Her daughter-in-law had started working as a home-help up and down the village and her name had quickly been put on the roster of official workers. To hear Sarah Pearson talk, one would think that she had never had anything but unqualified admiration for the woman. And it was not difficult imagining the blitzkrieg that had been waged in some squalid old men’s cottages.
“A tip, Jonathan Clegg’s was, Mr. Mosley. The sort of house where you wiped your feet when you came out. Until Lottie read him the riot act. He’d a saucepan of fat on his cooker that looked like a moss-garden. She had the place so you could eat off the floor.”
Then had come the epidemic. It had taken to their graves more than one of the old people that Lottie had looked after. Worse than that, it had laid low many of her fellow-workers in the field. The medical officer had come pleading with Lottie to go and ‘sort out’ Matthew Longden, who could not be taken into the cottage hospital because so many of the nursing staff had been struck down that all admissions had been suspended.
It was a March day, rain slashing in leaden spears across the dismal deserted theatre of the village square. The smoke hung low and amorphously over the cottage roofs, as if it were more than it could do to struggle up through the elements.
“You’d be mad to go,” Sarah Pearson told her, but Lottie was already putting on her German-looking hat, buttoning her outdoor coat across her well-found bosom. The welfare woman ran her up to the big house in her car. But it was late in the evening before she returned, and that was on foot, through rain driven by a near-gale. She had scarcely been able to stand up in it, had been able to make progress, she said, only by walking backwards with a stoop. And even at that, until she had mastered the art of leaning into the wind, her shoulders had been jostled against wall-ends and gateposts. Lottie Pearson was a tough woman, but she had had to sit by the fire for several minutes before she even wanted to start taking her coat off.
Sarah Pearson berated her for her foolishness. There was no man on earth who was worth that degree of exhaustion, least of all Matthew Longden, who had enough egg on his chin for a chamberful of district councillors. But Lottie insisted that she must go back there tomorrow. Old Sarah put on a very creditable imitation of her mishmash of accent and idiom.
“Ze poor old bugger have need of ze hands of ze woman.”
“You watch out he doesn’t have need of something more than your hands,” Sarah told her.
“Ach, zat! He is too weak to piss,” said Lottie, whose instruction in the English tongue had been broadly based.
And the next morning, without lingering even to make a proper breakfast, she had insisted on going back up to Hadley House, though there seemed to have been no abatement of the storm. Moreover, she had filled her basket from their joint larder with an abandon that Sarah described to Mosley with lurid resentment.
“Ach, was! He have money. I go to ze shop on ze way home.”
Lottie Pearson was away for the inside of a long day, came back in darkness, and was shivering to the core of her body as she sat with her knees burning in front of Sarah’s well-stoked fire. Lottie was one of those women who always escape epidemics in their early and middle stages, when the majority of the populace have succumbed. It is only when the rest of the world is recovering that they are stricken—and badly. Sarah Pearson had no doubt of the symptoms, but Lottie would still not admit them to herself.
“I can see myself nursing you through double pneumonia,” Sarah told her.
The old woman must have been speechless with exasperation to see Lottie facing the weather on yet a third day, with nothing inside her but a cup of tea, which she barely gave herself time to finish. She did not come home again at all that day—and sent no message, because there was no way in which a message could have been carried. But Sarah made no allowances for that. She had sat up till nearly eleven, waiting to lock up. From the way she told the story, it did not seem that she had forgiven Lottie for that yet. But the milkman, Bill Henry, brought a note the next morning. It was in Matthew Longden’s handwriting, not at its most firm, and it announced that it would be a day or two before Lottie would be fit to come home.
It was not quite a case of the blind leading the blind. Necessity sometimes draws strengths out of unexpected reserves. Lottie Pearson had nursed Matthew to the stage at which he could just about get up and go to the lavatory. Seeing the state that his nurse was in, he had struggled downstairs, and now it was his turn to concoct the sweat-making drinks. Lottie Pearson was not now in a state to deny that she needed them.
It was all of ten days before Matthew Longden drove her back down into the village. It was not a question of verbal warfare with Sarah Pearson now; the pair were speechless with hostility.
“So when are you moving in with him for good?” old Sarah asked.
It was not until the day after her return that Lottie announced that henceforth she was going in daily to look after Mr. Longden: in point of fact, he had told her that she must let at least two weeks go by before she thought of working again. Embittered and critical, her mother-in-law observed how she dressed up for what was supposed to be a charring session in her best lacquered straw bonnet, which she adjusted several times in front of the mirror. God knows where she had acquired it. It might have been fashionable in the more conservative German provinces before the last war.
“What time am I to expect you back this time, then? Have I to keep you a supper?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know whether Mr. Longden will ask me to share a bite with him.”
Which he did—and to stay for tea, as well as sit at his midday table. There was a complexity of sarcasm from Sarah Pearson’s lips. She had no room at all for Matthew Longden at the best of times. Mosley found it difficult to be clear about the reasons for this. It was partly class hatred, inbred—and with a lifetime of continuous reinforcement. But Sarah Pearson was also repetitive about the way he had treated his wife. What form this had taken, and how she came to be so sure of it were things to which Mosley found it difficult to track his way to a satisfactory answer.
“You could see the poor woman had no soul to call her own.”
But how could she see such a thing?
“It was written all over her face, even if you only saw her for a minute in Madge Rowley’s shop.”
What, exactly, was written in her face?
“She wasn’t part of the place—and you could see that she wanted be. She was always itching to hurry back to the big house. You could see that she wanted to stand and talk, but it was as if she was scared to be late back.”
Mosley knew Sarah Pearson and her sort too well to think that their case was weakened, just because they could not be articulate about it. One thing was clear: Lottie had not worried about how late she came back home. She was soon spending more time with Matthew Longden than she was with Sarah.
“Started staying to supper, too, if you please. Listening to music. Real music she tried to tell me.”
Sarah nodded towards her all-mains pre-war cabinet radio.
“We always listened to ‘Friday Night is Music Night’. I never knew her go on about that.”
But Matthew Longden had several hundred pounds’ worth of high technology.
“Beethoven and that. She cracked on there was something special about her when it came to music.”
One night she came home outrageously late from something they had been listening to together.
“Red spots over her cheeks. That excited. I could tell.”
Clearly this was the definitive crisis between the two. Two days later, Lottie made it known that Matthew Longden had asked her to be his resident housekeeper and that she would be taking all her lumber up the hill as soon as she could get Harry Wheeldon to shift it for her in his van.
“And the next the village knew, he was teaching her to drive his car. His housekeeper! Dressed to the nines at the steering-wheel as if she were on her way to open some garden fête. You’d think she was gentry, to see her driving round
the countryside. It hadn’t been often that we’d seen Matthew Longden outside his own grounds, especially since his wife left. But now it was all day up in the dales a day in the Trough, a trip out to Scarborough.”
And life had settled down to a rhythm with which many people were familiar, not forgetting their shopping expeditions on Friday mornings. Whatever venom Sarah Pearson might strew over the evidence, however piously Matthew Longden might pretend it had only been a master-servant relationship, Mosley knew that there had been a time when the two had taken such pleasure in each other’s company that they had not cared who had seen it. Matthew Longden had made a settlement on Lottie Pearson such as men only make on their wives. Those who were sympathetic to both parties had believed that here were two people who had had the good fortune to be compensated for their leaner years. And there had appeared nothing grotesque in their relationship. Lottie Pearson was a comely woman. Matthew Longden never cut less than a gentlemanly figure. And at the height of their friendship, their very happiness made them a pleasant pair to see together.
So when had the first signs been noticed that things were cooling between them? It was not a point on which Sarah Pearson could be helpful. She had been too delighted that things had cooled.
“What about your Jack? Did he never make any effort to get in touch with her?”
She looked at Mosley as if she doubted his sanity.
“He’d know better than to try to come here.”
“Has he been seen at all about the village?”
“Do you think he dare? There’d be too many wanting to settle with him.”
Jack Pearson was capable of sparkling good humour. Some of his catch-phrases might even sound witty, to someone as strange to the vernacular as Lottie Pearson. He had always had a strong taste for contemporary fashion: much of the dishonesty that got him in trouble from time to time was to finance his sartorial conceits. The photograph of him in wartime uniform, which his mother—oddly enough—had not thrown away, showed a cheap, common, yet fastidious Adonis. But when it came to petty crime, his absolute lack of intelligence showed through. He was incapable of imagining himself ever caught. He could not think that his current scheme was not foolproof. And in last ditches—in which he found himself regularly—he was capable of incredible and futile meanness. He did not understand the nature of debts of friendship. If somebody else could be caused to carry a can for him, he gave no thought for loyalties of the past, or investments that he might need for the future.
The last time he left home and Lottie Pearson, he had disappeared in the direction of Bradcaster, presumably into the twilit world of sleazy lodgings. It must certainly have come somehow to his knowledge that Lottie had gone to live at the big house. Could he have avoided the temptation to find his way to her there, a begging visit, pitching an all too credible hard-luck story? And could Lottie Pearson, with her weakness for underdogs, have resisted giving him at least some help, however shabbily he had dealt with her before?
There was no answer to that here. Old Sarah would not know. Mosley looked at the time. Sarah Pearson kept her clock permanently ten minutes fast, as if there was something that she was perpetually in danger of missing, as if her profound distrust in her environment extended even to escapements and pendula.
“You’re off, then?” she said, noticing his stirrings. “I’ve squared it all up for you, have I?”
“Squared?” Mosley asked. “Squared? Who’s got any right-angles in Hadley Dale?”
Chapter Seven
There were certain things you had to bear in mind when you were exhuming a corpse. One was that you did not know how deep the thing was likely to lie. Very often whoever had disposed of it had been glad of the time he could save himself by skimping the depth. You did not want to go driving in the point of your pick just where you would add to the pathologist’s uncertainties. And this was especially true when the cadaver had been in the earth as short a time as might be the case with Lottie Pearson: only since Tuesday, and today was only Friday. You didn’t want to go stabbing the edge of your spade into flesh that was at that early stage of decomposition.
The other thing you need is a rigid control of your imagination. You have to keep your mind on what you are doing, but not let it dwell on certain aspects: even detective-inspectors have their human susceptibilities. It had not come Mosley’s way to take part in many disinterments, and it was a long time since the last one. But he had in his time exposed both old bones and fresher flesh. In every case they had belonged to someone he had not known. When you are familiar with what used to be someone, you learn to look at things obliquely. Joe Ormerod, on the other hand, had never performed this kind of duty before. He went at it with a brute energy that Mosley had to curb.
“Just remember, Joe, she may only be a foot or so under. We don’t want to damage her more than she’s been damaged. At the very first sign that we’ve made contact, we don’t go on digging, we don’t even scrape—we start brushing soil away as if we were dusting the best china. She won’t have the protection of a casket.”
Joe had accepted the chore characteristically—with neither complaint nor any show of interest. Mosley had had to keep him quiet as they trudged through the Hadley Dale night. It was a struggle to keep digging gear from clanking. It would be a mighty feat to do what they were setting out to do without the knowledge of Hadley Dale, but they had to achieve that if possible. Mosley even refused to allow them to use lights until they were on the blind side of a wall that bounded Matthew Longden’s estate. Their progress was uneven, and accompanied by mutterings from Joe that did not seem to be an actual form of communication. Eventually they reached the spot to which the ley-line seekers had taken Mosley. He lit and deployed all their lamps and lanterns—they had to take a chance now—and began testing top-soil gingerly with a pick. He was conscious enough of his age to know that Joe would have to do most of the heavy work, and, once Joe started digging, it was not a question of urging him on, but of slowing him down, cajoling him to have a proper respect for what he was doing.
Suddenly Joe straightened himself up, put his hand on his stomach, then bent forward again, away from the shallow trench he had already made. He began retching.
“What is it, Joe?”
“I’m into something. I think it might be her neck.”
He heaved again.
“Let me,” Mosley said, and fell on his knees beside the spot where Ormerod had been working. He felt with his fingers, plunged them into something wet and cold.
“Pass me one of the trowels, Joe. You can leave this to me.”
He began to edge the soil gently aside, felt his spade catch presently against fabric.
“Here she is, Joe. Not more than eighteen inches down. Thank God for small mercies. He wasn’t very respectful, was he? Damn it, it’s a wonder the foxes haven’t found her.”
Grave-digger’s humour, path. lab. cynicism, undertaker’s callousness: you had to let yourself go to take your mind off the true meaning of what you were unearthing. You mustn’t let your mind dwell on the last time you saw Lottie Pearson: at Bradburn market, smiling her special sideways smile at Matthew Longden—and Longden smiling back at her.
“At least, he had the decency to wrap her in a blanket. That was probably so he didn’t have to keep catching sight of her himself. And blast it, Joe, the overlap is tucked in underneath her. We shall have to expose the whole surface before we can get at her.”
Joe Ormerod had quickly recovered.
“Shall I get working at the other end, then, Mr. Mosley?”
“Aye, lad. Let’s make half the work of it.”
Joe got down on his knees at the other end of the mound and started working as Mosley was, not actually digging, but gently easing away soil. A waning moon was just beginning to clear a skyline stretch of trees, and soon they could see remarkably clearly all they were doing. Every time one of their hands touched a blanket, they were within a fraction of an inch of what had been Lottie Pearson.
“You know what, Mr. Mosley? I don’t think there is a body under this thing.”
“You may be right, Joe. I’m beginning to wonder myself. Let’s hope that it isn’t—unless that means that she’s buried somewhere else—deeper.”
It was the right size and shape for a body—the right size and shape for Lottie Pearson’s body. But once they had the upper contour of the blanket exposed, it was obvious that something was wrong somewhere. In places the content was too soft, in others too hard and angular.
“No. Joe. This is not Lottie Pearson. We’d better see what it is we have got.”
They now had to scrape soil from under the blanket, which slowed them down. What they finally brought up into the moonlight was a pile of clothing—a woman’s clothing—underwear, blouses, summer frocks, skirts, jumpers. There were other things, too: a couple of cheap, touristy pictures of castled crags in the Rhine Valley, a few long-playing records, singles, German pop hits of the 1960s. If someone had wanted to clear out of his sight everything belonging to a woman whom he now hated, the result would be just such a collection.
Ormerod began assembling their implements.
“Hey, wait a minute, Joe. We haven’t finished yet. There could be a bit of a trick here. She might be under this lot. This might only be the top of the dressing.”
But it was not. The soil became firmer. Their spades caught into a root system that had not previously been disturbed. There had been no digging deeper than the bed on which the blanket had lain. Mosley insisted that they shift the soil back into the trench. It needed a double journey to carry their tools and their booty back down to the police-house.
“So what have we learned, Joe?”
Ormerod looked at him with eyes that seemed more than usually witless.
“Quite right, Joe. We’ve learned nothing. We don’t know whether she’s alive or dead.”
He got the constable to run him home. The cats’ eyes of the highroad undulated, swung smoothly round curves, were swept away behind them. The roads were free of traffic. Ormerod drove with his foot firmly down, but with steady control. He ignored village speed limits. Mosley did not complain.
Mosley by Moonlight Page 6