In accordance with received practices, PC Bowman got Ernie Hurst to help him down with the body, in order to ascertain that death was as actual as appeared to be the case and to apply resuscitatory drills if applicable. That these would be superfluous was apparent from the manner in which Mrs. Cater’s cervical vertebrae were incapable of holding up her head. Although he normally lived within a sort of emotional armour-casing in the face of death and calamity, PC Bowman was relatively distressed by Mrs. Cater’s head and its grotesque independence of its accustomed anatomical support. For several days he introduced this topic into all his conversations with all men.
“I reckon she’s a write-off, Sid.”
“Oh, aye. Not much point in towing her to a garage. What were you saying about her cat, Ernie?”
“Boudicca?”
“I still think that’s a rum bloody name for a cat.”
“‘If ever you see her waiting to be let in, Mr. Hurst,’ she told me, ‘let her in.’ And four mornings out of five she was waiting to be let in. Funny thing—”
The milkman furrowed his brow. Anything inexplicable was a rare event. He was a man who readily accepted the most immediate explanation for anything.
“Funny thing. I opened the door this morning, and she wouldn’t go in. You know, I reckon animals sometimes know things, Sid.”
“Happen.”
Bowman wrapped Mrs. Cater’s telephone in his handkerchief, as he had been taught by TV police procedurals, and rang through to the desk sergeant at Bradburn, who initiated action in several well-established directions. Thus Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw received the news while engaged upon the third and final phase of his breakfast.
“Suicide?” he asked, at the mention of hanging.
“The reporting constable seems to have his doubts, sir.”
“Who’s that?”
“Bowman, sir.”
“Christ! Scene of Crime?”
“On their way.”
“Coroner’s sergeant informed?”
“I am the coroner’s sergeant, sir.”
“Inspector Mosley told?”
“Can’t find him, sir.”
Grimshaw thought fast. Just for a change, he was going to make this his own case. He could give Mosley something innocuous to do on the periphery, if that was ultimately unavoidable. Grimshaw went back to his toast and marmalade. There was no point in arriving there too soon, and simply getting in the way of the Scene of Crime team. He did a little more thinking about Mosley. Yesterday he had been convinced that he had been very astute about the Inspector; now a little shrug of doubt was beginning to take the edge off his third and last cup of tea.
He had known—because Mosley had told him—that last evening Mosley had been intending to sit in on a meeting with the Marldale witches. But he had prevented Mosley from attending. He had arranged for him to be otherwise occupied: organizing and assessing questionnaires about the Bradburn muggings, and personally supervising an on-the-ground check of nightbirds who claimed any pretext to be on the streets of Bradburn after dark. This, he told himself, was an essential task, in which it was even conceivable that Mosley might turn up something useful; though it was, his second-echelon brain-cells tried to remind him, doubtful practice to take an officer off an enquiry, even an unreported one, that his teeth were already well into. Still, the Assistant Chief Constable’s say so had been unequivocal he did not want Mosley involved.
So, really, it was an uncalled for act of masochism to be tormenting himself with the incipient niggle that if Mosley had been in Upper Marldale on the previous evening, Mrs. Beatrice Cater might still be alive.
The Detective-Superintendent had one more thought before leaving home for Marldale. He rang his office and asked for Detective-Sergeant Beamish to be made available from D Divison. Grimshaw’s sergeant-clerk smiled as she dialled the Chief-Inspector, D: so Tom was going lone patrol on this one—and making sure that it got solved.
Chapter Five
The Scene of Crime team were a group who knew each other’s ways and were led by Inspector Heathcote, an aspiring type who lived in the undying hope of solving something big before the main body arrived. He had solved any number of little cases in time to save the investigating officer any work, but so far they had all been too unimportant for a commendation.
Heathcote and his satellites were hard at it when the main body, in the person of Grimshaw, pulled into the drive of the Old Tollhouse. Men were dusting for dabs, measuring the ten-inch depth of drop, photographing the carpet, taking coffee-dregs for analysis and labelling plastic bags that contained, among other things, a short length of rope, a bundle of bed-sheets and various wisps of hair.
“Her bed appears to have been slept in by two people,” Inspector Heathcote said, “although I’m given to understand that the lady lived alone.”
“Have you talked to anybody? How old was she?”
“Late sixties, that’s local opinion.”
“Some people are never past it, so I’m told,” Grimshaw said, his own sex-life inevitably crossing his mind: unexciting, definitely not moribund, though somewhat depressingly predictable. “Don’t forget dog-ends and so forth. Might come in for saliva tests.”
“Already attended to, sir.”
That was the trouble with all this ancillary teamwork that they had to go in for nowadays: it was all too easy for the mastermind to be made to feel superfluous. Grimshaw went outside to cast his eye over the surroundings. No pleasure would have come more welcome to him than the chance to call Inspector Heathcote and draw his attention to a print in a flowerbed or reversing tyre-marks in the gravel. But he found nothing—unless—
Grimshaw moved closer so as to be able to examine a window-pane from an angle that he had not been able to manage yesterday.
“Inspector Heathcote!”
“Sir!”
“Curious-looking smear on the window here. Take a swab of it, will you, and put it in with the rest of your samples.”
“Will do, sir.”
And at that moment a large and overfed tabby cat came out from behind a pile of yard-rubbish and rubbed herself against Grimshaw’s ankle, her tail quivering vertical.
“Oh, how do you do?” Grimshaw greeted her, always at his best with strangers whom he could trust not to be rude to him. The cat miaowed piteously and changed ankle and angle.
“Oh dear. Hasn’t anyone thought of giving you anything to eat? I suppose with all that’s going on people have lost all sense of priority. Now I wonder if that milkman bothered to leave anything, things being as they are?”
It had been mentioned in the first telephone call that it was a milkman who had found the corpse. This was important: the person reporting the discovery of a body was, according to statistics, a very likely suspect.
“Inspector Heathcote!”
“Sir!”
“There’s a cat here requiring to be fed. We must always behave sympathetically towards the bereaved—it’s in standing orders.”
“Sir, I’ve done my best. I can’t get the animal to come in.”
Grimshaw looked over his shoulder, and true enough the cat had stopped a couple of feet short of the threshold and was glowering in at the open door with her back arched, her upper lip curled back and the decision to spit quite obviously close to the surface of her mind. Grimshaw stepped forward with his hands on his knees, bringing himself down to sympathetic cat-level.
“Puss, puss!”
The creature put a brave paw forward, then suddenly snarled, spun about and shot streak-like behind the rubbish from which she had emerged.
“Makes you wonder if animals sometimes know things,” Grimshaw said. “Inspector Heathcote—did that milkman leave anything?”
“Milk and cream on a corner of the kitchen-table, sir.”
Grimshaw went and found a saucer in one of Mrs. Cater’s cupboards, filled it with cream, carried it out and set it down by a corner of the junk-pile.
“Inspector, I’m going to mak
e some enquiries in the village. When you’ve finished, or if you want me for anything, I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty in locating me. My every movement will be a local event. And if Detective-Sergeant Beamish arrives, send him after me.”
He drove slowly towards the Upper Marldale nerve-centre, but seeing a milkfloat parked fifty yards short of the High Street, pulled up and waited for Ernie Hurst to come out.
“Good morning. Am I to understand that you are the man who discovered the unhappy scene at the Old Tollhouse?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw, Bradburn Headquarters. And you are?”
“Ernest Hurst, Pringle Model Dairies.”
“Is it normal procedure for you to enter premises to deliver milk, Hurst?”
“I’ve already explained that, sir.”
“Well, explain it again, to save any possible delay in communications, Hurst.”
“I only open the Tollhouse door when Boudicca wants to be let in, sir. That’s the cat—”
“You mean the outside door is not locked?”
“Mrs. Cater unlocks it before she goes to the toilet, sir. She is a woman of regular habits and always goes—went—at five to seven. When Boudicca hears the toilet flush, she comes out from the shed where she sleeps for the night. Then it depends whether Mrs. Cater or I gets—got—to the door first. I’ve already gone over this, sir, with Sid Bowman and—”
“We’d better have it in writing, all the same.”
“I’ve got to go and sign a statement in Pringle police station when I finish my round, sir.”
“PC Bowman told you to do that?”
If so, it was, unusually, one up to Bowman.
“No, sir, Inspector Mosley.”
“I beg your pardon? When did you see Inspector Mosley?”
“Just as I was leaving the Tollhouse, sir. He came in and asked Sid Bowman what all the fuss was about.”
“And where is Inspector Mosley now?”
“Dunno, sir. He went off somewhere in the village.”
Chapter Six
Grimshaw decided to call first on Major Hindle. Apart from the fact that he knew no one else in the village, Hindle had struck him yesterday in the pub as a pragmatic and literate character who was likely to have a pretty shrewd finger on the pulse of Marldale.
To find where Hindle lived he had to ask in the super-market, where his very entry caused something of a knowing flutter. And a group of opinionated theorists at the check-out were keen to raise their voices for his benefit.
“Mark my word, it will be one of the freaks.”
“She used to be in and out of the Old Glasshouse as if it were her second home.”
“It was a bad day for Marldale when that lot moved in.”
“And she was wanting to move them up here, wasn’t she?”
“We wouldn’t have been safe in our beds.”
“If you ask me, none of us are.”
Major Hindle lived in a small, neat cottage up the cul-de-sac hill that is known in Upper Marldale, for no reason that anyone can remember, as Tinkler’s. Mrs. Hindle (Mrs. Major Hindle, as she was known in the village) was a little woman, hoovering in a mob-cap, who behaved as if she was afraid that every word she spoke would turn out to have been the wrong thing to say. The Major, she told Grimshaw, was in his workshop at the back. But he had already come into the house at the sound of Grimshaw’s voice. Forced now to abandon yesterday’s anonymity, Grimshaw introduced himself by his rank and station.
“Well, who’d have thought it? Must say you were on the ball, old chap—up here asking questions before it happened. Pity you didn’t stay on a few hours. Might have been able to put a spoke in someone’s wheel. I suppose it is foul play—otherwise, obviously, you wouldn’t be here.”
Grimshaw decided that he must not be too free with information. Hindle was quick to notice his pause before replying.
“Or perhaps it’s early days, Superintendent—”
“Can’t really say until the pathologist has done his thing. But what I’m here for is anything you could tell me about Mrs. Cater—”
“Bea Cater? Well, of course, we’ve got to start speaking well of her now, haven’t we? Got to say I didn’t greatly like the woman, though. Don’t know anyone who did. I told you that yesterday, so I must be consistent, mustn’t I?”
“What was wrong with her?” Grimshaw asked him.
“Too big for Upper Marldale: that’s your truth in a nutshell. Not that anyone in Marldale is prepared to admit that anybody’s big, but in this case they’ve been getting it shoved at them too much of the time. And they haven’t liked it.”
“Too big in what sense?”
“In every sense. In everything she did. She had to be different—and she had to draw everybody’s attention to herself. Let me think of an example. When she first came here—oh, it would be three years ago—it got along the vine before anyone had even seen her that the Old Tollhouse had been taken by a sculptress. She wanted the place because the annexe would make an ideal studio. Has a northern light, which is a good thing for an artist to have. Then there was a hell of a to-do with a special surveyor she called in to make sure the floor would stand up to damned great slabs of marble. Art-school trained: but I ask you—I expect you’ve been in the place already? Did you notice the thing she’s got on her easel at the moment? I saw it at one of her charity coffee mornings. Great big black circle with a few blobs of purple slapped here and there. Imperial haemorrhoids, that’s what I heard somebody call it. Not that I have anything against art and artists, you understand.”
Hindle put on a self-deprecating grin.
“Bit of an artist myself, in my own small way—well, craftsman, anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Got to do something as an honest pension-eker-outer.”
“Paint yourself, do you?”
“Oh, no—nothing so clever. Make walking-sticks. Don’t earn a fortune from them, but manage to sell one now and then, through the Craft Shop. Anyway, I was saying—Marldale’s got nothing against painting. In fact, the locals like to see somebody with a brush in their hand, immortalizing one of their cottages or a stretch of hillside. Especially if there’s a sheep on it. You’re as good as an RA any day of the week in Marldale, if you can paint a sheep. But when it comes to doing a diagram of Nero’s piles—”
“I don’t go for abstracts much myself,” Grimshaw said. “But I’ve yet to hear of them as a motive for murder.”
“Ah, yes, don’t get me wrong. I’m just trying to put her together for you. Everything she did, you see, had to be off-beam—off other people’s beams, anyway. You know, if she was into something fresh—which happened on the average about once a fortnight—she’d drop it like a hot poker if she found it didn’t put her into a minority.”
“Like what?”
“Well, there was a footpath that a farmer had tried to close over on Marldale Nab, and she threw herself into that as if no one else in Marldale cared. That’s something Marldale didn’t like. It was their footpath, not hers, her not having lived here all of three years yet. And when the Parish Council called a public meeting about it, she didn’t want to know. If it had been her committee, with her stirring it all up—see what I mean?”
“That’s still not enough in my book to string her up from a beam.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Superintendent. I’m not suggesting that. It was you who asked my opinion of the woman—”
“Yes—and I see I couldn’t have come to a better source. Sorry I interrupted. Do please go on.”
“Then there’s the Open University. She has to have a degree. Got that before she came here. Not that I have anything against education, you understand, but is right for these people to be using public funds to spread left-wing balderdash? And you switch your set on in the morning, hoping to hear the overnight score against the Aussies, and what do you get? A bloody talk about Jane Austen.”
“You mean that Mrs. Cater held
extreme political views?”
“Oh, good God, no. True blue as they come—though she played around with this that and the other. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth—you mention it, she’d been a member of it—for a month or so. But she wouldn’t join the Conservative Association—though I’ll wager she always voted Tory. So why not sail under her true colours, I ask you?”
“But how are you so certain what her views were?”
“Had to be, didn’t they, with her background? You know—leopards, spots and all that stuff.”
Grimshaw did not want to admit that he did not know what Beatrice Cater’s background was, but he did not have long to wait for Hindle to tell him.
“I mean, her husband—died fifteen years ago, poor devil—a top man in the Foreign Office, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Warsaw. Well, if you ask me, he was a bit more than an office-wallah. So she must have spent the inside of her life rubbing shoulders with the corps diplomatique.”
“You did say yesterday that you thought that this local witchcraft nonsense had to do with politics.”
“Local politics, old man—purely local.”
“To be precise?”
“To be precise, a field, Superintendent. Known to all and sundry here as Ned Suddaby’s—though Ned Suddaby died before Prince Albert did. It belonged to the District Council, who bought it years ago for possible council house development. Well, you know this government’s policy on council houses, and who the hell wants any more of them in Marldale? Anyway, they decided to put it on the market and they’d had a bid from one of these private health insurance companies who wanted to build a convalescent home. That got our village red-raggers going—not that there are many of them. This social worker woman who’s come to live here, some damned woman who’s married to a scientist on the industrial estate in Pringle—and, of course, the redoubtable Priscilla Bladon.”
Mists Over Mosley Page 3