“We would ask around in the right places. A lot would depend upon whom we knew—and what confidence they had in us.”
“I think I see.”
“And on our clear ability to pay in spotlessly laundered money. A third of the fee in advance is a conventional token of trustworthiness. Anyway, I am sorry in some ways, glad in others, that your bailiwick has been chosen as the latest theatre of operations. Glad because your Inspector Bream—”
“Sergeant Beamish.”
“And your Sergeant Moses—”
“Inspector Mosley.”
The Assistant Commissioner (Terrorism) pointed his nose at the Chief Constable the way he had pointed it at Sergeant Ball. He had a metropolitan contempt for these provincials who did not even know the names of their own lieutenants.
“Your two officers—”
“Good men—”
“They are indeed. They have put their fingers in a trice on the key feature that is going to break this case. We have, as you can imagine, questioned many thousands of suspects. Their signed statements occupy many dozens of filing cabinets. But thanks to computerization, our retrieval system can throw up distinguishing marks in a matter of seconds: hair lips, cleft palates, glass eyes and warts under shoulder-blades.”
“Wonderful.”
“But in only one case have we come across facial scars left by surgery on tubercular glands.”
“Ah.”
“Which is precisely what your Inspector and sergeant have unearthed in Marldale.”
“Application,” the Chief Constable said. “The number of times I have preached that word to them—”
“This man—the one with the scars—is undoubtedly one who helped with enquiries for several days at Huddersfield. Close-run thing. He had particles from a Rhode Island feather caught up in the zip of his flies, but the Yard solicitor took counsel’s opinion and it was decided on balance that that evidence was too likely to be dismissed as circumstantial. But this time—”
The AC(T) started to laugh for the second time that morning, the same nasal trumpeting as had alarmed Sergeant Ball. The Chief, not recognizing it as laughter, waited in increasing concern until it was shut off abruptly at source.
“This time we’ve got him. I have that gut feeling. We shall, of course, be relieving you of your burden of responsibility for the case. Authorization is on its way from the Home Office. I shall be personally in command and I have a comprehensive team already speeding up the motorways. I would like first, please, to see your current working log.”
“Ah, yes, gentlemen,” Grimshaw said, in the inspiration of crisis. “We believe here in keeping the paper-work down to a minimum, and all the working documentation is in our Incident Room in Upper Marldale.”
And the ACC (Crime) said that all the relevant papers were in his Detective-Superintendent’s hands; noninterference, when everything was going well, that was always the motto of the ACC. So Grimshaw was brought upstairs, too, much to the Chief’s comfort, for in times of confusion and peril he greatly liked to be surrounded by men of good faith who might possibly know what any of it was about.
“Ah, yes, gentlemen,” Grimshaw said, in the inspiration of crisis. “We believe here in keeping the paperwork down to a minimum, and all the working documentation is in our Incident Room in Upper Marldale.”
“Incident Room. Yes, of course. I shall be taking your Incident Room over. I take it you will run me there presently. But I am a man who believes in taking bulls by horns, and I first wish to call on this Councillor, Whitwell, is it? I would like you to come with me, Grimshaw. As Detective-Superintendent, I take it your finger-tips are on all the sensitive personality pulses.”
“Yes, sir. If I might just have five minutes to brief my divisions.”
Five minutes in which to despatch a muster-team to Marldale with instructions to make the Community Centre look like the busiest Incident Room in the history of detection. Five minutes also in which to set every other available man and woman in the headquarters on the one task that was to have priority until it had been achieved: find Mosley.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Magistrate’s Court in Pringle was held in a grim stone cube of a building whose soulless windows had looked down on a century and a half of melancholy histories. Beamish ran Deirdre Harrison to earth in a dusty little room at the back which was used to isolate witnesses. Ms. Harrison was alone in that room with a stocky, bristle-haired thirteen-year-old, and as Beamish entered her arm was cleaving the air through an are of a hundred and ten degrees. Her palm connected. The boy lurched to his right and braced his leg to stop himself from falling.
“Right?” she asked him.
“Right, miss.”
She turned and caught sight of Beamish, signalled to the lad to make himself scarce.
“You didn’t see that, Sergeant.”
“It didn’t happen,” he assured her.
“The little bugger got off,” she said.
“I was wondering—”
“Hadn’t you better caution me first?”
“I was wondering whether you’d let me take you out to dinner tonight.”
She adjusted a shoulder-strap: she was back in bib-and-brace.
“I wouldn’t have your job for four times what they pay you, Sergeant. The things you have to go through when duty calls. Where were you thinking of taking me? Smoky Joe’s?”
“Your choice.”
“That means I’m on expenses.”
“You’re not.”
“Dutch, then. No strings.”
“Fair enough. And we’ll talk about only what you want to talk about.”
“You might live to regret that. There are one or two questions that I’m dying to ask you. Do you know the Peacock at Pringle?”
“No, but I’ll find it.”
“I hardly think it’s the body beautiful you’re questing for. Don’t tell me I’ve met a man at last who’s spotted my lovely soul.”
The Assistant Commissioner’s eyes wandered without a great deal of interest over such sights of Bradburn as Grimshaw pointed out. “What can you tell me about this man Whitcombe, Superintendent? I only know what I read about him in this morning’s paper.”
As Grimshaw had been called to HQ before he had got deeper than the first two in his pile, he did not know as much as that.
“Local businessman,” he said. “Very well liked. Started life as a pharmaceutical chemist—dispenser in his father’s shop. Since it all came into his hands he’s developed it more and more on the lines of an American drug store. He bought adjacent properties and expanded into them. You can buy ironmongery, stationery, gramophone records—and the more the shop has prospered, the less he’s had to do with the day-to-day running of it. He’s been in local government since they hailed him as the youngest County Councillor in the record books. The local Examiner sometimes calls him Mr. Planning. Very popular with the electorate—especially the tradespeople. He has had a very sharp eye for what makes a town prosper.”
“The press seem to connect him with the sale of a field in Marldale.”
“They’ve known that from pub talk since Day One, but he’d have served a writ on them in no time, if they’d published his name in connection with the case on supposition. Now that our Inspector Mosley has openly been to talk to his former secretary, they have said whose secretary she was—no more. That’s the writing on the wall for anyone in Bradburn.”
“I must say that four hours seems a long time for a preliminary interview with a woman in her own home,” the AC said.
“I dare say four hours is creative writing. Half an hour is probably nearer the mark, knowing Mosley.”
“I’m dying to meet your Inspector Mosley.”
“So am I,” the Detective-Superintendent said.
Five minutes later, Grimshaw had still not caught up with Mosley, but he knew where he had been. It was not that Mosley smoked an exotic tobacco—he combusted a virulent brand favoured by many thousands
of fellow addicts. Perhaps there was something about the way he smoked it: in the ten seconds after applying flame to his briar, he invariably produced a screen that some performers would have wished to see accredited in the Guinness Book of Records. And there was no doubting that within the last hour, Mosley had surrounded himself with characteristic billows in Councillor Whitcombe’s magnificent sitting-room. There were even scrapings of Mosley’s vicious dottle in the chromium-plated ashtray beside the chair in which Mosley had sat.
Whitcombe caught Grimshaw’s eye just as it lighted on this evidence. Grimshaw and Whitcombe exchanged understanding looks. Whitcombe knew that Grimshaw knew that Mosley had been here. But for some extraordinary reason, Whitcombe did not propose to volunteer this information in his present company. Grimshaw made the silent, crucial decision to play along with him. The conduct of affairs was now entirely in the hands of this long-nosed god from out of the central machine, who knew so little of Mosley that he had only recently succeeded in getting his name right.
And how was the Assistant Commissioner (Terrorism) going to tackle a complex County Councillor of whom he knew no more than he had read in half a line in his morning paper? What excuse was he going to proffer for their even being here? There was a comfort in Councillor Whitcombe’s bucket chairs that communicated itself even unto the soul. Grimshaw settled down to learn by observation of the great, the thought not far from his mind that perhaps, after all, he was going to come away from this interview with quietly increased confidence in their local way of setting about things.
“Bit early to offer you anything but coffee,” Harry Whitcombe said. “Have you gentlemen any preference? We have Kenyan, Guatemalan, Costa Rican. I think we may be temporarily out of Martinique—”
They came to a largely arbitrary accord.
“So,” the Assistant Commissioner (Terrorism) said, “investigations seem to have come round to your former secretary. I must point out that you are not obliged to make any comment—but is there anything you could tell us that you think we ought to know?”
Whitcombe happily waved aside the need for the conventional caution.
“Only that, of course, my former secretary—as you call her—is only on the extreme periphery of recent unhappy events. She has twice received visits in circumstances which any woman must find frightening—in the first place by the woman whose murder has brought you to these parts.”
“And what was the purpose of that visit?”
“Mrs. Cater had by some means come by an old desk diary that Sally Wortham used to keep in her secretarial days.”
“And what was her interest in that diary? Blackmail?”
“No. She was asking for clarification of a number of entries which could mean nothing at all to any outside reader.”
“Can you be more explicit about these entries?”
“Yes. I can tell you about them. They refer to two overseas visits which I made four years ago.”
“Would you like to go into detail?”
“Yes. I will tell you everything. The first was to Scheveningen, where a composite working-party of EEC elected representatives and specialist officials had been convened to produce a paper on common policies in the planning field.”
“Why should that interest Mrs. Cater?”
“Because my most vivid memory of Scheveningen was of another Englishman—his name was Hilgay—who was a private guest in the same hotel. Hilgay went to quite sickeningly obvious lengths to get to know me, to importune me in the bar between our official sessions, to buy me drinks—and with considerable skill try to extract information about future development projects in this county.”
“And you know other things about this Hilgay?”
“Very little. An occasional entrepreneur, that’s the only way I can think of describing him, because he is not a known name in the world of developers. I had all but forgotten him until some months after my return home. Then he turned up as the spokesman of a small syndicate that wanted to buy some relatively waste land as a grouse moor. They got it, because their offer was viable and we had no use for the land in the thinkable future: it had been bought as an investment in the Railway Age. What I did not know at the time—Tweedledum and Tweedledee are not always aware what each other has in mind—was that the General Post Office was considering a requisition order on that land for an internal communications station. Hilgay and his friends cleared up a profit which would have been welcomed by the County Treasurer.”
“But none of this would be in Mrs. Wortham’s diary, surely?”
“No. But it is interesting that on a date six weeks before I went to Scheveningen, she had scribbled in Hilgay’s name, alongside a telephone number.”
“Not at your instigation?”
“Certainly not.”
“At whose, then? Hilgay’s?”
“I think that will become apparent. May I go on with my second instance?”
“Please do.”
“It was in Corfu, in the early autumn of that year, where I went to holiday with my wife, and once again found an English guest who was a pain in the neck. This one was quite candidly looking for a profitable deal in premises in which he could establish a private nursing home.”
“And he eventually found his way to one, I suppose?”
“The Evenlode, on the outskirts of this town. And I assure you, Assistant Commissioner, the transaction was constitutional down to the last half-line of small print.”
Coldly professional, the AC(T) avoided any remark. “And there was a diary entry about this?”
“The name of this Englishman—Barnes—was pen-cilled in in brackets after the word Corfu on the date of my departure.”
“You seem very well informed indeed about the conversation between Mrs. Cater and Mrs. Wortham.”
“Well, naturally I am. Mrs. Wortham was extremely worried by the woman’s visit. She rang me to ask me for my advice. I forced her to remember every question that Mrs. Cater had asked her.”
“You have remained close to Mrs. Wortham since her retirement?”
“Far from it. I don’t think I have set eyes on her more than twice in four years. But you see she did consider herself my secretary—”
“Consider herself? That is twice, Councillor Whitcombe, that you have attempted to qualify her position as secretary—”
“Because she was not my secretary, in the sense that she was never my employee. Please understand, I always found her extremely agreeable and efficient down to the final comma. But she was the servant of the County Council, and her job was in theory secretarial to whoever happened to be in the Chair of the Planning Committee. It is coincidental that I have held that honour for many years now.”
“I see. So her ultimate master would be the Head of the Personnel Department—?”
“Ultimately the Chief Executive Officer, a man whom we all know as Tod Hunter. And when Mrs. Wortham rang me, both after Mrs. Cater’s visit, and yesterday after Inspector Mosley’s, it was to the CEO that I referred her. I’m sure you will admit that that was the logical step for me to take.”
Grimshaw managed to look Whitcombe full in the face. A mention of Mosley: so was Whitcombe now going to admit that Mosley had already heard all this from him this morning?
No. Whitcombe looked away again. But was it Grimshaw’s imagination, or had a faint smile played across his lips?
The Assistant Commissioner looked at his watch.
“Well, this is all very interesting, Councillor; and there are a good many points which I shall want to follow up. But at the moment I must be elsewhere. I will be inviting you to come and talk to me at headquarters.”
“No,” Harry Whitcombe said with unruffled firmness.
“You would not wish to put yourself in an invidious position, I am sure.”
“If you arrest me, and if I am to be immediately charged with some offence, I shall, of course, not resist. But I do not propose to become the object of speculation by being seen accompanied to a place where you
cannot compel me to come. Moreover, I am adult enough to know what is going on in your mind, Assistant Commissioner, and I shall not voluntarily put you in a position to play psychological games with me. You are welcome to come here and talk at any time of night or day.”
Greek and Greek? The Assistant Commissioner took aim with his formidable nose—and Councillor Whitcombe was proof against it. Now there was no doubt that he was faintly smiling.
“And if I were you two gentlemen, I’d save myself a lot of trouble, and go and talk to your Inspector John Mosley. He’s miles ahead of you about all this—miles ahead.”
Grimshaw also stole a look at his watch and wondered what progress, if any, his shock troops had made in the establishment of at least the external appearances of an Incident Room. Was there even a telephone on the premises?
“This Chief Executive Officer, Grimshaw—?” the AC(T) asked, as they climbed the first of the hills out of Bradburn.
“A man of transparent integrity,” Grimshaw said.
“They invariably are.”
“Family man, ordinarily dressed, modest home, kids at the neighbourhood school, sand-castles and beach cricket for their summer holidays.”
“Sounds like the perfect cover to me.”
“I’m not going to stick my neck out, sir. But I shall be interested in your reactions when you come to meet him.”
“I once arrested a man, Grimshaw, who had thrown a bomb into a school playground, killing four infants and a teacher, grievously maiming a dozen others. All because a supergrass had two children on the roll. And yet, you know, we had it on good report that only the previous week this chappy had seen a blind old woman across a road. Tell me more about Hunter.”
“Boot-strapped himself up from virtually nothing through professional qualifications covering diverse fields.”
“Must be pretty proud of himself.”
“I think he’s entitled to be. But he’s certainly not ostentatious about it.”
“Stashing away for early retirement, you think?”
“I do know he’s always saved furiously for the time when his children’s education’s going to come expensive.”
Mists Over Mosley Page 16