“I think we’d better take this to the Chief,” he said at last.
The Chief made them very welcome, creating the feeling that he had been pining all morning for the company of colleagues.
“Old Mosley certainly seems to be jollying things along in Marldale,” he said.
“Oh, yes. I don’t think we can complain of lack of incident.”
“One thing has worried me about what I’ve been reading in this morning’s papers.”
Only one thing—?
“Perhaps you can tell me, Grimshaw: is any detail of what has been published true in any respect, or is it all a figment of Mosley’s imagination?”
“There are cross-currents,” Grimshaw said on the spur of the moment, and realized that he had hit upon a phrase that would stand him in good stead in many a future contingency.
“And what’s the problem?”
“Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw has unearthed cases additional to those referred by the Chief Executive Officer,” the ACC said.
“Oh, dear.”
He looked solemnly at Grimshaw.
“We have to be careful, you know, Grimshaw, very careful indeed. We have to distinguish between investigation and muck-raking. We have to dredge the bottom of the pond, as it were, without making it look as if we’re stirring things up.”
He held out his hand for the papers he could see Grimshaw was holding, and, unlike his Assistant, he did read them. He read them from beginning to end, once or twice looking back to check cross-references.
“I think you’d better leave these with me.”
Grimshaw went back downstairs, feeling as if his day had suddenly been emptied. But there was by now a sufficiency of routine aggro on his desk and he soon found himself in the familiar role of improvising ways in which distant colleagues might escape from temporary impasses. It was not until half past three in the afternoon that the Chief s secretary rang him. The Chief thought that it might serve a useful purpose, might clear the air, as it were, if he went and had a little chat with the Chief Executive Officer.
The CEO saw him at once, though “Tod” Hunter’s was by common agreement the busiest desk in County Hall. Everything about him spoke of the family man. Photographs of his wife and children stood in frames within his constant line of vision. He wore what was obviously a hand-knitted cardigan, and although he gave his staff considerable latitude in the matter of casual dress, was always himself in a suit: he was of stock size, and generally wore off-the-peg clothes. Hunter was a solicitor, held a diploma in public administration, was an Associate of the Society of Secretaries. His speech still retained a noticeable touch of the locality—an expert could have identified his home-corner. Grimshaw had met him often enough—in the staff canteen and at obligatory functions—but this was the first time they had worked closely together on anything. The two men took to each other.
Hunter listened, nodding with quiet, unspectacular agreement, while Grimshaw recited his three cases.
“Yes. I knew about these of course, and I’d wondered. The pattern is the same. The Council sells land—and the buyer does substantially better out of the deal than the Council does. But you see there are dozens of other cases, also put through during Councillor Whitcombe’s chairmanship, that are transparently above reproach. There are times when land has to be sold. There are other times, much less frequent nowadays, when land has to be bought. In either case, both buyer and seller hope to profit. Sometimes one of them doesn’t—and sometimes the one that doesn’t is the Council. In your instances the Council didn’t—but the only common feature in them is Councillor Whitcombe’s committee. It’s the same with the cases that I brought forward. Let me tell you what they were.”
There was a hill-top sold off dirt-cheap to a syndicate that wanted it for a country club. Only after the deeds had changed hands did the Ministry of Defence suddenly want it for the masts and radar dishes of its early-warning system.
High towering masts featured on another patch, too. Again, it was regarded as little more than waste land. It was looked on as the folly of an earlier Council ever to have tied up capital in it in the first place. They were lucky to sell it—for a song: except that within two years the Post Office saw its potential for a relay station in their internal communications system.
And finally there was an area of edge-of-town land that in more prosperous years had been ear-marked for overspill and industrial estate—developments that had become a fantasy in the paralysis of recession. It was disposed of as “investment”—amid the angry voices of some who wanted to know why their own Council could not have sat tight on a long-term gamble too. They might not have had to wait too long, because the site was now a privately owned heliport, with expanding air-taxi services to Manchester, the West Riding, the East Midlands, Birmingham and Tyneside. Already there were tenders in for a hotel and shopping-mall.
“It looks as if history’s forever repeating itself,” Hunter said. “But is it? And if it is—prove it. The beneficiary was not the same in any two deals we’ve mentioned.”
“The only common ground is Harry Whitcombe?”
“Who as chairman has the best entitlement in the world to be in on everything. Whenever I speak of Councillor Whitcombe, by the way, I mean Councillor Whitcombe plus associates. But don’t ask me who they are. He doesn’t meet them in pubs across the road from County Hall after committee meetings. It’s on a vastly bigger scale than that—it has to be. More likely Marbella or the Bahamas.”
“Tell me who the beneficiaries were.”
Hunter did. Four of them were companies, but neither these nor the individuals concerned meant anything to Grimshaw.
“You’ve run your eye down the directors’ lists?”
“I’ve done everything that’s obvious—and a good deal that’s devious and remote. No joy.”
Hunter pushed his chair back from the desk and looked at Grimshaw with a tired smile.
“Joy, did I say? Do you think I’m getting joy out of this? The intoxication of the chase? You don’t look to me as if you suffer from a surfeit of that, either, Grimshaw. I sometimes think this job’s simply making me bloody-minded. Maybe I saw too many films about the Mounties when I was a boy. Hunter gets his man. I feel bad about this, Grimshaw, that’s the dried-out truth of it.”
He opened a drawer, offered Grimshaw a cigarette from a wood-carved box. Neither man smoked.
“I’m a well-salaried man, Grimshaw, because I’ve always worked hard. I’m the best-paid man in this block of offices. And where does it go? I still have to do sums at the end of every month. I run an Escort—I used to cycle in to work until I was in my thirties. I didn’t have colour television till two years ago. I have four children. We always said we’d have four children. They go to state schools, because every penny I can save is for their future. Because when it comes to seeing them through university, I shall be trapped in an income bracket that will have me soaked for every shekel. In my early sixties I shall cash in on a couple of endowment policies—if I haven’t yet had my coronary. And I look round and see these buggers heading for Bermuda in their yachts—safari parks in Kenya—Sri Lanka—”
He subsided.
“I’m not jealous, Grimshaw. I have a thing about visible justice, that’s all. I like to see a fair relationship between effort put in and plums pulled out. When a man gets his halo from the hold he has over the electorate, I don’t like to see the electorate taken to the cleaners. That’s why I want to nail this villain. And it’s over to you, now, so thank God I can get on with something else. Of course, if there’s any mortal thing you need in the way of help from this office—”
“I would like to see your full file on the transactions we’ve been talking about.”
“You shall. In fact I anticipated and sent down to Registry for them as soon as your Chief had spoken to me this morning. So they should be ready waiting for you.”
He picked up his phone and spoke to the woman in his outer office. Then frowned.
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“I’m sorry. I’ll get them to you as fast as I can. There seems to have been some hitch.”
Chapter Nineteen
It meant an early start for Beamish, because for one thing, as he had expected, Mosley had nobbled him to do his chauffeuring, which added three quarters of an hour to the first leg of his journey. And for another, Mosley had insisted that they must be on Herbert Garside’s land by seven.
So they were pulling out of Bradburn while Grimshaw still had an hour of restless and unfortifying sleep in front of him, and they were climbing into droplet mists while sheep were still under the illusion that no motorist was likely to be on the road.
Marldale Nab Farm was a mile out of Upper Marldale, on a prominence that overlooked the first dip of the dale itself. It was true that there was a right of way through Herbert Garside’s fields, but as a link it was vital neither to society nor commerce, since it went nowhere that could not be more conveniently reached. Once a year the Footpaths Association sent a member to walk along its length, thereby establishing its continued usage, but no one in Upper Marldale would have dreamed of treading it. It was only when Bert Garside appeared to be denying it them that they held a public meeting and brought out cogent reasons why they could not live without it.
Beamish and Mosley trod it. They had not taken many paces before Beamish saw the wisdom of Mosley’s insistence that they bring their gumboots. One length of the path was a minor watercourse, inches deep at certain seasons of the year—and this was one of those seasons. Beamish made a detour and found, in different places, three lengths of old guttering that at first sight looked as if they had been casually discarded. But when he examined them in context, he saw that they had been skilfully placed so as to direct a further two-pennyworth to the downward flow.
Mosley seemed unsurprised, in fact uninterested.
“Shouldn’t bother my head too much over that, lad. We know he’s doing it. We’ve been told so, haven’t we?”
As if the word of any Marldale informant was a sacred revelation.
They found a tree, a scarred and arthritic hawthorn, freshly broken from a jagged stump and lying across the path at one of its narrowest stretches between walls. The marks of the axe were clearly visible.
“Not done by squirrels,” Mosley said.
They found a stile that had been stopped up, the new coping secured by recent mortar.
“He doesn’t seem to be making much effort to conceal what he’s up to,” Beamish said.
“Why should he? He wants everybody to know that this is an awkward way to come—and everybody does.”
Beamish stopped for breath and looked around all the compass points. A boundary across a dew-pond was declared by the head and foot of an old brass bed-stead. There was a mess of soggy wool and bones that had been a stillborn lamb. There was a short length of electrified fencing that was connected to nothing at either end.
“How does a man make a living out of this?” Beamish asked.
“Ask Herbert Garside’s accountant. In fact, HM Inspector of Taxes would give his ears to know the half of what Herbert Garside’s accountant knows. He’s a good farmer, is Herbert, has a good eye for an animal.”
“But he has to take the rough with the smooth. And it seems to me there’s a hell of a lot of rough about here.”
“Herbert holidays in Gran Canaria. He’s been to the Costa Brava and Sorrento, but he prefers the Canaries. Even in years when the Inland Revenue have had to bring forward his last year’s losses.”
They were close to the farmhouse now and arrived at the stretch that Upper Marldale had the most to complain about: thirty yards between a field-gate and the milking-parlour which he was accused of swilling down before the passage of his herd. It was the sort of morass that sucked a man’s wellingtons off, and it was in prime condition at the moment because the herd was actually passing. Mosley waited for the last slow, slobbering beast to go through into the yard. A fifty-year-old man in a leather jerkin was standing arms akimbo, waiting to close the gate.
“Morning, Jack.”
“Morning, Bert.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“The pleasure’s one-sided,” Mosley said, indicating the slough.
“I don’t know what’s got into folk. They ought to know farms are mucky places.”
“And should they expect stiles to be stopped and mortared?”
“Folk can still climb them, if they want to cross badly enough.”
“Yes, well, some of us do. We want to know what’s going on.”
Mosley had Beamish precede him into the yard. Garside closed the gate.
“If this were on the telly, I’d ask to see your warrant.”
“Well, it isn’t. And we haven’t got one. And we’re here.”
Garside looked into the milking-parlour. Each cow had gone in leisurely fashion into her accustomed stall.
“You’d better make it smartish then. I’ve this lot to milk.”
By way of answer, Mosley turned his back on him and stumped stiff-legged in his gumboots down to a gated track that led round to the front of the house. At the back the farm had the neglected appearance of an old Norse longhouse. On the other side some early-nineteenth-century yeoman had pushed out a mock-Palladian double front so that his wife could have her drawing-room and dining-room. The lawn, which was going to have to be laid afresh, was piled with builder’s materials: a good deal of brise, lengths of piping and stacks of glazed slabs.
“So what are you building here, Bert? Tractor-shed or swimming-pool?”
“Both,” Garside said.
Beamish noticed that he had made no effort to dissimulate to Mosley.
“What the hell do you want with a swimming-pool on Marldale Nab, Bert? Your knackers will shrivel up.”
“They bloody won’t. Because I shan’t be putting as much as a bloody toe-nail in it. Anyway, it’s going to be heated. The youngsters want it—for when we have the Young Farmers here. And it’ll add to the value of the property if ever I have to sell up.”
“You’ll want a boiler-house, a filter unit. You’ll need planning permission.”
“You don’t for a tractor-shed.”
“So you’re hoping that one will mask the other? You’re making trouble for yourself, Bert. It will go on for years.”
“By which time I shall have my pool.”
“Why don’t you keep ducks in it? Then you can say it’s purely for agricultural purposes. Honestly, Bert, you’ll save yourself years of argy-bargy, by going through the channels.”
“That’s what it’s all about, Jack. I can’t afford to go through the bloody channels. I can’t raise the premium.”
“Why don’t you ask for a swimming-pool on your Supplementary Benefits, Bert? Of course you can afford it. The fee’s only nominal.”
“That shows how little you know. Do you know how many palms I’d have to cross to get this through in less than bloody years? How many times would the plans be chucked back at me, by committee after committee, because they don’t like this tile or that keyhole? It starts at the bloody bottom, Jack. It starts with the clerks. It starts when you hand your papers in, if you don’t want them stuck for ever at the bottom of the pile.”
“Which clerks?”
“Nay, Jack. You’re not going to ham-string me with that one. I only know what’s happened to other people.”
“Which other people?”
“You’re not going to catch me that way, either.”
“Why don’t you behave like a model citizen, Bert—put in a complaint, if you think you’ve got one.”
“Because I want a swimming-pool. Within the next two years. As simple as that. The Old Chap up There helps those who help themselves, I’ve always been given to understand.”
Mosley turned to Beamish.
“Treasure this moment, Sergeant. You’ve just had a front-row seat at an exhibition piece of Marldale thinking. Well, thank you, Bert. I’ve been. I’ve seen. I know.”
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They started off back down the obstacle course, were in sight of the blocked stile when they saw an unathletic female figure rolling over the top of the wall. She picked herself up out of the wet grass and commented on the situation in terms which made Mosley pretend to cover his face—and Beamish stare away at an angle. She had discarded yesterday’s bib-and-brace and was wearing a long, loose, orange-turtlenecked sweater that deprived her of what shape she had.
“Morning, Deirdre. This your daily Keep Fit course?”
She repeated the tenor of her previous comments, though in a bowdlerized, less vitriolic spirit.
“It’s gone like wild fire round Marldale that you’ve come up here, so I’ve come after you. Because this is important.”
“Good,” Mosley said.
“Sergeant Beamish asked me last night to find something out for him. I’ve found it out.”
“Let’s go down to the bottom of this field, get that corner of wall between us and the draught.”
“I was hoping to keep personalities out of this,” she said, when they had found stones to sit on. “But I know now that that’s impossible. I’m not daft. This is too big. Merle Cox and Kevin Kenyon. But I’d ask you to do what you can to keep their names out of printer’s ink. The Coxes and the Kenyons are the Montagues and Capulets of Little Hawdale.”
“I know them,” Mosley said. “Their parents and grandparents, anyway. I couldn’t put names and faces to all the kids.”
“Well, you’ll know then we don’t want more ructions than happen in Hawdale in any normal week. And Merle and Kevin aren’t kids any more. He’s nineteen, she’s seventeen. They’ve been going steady for eighteen months, and when their glandular secretions get out of hand, they tend to home in on the Old Glasshouse. That’s all right,” she said, catching the look on Beamish’s face. “She’s on the pill. I’ve seen to that. And don’t look so shocked, Sergeant. While they’re stuck on each other, he isn’t catching a dose in Bradburn, Saturday nights, and she isn’t hawking her greens in Little Hawdale churchyard.”
Mists Over Mosley Page 12