“What, never? Or hardly ever?”
“Mr. Mosley, I only ever saw bits and pieces of anyone’s books. Only Mr. Longden saw the whole picture.”
“But didn’t you sometimes know that he had spotted something in the whole picture? Didn’t he ever remark that someone was sailing close to the wind?”
“He would never have said such a thing, Mr. Mosley. Mr. Longden never said anything that was not proper.”
And suddenly, for no reason that Weatherhead could see, Mosley took the pressure off.
“I suppose not. No. No—that would take a lot of imagining.”
“Mr. Mosley—I have a terrible amount of work to do. We have a Sale coming up. I ought to be going round stock.”
Yet Mosley went on talking, went on repeating disconnected questions that he had asked before, not forcefully now, but casually, almost sleepily, as if he had nothing else to do with his afternoon except keep Weatherhead from the routines he was anxious to get at.
It was getting on for four o’clock before Mosley got up and left the shop.
“I tell you, he’s overboard this time,” Marsters reported. “Blown his fuses, gone pancakes, bananas. I don’t know what he thinks he’s getting out of that Weatherhead. He can’t even umpire a cricket match properly now. Bradburn Second are thinking of dropping him.”
“Easier for them than for us,” the ACC said.
“I’ve had to carpet him for suppressing evidence,” Tom Grimshaw added. “You’d have thought in the pages of screed he submitted, there’d have been some mention of history repeating itself. Oh, I know that it didn’t matter. It was only that German woman, trying to dig her knife into Longden’s ribs. But it won’t do, will it? One wonders how much else Mosley is keeping to himself.”
Weatherhead had to work late. He had sat listening to Mosley’s drowsy voice while the work of the day piled up all round him. At half past four in the afternoon he had only just begun to check a delivery that had been made at ten that morning. At half past five he had not made out a single one of the day’s orders. But at least he was able to shoot the bolts of the main door at half past five and shut out the public. He rang Margaret to ask her to keep something warm in the oven for him.
As he walked home the town was closed down and nearly deserted, the sodium lighting imprinting a peculiar lifelessness on the shop-fronts. In an arcade three youths were playing football with a Pepsi-Cola tin. He took a short cut across the park. There was something about the dusty aisles, the litter under the shrubs, that seemed to sap him of spirit.
When he reached home, he saw that there was a light on in the front room. That was unusual at this time of day and on this day of the week. It was not that the Weatherheads were mean about fuel, or that they clung mindlessly to the habits of the lower working class in which they had both been brought up. But it did seem to them that it made sense to economize on the heating of rooms that they did not really need to use.
He was about to put his key in the latch when Margaret opened the door for him. Imperceptibly, she had given up making that sort of gesture years ago. But he soon learned the reason for it: she had to come and forewarn him. Mosley was waiting for him.
Chapter Thirteen
They were trying desperately to get a new legend going in the Plough.
“It’s funny they should be talking of bringing a dragon up Kestrel Clough. The old folk were never too keen on that footpath after dark. They reckon Isaac Oldham’s grandfather left his pub one night with his hair as black as a crow, and it was white as the driven snow by the time he got home.”
“But that was no dragon he saw. That was Walter Haig’s missus, waiting for Walt with a lantern and her copper-stick.”
“Aye, and Jess Oldham fell arse over tip into Walter’s lime-bunker. That was why his hair went white.”
Tom Appleyard and Brad Oldroyd were working hard on the dragon. But no legend was ready to emerge yet. It was too soon to anticipate events.
There was, however, a story that had gained general acceptance without any effort on anyone’s part. It was assumed that Lottie Pearson had formed one of her broad-minded friendships with someone at the managerial top of the television team. It was generally believed that wherever they had gone, she would be hanging about as a camp-follower. And every man in the Plough was convinced that when the crew came back with their dragon, Lottie Pearson would also be with them.
No one knew who had started this new belief.
Mosley was sitting in one of the Weatherheads’ armchairs with his raincoat actually off. The evening was not all that chilly, but Margaret Weatherhead had insisted on switching on one of the bars of their coal-simulating fire at nine o’clock. She could not understand what was making Ernest so late: it was not as if it were the end of year stocktaking. She made very obvious attempts to coax Mosley into giving her some hint as to what it was all about, but she knew very well that if Mosley did not want to be shifted, there would be no shifting him. As far as Margaret Weatherhead was concerned, Mosley was incalculable. Then suddenly, changing his mind for no reason that she could see, he said that he saw no objection to telling her. He did tell her. By the time he had finished, she was twisting her hands together like a neurotic adolescent.
“I can’t believe it, Mr. Mosley. I just can’t believe it of Ernest.”
“I think you’ll find he’ll tell us about it himself.”
“But what will happen to him, Mr. Mosley—what will they do to him?”
“I just can’t say, my dear. It’s not a situation I’ve ever come up against before. And the handling of it won’t be in my hands.”
“But if he tells you the truth—if he makes a clean breast of it—you’ll be able to help him?”
“I can promise you nothing like that. I don’t even know myself,” Mosley said. “And I have a strong feeling that no one’s going to take much notice of me. Mind you, it’s always good policy to tell the truth. It’s always appreciated when they see that you’re genuinely trying to help the court.”
“It will have to go to court, will it?”
“Oh, undoubtedly,” Mosley said mournfully.
Which was how she came to be waiting for her husband in a state of distress that she did not look as if she could tolerate much longer.
“Ernest, Mr. Mosley is waiting for you. Tell him everything you know, Ernest. Tell him the truth. Everything you know and everything you did. He’s told me what it’s all about.”
Mosley had sprung to his feet to greet Weatherhead as if they had promised to go out for a drink together.
“What’s this all about, Mr. Mosley?”
“I must ask you to leave us alone together,” Mosley said to Weatherhead’s wife.
She was loth to do that, and it looked for a second or two as if she were going to be difficult. But there was determination in Mosley’s eyes, and she was afraid of making things even more difficult for Ernest. She left the room, pulled the door to, stood outside it for an instant, then they heard her go into her kitchen. Weatherhead was now angry, a form of defence that Mosley had never seen him use before.
“What are you playing at today, Mr. Mosley? You’ve been messing me about since this morning. What’s this all about?”
“Well, it’s about making you late for your supper, for one thing, and I’m sorry about that. But really, the whole thing’s in your hands. The sooner you’ve answered a few little questions, the sooner you’ll be settling down with your knife and fork.”
“What questions? You’ve been asking me questions all day.”
“I think you know, Ernest, that Mrs. Pearson has left Matthew Longden.”
“And Queen Anne’s dead.”
“There are some curious features. That’s why I tried to find out from you the names of anyone that Longden was blackmailing. Besides yourself, that is.”
“He was not blackmailing me.”
“Call it by a kinder name, if it makes it easier to face. It doesn’t make the offence any kinder
. Lottie Pearson’s airline ticket to Amsterdam was found in a Greater Manchester phone-booth.”
“I don’t see how that concerns me.”
“It doesn’t. It concerns Lottie Pearson. She’d arranged it to happen, to draw our attention to an item of past history—just in case we’d missed it for ourselves. The same thing happened to Betty Longden—only Betty Longden hadn’t planted it herself—had she, Ernest?”
Weatherhead was rubbing his thighs with tense hands, but stopped as soon as he realized that he was doing it. “No comment,” he said.
“It was you who went into that police station and said that you had found her ticket—which Matthew Longden had given you. I can’t for a moment imagine that you enjoyed doing it. Early closing day in Bradburn, was it? It must have been one of the most wretched afternoons you’ve ever spent. I can just see you walking up to that police counter. The very floor-boards must have been lurching under you.”
“No comment.”
“And all because Longden was still threatening to expose you to Roderick Raven. He certainly got his interest on that two-fifty, didn’t he—not only by using you for evening after evening as an unpaid audit clerk.”
“I demand to have my solicitor present,” Weatherhead said, which was a ludicrous imitation from dramatic fiction, because the only solicitor he had had to do with was for the conveyancing when he had bought this house.
“You’ll set him a pretty problem, Ernest. Accessory after murder is not a charge that’s often been handled in Bradbum.”
“I know nothing about any murder.”
“Maybe not. Right hand, left hand. I don’t suppose anyone told you where Jack Pearson buried Betty Longden.”
“No comment.”
“No comment, Ernest, is one of the prettiest confessions in the annals.”
But Ernest Weatherhead showed a strength of character that Mosley could not break. It was after midnight, and there were only a few token sodium lights left shining as he walked back across the town. A squashed Pepsi-Cola tin lay abandoned in a gutter.
The Weatherheads were still up talking. One of the things that added to their bewilderment was why Mosley had not taken Ernest into custody.
Chapter Fourteen
Grimshaw had taken Mosley severely to task over the omissions of his reports. It was an offence that was impressed upon the greenest recruits to the force. Even an alteration in a notebook was suspect and could lead to disciplinary action. As it happened, the items concerned were of minor importance, and Grimshaw understood that Mosley’s sole intent had been to simplify. But in an officer of Mosley’s experience that was a kind of editing that was quite inexcusable. Mosley must watch it in future.
So Mosley was up late after leaving the Weatherheads’ home, composing an account for Superintendent Grimshaw in which he explained in a finely chopped logical sequence why he firmly recommended that no immediate action be taken against Weatherhead: to act prematurely would be to forewarn Matthew Longden—and perhaps other principals.
When he had completed this document, it seemed as if Mosley’s muse had been over-stimulated by the effort, for he went on composing in his rolling, antithetical English prose. A letter was long overdue to his cousin Samuel, a flourishing police figure, well known amid the wickedness of Hong Kong.
Mosley did not go into his HQ next day. He posted his letters on his way out to the wild country at the head of Hadley Dale. Grimshaw received his by the afternoon delivery. He drew it from its envelope and read it with satisfaction. It was a long, racy and rambling account of minor incidents on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border which he really did not need to know in such detail.
“Sometimes,” he told the ACC, “I have the distinct impression that Mosley is trying to tell me something.
Whatever it is this time, they are going to know about it in the Far East long before we do. What I have here is a newsy updating of his Cousin Sam. It is mainly about dark happenings behind the scenes at the Agricultural Show.”
Mosley went for a country walk up one of the higher reaches of Hadley Dale, over one of the crests down towards the valley bottom beyond. He had to begin his expedition by crossing a corner of Matthew Longden’s territory, but he knew the lie of the land intimately enough to achieve it without bringing himself into view from any of Longden’s windows. He made a broad detour round the rear of the house, crossed a corner of plantation and began a slow descent by a footpath that had rarely been trodden in the last few years. His way was presently barred by a gate firmly secured by a padlock and several windings of rusted chain.
Mosley climbed this gate—an unathletic and inelegant performance, rolling over the top of it rather than straddling it. Beyond it, the footpath was even harder to make out than it had been higher up. Thick tangles of brambles straggled out from either bank, tearing savagely at his raincoat. He thrust his hands keep into his pockets and bulldozed his way through a bed of nettles. Further down he squelched through a bog where a hillside spring welled out over the path. After a while he came to an intersection of field paths where two tracks led away from each other to serve the rough grazing of Bottom Farm. Here he had to pass an erosion on the flank of the hill where the rock-face had been washed smooth and concave by centuries of weather. It was not exactly a cave. Limestone caves usually begin as a fault in the rock which admits the destructive water. In this case, the fault had fallen in completely before the water had achieved much. Kestrel’s Hole was the beginning of a cave that had collapsed at an early stage of its formation. A skilful man with a camera here could produce a background reminiscent of the world when it was very young indeed. Mosley spent a little time looking round this spot. He kicked about in the undergrowth. He flattened nettles with the side of his foot and inspected the moss that covered the scree beneath them. He tested the weight and equilibrium of a large fallen boulder: it would not rock in its bed. He pushed up his hat, tilting it back from his forehead and stood for a few seconds looking back up the hill.
Then he continued downwards. The ground below him was now merging into the relatively flat bottom of the dale, providing one of the principal pastures of the farm. He heard the steady and arhythmical sounds of a man working with heavy implements against wood and stone. He made his way towards this activity.
“Nah, Isaac.”
“Nah, Jack.”
Isaac Oldham farmed the Bottom, which had once been the home farm of Hadley House. It had been detached from the property when Longden had bought it. Isaac Oldham was known to be wallowing in mortgages and second mortgages. At the moment he was engaged in basic repairs to an unrailed bridge that crossed a ten-foot-wide rivulet.
“You have to be able to turn your hands to anything, nowadays, Isaac.”
“Oh, aye, what with the cost of labour. I can’t afford a builder’s insurance stamps, let alone his time.”
“You’ve been at this long, then?”
“A week or two. If I can’t get a tractor and trailer across the beck, I’m in trouble next winter.”
Mosley inspected the workmanwhip with the eye of an apparent expert.
“You saved yourself an overdraft here, Isaac.”
“Aye—and what with my TV earnings—”
“Making you a star next time, are they, then?”
“Nay.”
Isaac laughed—as old friends do laugh together.
“I don’t know what they’d use my face and yours for, Jack, save to tan leather for ladies’ bags.”
He spat into the stream. “No. That producer. Forget his name. Round the week before last. Nice enough chap, when he wants to do business with you on his own terms. He wanted to know if I’d an empty sty he could keep a dragon in for a couple of nights. They’re going to photograph a sword-fight by moonlight up in the ’Ole. Advertising razor-blades, finest tempered steel. Going to be a real dragon, he reckoned. A big lizard that some bugger has brought back from an expedition. A monitor, did he call it? They’re going to do some double-shuffle with their c
ameras, so it can look like it’s breathing fire.”
Oldham stooped to pick up his sledge, groaned, and held his hand to the small of his back.
“I don’t mind telling you, Jack, I’m good for anything, these days. He offered me two or three months of my sort of income, just to stable his lizard, and for use of the ’Ole. No wonder razor-blades cost what they do. It’ll help to pay for my Saxon gatepost.”
Somewhere on the hillside above them, a curlew called. High in the sky a lark was exalting in a frenzy.
“So how did he come to find the Hole?” Mosley asked him. “It’s not the sort of spot one would just happen on.”
“She showed him,” Isaac Oldham said. “Walked him down there. Between takes, I think they called it. Just the spot for St. George to go to work in.”
“Had she often been down that way herself, then?”
“When she first moved into the House, she often came walking, sometimes with Longden, sometimes alone. I used to think to myself, what a good thing they were for each other. Oh, I mean, I know people talk. She had what you might call a reputation. And I felt the same as the rest when she first moved in with him. I thought to myself, he’s no different from anyone else, when a breath of air gets in at his crotch. But then I thought, they’ve both found what they wanted, something that neither of them had had before. And so it went for a few months. She was a gradely woman, when she wanted to be, and when things were going right with her. And there’s a lot to be said for Mr. Longden, when he’s letting himself be a natural man. But then he had to screw down into himself again, I don’t know why: pretending he’s something he isn’t, when all he’s got to do is be what he is.”
Oldham would not have had it that he was philosophizing. He had never ranked as a happy man, yet he seemed sure of his recipes for other men’s happiness. A hare came rushing in a diagonal line over the far distance of one of his fields. A dog, someone’s stray from the village, was hurtling madly after it, a hopeless chase, its prey gaining a yard in every ten. Mosley and Oldham stopped talking to watch, unexcited, uninvolved.
Mosley by Moonlight Page 12