Distant cattle lowing, the scent of distant hay, a distant cuckoo patrolling the perimeter: all the prime ingredients were there, including Matthew Longden in a deck-chair in the pavilion enclosure and a team of ladies, operating leaderless, but well versed in the construction of the ham sandwich.
Douglas Bowers got his eye in and began to rattle the bowlers’ confidence. Two successive attempts to york him devolved into loose balls on the leg side, which went where they deserved to go. Then an accurate, well-pitched ball was less devious than he judged it to be. He tried to knock off non-existent spin, misplaced his feet, and walked into the flight of it. The appeal was highly satisfying to both sides. Bradburn Second would rather lose him than chair him as man of yet another match. Bowers was resigned to his walk back across the green, and looked for the signal from Mosley. Then Mosley spoke an umpire’s decision that will be spoken of as long as cricket continues to be played in that part of the country.
“Sorry. Don’t know. Wasn’t looking. Not out.”
He ought, of course, to have been looking. But as his attention had wandered, and as he had been honest about that, he had no choice but to give the benefit of the doubt to the striker. Bowers carried his bat for 119, for which he received prolonged yet unenthusiastic applause. And there were men who were offhand with Mosley for the remainder of the afternoon. He told none of them what had taken his eye off the ball.
The ACC’s dinner-party for Councillor and Mrs. Bootherstone was not one of the easier conversation pieces of Bradburn’s social year. Tonight, Bootherstone wanted to talk particularly about the marshalling arrangements of the forthcoming Brad Valley Agricultural Show. It was not easy to divert the talk to the sale of young hares. Yet it was the Councillor who made the final opening for the subject. Like the shock of a gunshot in an empty room, he casually said the name Mosley. The ACC jumped visibly in his chair.
“A splendid officer,” Gladwin Bootherstone said. “A splendid officer. I had occasion to speak with him only the other day—oh, never mind what about: a confidence between us. What your force needs, Assistant Chief, is more officers like him.”
In almost all situations, Tom Grimshaw preferred the approach direct. He called on Mrs. Roffey in her Thirties Tudor villa. And at the mention of Mosley, the Amazon actually blushed.
“Now there is a man who is doing four times as much work as he is paid for. I don’t mind telling you that only the other week, he rescued me from a situation that could have become vexatious in the extreme. How long is it before he retires, Mr. Grimshaw? We must see to organizing a proper public testimonial to him.”
It happened that Mosley had to appear before the Bradburn Bench to give supplementary evidence of arrest in a case brought by a brother officer. The defending solicitor who, being an immigrant from the West Riding, was blunt to local sensitivities, began to treat Mosley with hurtful irony. Colonel Mortimer, not caring how his words might sound if there was an appeal to the divisional court, leaned down from his engine-turned oak throne under the royal coat of arms.
“May I advise you, Mr. Digby, that you are listening to evidence from one of this community’s most respected officers? He is here today, as always, solely to help this court, and the tone with which you are treating him does nothing to enhance either your credibility or your client’s.”
“I don’t even have to hear the man’s name,” the ACC said. “I suffer a physical tremor when I even remember his existence. There must be some truth in what we were saying the other day. The man is working up to something. And you still have no idea what it is?”
“No. But I cut myself shaving yesterday morning when his name crossed my mind.”
Tom Grimshaw’s relations with Mosley were often difficult, but he tried to remain pragmatic. He was, according to the official break-down of staff duties, in charge of the deployment of Mosley, so there had to be some basis of tolerance between them, even if it stopped short of brotherly love. The ACC, on the other hand, had now abandoned all belief that Mosley might in some way be an asset to his command.
“Do you think that he is aiming at a fundamental disruption of the established order, Tom? I hope you’re keeping a close eye on him. Ought we to put someone on his heels? A word with Marsters, perhaps?”
Now Chief Inspector Marsters was Mosley’s declared enemy. There was neither pragmatism nor the expiry of faint hope here. Marsters had no responsibility for Mosley’s operational programme. Otherwise he would by now either have suffered a stroke, or in self-defence have developed some grudging liking for the man. As it was, he considered it a personal affront that Mosley should be a member of the same organized body as himself. Veins stood out on Marsters’s temples when he was reminded of Mosley.
“I’ll have a diplomatic little word with Marsters,” Grimshaw said.
“We’ll both have a diplomatic little word with Marsters.”
But as yet there was no one on Mosley’s heels to watch how he comported himself when stumps were drawn at the finish of the Hadley Dale match. Douglas Bowers was delighted to get himself into conversation with all and sundry, yet all and sundry seemed adept at avoiding him—except for Matthew Longden, who went over to shake his hand, nobility for ever obliging. In any case, the nature of the offence that Douglas Bowers gave to other cricketers was not something that Matthew Longden could easily have understood.
Mosley did not seem to be in any hurry to leave Hadley Dale. He kept Matthew Longden in sight and attached himself to him as soon as players and spectators were clear of the ground. Longden went round testing that the changingroom doors were locked and began to walk lamely down to where he had parked his car.
“Wait for me, Mr. Longden.”
Longden smiled at Mosley’s hurrying little legs. “You don’t have to run to catch up with me, Inspector.”
Mosley came up alongside, and as he leaned on his stick, Longden’s discomfort seemed pathetically worse for the feeble comedy that he was trying to make of it. They eased themselves down a steep dip to where his car was.
“I need to ask you, Mr. Longden, whether Mrs. Pearson has made any attempt to get in touch with you.”
“She has not. And if she did—”
“If she did, I take it you would get in touch with us immediately.”
And the odd thing was that it did not look from his expression as if he ncessarily would.
“I just wonder if she might try to write to you from Holland.”
“If Holland is where she is.”
“You have reason to doubt that?”
“I would assume that Amsterdam was a stage in her journey to Germany.”
“And Mrs. Longden? Do you think that she was also only in Amsterdam in transit?”
Matthew Longden looked as if this whole conversation was so distasteful on his palate that he was going to call an abrupt end to it at any moment.
“I have no way of knowing where my wife went. And I long since ceased to trouble my brain over it.”
“You talked for a long time to our Superintendent Grimshaw, Mr. Longden, yet as far as I know you did not mention that there are these capricious similarities between the two cases.”
“Cases, Inspector. Everything to you is a case. To some of us they seem to be personal catastrophes—until we learn to get over them.”
“I’m sorry I used the word. I think you know me well enough not to accuse me of being uncaring.”
Longden looked at him without much belief. The shadows of the late spring evening were growing long and tapering, and away at some unmeasured distance they heard the clear-borne progress of a diesel train.
“I know, Inspector. But can’t you let this rest, now? Heavens—if you persist in this fashion, you’ll end up by bringing her back. And I can’t think of anything that would embarrass me more than that would.”
Heavy humour; Mosley did not allow it to put him off course.
“You didn’t tell Mr. Grimshaw about these similarities,” he persisted.
“I w
onder whether to. I decided against it. It could only complicate matters. And these things are wholly irrelvant.”
“You think so? I wonder how you account for them?”
“Account for them? Do I have to account for other people’s perversions?”
“They seem strange to an outsider.”
“An outsider, yes—you used the word yourself, Inspector. You didn’t live with the woman. No: let me put that less lethally. You didn’t have the woman living in your house. So you did not know—at least not at first hand—what vulgarities, what monumental lack of taste she was capable of. You are asking me why history repeats itself—or appears to be repeating itself. It’s because it is being made to repeat itself. And it’s being made to repeat itself because she knows how to make herself obnoxious. She thinks she’s offending me, opening up old wounds.”
“She knew all the details about Mrs. Longden’s departure, did she?”
Longden shrugged. If he answered that, it would not be because he saw much point in doing so. “We had talked about it. She was a great one for nosing into things that did not concern her. In the early days, when I first took her on, I made the mistake of being too friendly, too open. I made a rod for my own back, I suppose. Does any of this matter, Inspector?”
Mosley gave no direct answer to that. He went over to a fresh tack. “When Mrs. Longden went away, you leaned heavily on private agencies, if I am not mistaken.”
“That was because your colleagues of that time did not inspire much confidence. They seemed to have made their minds up in advance that she had gone off with a man she had been meeting—and that settled their priorities, once and for all. They did not seem to think that it mattered that I simply did not know where she had gone.”
“And which agencies did you go to?”
“Oh, Lord, I can’t remember. I got them out of the yellow pages, two or three of them, one after the other. I might say that I did not let most of them outlast their first verbal report. About all they were good for was keeping a comprehensive account of their alleged expenses.”
“I wish you could remember the name of just one of them,” Mosley said.
Of all the attempts that Longden had made to present a misleading picture, this business of private detectives was by far the least convincing.
“Why should I remember them? This was all of seven years ago, and if their performance was anything to go by, I would doubt whether a single one of them is still in business. And what are you getting at, Inspector? What are you rooting around for? What are you trying to dig out of a past that’s forgotten? There is no aspect of these miserable events that was not gone into by your superior officer, entirely to his satisfaction. And I may say that he is a man in whom I have every confidence, and a gentleman of a vanishing breed. Now I would hate to have to go to him and complain to him of harassment—”
“I’m sorry you should feel that there’s anything like that,” Mosley said mildly. “My commission is simply to arrive at the truth.”
“And you do not think I have been telling it, is that it?” Longden was over the top now and out from cover with bayonet fixed.
“The passage of time sometimes dulls our memories in spite of ourselves,” Mosley answered, his tone sadly apologetic.
“Meaning what, Inspector? If you think that I have anything to gain from misleading you—”
“Nothing is farther from my mind. But if I could just ask one more question—”
“What’s that? I’ll answer it if I think you have the right to be asking.”
“I just wonder whether there have been any other parallels between these two ladies, other than this coincidence of the airline tickets.”
Chance for him, at any rate, to say something about the sand-believed-arsenic. But Longden threw away the opportunity to clear himself.
“There have not. How could there be? And I resent the insinuation that I am open to question. I refuse to answer anything further except to your Superintendent Grimshaw. I shall ring him forthwith and complain of your attitude. I do not propose to have myself pin-pricked by a junior officer.”
“In that case, I’ll wish you good day, Mr. Longden. I do hope that if you happen to remember the names of any of those enquiry agents, you will get in touch.”
A sweet smell of evening. Mosley passed a farm of which even the coarser yard odours seemed like a healthy reminder of a clean and uncomplicated past. He went to call on Joe Ormerod at the police-house. Joe was sitting down to his Saturday-afternoon high tea of brown bread and cockles, his wife having returned on the bus from her shopping. At various points in the room there were specimens of a new generation of Ormerods, one of whom, a boy of nine or ten, bore so close a facial resemblance to his father as to look like some kind of family joke.
There was this to be said for PC Ormerod: he was not as dense-witted as he looked. Not quite. If that had been the case, society would surely have found some sort of refuge for him; he would certainly not have been allowed to play any acknowledged role in keeping society in order. His eyes and brow seemed combined in a permanent frown at his inability to understand the things about him. His narrow forehead, not dissimilar to that of theropithecus gelada, the Gelada baboon, suggested that here was a creature to whom epistemology and causation came as something of a puzzle. But Mosely knew that Joe Ormerod sometimes noticed things, though it did not always occur to him to pass them on. Joe’s favourite conversational tactic was silent withdrawal. His general attitude to trouble was one of non-interference. He had learned from experience that this sometimes encouraged difficulties to find their own solution. But he could also accumulate seams of arcane knowledge, and with patience and skill, these pockets of crude ore could sometimes be tapped.
The Ormerods were drinking tea from cups that each contained three-quarters of a pint. One of the most striking objects on the table was a tea-pot well capable of servicing such a battery of vessels. Joe’s wife poured a cup for Mosley.
“When did you last see Jack Pearson in Hadley Dale, Joe?”
“Not since he left,” Joe said, a characteristic Ormerod answer, but one which was perfectly satisfactory to Mosley. “Not since they saw him off,” Joe added. “The pair of them walked either side of him to the parish boundary.” That was a story that Mosley already knew.
“He was here this afternoon,” Mosley said. “Came up to the cricket field while Doug Bowers was batting. Didn’t show himself in the open though. Came slinking up along that dead ground behind deep extra cover.”
Joe washed down a prodigious aggregate of wholemeal bread and masticated molluscs, then swilled away this obstacle to speech.
“Oh, aye?”
“And I’ll tell you what, Joe, I got so tied up in it, I had to give Bowers not out. Matthew Longden spotted him the same moment I did. Got up out of his deck-chair and went hobbling round the back, casually, you know, as if he were going to the gents. Two or three minutes later I saw the pair of them together behind the score-box, down in that gully where they wouldn’t be seen from the benches. And that had me wondering.”
Perhaps Ormerod considered it presumptuous to anticipate a superior’s question. He did not react in any way.
“What has Longden ever had to do with Jack Pearson?”
Ormerod speared with his fork the best-fed cockle on his plate. “Used to work for him,” he said. “When Longden first came up here. Odd jobs. Clearing rubbish behind the house. Sawing logs. Window cleaning. Didn’t last long, though. Bit too much like earning his keep, for Jack Pearson, I reckon. Longden gave him his cards and Ted Hunter took over.”
“When, Joe, when? How long did it last? A week, a month, two months?”
Joe knitted his brow—not an achievement on which outside observers would have staked much betting money. “Let me see, now. It was Jack Pearson who shovelled the winter coals in, but I think it was Ted Hunter who did the snow-ridding when we had that big fall.”
“What I’m trying to get at, Joe—”
There were times when you had to ask Joe leading questions if you were to keep his mind on the subject at all.
“What I’m trying to get at, is: which of them, Pearson or Hunter, was odd-job man at the time Mrs. Longden went her ways?”
“Jack Pearson,” Ormerod said, without hesitation. “I know, because there’d been a hell of a to-do. Mrs. Longden had said something sharpish to Jack, like, and old Matthew was supposed to have come across him loosening the nuts on the car-wheels.”
“Eh?”
“That’s how it was,” Ormerod said.
“But surely Longden would have got rid of him there and then.”
“It wasn’t long after.”
“But on the spot, Joe.”
Ormerod clearly was applying his mind to the anomalies behind this. “I never did think we’d heard the whole story,” he said.
“The fact remains that the moment Jack Pearson appears on the edge of the cricket field, Matthew Longden gets up and goes to him. Keeps him out of sight and stands talking to him for six or seven minutes. Making me miss giving Bowers leg before. There’s something going on in this village, Joe.”
Mosley by Moonlight Page 9