‘On the other hand,’ Beamish said, his brain driven as by pistons, ‘our friend Mosley has gone away, you know.’
‘Oh, yes – he told us all about that.’
‘All the way to Africa.’
‘And he’s left me to tie up all the loose ends for him. He asked me to clear everything up when I saw you this morning.’
They seemed to need a few tens of seconds to chew all this over. He was conscious of rhythmical breathing on the seat behind him. The Misses Ledman were hemmed in by a formidable palisade of suspicion. He could not be certain how intelligent they were – but their elemental shrewdness was frightening. They had an all-embracing instinct for self-protection.
‘Well – I don’t know what we are going to be able to tell you,’ Lois said. ‘I don’t think we did know what was happening to us half the time.’
‘I certainly didn’t,’ Laetitia said.
‘But of course we’ll tell you all we do know. You must come in for a glass of ginger wine when we get home.’
They were aggressive teetotallers, but the ginger wine was something more than a concession, it was – they both said it – a proof to the world that they were not bigoted. They produced the bottle with proud panache and poured Beamish a tot as if they were handing him something that they knew he was craving for. During the course of the next hour, he learned a good deal. But the more he learned, the more conscious he was of essential gaps in his knowledge.
The first thing that they insisted on his knowing was that their father had been a bank clerk, and they produced this ancestral achievement as if he had sat on half the boards in Threadneedle Street. This was the financial basis on which their own lifelong business acumen rested. They were not well off: this fact had been established early on in a kind of self-defence, as if it would make it less likely that Beamish would try to beg or steal from them. But they had a certain small sum between them. They were coy at first about how much it was – but like all the things they were coy about, it was something that they were eager to announce after the appropriate dramatic build-up.
Together they had two thousand pounds. And they had invested it all over the market, in small sums that gave them a compulsive interest in the daily movements of shares: fifty pounds in a department store here, one hundred and fifty in a chain chemist there, nominal holdings in municipalities in all quarters of the realm. They were showered with balance sheets, received more invitations to AGMs than many a fiscal giant.
‘And, of course, it does make sure the postman calls.’
‘And we can check the figures so much faster, now we have this thing.’
A gesture in the direction of their computer.
‘Though of course we don’t make use of all the things it can do.’
‘We do at least know how to make it add up.’
But as well as their portfolios, they had one notional asset. There was a history of bad debt – something that they admitted they had long since given up any hope of retrieving, but that they had always included in their annual accounts for accuracy’s sake. Wilson Goodwin Senior had owed their father fifty pounds. It was characteristic of Goodwin that having had a request for a renewal of overdraft turned down in the inner office, he had at least managed to raise a puff of wind from a mere ledger clerk. But then, that was one of the reasons why Wilson Goodwin had survived at all. There was something about him that made all sorts of unexpected people get satisfaction from helping him out of temporary holes.
The debt had not been repaid until yesterday, and – at this stage the narrative of the Misses Ledman began to become vague – this was something that Mosley had initiated. A few weeks ago, Mosley had been round at the Ledman’s house asking questions and, while promising nothing, had dropped a few optimistic hints.
Janie Goodwin came into the picture somewhere, though Beamish was unable to find out – because the Ledmans did not know – whether it was as a prime mover. There were also two men involved in the story somewhere. They had both been at the meeting that Mosley had taken the sisters to attend yesterday. One of them they knew – because that was how he was addressed – was Janie Goodwin’s brother, a reprobate of whom they had heard, but whom they had never met.
‘The strange thing is, you’d have thought he was such a nice man.’
‘A gentleman, you’d have said.’
But they were able to give Beamish only the most disappointing account of the other man, amounting only to a physical description, which was remarkable only for the outdoor coat he was wearing.
‘Where did all this take place?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to try to tell you that.’
‘Do you know, we’ve lived in these parts all our lives, and there are some places we’ve still never seen?’
‘It was so wild.’
‘Like Wuthering Heights.’
‘That woman, screaming upstairs.’
‘That wasn’t Wuthering Heights, Lois – that was Jane Eyre.’
‘What woman, screaming up what stairs?’ Beamish asked them.
‘She was a young woman. I think they’d brought her with them. I think they’d locked her up somewhere.’
‘There was a little girl, too. Miss Goodwin was very nice to her.’
‘So was Inspector Mosley.’
‘Just a minute,’ Beamish said.
The women had in their minds a montage of crisply felt but inexplicable mysteries, of which they were only now beginning to relish the full flavour. They had clearly had to do with Janie Goodwin, Elizabeth Stirrup, Brenda Shuttleworth, Wilson Goodwin Junior, the man in the camel-hair coat – and Mosley.
‘Where did all this happen?’
Beamish was striving not to allow impatience to creep into his tone: it would be all too easy to scare them off.
‘We’ve been beating our brains against that. Lois is sure it was east of here.’
‘And Laetitia is certain the sun was mostly behind us.’
‘We went round so many corkscrews.’
‘I’m sure the driver was doubling back on himself on purpose.’
‘It was miles from anywhere.’
‘It wasn’t big enough to call a village. Perhaps it hasn’t even got a name.’
‘There can’t have been more than half a dozen houses.’
It had to be Barker’s Clough.
‘Then when the man came about the gallows –’
‘He looked just like the public hangman.’
‘Laetitia, that’s very loose talk. You know you’ve never seen the public hangman.’
‘No, but you know what I mean. This man drove up in a lorry, Mr Beamish. And he asked where the gallows was.’
‘And we weren’t the only ones who thought he’d come to do something dreadful.’
‘Wilson Goodwin certainly thought he had.’
‘And Inspector Mosley was lookng on with a sort of twisted, knowing smile.’
‘Like a sort of cherubic Beelzebub,’ Lois Ledman said.
‘Oh, come now, Lois – that’s going a bit far.’
There was more like this – a good deal more like it. A good deal of it fitted in with what Beamish already knew, but it did very little to extend that knowledge – or to help him to interpret it.
Beamish went back to Mosley’s letter to remind himself of the remainder of the day. It was clearly no mere flight of chance that his next call had to be on Ernie Walton who, according to the Ledman sisters, had figured very highly in the distribution of funds over which Mosley had presided yesterday.
Cabbages in plastic bucket in shed was the instruction that Mosley had included in his notes on Neighbouring.
Beamish found those plants, done up in newspaper and string in the yellow receptacle described. He did not claim horticultural expertise. Such lore as he had on the subject had come from other men’s complaints against their own folly in attempting to till the soil at all in such an area. But even Beamish could see that these waifs and foundlings from other men’s th
innings-out were not worth the trouble of preparing a bed for them. There was about them a limp weariness, a perforated yellow wilt that did not prognosticate survival. One did not need the cross-references of a Readers’Digest vademecum to recognize an early inclination to club root, the fatal evidence of early frost damage and an obvious propensity to grey mould, leaf spot and soft rot.
‘Did Mosley get these for you?’
‘Aye.’
It would be too much to say that Ernie Walton showed pride in his pailful of green weaklings. But he did not show dissatisfaction with them, which was curious. Ernie Walton was not a man who ever revealed pride – or, indeed, anything else so debilitating as a human emotion – but his normal conversation was a comprehensive, far-ranging and everlasting statement of dissatisfaction with everything. His only reaction to any circumstance was to distrust it. And certainly he distrusted Beamish. He asked him more than once, and in a variety of ways, whether he was sure that he was the man that Mosley had sent. Ernie Walton was a little man, in his early seventies, like so many of the principals in this action, and he wore clothes whose chances of seeing the year out were about on the par of those of his cabbage plants.
Beamish decided that the only thing to do was to get on with the job as if it were serving some useful purpose. A swashbuckling spade and a touch of bravado with the dibber would all help to lessen the time that the job would take. Ernie Walton fetched a backless kitchen chair from his shed and sat on it at the end of his patch, watching every one of Beamish’s amateurish movements and registering grounds for complaint the next time he saw Mosley.
It could be said of this particular acreage of allotments that Ernie’s cabbages, once deployed, would not look out of place. The grey, stony soil, liberally laced also with riddled cinders, was the sort of environment that these tender plantlings had grown up in. By the time that Beamish had come to the end of his third and final row, a number of other weekend gardeners had also left their last ostensible occupation and were dotted about their earthy paths silently watching. Beamish put in the last sorry herb, pressed the soil firmly against its feeble stem with his heel, and stood back to survey Ernie Walton’s investment in the seasonal future. The leaves of some thirty plants were lying flat on the ground, at the end of stalks that looked like discarded vermicelli.
‘Poor little buggers!’ he heard some one say.
He scraped soil off the spade, wound up Ernie’s sack-tie line and carried the bits and pieces back into Ernie’s shed.
‘Well, there you are, Ernie. Don’t blame me if some of them don’t make it. Get in touch with Mosley.’
Ernie looked at him with an ugly eye, as if the very superfluity of speech was some guide to what its content might have been.
‘Did Mr Mosley not say owt about any money?’
‘Not to me, he didn’t. But I gather you did rather well out of yesterday’s readjustments. Quite a few outstanding debts were settled, I’m told.’
‘Oh, you were told, were you?’
Once Ernie Walton had taken to doubting, it was difficult to utter any single syllable without further nourishing that doubt.
‘You saw the Inspector last night, I take it, after he’d finished with us?’
‘Well, no – he left me a letter.’
Ernie’s suspicion deepened. Nothing was quite as untrustworthy as the written word.
‘Forty pounds,’ he said, with a sinister insinuation. ‘You’re sure Mr Mosley didn’t say owt about forty pounds?’
‘Do you think I’d hide it from you if he had? Look – you don’t doubt me, do you? Mosley told you it would be me who’d come today, didn’t he?’
‘He said it would be a bright young fellow, very much on the ball.’
‘There are one or two things I’d like to ask you about yesterday.’
‘Oh, aye? Well, you’d better ask Mosley, hadn’t you?’
By now Ernie had firmly decided that Beamish must be entirely on the wrong side of the fence.
‘This is altogether a complicated business,’ Beamish said.
‘Aye – well, some of that forty pounds went to pay off the bloke who came for the gallows, Emma Rawlings being out, and not having left anything in the tea-caddy. And Mosley needed the rest to settle out-of-pocket expenses – so he said. He’d let me have the rest later. That’s all I can tell you. And I don’t know how it comes about that you don’t know these things for yourself, if you’re who you say you are.’
And that was the tenor of the remainder of Beamish’s talk with Ernie Walton. He decided that the time had come, much as he would have liked to put it off, to make another report to Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw.
Chapter Sixteen
Georgina Crane looked at Elizabeth Stirrup’s face as it lay valleyed in the pillows, in final surrender to exhaustion. How was it possible that such a quick-brained and above all else industrious child should have turned into this useless creature? The most sobering thought was that perhaps she had positively striven to turn herself into the end-product that she thought her teachers wanted her to be.
Georgina went to her window and looked out over the village. It was the same April morning on which Sergeant Beamish had started out in the vanished wake of Mosley: a freshness in the air and a fair sky for the first time for days, with only shower-clouds moving fast over the horizon. She had a view of Hempshaw End that would perhaps not have appealed to many landscape painters, but she saw a positive beauty in the random cast of roofs and chimneys. And she saw that from one of those chimneys, smoke was rising: from Janie Goodwin’s.
She put on her outdoor coat, let herself silently out of the house, and made for Janie Goodwin’s. When she was almost there, she had a change of mind, turned face-about and climbed the hill towards Noll Cromwell’s.
As if by some masochistic intuition, Grimshaw came awake a full minute before his bedside phone rang: long enough for him to reassemble in his mind the expectation that today was going to be worse than yesterday. There were times when Grimshaw wished he had embraced some other career: raking up elephant dung in some under-capitalized travelling circus, for example.
And who would be phoning him at this pre-dawn stand-to hour? The Assistant Chief Constable, perhaps, proffering some overnight hunch about where he might lay his hands on that rabbit-skin?
It was the Warden of the Field Studies Centre, informing him of the unharmed return of Brenda Shuttleworth. His better nature told him that this was a moment for silent thanksgiving. But his mind, more active on a less noble stratum, was filled with the illogical feeling that the news could signify only that something else, somewhere else, must have gone wrong. It could not be straightforward good news. Somebody, somewhere, must have buggered something up. It had, of course, to be Mosley; but there was yet another cloud-shadow on Grimshaw’s horizon nowadays; it might equally easily have been Beamish. Grimshaw drove through the Sunday-morning streets of one of Bradburn’s most desirable dormitory suburbs, feeling nothing but venom towards the visible and outward signs of bourgeois complacency all round him.
Why this unreason? Why not unmitigated relief that the child was still alive? The Warden had insisted that she was in the pink of condition. A little child shall lead us. Maybe a little child was going to clear up the whole issue for him; rendering him, of course, superfluous.
Brenda was sleeping the sleep of the innocent when Grimshaw arrived at Hempshaw End. And there had to be a strong-willed Matron in attendance to whom it seemed inhuman that anyone should think of disturbing the child. Grimshaw hovered at the bedside wishing to God that somebody would make an accidental noise. But Brenda slept loglike, an unaesthetic bubble quivering in the corner of her mouth.
As far as a fairly superficial examination could ascertain, she was quite unhurt; Grimshaw the professional insisted that she was to be taken off to Casualty for unmentionable investigation as soon as he had finished with her: that was if he was ever going to be allowed to start. She had come back to the Centre, those ab
out her informed him, in very high spirits indeed, not so much, they had to admit, through relief at being back among her own kind, but in elation at the things that had happened to her in her absence. She had said something about an old woman and a ride in a pre-deluge but super car. Both woman and car had conveniently disappeared by the time Brenda’s return was known to the staff of the Centre.
It was getting on for mid-morning when she woke, and her first reaction was to cry, presumably in expiation of her supposed naughtiness. Advisers at all levels quickly put her right on that score and Grimshaw was eventually able to question her as she sat up in bed dipping her spoon into a boiled egg.
Common ground was that she had gone off from the field by the sawmill to try to find some friends from the Second Year in the next sector. Under cover of a hedge down by the derelict woodyard, she had run into a person who could only, from her description, have been Janie Goodwin, with whom she had quickly made friends. Tut-tut that any child from a school frequently visited by crime-prevention officers should go off alone with an adult stranger. But children did go off with adult strangers, however often one lectured them. Brenda Shuttleworth was obviously just such a child. And there was no doubt that the adult stranger in this case had made herself very plausible indeed. Successful abductors generally are.
Little bits of the jigsaw came together. Brenda Shuttleworth had lingered for a long time in an entertaining conversation with Janie Goodwin – for such a long time that they both failed to realize that the school party had moved on. Janie therefore said that if Brenda came with her, she would ring up the Centre to let them know that she was in good hands, and that she would organize transport to take her back to her friends. She herself did not want to get caught by the search-party – it would spoil a game that she and some of her grown-up friends were playing. She had so far evaded capture by moving forward on the extreme edge of the search-line, so far from the others that they could not recognize even the weirdness of her costume. Twice in fact, much to her amusement – and Brenda laughed again as she retold it to Grimshaw – a policeman had spotted her from a distance and beckoned her to move in closer to the cordon.
Mosley Went to Mow Page 13