Once she got into full spate, it was difficult to interrupt Priscilla Bladon.
“Look at television advertising. It must work, or they wouldn’t spend on it what they do. But do they talk sense? If they want you to give yourself lung cancer with a new brand of cigarette, they show you a girl standing by a waterfall. Does anybody think there’s any connection? No: but they smoke the cigarettes. If they want you to buy a petrol of the same chemical composition as anybody else’s petrol, they show you a tiger prancing along a sea-shore. Have they listened to me when I’ve tried to warn them about Suddaby’s field and Garside’s footpath? No: when I tried to present a reasoned case at the parish meeting a sigh went round the room—that daft old woman’s on her feet again. But when I dance to a gramophone round the Mawdesley vault, they start paying attention.”
“But what do you want them to do with Suddaby’s field?” Beamish asked her.
“We want a recreation ground for our children,” Susan Bexwell said.
“Or something for somebody. The point is, that field is a public asset. It belongs to Upper Marldale. A few square inches of it belongs to me, because I was a ratepayer when the Council bought it. Then we suddenly hear it’s on the market, with what they call outline planning permission—which shows that somebody in some Council office has been scheming it out for months. Is it going to make an atom of difference to next year’s rates, the price they’ll get for Ned Suddaby’s? No—any transaction that involves public property in this county is done for one reason only—because somebody stands to gain from it.”
“And we do want a playing-field.”
Mrs. Bexwell must have said her piece on every available platform in Marldale.
“They’ve got the notion in Bradburn and Pringle that country children don’t need amenities. If a child lives in the country, his life’s made—that’s what people think. Well: take a walk round Upper Marldale any evening: not even a street-lamp to sit on the kerb under. A child in the country has nothing—but nothing.”
“So somebody on the back row of the meeting tells her she doesn’t have to live here.”
“And it isn’t only Marldale,” Deirdre Harrison said. “It’s going on all over the country. What happened to the Evenlode Home up Bradburn Brow? What about the hypermarket on the Bradcaster by-pass? What about the new sports centre? And what name comes to mind whenever you see a theodolite being lifted out of a county van? Harry Whitcombe.”
“It’s all right talking like that within these four walls,” Mosley warned her. “Don’t forget you’re a public employee.”
“That’s why we feel we need a touch of witchcraft here and there, Mr. Beamish.”
At that point the door-bell rang—one of those simple wire-pulled mechanisms that set up a jangle in the hall. Priscilla Bladon got up and swept out of the room with a flourish of her dress that endangered a rich variety of relics.
“Of course, we do realize that there could be other ways of setting about this,” Susan Bexwell said. “But it’s been—well— amusing, until now.”
“It looked as if it was going to work, too,” Deirdre Harrison added.
“Past tense?” Mosley asked her. “You mean that what’s happened to Beatrice Cater is giving you furious second thoughts?”
“Public opinion in Marldale is not going to care for monkeying about for some time to come.”
“You’ve put that to Miss Bladon?”
“She’s got some idea of her own. I wish I knew what it was.”
“Did Mrs. Cater want to be associated with your witchery?”
“Far from it. She regarded it as in bad taste, pointless and in some vague way, I think, blasphemous. No sense of humour, of course. A silly woman, in fact, though she would stick at things once she got an idea into her head.”
“Obviously she was working on this alleged corruption from some angle of her own. Have you any idea what the angle was?”
“Not for sure. She made a number of trips into Bradburn. Major Hindle ran her up in his car.”
“Hadn’t she a car of her own?”
“Off the road. And what with one thing and another, Hindle was hardly in a position to refuse. We think she was cultivating someone in County Hall.”
“But no idea who?”
“Priscilla’s been working on it.”
Then they pricked up their ears at the sound of voices in the hall. It sounded like an invasion in force: the media. Beamish wondered how Mosley would manage to get rid of them.
Chapter Fourteen
Beamish counted twenty-five of them, but thought he could have missed someone in the confusion. There were cub reporters who looked eager, youngsters who looked conceited, others cynical and some bored. There were old professionals, hard-bitten, with nicotine-stained fingers. There were young women in jeans and one in a patchwork caftan. There were Minoltas, Ricohs, Olympuses, Pentaxes and a prominent Hasselblad. Even the most blasé was momentarily knocked back by the impact of the extraordinary room. Flashes were busy all over the place and it seemed as if everything and everybody was being photographed at once. One woman had hold of the South Sea Island paddle and another was plucking a string of the bass-viol.
“Do, please, handle anything you want to. I always used to feel with children in school that it was frustration only to see things in glass cases.”
There was no irony in this at all. Miss Bladon seemed far from put out by the onslaught, appeared indeed to welcome the chaos.
“We’d half expected to find you sitting round a cauldron.”
“Cauldrons are out,” she said. “We do our newts’ eyes in a micro-wave oven nowadays.”
“Would you like to make a prediction, Miss Bladon? About the Tollhouse murderer?”
“We understand that Mrs. Cater was not a member of your coven. Is it true that you’d turned her down?”
“Would you and your friends accept a challenge from the Morning Herald, Miss Bladon?”
“Would it be true to say that you have been prophesying that something like this was going to happen, Miss Bladon?”
“It certainly would not,” she said.
“We understand that your next coup is to be at a Sheep Dog Trial, Miss Bladon. Would you care to enlarge on that?”
“What is the connection between the late Mrs. Cater and a footpath across a farmer’s field?”
“How does the field called Ned Suddaby’s fit into the picture?”
It was not to be doubted that the invaders had already discovered the resident oracles of the Crook.
“When is the next plenary session of your coven?”
Miss Bladon went to a shallow drawer in a Chinese lacquered cabinet and brought out a football referee’s whistle, which she blew within a couple of inches of Beamish’s ear.
“Ladies and gentlemen—I almost said children—”
The silence that she produced was so galvanic that it might indeed have been wrought by the casting of a spell.
“If you will find seats for yourselves—please do not hesitate to lower your posteriors on to any article of furniture that looks capable of bearing your weight—I will endeavour to answer your questions. But I warn you in advance that I will turn a deaf ear to anything I consider silly and that I rapidly become bored if required to repeat the obvious. Moreover, nobody else’s mouth will be open at any time that mine is and anyone wishing to say anything will first put up his hand in the normal civilized way. I will then invite him to speak unless I have taken exception to something he has already said. Now—sort yourselves out.”
Stools, corners of sofas and vacant floor spaces were sought and occupied and twenty-five journalistic hands were raised high above heads.
“Ladies first—”
She pointed to a young woman with enormous spectacles.
“How seriously do you expect us to take your reputation for sorcery, Miss Bladon?”
“I think it would be prudent to play safe with it, ma’am.”
“In other words, you
are serious about it?”
“Do I look a flippant type?”
“Do you mean that you are dabbling in diabolism?”
“Not at all. Nothing so foul.”
“But alliance with the devil was surely the basis of medieval witchcraft?”
“If you will read your social history more carefully, you might conclude that the ritual was a cover for an early feminist movement.”
“So that is what you and your friends are trying to achieve in Marldale? You are an ardent feminist?”
“I am seldom criticized for being submissive to males. Or to females either, for that matter.”
“It does seem to me, Miss Bladon, that your so-called feats in this village could have all been contrived by artificial means.”
“You are welcome to try to contrive them by any means you can think of. What paper are you?”
“The Guardian.”
“What a pity you didn’t come to my school. I’d have taught you to spell. You, sir—”
She pointed to a man whose hand was signalling more vigorously than the rest.
“Davies of the Courier. I wouldn’t like us to get bogged down in this sideline, Miss Bladon. It is only a sideline, and some of us do cater for a readership that prefers facts to sensations. What we are here for is a death that the police are treating as murder—the death of an interesting woman.”
“I am glad to have you remind us of that, sir.”
“A sculptress, I believe?”
“I really do think she believed that herself. Not that any of us are aware that she had ever done any sculpture, but I am quite sure that she hoped to, one day. That would be sufficient for her to confer the title upon herself.”
“You are suggesting that she went about deceiving people?”
“Never until after she had succeeded in deceiving herself. You might say that that entails a kind of honesty. Between ourselves we used to call her the Great Pretender.”
They heard an unplaceable whisper of nil nisi bonum.
“You are failing to understand. We used the term kindly. We knew what she had to contend with. After all, she had been Trixie Lowther.”
“Trixie Lowther?”
“Ah! Most of you are too young to remember. And some of you others may not have paid much attention at the time. The full mouthful was Lowther, Cross and Dickson, but there were only Lowthers left on the board by the time Trixie was getting mentioned now and then in the society columns.”
“Lowther, Cross and Dickson—?”
“Brewers,” Priscilla Bladon said. “Lowther’s Blacksmith Bitter, Horseshoe IPA and Smithy Brown. Long since merged with the big boys, but there was a time when you saw the forge under the village chestnut on every edge-of-town hoarding. I can’t tell you much about what life was like for Trixie Lowther when she was a girl. But from what little talk I ever had with her on the subject, it’s clear that she was both spoiled and hemmed in. She was spoiled because not only must the Lowthers want for nothing—they must be seen to want for nothing. And she was shackled because there were certain values that were only questioned by the demented or the anti-social. I hope I’m not boring you? I promise you I’m coming to the point.”
There were some murmurs of encouragement.
“Beatrice Lowther was neither demented nor anti-social. She was mentally alert without being clever. She didn’t know enough about society to be on fire for reform. She’d never rubbed shoulders close enough with real life to believe that anything could threaten her survival. She did embrace unfashionable causes, but it was not because she knew anything beneath the surface of them. It was because they were different, because she was bored to tears of having to toe mindless social lines. She had a little surplus energy, a little surplus curiosity—and a lifelong deficit of judgement. Judgement can only be a series of comparisons with the yardsticks of your own experience. And if your experience amounts to nothing, what yardsticks can you have?”
“What causes did she embrace?” somebody asked.
“The Fascist dictators, with a preference for Nazi Germany. But that was largely coincidental. Beatrice Lowther was holidaying in Vienna with a girl-friend, a pair of eighteen-year-olds, in 1934. An attractive, inexperienced, harmlessly scatter-brained couple. Does the year 1934 mean anything to the present company?”
She looked round to their face for an answer—the routine of the classroom.
“No? The assassination of Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor. Actually, our all-but-bright young things had just started for home when the news broke and it was one of those railway journeys that we sometimes used to see in the thirties’ cinema: long halts at benighted stations, luggage searched on freezing platforms, interminable and poker-faced identity checks. But somewhere between the Hohe Tauern and the Bavarian Alps the two English girls were rescued.”
Was this how she used to tell The Three Bears to her assembled infants at the end of a drowsy afternoon?
“There was a party of strapping young Aryans a couple of compartments down the corridor, and no doubt there’d been a certain amount of eye-to-eye flirtation, exchanging frustrations when they couldn’t get anything to eat or drink in a shut-down restaurant car. Somewhere between the frontier and Munich—one of those nowhere places—the train pulled up again, even the engine was shunted off. Beatrice and her friend and two of these Germans were at a corridor window, trying to see what was happening, when one of the men said, “Oh, to hell with this! Where are we? Not all that far from Rosenheim? I think I know how to improve on this as a means of transport. Would you two ladies care for a change of scenery?”
“So they got off at this god-forsaken village, and the men were apparently members of some political para-military in mufti, and carried papers that had people heiling Hitler. They had no difficulty hiring a car, but they didn’t go any farther than some mountain guest-house for the night, and in view of the youth of some of my audience, I suppose we’d better draw a veil over anything else that might have happened.”
She half rose, resettled her limbs in her chair.
“I’m sorry if I seem to be going on. I’m trying to get you to understand Beatrice Lowther-Cater. This affair does concern her, after all.”
“How do you know all this?” the man from the Courier asked her.
“I’ve gone into it.”
“From her own lips?”
“Not a lot of it from her own lips. I can’t pretend that we were close.”
There was a subtle change in Priscilla Bladon’s tone. This was a point on which she did not want to be pressed. There was a slight ripple of restlessness among some of the reporters.
“She went back to Germany again the next year and the year after: the Rhine Valley, the Harz Mountains, the Black Forest—the usual. And clearly chance had given her the key to a certain stratum of the up-and-coming young leadership. You might find it difficult to understand how she could be taken in by them. I don’t. Politically she was infantile. Impressionable she has always been. But they were exploiting a romanticism to which even some Anglo-Saxons were not immune: folk-guitars round pinewood camp-fires, Siegfried, Student Princes. And there were ambitious young Germans who felt they were reinforcing their own main chance by cultivating a sympathetic young lady from a supposedly influential family in the other camp. She had a much-publicized interview with a Gauleiter. And then, lo and behold, came an invitation to Berchtesgaden.”
Miss Bladon made a combination of gesture and facial disclaimer that would have done credit to a French higher bourgeoise.
“I’m not saying that Hitler gave her much of his time, or that he was impressed, or that he thought he was achieving anything by seeing her. Slightly amused, perhaps, bored more likely—and given another fillip to his hopes that he could walk right over us when the time came. But she came home besotted, full of it, as near to an activist as she ever was in her lifetime: the injustice of Versailles, the loss of the African colonies, the impracticability of the Polish Corridor—that’s how sh
e talked to Territorial Army officers at country-house dances in 1938. Those were the views she bored her father’s friends with. She joined the Link—a suspect organization, that was banned the moment war did break out. She took to writing voluminous letters to Germany in which, the rumour went, she was listing by-roads, culverts and transformer-stations for the information of forthcoming Panzer commanders.
“The Lowthers had her put away—quietly, respectably. There was a liberal-minded experiment, caring for the mentally deranged in Eastern Belgium—at Gheel, in Province Limburg. Patients from all over Europe were institutionally managed in large numbers, and wherever possible were farmed out to civilian billets in a remote countryside. That’s how her family “lost” Trixie Lowther early in 1939. And that’s how she passed behind the German lines when Belgium was overrun in 1940.”
Miss Bladon was obviously not in command of all the detail of the later stages of the story. She was beginning to race and perhaps to skip some of what she did know. Trixie’s fees at Gheel were scrupulously paid via the Swiss Red Cross throughout the war. There was no record of any attempt to pull strings and get her repatriated: she was an embarrassment successfully put out of mind. Nor was there any innuendo that the Germans, for the first few war years at any rate, treated her other than correctly. As long as people in her kind of predicament remained up against the Wehrmacht or the older generation of administrator, it was remarkable how often they did escape without major maltreatment. In the later stages she was transferred to internment, which was not without its greyness and privation—but millions fared worse.
And Beatrice Lowther’s phenomenal ill-judgement let her down again. She was one of a handful of stranded Britons who accepted a few trivial privileges in exchange for making radio broadcasts over the propaganda network. What she had to say was pitifully harmless—and politically empty. It amounted to no more than the sort of messages that might have been passed with the dedication of a record request on a Sunday-morning programme at home. But those who drew up the official come-uppance lists saw things differently. There were others whose broadcasts had been recklessly damaging. Beatrice Lowther had to be classified with them, for had she not formally furnished succour and comfort to the King’s Enemies?
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