“It’ll take me a day or two,” Mosley said.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I take it that elementary book-keeping is no problem for you?”
“It’s largely a matter of common sense, I would think.”
“It can need uncommon sense, if someone’s trying hard enough to lose an item. Ernest Weatherhead’s columns are plain enough for a child to follow. Could you spend an hour or two with this little lot, see if your conclusions agree with mine? I may say it’s touch and go, when I know someone as well as I know Ernest, whether I actually ask to see the inside of the safe. I don’t know what prompted me to this time.”
Mosley did not find the task difficult. He had a long interview with Ernest Weatherhead that did not go into his official notebook. One day towards the end of the previous June, Weatherhead had made a fundamental change in his working routines. Up to now he had always paid the takings into the bank through a night-safe at the end of each working day. Then he had started taking in his paying-in book during the course of the morning—with the previous day’s receipts. From now on, his banking was consistently a day behind. And Ernest Weatherhead was a day’s takings—approximately £250—in pocket. He had been unable to make up the deficit by the end of the financial year.
Mosley knew the young man, knew his wife, his and her family. Ernest Weatherhead was what they called locally a worriter: trivial details could obscure his larger view. It was easy to picture the torment he must have been through. The sum was small enough for him to have had some hope, in the first months, of making it good: by a windfall or a bet. Weatherhead was not normally a betting man, but he made one catastrophic experiment. He even had some hope at first from cheese-paring weekly savings—but domestic emergencies swallowed up the lot. And the whole thing was because of his wife’s first baby. She had insisted, to the brink of hysteria, on a private nursing home: an extravagance over which the town of Bradburn had clucked. Margaret Weatherhead had heard scarey stories about the NHS maternity wards. Young married women got on each other’s nerves with their bitchy tales.
It was no trouble to Mosley to get at the details. The young man’s hands were trembling when he was asked to call at the accountant’s offices to collect his books. There were tears—it embarrassed Longden to look at the man. But he was psychologist enough to let the suffering go on for some time before he let it be known that he was prepared to act as fairy godfather.
That had not been the end of the matter. Weatherhead had paid back Matthew Longden to the penny and to the day. But Longden had never let him forget the episode. If ever he came into Raven’s shop, Weatherhead wanted to hide. Longden had a way of looking at him that was a perpetual reminder. When the books came in for annual audit, it was not beyond him to remark that he hoped that Mr. Mosley wouldn’t have to show an interest this year.
“Honestly, Mr. Mosley,” Weatherhead once said to him, “I sometimes wish I’d been found out and faced the music. At least it would have been over and done with.”
But for Matthew Longden, nothing was ever over and done with. He had been magnanimous. He knew he had been magnanimous. He prided himself on what he had done for Ernest Weatherhead. It was another act of magnanimity to add to his personal capital.
Mosley looked at him now, exercising his exemplary patience—which threatened to reach exhaustion point at any moment. But the outburst did not come. Instead, Matthew Longden took solace in a bout of self-pitying irony.
It had seemed to the world—to two worlds, Bradburn and Hadley Dale—an exemplary marriage. Then his wife had gone off with some man whom she had apparently been seeing for some time. It had been a shock that neither Bradburn nor Hadley Dale had found it easy to assimilate. Betty Longden was a tall, serene, altogether rather splendid woman from a part of the country of which Hadley Dale knew nothing but imagined a good deal that was unsubstantiated. She had been a paragon of courtesy to everyone she met, yet there had been some barrier that had prevented anyone from getting to know her—as Hadley Dale understood getting to know people. It was not quite the same sort of thing as prevented people from getting to know her husband. In his case, it was his convincing sense of superiority. In hers, it was something totally elusive. Mosley had wondered, while the period of speculation had been at its most feverish, how well even her husband had known her.
“Of course, I’m no stranger to being left to my own resources,” Longden said to Mosley now, not without quiet enjoyment of his own martyrdom.
At least he was not asking Mosley to start looking for Lottie Pearson. When his Betty had wandered off, he had stirred up the pot and kept the sediment in suspension for months. He had employed and dismissed three private detectives in succession to try to get after her traces. He had almost ruptured blood-vessels in his fury against the police, whose certainty clearly was that she was an adult female who had gone her own way and was breaking no laws. They did not believe her to be in any danger, and they were obviously not bestirring themselves to look for her. Then had come one of those fortuitous strokes that sometimes cut corners. Betty Longden, making a phone call from a kiosk in the Greater Manchester area, had left behind her in the booth a booklet of airline tickets. It looked as if she had been calling the airline to confirm a check-in time. The tickets, which bore her name, were found by the next man to use the box, and he handed them in at a police station. No one there connected her with a missing person, and the duty officer informed the airline company at the airport. It was the next day before a police clerk spotted that she was a listed person—and by then there was no more to do than to confirm against the passenger manifest that she had already departed for Amsterdam on a single ticket. Longden had despatched the latest of his private eyes to Holland, but there had been no trail there to be picked up.
Longden, still lingering over the image of how meanly the fates had treated him, offered Mosley more Scotch. Mosley declined.
“Do you remember how I talked to you about it, when Mrs. Pearson first moved in here?”
Mosley had known at the time that he was being used as nothing more than a baffle-board for Longden’s own thoughts. There was nothing unorthodox about a man’s taking a housekeeper. It was as safe a way as existed for a man like Longden to take a mistress. Yet somehow, Longden had needed to talk about it, and it had not been lost on Mosley that the retired accountant was more deeply affected by the woman than he would admit. The only personal thing he had said about her was to praise her for her musicality. That, Longden had thought, stemmed from her nationality. How many people in Hadley Dale would have been as moved by J.S. Bach as Lottie Pearson was?
Mosley had limited himself to saying that he was sure Longden was doing a sensible thing. He ought to have had help in the house years ago. And if he had been able to find a woman to share his interests—Longden lived for his stereo—so much the better. Of course, clacking tongues here and there would jump to peevish conclusions—but what did that matter? A month from now, Mosley told him, the idea of Mrs. Pearson living at Hadley House would be as natural a part of the status quo as if she had always lived there.
At the same time, Mosley had noted that Lottie Pearson was a sensuous and potentially sensual woman. He had no reason to think of her as morally loose, but he thought she might be morally flexible. She would never have sold herself, but he fancied she might be the type of woman who would give herself generously and without much judgement. She was obviously a woman who had enjoyed men in her time, and had an appalling track-record of being blind to their faults until she was entangled with them. That was what had happened in the case of her first husband, an English private soldier in the Rhine army, whom she had probably regarded as a triumphant capture at the time. There had undoubtedly been something romantic in their linguistic difficulties, and through him she would have gained entry into a set that would have made her the envy of some German girls. There would have been madcap beery nights out. It was not until he had brought her to England that she realized what she had come down to. When
he started knocking her about, she forgave him a time or two: the task of standing on her own feet in a foreign country still looked a formidable one, and she was too proud to want to go home disillusioned. But eventually he abandoned her—in Bradcaster. That was where she met Jack Pearson—with whom she was to fare no better. Anyone in Hadley Dale, not excepting Jack’s mother, would have forecast that for her without hesitation.
Then after Jack Pearson, after living on for another eighteen months with his mother, came Matthew Longden. It was not difficult to see what illusions she might have had about him.
“So she got herself involved with that crew from the TV company?” Mosley asked casually, and as if his sympathies all lay with Longden.
Longden snorted. “I make no bones about it. I was furious with her. It was all so cheap. She threw herself at that producer as if she had not set eyes on a man in ten years.”
There was a limit to what Mosley could afford to reveal. He must not know about the sand in her porridge. That would be letting down Percy Allnut, Chymist.
The interference with the wheel-nuts on the car, on the other hand, was something that it was safe for him to know about, since Ted Hunter had been involved. Hunter was certain to have been indiscreet in the Plough. There was no point in protecting the confidences of Plough talk.
“She sometimes drove your car, didn’t she? Hadn’t you taught her yourself?”
“That was in the early days, before I came to know her properly. It’s a decision I’ve often regretted.”
“Wasn’t there something to do with the wheels?” Mosley said suddenly. “Something about nuts being loose, and a hub-cap off?”
And there was no doubt that this caught Longden like a blow to the side of the head. The blood flushed up under the scaly skin of his cheeks and he momentarily caught his breath.
“How do you know about that?”
“Talk.”
Longden paused a second. “I should have known. Not my cleverest moment. Not a thing I’d do if I’d my time over again.”
“It was your doing?”
“I told Hunter to do it. I had no intention of harming her. That’s why I insisted on his leaving the cap off the wheel, lying where she would see it—so there was no danger she’d try to drive off. I felt certain she wouldn’t know how to use a wheel-brace—or even that there is such a thing. It was just bad luck that Hunter was still about the place. Of course, he had no alternative but to tighten the nuts for her.”
“And what was it all about?”
Longden took a slow, deep breath. There was a strong suggestion in his eyes that any moment now he was going to start objecting to these questions. But—almost visibly—he applied himself to this one.
“I might as well tell you. I didn’t paint the whole picture just now. She’d been speaking for some months of leaving. And I’d told her that as far as I was concerned, I’d rather she made up her mind about it than go on talking about it. What I didn’t want was her going off with the car. I’m not suggesting for a moment, Inspector, that she would have stolen it: not to deprive me of it for good. She’d have left it where I could have picked it up, once it had taken her where she wanted to be. In the meantime, I would have been putting up with God knows what inconvenience.”
“And why was she threatening to go?” Mosley asked.
Again came the pause that was a danger sign. And again Longden disciplined himself. “Because she was getting above herself. Because being the best paid and most indulged servant in the western hemisphere was insufficient for her. Because she to whom thou givest shall ask for more. Because the novelty had worn off. Because it bored her to have to run a household in my way. Because it would have suited her better to turn Hadley House into a cross between a mausoleum and a Teutonic social history museum. Because if I asked for a four-minute egg, and she thought a three-minute egg was better for me, a three-minute egg was what I got.”
Outside, the light was beginning to fade. Beyond the tops of the trees the sky was dissolving into a uniform dark blue. Joe Ormerod would have come home for his supper by now. The beetle-browed constable did not yet know what sort of a night he was in for. Mosley had to go and tell him that he had a date on a hillside, once it could be assumed that Hadley Dale had gone to bed: a date with a spade.
“No. It hadn’t been working for some months—which was a pity. Because at her best, Mrs. Pearson was a hard worker, and until she began to need variety, as contented to be here as I was to see her about the place. However …”
Longden was going dismally on, self-righteous, and obviously under no doubt that he was justifying himself. Mosley terminated the conversation and stood up. They promised each other that they would keep each other posted with anything there was to report. Despite the excruciating business of getting his limbs into motion after so long at rest, Longden insisted on seeing Mosley to the door. And when Mosley had gone no more than twenty yards along the drive, he heard music so loud that it seemed to be breaking through the stone-work of the house.
Over to Joe Ormerod then, to alert him. And then Mosley had another call to make before the melodramatic side of the night’s activities started.
Chapter Six
So what did Mosley really know about Lottie Pearson? What people said, interpreted in the light of what they might be expected to say. People said about her what they did say about Germans, forgetting two world wars: that she worked like a Trojan and ate like a famished horse. That she had a wandering eye for a man, but that no man in Hadley Dale had let his eyes wander in her direction—except Jack Pearson and Matthew Longden, as unlikely a pair to speak of in the same breath as any man could imagine. That she had married a good-for-nothing who had blackened her eyes and abandoned her in Bradcaster. That it was in Bradcaster that she had met Jack Pearson who, anyone could have told her, would go on to treat her even worse than the last one did. That she seemed constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to “help” any man who appeared to need help. Then Jack Pearson had also departed from her life, and it was confidently reported that it was old Sarah and Lottie working in concert who had given him his marching orders, since when it had been love and hate all the way between Lottie and Sarah. There were goose-pimpling stories of the screaming rows that went on between them, but this could not have been the whole story, because both women were free agents. Sarah had shown no signs of kicking Lottie out, and Lottie had given no inkling that she wanted to up sticks: until she and Matthew Longden caught sight of each other, and Matthew Longden saw which side his bread was buttered.
Mosley went briefly to see Joe Ormerod, and then, until such time as the communal curiosity of Hadley Dale had reached the snoring stage, dropped over to chat with old Sarah. Because old Sarah was going to be the key to many things—if only he could coax them out of her before she took it into her head to kick him out into the night.
It was between nine o’clock and half past and old Sarah was getting ready to go to bed, an old country widow’s habit that did her no good at all, since she was making her first pot of tea by five every morning and had her vigorous round of household fettling completed by seven, leaving herself a fruitless morning of pottering about. Sarah Pearson was a woman who for various complex reasons liked all people to think she looked on them as enemies. For some equally extraordinary reason, she always seemed ready to admit Mosley to her councils. Perhaps this was because she thought that the nature of his work qualified him to share her contempt for humanity.
She made no difficulty about admitting him now, though at the moment when he knocked she was at her front door involved in her final day’s fury with bolts and chains. She had raked out her fire and damped down what embers remained: she had a vivid anticipation of every possible type of catastrophe. Her living-room, like herself, was a compound of personalities. There was a mantel photograph of Edwardian parents in all the self-conscious solemnity of the lowest respectable stratum of the rural working class. There was a framed postcard of her son Jack
in the uniform of a 1939 militiaman—taken, actually, between two spells in the glasshouse. There was a tradesman’s calendar several years old that she had preserved presumably because its picture appealed to her: an Olde Englishe rustic ford, bridge and willow. Her furnishings were threadbare but clean: dust was given little chance to settle in her house.
“You must be ruddy barmy, you must,” she said, establishing in advance that however friendly and helpful she might feel, she was not going to show it.
“What have I done now?” Mosley asked, with the right shade of comic resignation.
“Carrying all that lumber for me down to the bus. I hear enough about myself now, without being seen to be friends with a copper. So you’ve come at last, have you? About time, too. If you ask me, he’s done away with her—same as he did with his first wife.”
Her tone admitted of no doubt on these issues. But it would need an hour or two of subtle patience to find out whether she had any useful evidence to offer. Mosley nodded as if he had known all along, of course, that both accusations were true. They sat chatting like a pair of old friends in a vintage parish magazine illustration.
“You could hardly call Lottie his wife,” he said tentatively.
“You don’t reckon they sat listening to his gramophone all night, do you?”
“How did she fall in with him in the first place?”
“It was when everybody had the flu, wasn’t it? It was that young fly-by-night from the Bradburn Welfare, wasn’t it, who came bellyaching for someone to go up and do for him.”
“Was it?”
Sitting in her rocker with her hands folded in her lap, Sarah Pearson’s head nodded like a foraging hen’s as she told her story.
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