On this particular Friday morning Mosley was standing at the corner of Cornmarket Street and Tinker’s Lane in time to see Matthew Longden’s old blue Austin Cambridge come into town at the lower end of the Ribblesdale Road. His first impression was that Longden was alone in the front seat, but at the worst of moments a furniture van moved from rest and obscured his view. He had to wait until the car was turning into the Chapel yard before he could confirm that Matthew had indeed come into town on his own. It was the first time Mosley had known that to happen since Lottie Pearson had moved in as his housekeeper.
He sheltered in a shop doorway towards the less commercial end of Water Street. Whichever route Longden intended to follow, he would be certain not to come down here. Mosley watched the old man’s painful progress as he forced himself with determination towards Teape’s.
Mosley made his way to the Chapel, where instant coffee was being served by a knot of worthy women. He spotted Mrs. Pearson sitting alone. He had known her for most of his life and recognized her as a type that had still not disappeared from the remoter areas of the north country. She seemed to regard it as a matter for personal shame if ever she showed herself susceptible to any of the nobler emotions—especially love, pity or a capacity for self-sacrifice (which she had been practising all her life). Lottie had lived with Sarah Pearson throughout her second marriage, and, when Sarah’s son had left the two of them, she had remained there, to the accompaniment of one long strident quarrel that filled all their waking minutes. Perhaps the common ground between them had been their opinion of Jack Pearson.
Mosley moved towards the old woman in the tea-room, and she spotted him when he was halfway across the. room.
“I think I’ll draw up and take a cup with you,” he said.
“Aye. Take that chair.”
“So how are you keeping, Mrs. Pearson?”
“I mustn’t grumble.”
“Been having fun and games up the Dale, then?”
She did not seem to know immediately what he meant.
“Oh, that!” she said, when the television crew occurred to her. “And there’s some that ought to have known better than get mixed up in it. I don’t know what Mr. Longden would have to say about that, I’m sure.”
It was not simply that Sarah Pearson disapproved of acting and cameras. Innovations and publicity in general offended her. It was tempting to believe that she disapproved of everything—and certainly of her daughter-in-law’s liaison with the big house. She must surely scorn Matthew Longden’s morals. She hated him like a mortal enemy of her sort. But she would even pretend to respect him, if that was another lash for Lottie’s back.
“So Lottie got mixed up in the acting?”
“You can ask her yourself. She’ll be along in a minute.”
So Sarah Pearson did not know yet that Lottie had not come to Bradburn this morning? Hadley House was beyond the outskirts of the village. What went on up there could be very private. Mosley looked at the old woman’s two shopping-bags. They were very full. She had bought a stone of potatoes as well as her usual groceries. She must have made two visits to the vestry to get it all here. It was going to be a struggle for her to get this lot to the bus. He had better tell her.
“I see Matthew’s come to town on his own this morning.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m surprised he wants anything to do with her at all, after the exhibition she made of herself. Letting those creatures put their arms round her, stroking their chins. Letting them maul her about—then going off in the car with them.”
“You’d better let me give you a hand with your parcels.”
“I can manage.”
And maybe she would have tried, even if she had collapsed in the street. Up in the Dale, they looked on it as a hallmark of character, to push stubbornness to the extreme of stupidity. You had to ignore what the likes of Sarah Pearson said, and do what had to be done. Mosley stayed talking to her till he saw that she was getting worried about the time. Then he picked up her bags, and carried them down to the bus station ahead of her.
After that, he pushed his footsteps along to the quieter end of Fullergate, where he ran into Brad Oldroyd, who had been having a saw set at Hebblewhite’s.
“Nah, Brad.”
“Nah, Jack.”
“Settled down up yonder, has it now, then?”
“Aye—but it’s funny where things will lead folk.”
Meaning something about Lottie Pearson? For Mosley at the moment, all roads led to Lottie Pearson. But this was something different.
“Rum do,” Oldroyd said. “Three chaps up there today, looking at marks in the grass where that flying tea-caddy’s supposed to have come down. Had surveyors’ instruments with them, drawing-boards, the bloody lot.”
“Highways Department?”
“Chaps from away.”
“Funny, you know,” Mosley said. “There’s always somebody, somewhere, who only hears half of any story that’s going. I was saying in our office—”
“I thought it was only you and Joe Ormerod got took in like that.”
Then he caught the look in Mosley’s eyes.
“Sorry, Jack.”
“Brad, were you down in the village when that lot were swarming the street?”
“Yes. Some bugger had boxed me in with his car.”
“Lottie Pearson was getting up to some larks, so they tell me.”
“Oh, aye. She let herself go good and proper with one of those doodle-buggers. Like a couple of kids up Sandy Lane, they were.”
Mosley waited to be told why she had not come to town with her lord and master this morning. Oldroyd did not mention the fact—which could only mean that he did not know about it. But he knew something else.
“Funny thing about Lottie Pearson. Ted Hunter told me. He does odd jobs up there, you know, now the old fellow isn’t so good in the garden. Lottie went one morning to get the car out, found the wheel-nuts slackened off on all four. Called Ted to tighten them up for her.”
“Since the spacemen?”
“Couple of weeks before that.”
The same vintage as the sand in the porridge, then.
“How did she know they were loose?” Mosley asked.
“You’d hardly expect a woman to check on that every time.”
“Whoever had done it had been interrupted. The hubcaps were still off and lying there.”
“They didn’t report it.”
“No. She told Ted Hunter to say nowt. She’s a rum woman, you know. Believes in sorting out her own battles. There’s a lot to be said for keeping things to yourself.”
“Sometimes.”
“Ta-ra, Jack.”
“Ta-ra, Brad.”
Mosley went on his way. Just before the Mitregate crossing, a panda car drove up and the driver wound his window down.
“Got a minute, Inspector Mosley?”
It was Grimshaw, being driven by a constable new to the division, hence his scruples about the courtesies. He managed to get his long, ungraceful legs out of the car, and walked some way with Mosley.
“Strange times we live in,” he said.
Mosley always strictly rationed any appearance of co-operation with Grimshaw. He said nothing.
“I mean, there are crimes that hadn’t been thought of when you and I were recruits. Like these damned silly kids.”
Mosley showed no curiosity about them.
“Glue-sniffing,” Grimshaw said.
He waited for Mosley to ask for an explanation. But Mosley did not reveal whether the term and the practice were new to him or not. There had, of course, been circulars about it. But no one in head office believed that Mosley ever read those.
“Some of the doctors reckon it’s harmless. They’d do better to keep their mouths shut. It can lead to worse things. In any case, it’s a damned nuisance. A lot of parents are worried out of their minds. Now we’ve a nasty one, out on the Cheviot Estate.”
“Who’s that, then?”
“La
d called Watlington. Father’s a finisher at Chadbolts’.”
“I know him. What’s happened?”
“The silly young sods have found a new way of doing it. They soak the stuff into a bit of old rag, Scotch-tape it under their noses, then put a plastic bag over their heads. Young Watlington died of suffocation last night. Twelve years old.”
They had to wait for lights to let them over a crossing.
“No need for you to trouble yourself over it, though. Straightforward case for the coroner. I’ll get Tyson over to give a talk at the school. He’s Crime Prevention Officer, puts things over well with the kiddies. Of course, if you feel you ought to do that yourself, it’s your territory—”
Mosley shook his head. Grimshaw wondered what, if anything, had registered. Glue-sniffing? Could Mosley possibly have heard of this bloody silly craze? They crossed the road, jumping outside the studs to avoid the bonnet of an orange Datsun whose driver hoped too much of the amber.
“I’ll tell you what, though, Mosley. Find time to go round to the model shops and DIY places. Warn them to be on the look-out for non-genuine purchasers. Get the name of any kids they suspect.”
“I did that last week,” Mosley said.
Grimshaw stopped in mid-stride and grasped his elbow.
“There are times when I don’t know what to make of you,” he said, “I had to read this all up this morning.”
“You ought to watch more telly,” Mosley told him.
Chapter Four
At the end of the afternoon Mosley went up to Hadley Dale on the school bus. An hour earlier he had been over to the school, but he did not go in. Last week he had called and given a list of names to the headmaster. Watlington’s had been one of them. Some of the shopkeepers must have known that there were kids who could not possibly be making legitimate use of the glue in the quantity in which they were buying it. The headmaster had been polite, smooth—and unpersuaded. Now Mosley stood by the railings and looked into the yard with idle, middle-aged vacancy. It was a Middle School. The younger ones had not grown out of singing games.
The big ship sailed through the alley, alley-oh—
He remembered singing that one himself, when he had been that age. It gave him a sense of the continuity of time. The older boys were playing a game of forty-a-side asphalt football with an old tennis ball. Girls were skipping to a rhyme about Shirley Temple. Had they any idea who Shirley Temple was? One boy, under-developed for his years, was standing apart from everyone else, near a railed flight of steps that led down into a boiler-room. He looked miserable, isolated. At intervals he drew snivelling breath up a damp and suffering nose. For two or three minutes Mosley did not take his eyes off that boy.
He got a place on the school bus because the driver knew him. He sat behind the boy he had watched in the playground. The lad entered into no conversation with the child sitting next to him. He kept his face turned to the window, though he was probably seeing nothing. At intervals, he sniffed.
Elsewhere on the bus, the noise was so great that children were having to shout to their nearest neighbours. There was excited talk about the boy who had died. Excitement was the key-word, not grief. Only the child in front of Mosley seemed to have been driven out of his wits by what had happened.
“Mr. Reynolds sent for three out of Mr. Hall’s class.”
“And Jackie Beavis and Dicky Bird out of Miss Jackson’s.”
“Somebody must have told on Michael Turner Mr. Reynolds came and fetched him himself.”
Outside the Technical College, the bus stopped to pick up a handful of older students from outlying hill-country: jeans, sweat-shirts and chewing-gum. The bus stopped at crossroads and milk-platforms that were now mostly disused. Hadley village stood at the watershed of the Dale and there was a long, straight climb before the road twisted round a double hairpin under the first row of cottages. There were only three passengers left, and Mosley let them disappear into their homes before he himself moved in leisurely fashion along the broad main street. He made his way towards the end-cottage of a short terrace—a swept, flagged path, aluminum windows replacing former leaded lights. A woman was moving sloppily about her kitchen in ill-fitting mules.
Mosley knew that a lot of nonsense was talked about a policeman’s sixth sense. What a policeman did need was experience: a stock of yardsticks, precedents, associations. May Hunter did not come immediately to the door when he knocked, and he knew that was because his visit did not come as an entire surprise to her, though she probably had a completely wrong idea of what it was about. He could hear her doing a frantic, flapping round of tidying up. The police, her mind would be telling her, were concerned with law and order, therefore they would be influenced by the state of law and order on kitchen shelves and living-room mantelpieces.
May Hunter was invariably harassed, even when there was nothing apparent to harass her. She had been pretty once, in a petite way that made her an improbable partner for Ted Hunter. But being married to him had dissolved her prettiness, superannuated it. Flesh and colour had shrunk away from her face. Her nose had become thinner and sharper, to the point at which it must have seemed a permanent accusation to the man who had to live with it. Not that Ted Hunter was a round-the-clock-and-calendar hellion. It was the drink—as he sanctimoniously repeated between bouts. He had both long and short spells of staying away from it.
“Mr. Mosley?”
May Hunter could not hide her concern. It could not be good news when Mosley came visiting.
“It’s your lad I wanted to talk to.”
“What’s he done? He went up to his bedroom the moment he came into the house. He does nothing but moon about, these days. I don’t know what to make of him. I can’t do a thing with him. He hardly speaks to us. What’s he been up to?”
Her eyes, rather than her nose, were the arresting features now—ridden with anxiety, yet capable of being vituperative.
“Better get him to tell us,” Mosley said.
She went to the stair-bottom and called the boy. Mosley looked round the room. There were one or two pictures on the walls, simplistic landscapes: the Lakes and a Cornish fishing village. The Hunters were not a bookish household: a greasy cookery manual, a Family Doctor, a Road Atlas, an unexpected Book of Stately Homes. Also unexpected was a row of half a dozen volumes in German: condensed novels, a schoolgirl’s collection of Goethe’s lyrics, a popular paperback edition of Durer’s woodcuts.
A full minute elapsed, and there was no answer from young Hunter.
“What’s it all about, Mr. Mosley?”
Then her temper gave out. She sprang halfway up the stairs and screamed for the boy. He came down as if he were afraid to take every next tread.
“What have you been doing with yourself, young Bernard? This in Inspector Mosley, the detective.”
Bernard remained near the foot of the stairs. Mosley called him over to the window, put two fingers under his chin and tilted his face up towards the light. He bent down to examine the skin under his nostrils.
“It’s his hay fever,” his mother said.
“Sore, isn’t it Bernard? Only it isn’t hay fever, is it?”
The boy kept his defensive silence.
“It isn’t, is it? It isn’t hay fever?”
“I don’t know.”
“What else could it be?”
The boy was too frightened to speak. Mosley turned to the woman.
“Glue,” he said quietly.
“Glue?”
“They sniff it,” Mosley said. “It’s a drug.”
“Oh, God, Bernard—you haven’t, have you?”
Bernard grasped at a rationalization.
“I was leaning over a bench, and some of it went up my nose.”
Mosley took the boy’s shoulders and pulled him round so that they were facing each other.
“I don’t like boys who tell lies. And you’re doing worse than telling lies to me. You’re trying to tell them to yourself. A boy who would cheat himself wo
uld cheat anyone. You’ve been sniffing glue—like Jackie Beavis and Dicky Bird out of Miss Jackson’s class—and George Watlington. Tell your mother what happened to Georgie Watlington.”
No answer.
“Who’s Georgie Watlington?” May Hunter asked.
“A lad from one of the Bradburn estates. He died yesterday. Glue-sniffing.”
“Oh, my God.”
She looked helplessly at both of them.
“His Dad will kill him. I daren’t tell him. Does he have to know? Is there no way? Do you have to …?” Mosley looked at her as if he were extremely reluctant to stretch a point for her.
“What time does your husband leave for work in the mornings?”
“Half seven.”
“And what times does the post arrive?”
“Never before eight.”
“There’ll be a letter from the school. Bound to be. It will be addressed to the boy’s Dad. Get it before he sees it. Say nothing about it. If you have to go and see the headmaster, can you manage it without letting on?”
“I can make out I’m going for a hair-do.”
“I’d do that, if I were you, Mrs. Hunter.”
She nodded, then turned and seized the boy by the sleeves of his jacket.
“What did you go and get mixed up in this sort of carry-on for?”
“Experiment and sensation,” Mosley said. “And imitation.”
He moved forward now without making any excuses for himself and took one of the tattered text-books from the shelf. He chose the Goethe, whose archaic Gothic print meant nothing to him. He turned to the fly-leaf: Charlotte Illing, Hildesheim, 1952.
“Mr. Longden’s housekeeper was having a clear-out,” May Hunter said. “She gave Ted a few books that she said might one day come in useful for Bernard.”
“When was this?”
“A few days ago. And I’ll give the little bugger sensation. I’ll give him imitation. I never know what’s going on in his mind these days. I sometimes wonder if he’s in his right mind. He’s not like other lads. What’s the betting he won’t blurt this all out in front of his father even now?”
Mosley by Moonlight Page 3