“You say you work the Bradburn area?”
“Bradburn Rural.”
“That includes Marrington? Stonemill?”
“Place-names etched on the lining of my heart.”
“Does the name Garrod mean anything to you?”
“Edwina Garrod?”
“The same.”
Mosley winced in exaggerated fashion.
“Not to be taken at her face value?” Houston asked.
“Or her apparent cash value either,” Mosley said.
Houston wrote something on a jotter.
“Obliged. Now what can I do for you?”
Houston listened, and did not pretend to remember Matthew Longden or any assignment for him.
“But I don’t clutter my mind with what’s gone before. If I ever did anything for him, it’ll be in the records. Give me approximate dates, and I’ll go through the books. Can you call back tomorrow morning?”
The outcome was that Houston told how he had been engaged by Longden some weeks before the disappearance of his wife. His task had been to find the identity of the man whom she had been meeting in Bradcaster on the sly. What had happened was that she had had a series of dental appointments, for root-canal work, on Thursday afternoons. There were greener-over-the-hill reasons why she had not had it done in Bradburn. She always came into the city by bus because Longden needed the car, and he could not run her over himself because Thursday was his Rotary day. The service time-tables were wretchedly unhelpful and condemned her to a weekly wait of some two and a half hours during which she started taking a leisurely tea upstairs in Marley’s. The word was not slow in reaching Hadley Dale that it had become a weekly event for her to share a table in a discreet corner of the restaurant. It never did become clear who had actually seen them, but there was a confident consensus description of the man: perhaps five, even ten years younger than her, well dressed, quietly spoken and carrying an executive brief-case that suggested an established vocation. It was thought, from the tender, even proud way in which he looked at her, that he must be becoming very fond of her indeed, and they must have something on their consciences, because they were always careful not to be seen coming out of the restaurant together.
Then a further report went the rounds—brought by Mrs. Wilson, a dormitory migrant to the village, who had been taking her child to town for expensive orthodontic consultations. The new story was that Mrs. Longden had not been to the dentist at all that afternoon, and had not been expected there. Nevertheless, she had travelled in on the bus as usual.
“I remember it all now,” Houston said. “Longden was a very bitter man, very angry because I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. I’d been to the cafe, ye ken, I’d talked to the waitresses, I’d had a word with other regular customers. I’d also talked to yon dentist’s wee receptionist, and I’d come to the conclusion that there was nae man.”
“But there had been dental appointments?”
“In the first instance. But the visits to Bradcaster had gone on long after her treatment was complete.”
Mosley leaned on the balustrade and waited for a moorhen to reappear after a long expedition down among the bottom weeds.
Dick Godfrey had given him the names of three people who knew more about Betty Longden than they had ever told. He had already done the spadework on them.
Chapter Twelve
When the dust had all finally cleared—when the linen, as it were, was fluttering like bunting on the line—there were some not altogether unsympathetic inquests behind the scenes on the manner in which Mosley had conducted himself. The opinion was strongly held that he had taken a quite unnecessarily circuitous route to soften up his eminent informants, that he had been elaborately devious simply for his own amusement. Mosley was not given to justifying himself. When opinions were being expressed that were obtusely critical of his methods, his habit was to receive them in silence and absent himself about fresh work at the first opportunity. But he had been heard to mention to a colleague how he had come to act as he did with Councillor Bootherstone, Colonel Mortimer and Mrs. Roffey.
“Not easy bodies to manipulate, that lot. Not much imagination for problems other than their own, and very ready to defend those they consider belong to their own kind. If, on the other hand, you can somehow get them into your debt—like saving them from a dollop of aggro—Colonel Mortimer wouldn’t have wanted to appear before neighbouring justices, so that fair play could be seen. Mrs. Roffey could have gone on collecting for flag-days, but she might never have been chairman again. Councillor Bootherstone would have to have paid a nominal fine, because he had committed a technical offence. And I was the one who had pulled them out of all that. So when I called …”
He did not feel at ease, calling on Mrs. Roffey. But then, where did he feel at ease? For what occasion could his everyday clothes fit him, except perhaps for a society of unemployed pigeon-fanciers at the funeral of one of their friends? When he was visiting Mrs. Roffey, he even felt incapable of sitting properly on a chair. His stubby fingers looked, he knew, as if he could not move one of them without moving them all. He held Mrs. Roffey’s bone china cup as if he were afraid that the delicate handle might spontaneously detach itself. And Mrs. Roffey, watching uneasily from her cushions, looked as if the same thought might be running through her mind too.
Mrs. Roffey’s drawing-room was the showcase of the most influential woman in Bradburn. She was the only woman in the town to possess a grand piano. It always stood open, and the same piece of music was always open at the same page on its rack: something in five flats that leaped about a mountain-range of semi-quaver arpeggios. No one had ever heard her play a note.
Somewhere in the background of her happiest of possible marriages there was a Mr. Roffey whose business, the reconstitution of textiles from rags, shreds and waste, kept him for the most part absent from home. The word shoddy was not one which Mrs. Roffey could ever bring herself to use of the basis of her financial security.
She was demonstratively happy to see Mosley again, especially since he was able to open by assuring her that the affair of the lawless King Charles spaniel had now indeed been consigned to the salvage. When he brought up the name of the former Bradburn accountant, she had necessarily to launch herself on a powerful moral diatribe.
“Quite disgusting. Quite disgusting. If he finds himself now left alone in that cold old barracks at his age, he has only himself to thank for it. And the way he comported himself with that German woman! I mean, I have nothing against Germans as Germans, but when all’s said and done, they are Germans. Even in Teape’s, at the bacon-counter, you could see the lust fairly oozing out of her eyes. You know what my husband said about him: third mate to a German destroyer.”
She laughed in a manner that activated every unsupported ounce of her flesh. Mosley smiled coyly. He forebore to wonder aloud that her husband had ever remained at home long enough to formulate such a gem.
“So different from Mrs. Longden,” Mosley said.
“Ah!”
For a moment it quite looked as if she had recognized an attempt to decoy her into a betrayal of confidences. It would have come as no surprise if she had then said that, alas, this was not a subject to be discussed by charitable society. But the second time she said, “Ah!” she shook her head knowingly.
“So charming. So sweet-natured. So uncomplaining. And so repressed. She had money, you know—but of course a good deal of it went into the business. Those new premises in Cross Street: I never saw the necessity for them. And he was so jealous. He couldn’t bear for her even to talk to a man. I believe there was even a row over that weedy little Weatherhead in Raven’s. And he wouldn’t let her do things. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a man in his position would have wanted her to be a corner-stone in everything that went on in the town. If there was a chance that she might exchange two words with a member of the male sex, then he forbade it. Do you know that she never once took part in a charitable activity? Not
even Haig’s poppies? And do you know what he had the nerve to say to her, when she plucked up the nerve to ask if she might? He told her he could not bear the thought of her loitering in shop doorways. My God, I’d like to see my husband try to keep me out of shop doorways.”
If Mosley’s imagination extended to an image of Mrs. Roffey on the game, he succeeded in suppressing it.
“No, the trouble with Matthrew Longden was that he was first, foremost and finally a book-keeping man. Double-entry ledgering had entered into his soul. He wasn’t capable of being married to a woman. He co-habited, Mr. Mosley, with something that had to be seen to balance. He had to assure himself at intervals that her assets exceeded her liabilities. Do you know that they had a dreadful scene on the first Monday night of each month when he went over her housekeeping books? She had to keep all her receipts. I remember once she picked up a W.H. Smith check-out slip on the pavement, and said it might come in useful if she had some item unaccounted for. It wasn’t that money was ever tight in the house, you know. It wasn’t even that he was mean: I’ll go so far as to say he could be generous to a fault. But everything had to be right.”
“I’m surprised that she tolerated it for so long,” Mosley hazarded.
“Well, she didn’t, did she? She went kicking over the traces in Bradcaster, didn’t she? But I’ll never believe that there was any man involved in that. I think she went to a lot of trouble to cover up for what she was getting up to in Bradcaster. But it was not for a man. That I simply won’t have. If you ask me, she went to all those lengths for the sake of a quiet cup of tea once a week.”
Then Mosley went to see the Bootherstones at home, and that was a dialogue that needed a somewhat different approach. Councillor Bootherstone and his wife were a couple for whom there was no greater attainable heaven on earth than their own uneventful, uncoloured, unventuresome, unquestioned family life. They had been married forty-five years. They never contradicted each other. They never even had to discuss which television channel to watch. And the only people of whom they truly approved lived, they assumed, in a similarly static domestic paradise. Yet when it came to discussing the Longdens, there was something that was possibly shrewd about their diagnosis.
“You know, we were always very fond of both of them. What happened—well, it came as a very great surprise to us. I mean, Matthew had done my books ever since the pair of us started in business.”
Could there by any safer guarantee of marital integrity than that?
“There were times, though, when I was tempted to take Matthew on one side and warn him. It had come as a surprise to us when we learned that he was marrying a woman from away. Oh, and she was a beauty, but very reserved, you know. Perhaps that did not go down too well in Bradburn. And they seemed so close together—as, indeed, they were close together. But Matthew had old-fashioned ideas. I’m not saying he clung to the ancient view that a man’s wife belongs to a man, goods, chattels and all. But there were times when he behaved as if that’s what he thought. He still believed in the obedience clause.”
“I’m surprised that she tolerated it so long,” Mosley said, not for the first time that day.
“But then she loved him. And it took time to get used to him. And when you get used to things, you don’t want to change.”
“And her vows were made in front of an altar,” Mrs. Bootherstone said. “There are people to whom such things matter, you know, Mr, Mosley. I remember she said to me, ‘My vows were made at the altar. Or else—’”
“Or else—well, it came to or else, didn’t it?”
“That’s something we’ve never believed, Mr. Mosley. That’s something we’ve never let our minds dwell on. That a respectable married woman should be making assignations upstairs in Marley’s …”
As Mosley was ready to go, Bootherstone gingerly brought up his own criminal record.
“That business about my deep freeze, Inspector—?”
“Oh, you can forget about that,” Mosley said. “There were one or two voices at headquarters that went on demanding blood for a day or two, but I managed to talk them out of it in the end.”
When he was asked for opinions, as man to man, Colonel Mortimer generally assumed that all men’s outlooks were as his was, and he often wrapped up his answers in a coarseness that one would never have guessed from his deportment on the magisterial bench. It was a promising portent when that happened, the offer of a Shibboleth that he was on your side. He thought for a few seconds when Mosley brought up the inside story of Betty Longden.
“I remember an old Major, second-in-command at the Depot, who had a recipe for holding on to a woman. Keep her well-fed, he used to say, well-shagged and ill-shod. It always seemed to me that Matt Longden must have come unstuck somewhere. She bought her shoes at Carruthers, and she never looked hungry to me, so—of course, no man knows what goes on in another man’s bed, but when I saw them out together, it sometimes crossed my mind to wonder whether he was doing her justice. I reckon he was under-estimating her need for it, but you can’t go about telling a fellow that, can you? Not in civilian life, anyway. And yet, from what I’ve heard of his carryings-on this last year or two, he seems to have been open to further training, the crafty old bugger. This fellow Hunter comes up the day after tomorrow, by the way. What are we going to do about him?”
A supplementary picture emerged with the help of Ernest Weatherhead, though when it came to opinions, Mosley had to tease them from him.
As Chief Inspector Marsters had reported, Mosley seemed to be spending a lot of his time in the office at the back of the furniture shop, amid carpet patterns, upholstery samples and bees’-wax polish. Roderick Raven these days was not spending in aggregate much more than half an hour a day on his premises.
Ernest Weatherhead was repeating his familiar complaint about Matthew Longden, who never let him forget his single lapse from honesty. Mosley was listening as closely as if he were hearing it for the first time.
“So you became quite a regular visitor to his home?” Mosley said.
“Not exactly frequent. It all started when I paid him the last installment of what I owed him. He said we must celebrate that. I must bring Margaret round to supper at his house.”
“Was that the first time you had met Mrs. Longden?”
“I had seen her about town, knew who she was. She had been in the shop once or twice, always knew precisely what she wanted, wouldn’t have substitutes. Some of the locals called her toffee-nosed, but they’ll say that of anyone who doesn’t speak with a Bradburn accent.”
“You didn’t find her toffee-nosed at supper?”
“Far from it: delighted to have us. And Margaret will tell you the same thing. She and Mrs. Longden got on like childhood pals. We invited them back to a meal at our house: but they didn’t come.
It was obvious they didn’t want to. It was a relief in a way. We hadn’t much room in those days.”
“Had you the feeling that if it had been left to Mrs. Longden alone, they would have come?”
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Mosley.”
A barrier? An unwillingness even to think about the question?
“But you yourself did pay other visits to the Longden household?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes Mr. Longden had an audit at a stage that was purely mechanical. I’d do the arithmetic for him.”
“For a fee?”
“Mrs. Longden always brought me a nice supper tray.”
“Good Heavens! Look at the time! And I’m supposed to be meeting one of my sergeants on the other side of town.”
Mosley hurried out of the shop. In the afternoon, not more than five minutes after the OPEN/CLOSED notice on the door-pane had been turned round again, he was back.
“I don’t want you to think I was persecuting you, Ernest. But I’ve been thinking of some of the things you told me this morning.”
Weatherhead was a desperately overworked man, and he was beginning to be worried about the devastation of his time.
“When Mr. Longden moved over to Hadley Dale, did you continue to do work for him at his home?”
“Not very often, Mr. Mosley. He had retired. Perhaps he’d still do a tax-return for a friend, or cast his eye over charity books.”
“So he did ask you over sometimes?”
“Sometimes.”
“Whose books? Which books was he still doing?”
“I’m trying to remember. Mr. Bootherstone’s for one. The Hadey Dale Community Centre Fund.”
“Did you notice any change in the Longdens’ life-style?”
“It was a cold house. Mr. Longden had more time to spare. He spent a lot of it listening to music.”
“Mrs. Longden, too?”
“She didn’t think much of the music.”
“She told you so?”
“Not in words. Sometimes she’d seem to catch my eye.”
“Did you ever have a private conversation with her?”
“Only once. Mr. Longden was upstairs, doing some enlarging in his darkroom. I was checking someone’s receipts against their day-book. Mrs. Longden came into the room to bring me bread and cheese and beer. She led off about how much she hated the house. I was quite taken aback.”
“Did she lead off about her husband, too?”
A dark flush came to his cheeks.
“No. Nothing like that. But I was surprised. She had always been such an uncomplaining sort.”
“Like yourself.”
“I like to oblige people. I like to have plenty to do.”
“It seems to me that Raven and Longden between them have managed that for you. How often in your moonlighting for Matthew Longden did you come across shady book-keeping?”
It was a question that Ernest Weatherhead did not like. Perhaps his answer was a little too emphatic.
“Never, Mr. Mosley.”
Mosley by Moonlight Page 11