“God! Could it have been as late as that?”
“Where did you go, when you left here, Major?”
“Where did I go? Where do you think I’d go at two in the morning, man? I went home.”
Hindle laughed: a brittle attempt at ridicule that would surely have convinced no one.
“You did not pay any calls on the way?”
“Calls on the way, Mosley—at that time of night?”
“You’re saying no, sir?”
“Of course I’m bloody well saying no.”
“In that case I ha-have to ask you, sir—”
Mosley’s diffidence went as far as a slight stammer. He seemed to hate himself for having to put the question.
“I have to ask you, then, when you were last at the Old Tollhouse.”
There was no doubt that the dart homed in. And Hindle was so unskilled a dissimulator that he lost his temper.
“What the hell are you insinuating now? What bloody gossip is this that you’ve been listening to? Even on the level of good taste, Mosley, this is monstrous. I don’t know what your superiors will say, but I’ll certainly see they hear of this.”
Mosley’s head was slightly bowed: it could have been with shame and an implied apology.
“I would have thought on the whole,” he said, “that we’d rather not have my superiors going round Upper Marldale asking this sort of question. I mean, between ourselves, there exists a need to know. I need to know. But once I do know, if the facts are irrelevant, there’s an end to the matter.”
He was not able to take it up further with Hindle at the moment, because they were interrupted by the arrival of the uniformed motor-cyclist with the papers that Grimshaw had sent. This officer had had previous experience looking for Mosley in the deep country, and had made a bee-line for the Crook.
“Excuse me.”
Mosley went over to a table and opened the envelope.
“Excuse me,” he said again. “I must make a phone-call to my superiors.”
Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw sat in his bedroom slippers in his armchair, sipped a whisky-and-water and cast an appraising eye down his first interim short-list of land-deals.
There was one that stuck out like the telegraph poles on Crumble Ridge, which was the name of the tract of country concerned. What drew Grimshaw’s attention was that he could see no reason why the County Council should have wanted to acquire this bleak and sterile moor in the first place—unless to speculate on its resale value if a link-road between two trans-Pennine motorways were ever to be driven across it. As it was, the County resold the land within two years of purchase, at a profit that could scarcely have covered the survey and legal costs of the original conveyancing. Yet the new owners, a financial holding company, must have made a bomb when the earth-shifters for the link-road did finally move in.
The next case was a ten-acre parcel where the County boundary ran down to the edge of Bradcaster City. These fields had been bought in the early 1950s for extensions to the adjoining county grammar school, now a sixth-form college. On the face of it, there seemed reasonable grounds for selling: the falling birth-rate and the enlargement of a neighbourhood comprehensive certainly gave the impression that the land was now surplus to the requirements of the Education Department. It was sold to a massive hypermarket, despite vociferous opposition from the Bradcaster Chamber of Commerce.
But this was ignoring the overall picture. The Education Committee had aspirations in other directions. At the same time as the hypermarket deal was going through, a sports and leisure complex was being envisaged for an overspill estate not three quarters of a mile away. Fifteen acres were needed for the establishment and its accompanying playing-fields, but the populace had to be satisfied in the end with half that area—bought at a quarter of a million pounds more than the hypermarket had paid for their freehold.
Finally, Grimshaw had been struck by a transaction on a much more modest financial scale. Evenlode, an old people’s home on one of the hills bordering Bradburn, had been discontinued and the property put on the market: a not extensive former country house in secluded grounds. A strong case had been made out: general retrenchment was required by central government. The property needed much spent on it both structurally and from the sanitary point of view. Its distance from town was highly inconvenient for the old people and their relatives. And more sheltered housing in the heart of Bradburn was promised within ten years’ time. What happened to the old people of Evenlode was not recorded in the minutes. Few of them could have afforded the fees of the private nursing home which bought the property. In no case did the minutes answer the key questions. They contained a statement of final decisions, of facts, dates and figures. They did not recapitulate the arguments, the infighting or the wheeler-dealing that must have gone on in sub-committees, official and unofficial, before party whips finally dictated the block voting in full Council. The common ground in all three cases was that it was outsiders, and not the County rate-payers who had benefited both financially and in the matter of amenities. Whether there were any common personalities among these outsiders was the crux of the matter—that was the missing link at which the DPP’s assistant had jibbed. The tangle of frontmen, nominees and holding companies was something that Grimshaw knew he had not the expertise to unravel. But he did know that there was common ground on the local-government side. County Councillor Harry Whitcombe had been the genial committee chairman in every case. Grimshaw poured himself another whisky and picked up the phone. He dialled his office to ask if there were any operational messages that he ought to know about before he went to bed. Having heard what there was, he dictated one short memo to be transmitted forthwith to Mosley.
Public bar at Crook Inn unsuitable as Incident Room. Find alternative at once. T. G., Det-Sup.
They were finally going to Priscilla Bladon’s. On their way Beamish ventured to query Mosley’s future policy towards Major Hindle.
“Oh, he’ll come to us. He’ll be so damned scared in case a word of this gets to his wife.”
“You really think he was at the Tollhouse last night?”
“Damned sure he wasn’t. Bed was slept in by two other people. Hairs from their privates prove that. Grimshaw has sent me the path notes.”
“So what do you hope to gain from him?”
“Pillow talk.”
And the thought seemed to bring Mosley genuine merriment.
“If you can imagine what Hindle and Mrs. Cater found to chat about between their passionate exertions.”
“I must say I find the thought of that liaison both astonishing and more than slightly sickening.”
“Do you? We never know what any of us might come to, Beamish.”
“Really, Inspector—”
“Think I’m a dirty old man, do you? These things happen, laddie.”
“I know that. But—”
“It boils down to physics in the long run, Beamish—the incompressibility of liquids. The relief of hydrostatic pressures becomes imperative on the one hand, and both parties enjoy an exchange of sensations—or at least, the never-dying hope of a sensation. Plus the fact that the two of them are working hard to convince themselves that they aren’t past it.”
“Yes. I understand all that. It’s the final image that I find revolting.”
“Not so revolting as the final image of the other couple in Mrs. Cater’s bed.”
“I must confess I haven’t got the weight of them yet.”
“I have. Professional killers.”
“You’re convinced of that, aren’t you?”
“I see nothing else that fits the bill.”
“All right. Hypothesis accepted. So why leap into bed? At the very moment when they ought to be putting miles behind them?”
“They’re professional killers for two reasons. One’s the contract fee. The other’s the joy they get from the moment of performance: and by performance, I mean killing. Killing turns them on—I believe that’s the favoured termi
nology. No bag over the victim’s face, remember?”
A little man in a homburg—a homburg that he ought to have exchanged for a new one at least a couple of years ago; a little man in his mid-fifties who looked a good deal older; a little man in a navy-blue suit that shone at the knees, and whose jacket-pockets appeared to be stuffed with potatoes. His mind had no right to be running on lines like these.
“Don’t think I’m pontificating, Beamish. How can you and I know? But something must go on in the minds of a pair of professional killers. They do a deliberate, Home Office job on Beatrice Cater. They watch her face death. And it turns them on. The bed’s there.”
“I still think—”
“Damn it, it wouldn’t take them long, Beamish, worked up as they were. Don’t you see, lad—”
The unwonted enthusiasm of a man who had just seen something else—
“Don’t you see—that’s why they moved the corpse? Maybe the lady’s on the fussy side. Maybe she didn’t care for a spot of how’s-your-father with that thing hanging there. So they moved it into the next room, hung it from the beam. Wouldn’t take a couple of minutes. And I’ll bet the other thing didn’t take a couple of minutes, either.”
“But if you’re right—and I’m not saying you are—this is all a long way from anything we know or can prove—doesn’t this give us a modus operandi?”
“I’ve heard people sling terms like that about.”
But Beamish’s enthusiasm was turned on now.
“Just let’s say you’re right: a couple who can’t resist coitus immediately after they’ve killed. Then that’s their modus operandi, a felon’s hallmark. They’re getting these things computerized these days.”
“Are they, by God?”
“At the CRO.”
“Oh aye?”
“The Criminal Records Office.”
Mosley looked as if it was news to him that there was any such institution.
“We ought to ask them for a search,” Beamish said. “Just in case—”
Mosley looked unimpressed.
“Well, will you leave it to me, Mr. Mosley? Just as soon as we’ve finished with this witch, I’ll get on to the Met—”
Mosley shrugged, as if he saw little point in it, but had no wish to spoil Beamish’s fun.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “if they’re contract killers, they don’t interest me all that much. They’ll be a long way from these parts by now, and as people they’re probably deadly boring. The man I want my little chat with is the one who put them under contract.”
“Well—that’s what matters, of course—”
“It’s all you and I can hope to achieve, laddie, stuck up here in this wilderness. Anyway, here we are—”
And Priscilla Bladon opened the front door to them as she saw them halfway up her drive. A big woman: in her eighties, they said—though she could have passed herself off as sixty-five. Beamish remembered to look at her hands and understood what Mosley had meant about them.
Chapter Thirteen
Priscilla Bladon’s house was a big one by Upper Marldale standards, built in the later Georgian years. Miss Bladon led them through an expanse of entrance hall into an even more spacious drawing-room with a handsome bow window overlooking a large walled garden now beginning to sink into first twilight.
The room needed to be spacious not to be overwhelmed by all that was in it. It was incongruity on the grand scale rather than actual disorder that set the tone. African tribal masks kept company with warriors’ shields and drums. An exquisitely carved Polynesian paddle lay athwart a Renaissance bass-viol. A fruit-bowl in Hindu brass contained half a dozen immobilized hand-grenades. There were urns, bowls and ewers in earthenware and porcelain, as well as vessels fashioned from gourds from every latitude. The empty shell of an armadillo lay upside down as a receptacle for thimbles, lace-makers’ bobbins, wax fruit and lumps of coral.
There was something abysmally depressing about the collection, some over-riding influence that deadened the room. Beamish decided that it emanated from the ubiquity of stuffed animals, almost every one the craftsmanship of the less sensitive breed of taxidermist. They ranged from squirrels, parrots and a forest pig to a moronic wallaby who had a boomerang between his teeth, as if, ironically, he had just retrieved it. In her scholastic days, Miss Bladon had made every class she taught “adopt” a merchant ship, which led to voluminous correspondence—and a gift from every home-coming master who made landfall within visiting distance of Marldale.
One effect of the melancholy miscellany was to dwarf two of the three women who had been waiting here for the police to call. Priscilla Bladon was not dwarfed. In crossing the room to show the two men in she had, as it were, imprinted an enduring impression she accommodated her physical size by exaggerating it, rather than by an attempt to draw the eye away—she was wearing a long, flowing dress that made very little contact with her body below the bust and its floral pattern was bold and colourful. She was sitting now on a chintzy armchair, was clearly not truly at her ease on any other chair in the room. Susan Bexwell was at the opposite side of the hearth, her long pony-tail drawing her hair tight across her scalp, her round, slim-rimmed spectacles seeming to proclaim her an honours mathematics graduate. Deirdre Harrison sat with her trousered legs curled up on a priceless strip of Kurdistan carpet, the straps of her bib-and-brace even more awry than when Beamish had last seen her.
Mosley came to the point.
“Well—who killed her?”
“Outsiders,” Priscilla Bladon said, her voice a confident contralto.
“You sound sure.”
“If it had been someone local, somebody would have known.”
“So why kill her?”
“Because of what she knew.”
“And what did she know?”
“That’s what we couldn’t find out.”
“I thought she invited you three up there to tell you.”
“She did. Subject to terms. Which we couldn’t agree.”
Slight pause; end of first phase of question and answer.
“Aren’t you going to tell us her terms?” Mosley asked.
“No.”
“You mean that you three still mean to go it alone?”
“We stand a better chance than you do.”
“Only by withholding information,” Mosley said.
“Have we withheld information in the past? Our difficulty has been getting information listened to.”
“You haven’t had the sort of information that people are prepared to listen to. You don’t know what someone wants with Ned Suddaby’s field. You don’t know why Herbert Garside wants to keep people off his footpath. Now, I suppose the implication is that Beatrice Cater had found out.”
“She thought she had.”
“She must have come pretty close to the mark,” Mosley said, “for them to have killed her for it. What price they’ll try to kill you next?”
“That lightning daren’t strike here again.”
“A very dangerous assumption, Miss Bladon.”
End of second phase.
“So,” Mosley went on. “You’re going it alone. Only you can’t. Because you won’t be alone. I’m on the road too.”
“We’re not in competition, Mr. Mosley. We just want to make sure somebody gets there.”
“Which means more conjuring tricks, I suppose?”
“Conjuring tricks, Mr. Mosley? You should be more respectful.”
“Well, what were they but conjuring tricks? Putting dud eggs under some poor smallholder’s broody. And obviously you sent someone up the old church tower, whilst you diverted attention with your Danse Macabre round the gravestones.”
“Wally Brewer, from Chapel Burton. He does their clock.”
“It’s obvious what sort of contribution Flavour Control, Ltd. made to local unfeline behaviour. And while we’re on the subject, I must warn you—watch what you’re doing with toxic substances at Hadley Dale Dog Trials.”
“We will, Mr. Mosley.”
“I must admit that you have our police laboratories puzzled over those withered cabbages.”
“We whipped the good ones out and planted dead ones.”
“Very commendable social behaviour, that, I’m sure. And I’m still perplexed by the winning darts throw.”
Miss Bladon nodded gravely.
“That was touch and go—the only real risk we’ve taken up to now. That was the only stunt that rose above the strictly materialistic plane. But Harry Akeroyd’s a very good darts-player—and also very highly suggestible. I should know: I taught him from the ages of five to fourteen. I taught him all he knows—bar playing darts. I took a chance, I’ll admit. I put it firmly into his mind what he was going to do. He believed it—and he did it.”
“Thank God!” Deirdre Harrison said.
Mosley brought Beamish into the conversation for the first time since they had come in.
“My friend and colleague here is an unsophisticated man by Upper Marldale standards. I don’t think he has fully grasped yet why you’ve had to turn to magic.”
Priscilla Bladon turned patiently to Beamish. He expected her to have a slightly amused contempt for him, if not the superior conviction that he could be ignored altogether. At the best he expected to be patronized, but on the contrary she treated him with the same sort of respect she might have given to a child who wanted the answer to an intelligent question.
“Because it’s a waste of time talking sense to people,” she said, and waited to see if this sank in. “People don’t believe in magic, but wouldn’t they just love to? Given the opportunity, they’ll even pretend to. They loved that business with the church clock, even though every man jack of them knew it must be a fiddle. But if we’d tried to persuade them to bring Wally Brewer in to wind it up, they’d have gone on arguing for weeks. Somebody would have heard that Wally was no good. Somebody else wouldn’t have wanted to bring talent in from Chapel Burton. Somebody would have known a better man. Somebody would have argued about how much to pay him, and what fund it was going to come out of. Somebody would have asked if we’d got him insured while he was up the tower. I’ve always been one for getting on with things.”
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