“Bloody dozens of em. And there are one or two I’d be very sorry to see cadging a lift on this sort of shit-cart.”
“Names? Whereabouts? Reasons for suspicion?”
“Oh, for the love of O’ Riley, Sergeant. That would only be starting up hares. Absolute waste of your time. Don’t you see, I just want to eliminate?”
“Eliminate for me, too, then.”
“I’m buggered if I will.”
He held out his hand.
“Give me your car keys. Wait for me outside.”
“Have a heart, Sergeant. It’s bloody draughty out there.”
“Do as I say.”
“And do you think I couldn’t lose you in this camp? Get that door between us, and you’ll have Marldale to search for me. Better keep me where you’ve got your eyes on me. I know you don’t want me to see how you go to work. But do you think that you and I are on different sides? Look—I’ll go and stand in that far corner with my face to the wall like a naughty bloody kid, if that’ll make you feel more comfortable. And then when you’ve finished, I’d like to come with you to see Jack Mosley.”
She went into the corner furthest from the door, a gross, shambling, round-shouldered, ill-dressed wench. But she had not been in position more than a few seconds before she turned her spotty face back over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Sergeant. I just couldn’t wait. I never can. If you did my job and lived my life, one lesson you’d soon learn would be to get on with things yourself.”
Beamish ignored her, turned to sift through the papers that she had been examining. There seemed very little that could tell him anything: sheets of old newspaper, the guarantee card for a transistor radio, a few old envelopes.
He spoke across to her.
“Who is A. W. Canniff? Know him?”
“He spent a month here. At present the guest of Her Majesty—misrepresentation for family allowance purposes.”
“Charming friends you have.”
“Bollocks!” she said.
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. You might as well blame me for screwsmen and Paki-bashers.”
“I do.”
“How do you work that out?”
“You’re supposed to see them put away, aren’t you?”
“Bollocks to you too, then.”
He gave his general attention to the room: a stained and slashed poster that had once been a map of French vineyards; another, more recent, of the Who; two double-tier bunks, to neither of which he would care to trust his weight; one threadbare blanket, so filthy that no one this side of despair would want it near his body.
It was possible, in theory—sometimes—to look at a room and read the signs of things that had happened in it. Beamish looked round this one and was unable to think of anything except his disgust at the thought of anyone shutting himself in here without scrubbing the place out and fumigating it first. What were the two questions that Mosley had sent him here to answer? Were they real punks, and how many of them had spent the night here? He examined each of the bunks in turn, decided that it was touch and go whether any of them was serviceable. But he could see nothing to suggest whether any of them had been occupied or not.
Deirdre Harrison was now openly looking back over her shoulder again.
“Trying to sus out how many actually did overnight here, Sergeant?”
“Have you sussed it out?”
“One,” she said.
“What makes you so certain?”
“Can I come out of my corner?”
“For half a minute.”
She loped across the room, went towards the wall under the vineyard poster.
“Space the area of one sleeping-bag has been swept out here. Not with a broom, because there isn’t one. With an old newspaper or something. Fastidious bugger, obviously.”
“You could be right.”
“Of course I’m right. And I’m not trying to be clever. I’m not trying to take the piss, Sergeant. You’d have spotted it. I’ve been in here longer than you have.”
“All right. Back to your corner. No—you can stay out—if you’ll tell me anything else you think you’ve worked out.”
“Well, there is one thing. Aren’t they supposed to have had three-cornered sex in here?”
“How do you know that?” he snapped at her, his suspicions alerted again.
“Joe Murray told me. He’s the one who reported it to Mosley. Have you ever had three-cornered sex, Sergeant?”
“Have you?”
“I was educated in a big school. But wouldn’t you say, Sergeant Beamish, speaking from your ivory tower of cold chastity, that a threesome requires space? And must make some impact on the environment?”
They both looked round the room again. The area where the sleeping-bag had lain was the only space where the dust and litter had been disturbed for months.
“So—given that Joe Murray is no sensationalist, and knows the meaning of what he heard—”
“A tape-recorder,” Beamish said, and his eye travelled at once to the power-point in the room.
“Actually, I’m surprised that the power’s still on,” he said.
“Are you? Why? It’s the job of the Electricity Board to sell electricity. And the commune settle their accounts. There are self-respecting, responsible people here, you know, Sergeant. Don’t hold it against them that some of them have nowhere else to live and work. Jack Mosley doesn’t.”
“Yes, but good Heavens, look at this—”
Beamish was stooping to inspect the power-point.
“This is a pre-war two-pin. Obsolete: industrial archaeology. What are the chances that they’d have carried a plug to fit this?”
“They’d be sure to have had a multi-purpose adapter. They seem to have been a pretty efficient bunch.”
“Or batteries, of course—power-packs. But they’d have needed a good supply to last the night.”
But then his eye caught something on the floor.
“Just come and shine your torch on this, Miss Harrison.”
“Deirdre—”
“Just come and shine your torch.”
He picked up something, two or three small things, she could not see what. He straightened himself up, brought little plastic envelopes from an inside pocket and wrote labels for them.
“Of course, my name’s only Watson,” she said.
“Two broken match-sticks. One little curled fragment of stranded copper wire. Have you ever seen that done—when you have an appliance and no plug? You strip the ends of the wire and fix them into the sockets with matches or whittled bits of wood. Extremely dangerous, and I don’t recommend you ever try it.”
“I’d never have got that.”
“And it doesn’t look as if I’m going to get the names of the people you came here to check up on,” he said.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I can tell you now it wasn’t them. A tape-recording of a gang-bang? Improvisations when a plug won’t fit? Not their class at all. Besides, they’re strictly local. This was an outside job. I’m sure of that now.”
“Outsiders who must have known the potential of this place. So they must have talked to someone local.”
The sense of this appealed to her.
“Why are you only a sergeant?” she asked him.
“Never mind about that. We need to know who told our chums that this was a good place to lager up.”
“I’ll find that out for you.”
“You’ll put me in a position to find out for myself.”
“Oh, God! What it is not to be trusted!”
“I have to watch points,” he said. “I’m answerable to superiors.”
“Superiors? Jack Mosley?” She laughed. “Jack would leave it to me. Be only too glad to.”
“I’ll tell you what. Take me to see these friends of yours. I’ll let you be present throughout.”
“That,” she said, “would be what is known as pissing in the milk. Two other bastards who’d
never trust me again. Why don’t you do what Mosley would—give me a time-limit? You can’t be everywhere at once.”
Every time she had mentioned Mosley’s name, she had wielded it like a lethal weapon.
“What sort of a time-limit?”
“Midday tomorrow.”
“Far too long.”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“Make it half past ten.”
“Done!” she said. “Where shall I find you?”
“That’s going to be your problem. And if you’ve got anything worth reporting, you’ll find the answer.”
He followed her tail-lamps out of Lower Marldale and up the lower reaches of the valley. But within ten minutes she was out of his sight.
As soon as he arrived back in the village he pulled up in the square and made for the telephone kiosk. It was the first opportunity he had had to ask Central Records if any of their clients were known to make a habit of sexual intercourse immediately after committing murder. He had some difficulty in getting through, and even more in finding his way to the sub-department most likely to have such uncommonplace information on short-notice tap. Then the line was so bad that he had to shout, and detached phrases escaped through the missing panes of the booth, much to the interest of a gang of Marldale adolescents who were gathered round their cycles a few yards away.
“Leaped into the nearest bed as soon as they’d strung somebody up—modus operandi—anything you’ve got—chap who gets an erection when he sees somebody snuffing it.”
“I’ll put you on to Sergeant Barker.”
Sergeant Barker was a woman, which resurrected the latent puritan in Beamish, and caused him to seek a fresh phraseology.
“It seems that some people are inspired to procreation by the sight of death.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Beamish threw all hope of euphemism to the Marldale skies.
“We’ve a case here of a couple who got straight on the job within a minute or two of doing a murder.”
“People up your way must need education in the proper use of leisure,” she said. “I’ll put you through to the Inspector.”
Whereupon he lost the line and had to dial afresh.
“Who are you?” the Inspector asked him.
Beamish announced his credentials.
“But we’ve dealt with this. An hour ago. We had an Inspector Moses on. Told him we’ll come back to him in the morning.”
Depressed, Beamish came out of the kiosk into the cold night air. What was Mosley playing at? It was unusual for him to do a job himself after delegating it—a rarity, in any case, for him to tackle anything at all through an established channel. Beamish became aware that there was human activity at the further side of the square. The Upper Marldale Good Companions, all eight of them, were issuing forth from the Community Centre at the end of a Bingo session. A familiar voice among the shuffling ancients caused Beamish to cross the road. Had Mosley been filling in an idle hour succumbing to his reckless gambler’s streak?
But no: it was the caretaker of the Centre that Mosley had gone in to buttonhole: a one-armed little man whose torso went through an are of sixty degrees with every stride that his right leg took.
“Just hang on to anything that anybody brings and pass it to me when I drop in. There might be the odd letter. Everything will all be regularized in the fullness of time, and I dare say you’ll get something on paper about it within a month or so. In any case, I’ll see you’re not the loser.”
“I know you will, Mr. Mosley.”
It was evident that the little cripple was one of Mosley’s devotees. Beamish saw that a roughly cut oblong of cardboard had been drawing-pinned to the front door. INCIDENT ROOM. The caretaker locked up for the night.
Mosley caught sight of Beamish and sidled along to him.
“Time we knocked off for the day, I think, Sergeant.”
Beamish had not made up his mind which of his two leading troubles to broach first: a politely impersonal but unequivocal complaint about the inefficiency of Mosley’s duplicating the call to the CRO; or a closely argued justification of his negligence in entrusting a confidential and highly sensitive enquiry to a not very prepossessing social worker.
“What’s the time, anyway?” Mosley asked and an obliging member of the gang of youths raised the frame of his cycle, pedalled furiously, and played the beam of his dynamo-driven private searchlight on to the dial of the church clock.
“Oh, my God!” Mosley said. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! That’s done it! That’s something we could have managed very well without. I can see this bringing us no end of complications.”
The clock in the tower had stopped again.
Chapter Eighteen
Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw sat at his breakfast-table with a stack of newspapers fifteen inches deep. He had an arrangement with his newsagent for the delivery of a cross-section of the nation’s press whenever matters affecting his sector of law and order had achieved front-page status. If there was one thing that Grimshaw could not stand, it was to arrive in an office lined with the silent smirks of those who were ahead of him in their reading of his more spiteful critics.
There was a photograph of Mosley and Deirdre Harrison together in the Upper Marldale Square: an unfortunate juxtaposition of faces, that. CID LEANS HEAVILY ON WITCHCRAFT proclaimed one trusted organ. Behind dour pillage walls, said another, seethes a cauldron of sex and alleged corruption. Very careful in their use of that word alleged, Grimshaw always noticed, though they didn’t seem to think that sex needed any qualifying adjective.
Some editors featured Herbert Garside’s footpath. One mentioned Ned Suddaby’s field. Every one made a great deal of charmed darts, expiring cabbages, frustrated hens and the stay-away instincts of the community’s omniscient cats. It amused Grimshaw to reflect on what conception of everyday life in Upper Marldale might be gained by the general reader who was personally unacquainted with the Pennines.
And what the blazes was all this about?—Grimshaw had so far heard nothing of the Trixie Lowther angle:
DOORMAN’S WIDOW WAS HITLER’S FRIEND
Daughter of a once well-known brewing family, Trixie Lowther may have been injudicious in her nineteen-thirties friendships with leading Nazis. But she paid for her ill-wisdom by long wartime internment in the Reich, and even after the outbreak of peace, was for a long time held by MI5 before her final exoneration on potential charges as a renegade.
Only in her marriage to quiet, gentle-mannered Henry Cater, doorman at the British Embassy in Moscow, did she find ultimate happiness.
Long-widowed, Beatrice Cater has ended her days hanging from a beam in a picturesque tollhouse in a fell village well-known to walkers. Where will the tangled roots of Mrs. Cater’s troubled past lead Detective-Inspector Mosley?
Craggy, unruffled, laconic—known locally as Crafty Jack—Inspector Mosley confidently expects to announce an arrest some time today. But the question being asked round every Marldale hearth tonight is: will Priscilla Bladon get there first?
The references, to MI5, to Cater’s Christian name, to his posting in Moscow and to a nickname that no one had ever applied to Mosley before, were all editorial embellishments aimed thoughtfully at the contentment of the readership. Grimshaw also felt that there were other features in this narrative which might be straining truth. But this was surely all to the good. He thought he deserved to congratulate himself on the wisdom (by this time he believed that it was his) that had left Mosley in sole charge up in the hills. Mosley was certainly digging things up. And attention was certainly being well and truly diverted from Councillor Harry Whitcombe.
Only one newspaper—the Morning Herald—had been put to bed so late that its observant reporter had been able to report that the Upper Marldale church clock had stopped again.
HERALD CHALLENGES COVEN ran the headline.
Can the coven start the clock again? The Morning Herald issues this challenge to the Marldale witch
es. Can they, under stringently refereed conditions, start the Marldale clock without approaching within a fifty yards’ radius of the church tower? Should they succeed, we propose to buy and donate to them a field which has for a long time been a bone of contention in the parish, together with a pavilion, goal-posts, a gang-mower and basic recreation-ground equipment.
All to the good, Grimshaw told himself. Any red herring across the misty flanks of Marldale was welcome, giving both time and privacy to the priority business of mixing a bottle for Councillor Whitcombe.
There was one brief message from Mosley on the Detective-Superintendent’s desk. Incident Room in Marldale Community Centre. Mosley really did seem to be using his loaf at last.
Grimshaw gave the Assistant Chief Constable’s secretary time to get her coat off, and spoke to her one minute after nine. By ten-thirty he was in the ACC’s room.
“Good press, I’d say, on the whole, wouldn’t you?” the ACC said.
“A lively one, certainly.”
“I must say there do seem to be unexpected complexities. Thank God Mosley has a clear mind.”
“So has Beamish. Between them, I believed they are going to keep people occupied.”
“And I take it that you haven’t been wasting your time, either, Tom?”
“No, sir—”
Grimshaw produced papers—which the ACC did not want to see—and briefly outlined the three cases which he believed worth following up: the hypermarket, the sports centre, and the Evenlode home. The ACC looked extremely grave.
“But these aren’t the three cases the CEO referred to the DPP, Tom. I deliberately didn’t tell you what they were, because I felt it would absolutely clinch matters if you were to put your finger on them yourself.”
“These others give us additional ammunition, surely.”
“That’s as may be. The question is, do we want additional ammunition? Oh, I know every little helps. But we don’t want to complicate matters, do we? Simplify, Tom—wherever possible, simplify.”
“Simplicity hasn’t seemed to me to be the hallmark of anything concerned with this case so far,” Grimshaw said, but the ACC did not appear to have heard this. It was as if an additional problem was more than he could sustain. He tapped on his desk four times with his finger-nails, a sure sign that he was distraught, and continued to wear the most extreme face of gravity of which he was capable.
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