were evenly drawn back at the windows.
Beamish drove up to the house. He knew he was going to need a cover-story, and found himself unusually incapable of fabricating one: there was no telling what or whom he was going to find. He was going to have to rely on an improvisation of the moment.
The yard was in the same forsaken state that had struck him yesterday. The door of the shed which housed the Widow Rawlings’s investment gallows was closed. A straggle of dejected and hungry-looking hens ran away at his approach.
He went to the door and hammered heavily. There was no response. He went and looked through one of the front windows, shielding his vision with his hands at the sides of his eyes. Within he could see a generous log fire just beginning to get up in the hearth – and at a corner of her kitchen table sat the Widow Rawlings herself, dipping a spoon into a bowl of bread and milk and reading a newspaper that lay folded in front of her. He tapped on the pane, but she did not look up. He had known that she was deaf, but had not realized that she was as deaf as this.
There was only one thing for him to do, and that was to lift the latch, a technical trespass that was likely to be vigorously resented in these parts, the one thing calculated to get him off on the wrong foot from the start. However, he had no choice. He pushed the door open just wide enough for him to see round it, giving another loud knock in attempted self-justification as he did so.
That did it. Mrs Rawlings was on her feet at once, glowering at him. He noticed that she was glad to rest her weight on the table as she came to her feet. He also saw that her fingers were trembling.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘That young man of Mr Mosley’s. You said you’d come back, but you never did.’
‘I did come.’
It is difficult to impress a simple fact on someone who does not hear it.
‘Mr Mosley said you’d come and put my curtains back up. He said you might iron them for me, too.’
‘I did come.’
‘It’s a big job, you know, for an old woman like me. And I don’t like having to stand on chairs and things.’
‘Mrs Rawlings –’
‘There’s one thing about Mr Mosley – if he says he’s going to do a thing, he does it.’
Yet the first time he had met her, she had been truculently averse to having anything done for her at all.
‘Mrs Rawlings – I did come.’
‘There’s no need for you to shout.’
‘I did come – and you weren’t here.’
‘I’d know what you were saying, if you didn’t shout. It’s the lip-reading, you know – but it only works when people speak in their ordinary voice. Oh, my God, what it is to be old!’
So he tried to form his words in a clear-cut way, but that did not seem to work either. Perhaps it made him exaggerate.
‘Well – now you are here, there is a job you can do for me.’
‘Gladly.’
‘There’s a sack of taters in the shed. Dick Bentham brought them yesterday, while I was out doing my bit of shopping. If you wouldn’t mind carrying them into the scullery for me –’
‘Gladly.’
It was the shed in which he had seen the components of the gallows stacked. He looked round and saw that every single cubic foot of timber had disappeared. The shed was spaciously empty, except for the potatoes and a miscellany of spades, forks and hoes leaning under cobwebs against the walls.
Mrs Rawlings had followed him out of the house, as if she did not trust him out of her sight. She seemed to know what he was looking for – and not finding.
‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘Glad to have got it away, too – horrible thing. The man came for it yesterday afternoon, with a lorry from Bradburn.’
‘Oh.’
‘But he didn’t pay me any money. I don’t know how long I’m going to have to wait for my money. The lorry-driver said that was nothing to do with him.’
Beamish carried the potatoes into the house and made varied attempts to direct the conversation usefully. But nothing came to anything. He could not make up his mind how much of her deafness was pretence. There were moments when she showed signs of an unexpected intelligence. Or perhaps it was only by contrast that it seemed to be intelligence. At one point, she even remembered his name from his first visit.
‘If you would not mind doing one more little job for me, Mr Beamish …’
But as soon as he tried to ask her a seemingly casual question about her movements yesterday – had she perhaps been out down at the shop while he had been trying to call on her? – it was impossible to make any contact with her mind at all.
The other little job took him a good deal longer than he had expected. It consisted of scrambling about in all the dirtiest and least accessible corners of the yard, under Mrs Rawlings’s nagging direction, collecting the eggs that her hens seemed to lay wherever they fancied. He undertook it because he hoped that further willingness might unloose willingness on her part. But it didn’t. She was clearly on the point of remembering something else that she wanted done, when he managed to back away from her towards his car.
Of course, he could ask in the shop. He had made reasonable progress in there, the first time he had come to the Clough. He could find out at what time yesterday, if at all, Mrs Rawlings had come in for her groceries.
He had to wait a long time for attention. The only customer in front of him was a small child buying sweets, but the woman behind the counter was giving as much attention to the choice between sherbet balls and spearmint chews as she would have done to the visit of a Health Inspector.
When Beamish’s turn came, it was obvious that she recognized him at once, for she reached up to a shelf behind her and handed him a sealed letter.
It was from Mosley, and consisted mainly of a list of domestic favours that he begged Beamish to do today on his behalf.
Because by the time you read this, I shall be well on my way to East Africa.
Chapter Fifteen
‘She’s just about as sound constitutionally as any young woman I’ve ever examined.’
That was Dr Moulton’s verdict on Elizabeth Stirrup.
‘Heart and lungs as sound as I’d prescribe for one of her age. And not a bruise or scratch on her. But obviously she’s been in some sort of war …’
He looked quizzically at Georgina Crane. Elizabeth Stirrup hardly seemed to know that she was being examined.
‘You may have heard of her in the news. She’s one of the two who disappeared. She came back in this state.’
‘Let her sleep it out. See what she’s like when she wakes. I’ll pass by this way again this evening. In the meantime, if you’re worried, give me a ring.’
Beamish did not believe that Mosley had left the country. Nor would he have guaranteed at this moment that his earlier admiration for the Inspector was going to survive this latest bout of imbecility. Moreover, he believed that there were plenty of people in this neighbourhood who knew very well that Mosley had not gone to Kenya, and who could, if they saw fit, reveal his whereabouts at the drop of a hat. But no hat was going to be dropped. Mosley would have seen to that. His ridiculous headgear was wedged firmly down to the tips of his obstinate ears. There was a persistent image at the back of Beamish’s brain: it was of the stumpy little Mosley, homburg, raincoat and all, hiding behind every bank of heather, every slither of boulders and every screen of gorse, watching his, Beamish’s, every movement. And, here and there, Mosley would have planted clues, indications as to where he wanted him to go toiling off to next.
There was only one thing to do, and that was to pursue the list of chores that Mosley had bequeathed him. Because it was somewhere on the flanks of that pilgrimage that Mosley would be lurking. But Beamish
knew he would have to continue to work on the woman who ran the shop. She was clearly an ally of Mosley’s and firmly under his thumb – but there might be some way of tricking her into giving something away. The first time Beamish had met her, he had managed to get information out of her by patient subterfuge. He was just about to ask her a vital question now when someone else came into the shop. Like a well-trained commercial traveller, Beamish stood back to give priority to a local customer. It was a decrepit veteran pauper in bedroom slippers who wanted to buy a single rasher of smoked back bacon. This the woman declined to sell him, informing him that it was against the law to sell on the Sabbath a foodstuff that required preparation for the table. At the same time she made elaborate facial signs to try to let him know that the law was on the premises. And good God! Beamish thought – does she think I have nothing better to do than come between a man and his breakfast?
‘Why don’t you promise her in front of a witness,’ he suggested, ‘that you are going to eat it raw.’
‘Oh, aye – allus do,’ the man said. He got his rasher, for which the shopkeeper had to broach a prepacked plastic bag. Beamish was left alone in the shop.
‘Was there something else, then, Mr Beamish?’
Beamish was certain that he had never told her his name. She could have had it only from Mosley. And she had remembered it.
‘Yes – about Mr Mosley – he didn’t leave me any verbal message?’
‘No – he just dropped in last night – after he’d brought Mrs Rawlings back. And he’s gone now to spend a few days with his sister, you know – hasn’t seen her for seventeen years. He’d just had a message from the airport about his reservation.’
‘Just a moment – did you say he had brought Mrs Rawlings back from somewhere?’
‘Yes. She’d spent the day with her grandniece, over at Lower Calesthorpe.’
‘Had he taken her there too, yesterday morning?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t say about that. But I do know that he brought her home again.’
‘I see. What time was this?’
‘Oh, it would be between six and seven in the evening.’
‘And when was his flight? Did he mention that?’
‘Oh, no – and I didn’t want to seem inquisitive. It was none of my business.’
‘He didn’t say which airport?’
‘No, he never mentioned anything like that.’
No – he wouldn’t, would he, the wily old basket.
‘It’s funny, you know,’ she volunteered. ‘There were a lot of strange faces in the Clough yesterday.’
‘Oh, ah?’
‘There was this big old black car – I’d seen that in the morning, too. Then it was back again only a second or two after Mr Mosley had left.’
‘What kind of big old black car?’
‘Oh, very ancient – but spick and span – like as if it had escaped from some transport museum. I suppose there was a rally somewhere. The people in it looked like gentry of the old sort, too. Two women, a man and a little girl.’
‘And you say they followed hard on Inspector Mosley’s heels?’
‘Oh, yes – there was hardly a moment between them.’
‘So you’d say that Mr Mosley must have seen them?’
‘I don’t see how he could have missed them. They must have been getting out of their car as he was getting into his.’
Sunday morning, I’m taking two old ladies to chapel at Higher Stonely.
So Mosley had said – and their names and directions for finding their house were duly to be found in his letter to Beamish.
It was a fair drive to Higher Stonely, which lay at the north-western extremity of Mosley’s kingdom. The two old ladies – Miss Lois and Miss Laetitia Ledman – were as Beamish expected two compulsive chapel-goers to be; but there were things about their home that were out of character. As to appearances Laetitia was tall, gaunt and under-nourished. Lois was apparently the one who accounted for most of the household’s rations, being short, round, well-fleshed and beaming. Both spoke in thin, apologetic voices, rich in local vowels but extremely precise in their enunciation. Their gratitude at being taken to the next village for morning worship was embarrassingly repetitious. Their clothes belonged to the period between the wars – though not of the same vintage as Janie Goodwin’s: they had at least emerged from the 1920s – if only just. They must have found some friendly neighbourhood hairdresser who had reached the prime of her skills long before the Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary. Miss Laetitia had clumps at the side of her head in the fashion that used to be known as ear-phones, while Miss Lois’s coiffure seemed to date from the original introduction of the permanent wave, which clung tightly and whitely to the contours of her head.
The walls of their house were appropriately adorned with comforting texts, and an evangelistic hymnbook stood open on the rack of a piano that had presumably so far escaped Mosley’s specialized attentions. But these things apart, there were possessions in their sitting-room that Beamish looked at twice.
For example, the sisters owned a small and relatively inexpensive but none the less contemporary personal computer, and the manual on the table beside it suggested that one or both of them took an active interest in data-management systems. Most of their furniture was old, and some of it antique but without consistency of taste or co-ordination of impact. And in one corner, between a bamboo-matting table and a revolving bookstand in fumed oak, stood a three-tier suspension filing-cabinet in green metal. The pink newsprint of the Financial Times was prominent among the contents of a wicker magazine-rack.
Time was advancing, and Beamish took them straight to their chapel without much time for constructive talk. He did not go into the service with them, truthfully pleading that he had urgent telephone calls to make.
These started at the main information desk of Manchester Ringway, and led him eventually to Heathrow, where he learned from a passenger manifest that a man called Mosley had taken off for Nairobi with Air Kenya at seven this morning.
On the way home with his two passengers, Beamish was too full of difficult thoughts for conversation in depth. There were things that he needed to work out, but instead of coming up with solutions, his brain kept circling round them. He still did not want to believe that Mosley had gone, and his mind did not want to come to grips with the likely consequences if the old man had in fact deserted. He told himself that it was by no means beyond Mosley’s resources to have fixed the Air Kenya desk to give false information. But if the bird had indeed flown – and if he could be implicated as an accessory in the disappearance of a woman and a girl – then the prospects would not bear contemplation: Beamish could not forget that there had been a time when he had had quite an affection for Mosley.
An April shower hit the windscreen, then the cloud that had produced it was gone. His two passengers burbled on. There was no doubt that this morning had been a true spiritual experience for them, and they could not keep their elation to themselves. Beamish was glad he had taken them: the halo-consciousness of the do-gooder who sees something for his pains. He changed into third gear to negotiate the bends of a falling valley whose greenery was beginning to attest the freshness of spring. And he managed to keep up a polite end in the conversation without at first paying very deep attention to it. The thought also occurred to him that under their rather pathetic effervescence, the two sisters might possibly be building up to telling him something.
‘It’s not every day of the week that something like this happens to us,’ Miss Lois giggled.
‘I say good old Inspector Mosley!’ Miss Laetitia chortled.
‘I can still hardly believe it has happened.’
‘That sum Inspector Mosley did about the compound interest was the finishing touch.’
‘Quite the finishing touch.’
‘We must put it in the computer and see if he got it right.’
‘Oh, you can be sure he got it right. Inspector Mosley doesn’t make mistakes about t
hings like that.’
‘Or about anything else if you ask me.’
‘Don’t you think Inspector Mosley is a wonderful man, Mr Beamish?’
‘Oh, quite remarkable,’ Beamish said, aware that his tone might be lacking in the unqualified enthusiasm that the women clearly expected of him. It was also now obvious to him that they were no longer talking about the uplift of the service that they had just attended.
‘But then, of course, you’ll have been in on this all along the line, won’t you, Mr Beamish?’
‘Oh, yes – we work together a good deal of the time,’ Beamish said.
‘Now, of course, we’ve got to put our heads together and decide what to do with it all.’
‘If you put it into unit trusts, there’s no telling how much of it goes into breweries and cigarette firms.’
‘I thought there was going to be a fight, though, at one time.’
‘Those two men – I felt sure they were going to come to blows.’
‘Miss Goodwin was a tower of strength from start to finish.’
‘I shall never forget the look on Ernie Walton’s face. I don’t think he’s ever had his hands on so much money at one time in his life.’
‘And Mr Mosley said that even compound interest didn’t compensate for all these years of inflation.’
‘Still – we musn’t grumble.’
‘Ernie Walton certainly wasn’t grumbling.’
And the sisters laughed together as if they were auditioning for a scene on a blasted heath.
‘Look,’ Beamish said. ‘You must tell me what exactly did happen yesterday. I’ve not seen Mosley since, and I’m not up to date.’
‘Oh – in that case – I don’t know whether we ought –’
‘I don’t know whether Mr Mosley would want us to –’
‘He did say he wouldn’t care for everybody to know how he sometimes sets about things.’
‘“Right hand, left hand,” he said.’
‘Perhaps you’d better wait until you see Mr Mosley again, Mr Beamish.’
Mosley Went to Mow Page 12