“That sort of saving can become obsessive.”
“A lot of people do it.”
“And some people are in a stronger position than others to pull off the occasional big one. It can be habit-forming. And a self-made man falling from a high position sometimes takes it very badly. It’s more than he can face.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to be his advocate, sir. I hope I’ve held my present post long enough to be beyond surprises. I find it difficult to picture Tod Hunter even knowing where to start looking for a contract killer.”
“Surely the CEO of an organization as big as a County Council has to know whom to contact for anything on earth?”
“Anything legal.”
“Oh, come, Grimshaw. You know as well as I do that half the dignitaries at any civil reception ought to be under lock and key.”
“I’ve been heard to say those very words,” Grimshaw said.
They turned into the Narrow Road with Passing Places which half the sheep on the Pennines seemed to prefer to the grazing on either side of it. Grimshaw wondered if it would have occurred to anyone that a commendable preliminary move would be to sweep the floor of the Community Centre.
Beamish lingered in the precincts of the Pringle Juvenile Court for half an hour longer than honest duty called for. Deirdre Harrison went and fetched two cups of coffee from some contact she had with the permanent denizens of the building. It was lukewarm and coffee-coloured—and was what Beamish imagined that brew had been like which Nazi Occupied Europe had infused for itself from ground acorns.
PC Sid Bowman happened to be waiting to give evidence in a case of theft of a brassière from a clothes-line and it was he who took a telephone call which caused him to break up the interlude in the ante-room.
“Beamish here. Yes: I can make it in less than twenty minutes—yes, I quite see that we had better pull out the stops. Certainly, Mr. Mosley.”
Grimshaw was beginning to believe that life in Upper Marldale whenever he arrived there was a closely scripted scene from some over-rehearsed workshop drama in which no actor was ever allowed to vary his movement from one performance to another. The same women were congregated outside the supermarket with the same packets of convenience food protruding from their plastic shopping-bags. The same cyclist had reached precisely the same spot on Market Hill with his rabbit-hutch. But today there were differences. So many police vehicles were parked outside the Community Centre that it was likely to be the general public who brought charges of obstruction. Two large yellow British Telecom vans were half on the pavement.
Grimshaw ushered the Assistant Commissioner through the main door to find a row of half a dozen trestle-tables dressed in line along either side of the hall. At each of these an officer in mufti was poring over sheaves of paper in issue filing-trays. At the far end, sitting on the platform at a table with his homburg on it, Mosley, like a macabre minor princeling holding court, had obviously just applied fire to his pipe.
“Making progress with getting the phone on, I take it?” Grimshaw asked him.
“Actually, no. Some delay in the paper work. But the engineers happened to be repairing the kiosk in the Square, so I asked them to park outside here. I thought it might help us to look willing.”
Chapter Twenty-four
A few weeks before his secondment to Marldale, Beamish had done an infiltration job for which he had had to cultivate an appearance: a close-cropped green wig, though he had baulked at the cockades that some of his temporary associates sported; a loosely hanging patchwork cloak that would have offended the brethren of Joseph; and gumboots.
He thought it might put Deirdre more at her ease if he reverted to this rig for their evening out, though he omitted one or two accessories; the safety pin in one ear and the stud in one nostril. It was unfortunate that Deirdre had also departed from her norms, wishing Beamish to see her feminine potential. Since the evenings were chilly, a summer dress seemed inadvisable, and the wisdom of this decision was reinforced when she discovered how much amorphous girth she had acquired since last she had worn one. So she had put on a maroon frock in velvety material that she had last shown to the public three years ago, at a finical old crone’s charity bun feast. It seemed now to hang where it should be clinging, and clung where it ought to have hung. But this was as nothing compared with her horror at its pointed lace collar, which made her feel like an addition to the Bronte brood. The collar had to be rapidly unpicked; and when she saw the discolouration underneath it, it had to be sewn on again, which almost made her late for the date. They met on a corner of Pringle Market Place—and each stood and laughed at the sight of the other’s strategy.
“They’ll never let you into the Peacock,” Deirdre said.
“And I wouldn’t give much for your chances in Smoky Joe’s.”
They compromised with a motel restaurant on the Bradcaster by-pass, where they were relatively insensitive to fashion.
“So,” she said. “We have a visitor from Olympus. What’s the verdict?”
“I’ve only seen him at a distance. I hope I shall be able to keep that distance. He doesn’t look as if he’ll have much sympathy with witchcraft.”
“I’m wanting out of that, anyway. Sue Bexwell feels the same, and I think Pris Bladon would give her ears for an honourable escape route.”
“You’ve had fun.”
“We’d have some more—if there was a cat in hell’s chance of winning the playing-field. But there’s no way we can cope with that clock on the Herald’s terms.”
“You know that Mosley has ordered me to see that you win the bet?”
“Not seriously?”
“Mosley was serious.”
“So you’ve got a plan?”
“Several. But we can’t beat this Army Corps that the big man from London has brought with him. There’ll be no space for manoeuvre in the churchyard.”
“It’ll take more than a gramophone record of Saint-Saëns this time. I’m afraid the playing-field’s a lost cause. And who are the pincers closing in on? Am I allowed to ask?”
Almost every shred in Beamish’s make-up was for loyalty to Official Secrets. But he saw a slim chance.
“One leak deserves another.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why you three didn’t buy what Mrs. Cater knew.”
“The price was unacceptable.”
“And the price was?”
“We were to drop the playground idea. Suddaby’s field was for a hostel for the Glasshouse inmates.”
Then before Beamish could give away any operational confidences he felt a presence behind his chair. He turned and saw a young man of a type with whom he had become familiar during his infiltration exercise: a ritual hair-style attributed to American Indians. And he had with him a girl who was doing her best to emulate him, but was defeated by her peakiness. She looked too young, too unfilled-out to be sleeping away from home in NCOs’ old cubby-holes.
Deirdre introduced them: Merle Cox and Kevin Kenyon.
“Miss—they’re here again—they’re staying in the annexe.”
“Who are here again? Take your time, Kevin.”
“Those three who stayed in the Glasshouse. But they’re different. You wouldn’t think they were the same people. But that one, the one with the scars—I’d know him anywhere.”
“Are you sure, Kevin?”
Beamish was in no doubt. It was true because it was expected. And if they were here, it could mean only one thing: that they believed—because either Harry Whitcombe or Tod Hunter believed—that when the witches had come away from the Old Tollhouse, Beatrice Cater had told them what she knew.
“Where are they now?”
“They’ve gone into the bar.”
“OK,” Deirdre said. “Leave them to us. Don’t let them see you staring at them, and don’t speak to us again. Don’t even look as if you know us. Go on, now—scatter!”
The three people were already coming into the main dining-room,
looking for a waitress to show them to a table: two men and a woman. Deirdre was in the better position to see them.
“My God—I hope I never come up against them!”
“Let’s hope you don’t.”
“The one with the scars is bad enough—but his mate—! I’ve not believed in original sin since I rumbled Father Christmas—but I’d have to revise my theology if I saw much of that one.”
“And the woman?”
“Hard—and soft. Cruel eyes and a weak mouth. Straight on to the bed after watching a woman’s neck snap! She looks the part.”
“Deirdre, I’m sorry to break this up. I’ll finish my meal, because they mustn’t see I’m in a hurry. But we mustn’t hang about longer than we need. I have things to do.”
“Of course you have. There’s always the day after tomorrow. Dress for the Peacock next time! And why not leave me here to keep an eye on them?”
“Because you’re one of three on their hit list.”
Only when their coffee was served in the lounge was Beamish able to get a useful view of the trio. The men could have passed themselves off as executive types, or salesmen for computer software. After all, why should not an exclusive sales rep have eyes that would smile only at the sight of the ultimate fear on a victim’s face? And as for the woman, the last time Beamish had seen her like had been in a French film with captions: mostly shot through the louvres of a flat over a village patisserie.
It was impossible to use the pay-phone of the motel, which was sheltered only by an acoustic hood. It seemed a long drive before they found a booth from which Beamish could raise HQ, and then, since the AC’s staff were now manning their own switchboard, he was dealing with strangers. The Duty Inspector was the highest up the ladder that he could reach, and he was so unexcited by the news that it seemed doubtful whether he was going to take it seriously.
“I’d better follow this up every inch myself,” Beamish told Deirdre. “The first step, as always, is to look for Mosley.”
Among his follow-up force, the AC(T) had brought a Chief Inspector from the Fraud Squad and it was with this gentleman (who looked more like an escapee from a heavy mob) that he went to call on Tod Hunter, suavely and apologetically telling Grimshaw that he thought three would be too many for the interview. Grimshaw nailed Mosley down and took him with him to see Mrs. Wortham—because he fancied that there was a lot about the former secretary that so far only Mosley knew.
“We are sorry to intrude yet again, Mrs. Wortham, but there are one or two things I’m not clear about.”
Mosley sat balancing his homburg upside down on his knee and looked as if his apology for Grimshaw’s intrusion was genuine.
“I’m not quite sure of the machinery, Mrs. Wortham, by which a secretary at County Hall is expected to serve two masters.”
“I was never aware of any conflict,” she said.
“I’m not suggesting that it ever came to conflict. But when, for example, you wrote the name Barnes in the diary, on the day of Councillor Whitcombe’s departure for Corfu, who had told you to do so? Councillor Whitcombe—or Mr. Hunter?”
“It was a reminder to myself.”
“I understand that. But from whom did you first hear the name Barnes?”
She had to think about that one. And Grimshaw thought that her difficulty was not remembering the truth, but deciding whether to tell it.
“From Mr. Hunter,” she said. “Don’t think I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur, Superintendent, but we Chairmen’s secretaries were a little more than shorthand-typists. Up to a point, it was our job to try to keep the elected representatives on the rails.”
“You mean you had to keep your Chairman on the Chief Executive Officer’s rails?”
“That’s a misleading way of putting it. It was more a question of administrative consistency. We couldn’t, of course, tell our Chairmen what to do; but we could remind them what needed doing. We could shift papers up towards the tops of their in-trays when they had been hanging fire too long.”
“So you would get regular memoranda from Mr. Hunter, telling you when to jolly Councillor Whitcombe along?”
“That was more or less how things worked.”
“And did you have to jolly him along about Mr. Barnes?”
Again the pause: because she knew that what she was about to say next was another point of no return.
“Councillor Whitcombe had not heard of Mr. Barnes—or of the Mr. Hilgay whom he met in Scheveningen. In both cases, Mr. Hunter had asked me to contact the gentleman concerned and let him know Mr. Whitcombe’s dates and travel times.”
“So you knew in advance that Councillor Whitcombe was going to meet them—but he didn’t?”
She held her lips pursed, which was almost answer enough, because she knew that the truth about this must give everything away. But she had no intention of telling anything but truth: she knew things had reached that point.
“So I suggest, Mrs. Wortham, that Mr. Hunter had specifically told you not to mention Mr. Hilgay or Mr. Barnes to your Chairman.”
“He may have done. It is a long time ago.”
“He may have done? You mean that he did sometimes give you that kind of instruction?”
“Sometimes.”
“And in the cases of Mr. Hilgay and Mr. Barnes?”
“He told me to say nothing to Councillor Whitcombe.”
“Did you never ask yourself what it was all about?”
“There were times when it paid not to bother your head. Just to get on.”
“Why not bother your head?”
“One didn’t want to get involved in intrigues.”
“Was life in County Hall as frightening as that?”
“Not frightening, Superintendent. We are not talking about criminal activities—at least, I’m not. You used the phrase jollying along just now. There was a tremendous amount of that going on. It was going on all the time. It was the only way the machine ever kept working.”
“Mrs. Wortham, we started off by talking about conflict. If there had been a conflict—if you had had to make a loyalty decision—to whom would you have been loyal?”
“That’s not a fair question, Mr. Grimshaw.”
“Just treat it as a hypothetical one.”
“The question never arose—and if it had, I think I would have resigned, rather than risk falling out with either of two men with whom I got on excellently.”
“But if it had come to the crunch?”
“If it had come to the crunch, naturally I would have stuck by Mr. Hunter. Mr. Hunter was the permanent head of the administration. Councillor Whitcombe could have vanished the day after any election.”
Grimshaw and Mosley walked at a leisurely pace back to Grimshaw’s car.
“An innocent party,” Grimshaw said. “Hunter would have kept her that way, and that’s how she preferred it. Negative knowledge—but it’s progress.”
“I made as much progress as that when I came to see her yesterday,” Mosley said.
Did you ever give this woman a lift into or out of Bradburn?
The Assistant Commissioner’s task force was pushing questionnaires on the grand scale. And they unearthed someone who had twice given Beatrice Cater a ride: a milkman, Ernest Hurst, Pringle Model Dairies.
“What—on your float?”
“Friday afternoons I sometimes come round in the car. Bad debts. Special visit looks more impressive. Then I go off to Bradburn to do a bit of shopping for the wife.”
“Do you know where Mrs. Cater was going to in Bradburn?”
“The County Offices.”
“Did she talk at all?”
“Did she ever bloody stop?”
“So she may have dropped hints about why she wanted to go to County Hall?”
“Dropped hints? My head was bloody rattling with them.”
“So you were able to draw conclusions about what her business had been?”
“Able to draw the conclusion that she must be three parts
round the twist. Couldn’t make head or tail of it, the way she kept jumping from one thing to another. I know it had to do with cleaning women: because the cleaning women draw their pay on Friday afternoons. There was a char she wanted to see about something or other.”
“You don’t happen to know which department?”
“Yes: Highways. I know that, because I wasted time enough helping her to find it.”
“Actually, it’s Mr. Mosley that I wanted to see. You don’t know when he’s likely to be back?”
“I’m afraid not. But I’d be glad to take a message.”
“Happen he’s in Pringle or Bradburn. I’ll drop by later on. I’ve got to come back this way.”
It seemed important to Beamish to hang on to this man. There was something nervous about him—the sort who came along duty-bound to make a statement, and then if something went wrong in the handling of him, was off into the wilds without ever making it. Not a totally uneducated man: marked regional speech, but well under control; sober suit, not new, but well pressed; a man in his fifties, not corpulent, but did not neglect a healthy appetite; hill-weathered, but not a bumpkin by a long chalk.
“It will keep,” the man said.
“Well, perhaps you’ll let me have your name and address, and I’ll ask Mr. Mosley to call on you. Ah, no—wait—”
Beamish saw Mosley crossing the road to the Incident Room.
“Nah, Bob.”
“Nah, Jack.”
“Long time no see, Bob.”
Bob Mercer, Insurance; knew the way to as many farmhouses and cottages as Mosley did, but had had an inside job for the last few years.
“If we could have a bit of a word, Jack.”
“Aye.”
And Mercer looked meaningfully towards Beamish. Beamish did not expect Mosley to humour him, but Mosley did.
“You’d better come into the inner office, Bob.”
Which meant the crumby little kitchen in which Hardcastle and various women’s organizations made tea for which they could have found a use in a tanyard.
“Trouble, Bob?”
“I’m worried, Jack. And I’ve no right to be telling you this. I’ve no right to be here. I could get the push if it got out that I’d been—talking about a customer’s business, at that. Young Tod Hunter.”
Mists Over Mosley Page 17