“Just as soon as a charge-room is vacant.”
“Pehaps you would give me some inkling of the charges.”
“I shall be formally cautioning you that you are not compelled to make any statement—though there are numerous witnesses who will leave you little room for manoeuvre. I understand that you are the owner of a dog that chased grazing sheep on a date of which I will remind you as soon as I can put my hand on the papers. And while we are-about it, you may also care to let me have the names of those of your associates who were involved in breaking down fencing with a length of co-axial cable. Also with failing to stop and report damage to a gatepost of historical significance.”
Chapter Sixteen
A highlight of the Bradburn summer season is the cricket match that is played annually between the elected members of the Borough Council and an eleven selected from among the municipal employees. It is a throwback to a more paternalistic and patronizing age. The Councillors play in top hats and long black frock-coats, strongly redolent of the camphor in which they are stored for this single yearly airing. The rude mechanicals from the corporation yards can always count on a salting of skill and strength, so it is considered a fair handicap for them to take the field in female costume. And there are subtle strategists in the Treasurer’s and Surveyor’s offices who can bring strains of extempore caprice to the field. For many years the employees used to appear as elderly spinsters, hampered by voluminous skirts and long strings of beads that became entangled with the handles of their bats. Since the permissive sixties they have tended to walk out on the green looking as if they are about to ask the umpires if they would care for a good time. The sight of the Town Hall doorkeeper, with a glimpse of apishly hairy leg between the tops of his pipe-clayed pads and the hem of his miniskirt has had wolf-whistles shaking the decorum of the pavilion enclosure. It stands to sense that Mosley is always asked to preside at one of the wickets. But a regrettable interruption to this year’s match caused him to default at the judgement end for the second time this season.
The Mayoress had bowled the ceremonial opening ball. The batsman had had to walk six yards out of his crease to tap it for an impudent single. His Worship the Mayor had been stumped twice, but Mosley had given him loudly and provocatively Not Out, it being an honoured convention that the wearing of the chain gave him three lives. The wicket-keeper was wearing an Afro-style wig and his false bosom had shifted like ballast in the hold of a distressed steamer.
It was at this moment that the peace of the afternoon was dissipated by the arrival on the ground of a motorcycle whose exhaust reminded spectators of a Boeing 747 about to raise 600 passengers and their baggage from the ground. Two minutes later, the rider, obviously no respecter of the national game, was striding out to the wicket as the bowler was actually starting to run. He was encased in a massive helmet and plastic clothing of avant-garde fashion that made it look as if another Martian sortie had been mounted. Square leg was heard to inform him that Venus was second on the left.
The invader made his direct way to Mosley, to whom he said something that was inaudible through his visor. Mosley gesticulated fiercely, but without immediate effect. It was only when the Mayor threatened the aeronaut comically with his bat that the thought came to him of unbuckling his helmet. A number of players crowded forward to produce a confusion of help. The visitor was now seen to be PC Ormerod, his beetling brows offering violence all round.
“You’d better come,” he said to Mosley. “He’s gone berserk.”
“Who has?”
“He has.”
“Who’s he?”
“Hunter. He’s locked himself and his wife in their cottage. He’s got a shot-gun, and he says he’s got dynamite from the quarry. He’s going to blow them up at six o’clock if his kid hasn’t been delivered to his front door by that time.”
“Have you reported this to division?”
“They’re going to send as many men as they can spare from the Foxlow Steam Rally.”
“I doubt the wisdom of that. In this mood, Hunter would make mince-meat of them.”
“Seargeant Beaver was on the desk when I rang through. He says the best thing would be for you to come up to Hadley Dale and talk to Hunter. He says he might listen to you.”
Mosley nodded, as if it were usual for an inspector to take orders from a desk-sergeant. He spoke to the two captains and the other umpire and three minutes later was on the pillion of Ormerod’s machine, his short little arms grimly holding on to the slippery plastic of Joe’s futuristic coat.
It was a ride that deserved the accompaniment of a Wagnerian tone-poem. A hurricane beat into Mosley’s face and filled the flapping legs of his trousers. They took corners with a centripetal verve, at an angle from which it seemed they would never right themselves. They overtook articulated lorries with inches to spare. Round one of the zigzag corners of Crawdon they mounted a pavement to negotiate a milk-float. They performed a classical broadside on the sandy shoulder of the Stonemill Bend.
But Joe delivered Mosley eventually within the central open space of Hadley Dale village. A panda car was discreetly parked in the lee of the post office. A uniformed town inspector called Spears had been sent out to take charge, and set about evacuating every house within a fifty-yard radius of the Hunters’ cottage, and despatching the residents under cover. But except for one deaf old man, and an elderly woman who refused to budge, every such house was already vacant. The word had gone round, and Hadley Dale bore a resemblance to a melancholy ghost village.
Spears was an officious officer who never liked to be far from a telephone that connected him with orders from above. He recognized Mosley when he came out from behind the shelter of Ormerod’s shoulder-blades.
“There may be nothing for you to do after all. The squire has gone in there.”
“Squire?”
“The chap from the big house. What’s his name? Longden. He seemed to know what he’s about. He’s been in there a good half-hour now, and all’s quiet. Now that you’re here, I think I’ll just put my nose in that pub round the corner. That’s perhaps where everybody is. They may be taking advantage. Some of these people seem to think that licensing hours don’t apply in country districts.”
Longden, it seemed, had come down to the village for some essential from the shop, of which his stocks had run low. On learning what Hunter was up to, he had announced that he was going in to reason with him. Tom Appleyard, who was waiting his turn at the counter, had tried to tell him what was certain to happen: that Hunter, in his present mood, was likely to be even further inflamed by the sight of one of the ruling classes.
“All that Hunter needs is the sight of calm authority,” Longden said.
No one in the shop chose to argue with him. They all wanted to get their supplies and be away. Taking a second’s rest each time he put his stick to the ground, Longden walked openly and slowly across the space in front of the Hunters’ windows. It was like the climax of High Noon. The barrels of Hunter’s shot-gun appeared under the flap of his letter-box. He fired, and shot licked the dust wide of Longden. Longden ignored the gesture in finest cavalier fashion. He opened Hunter’s gate, his crippled steps adding dignity to his style as he walked up the stone path. The shot-gun waved from side to side with the impatience of an irritable man. Longden gripped the muzzle and thrust it superciliously in out of sight. There was some delay in opening the door. But he was let in—and immediately became an additional hostage.
Inspector Spears came back from the Plough in his brown leather gloves, carrying his leather-covered swagger-cane.
“There’s only the landlord there. It seems that all the rest have gone to some place that they call Kestrel Clough. It appears that there’s some sort of filming going on there. Seems to me the cameras would find more action here.”
For all the signs of life that rose from it now, the Hunters’ cottage might have been uninhabited. The merest wisp of white smoke crept up from its chimney-cowl. And that might hav
e been the product of a banked-up fire whose owners were away for the day.
“If we go on doing nothing,” Mosley said, “he might feel he has to remind us of his existence: a shot through the ceiling, perhaps another across the square. All Longden has done is to give him extra bargaining power.”
“You know Longden well, do you?”
“We’ve met.”
“And you don’t think Hunter will listen to him?”
“He’s most likely to put his back up more than it is already.”
“Let’s leave things alone for a while,” Spears said. “It’s still a long time off six o’clock. While Longden is with him, no blood’s being shed. They’ll be here from the Steam Rally before long. When we see what forces we’ve got, we can make some sort of plan.”
“We’ll send Ormerod to flag them down before they arrive. Hunter had better not see them before they’re ready to strike. This may not seem very real at the moment: but I assure you it is.”
Explosion and death might not seem very credible in such a setting: a stone squat village as deserted as if no one had been willing to tear himself away from his television screen. Yet in one of the cottages, a man who had possibly murdered his wife was playing the phlegmatic hero. He was being held at gun-point and with gelignite by a crazed and dangerous bully who had almost certainly known the facts of that murder, if murder it had been. It was a curious situation. And in a field beyond the edge of the village, the curlew, a summer visitor, was calling as if the world were at peace.
“And what would be your solution, left to yourself?” Spears asked.
“I’d go down to Bradburn for the boy. I’d tell Hunter I was going to do that, and plead with him for more time if necessary. Hunter won’t hurt the boy—not today; never again, in my book. Under cover of their reunion, our forces would act as opportunity offered: to isolate Hunter.”
“Unthinkable,” Spears said.
Mosley looked at him with dog-like, pitying eyes, more eloquent than verbiage.
“We could not possibly be associated with such a thing. I wouldn’t even care to suggest it to HQ—playing with the life of a child who is in official care.”
Mosley looked away. He did not seem disposed to press the plan.
“Listen!”
They heard a distant car-engine. Spears stepped back into a stretch of the street that was not visible from Hunter’s windows, to halt the new arrivals. But it might just be someone from Hadley Dale, back from shopping. Or, with luck, it could be elements of the Foxlow contingent. They heard the vehicle’s gears deal with the hairpen entry into the village. They followed its progress as far as Well Street, which would bring it round by the western edge of the square. And then it cornered into sight—a J-registration Cortina, with two women in it.
Spears semaphored vigorously for the car to stop, ran in full view across the square when it ignored him. Shot whipped up dust from the road, wide of Spears’s feet. The second barrel might perhaps have been aimed at the car. but the only damage was a panel scratched by a ricochet. Crouching behind his front door, peering through a two-inch-square gap, Hunter could take no sort of aim. The car lurched from a startled hand on the steering, then righted itself without decelerating. Spears swung round behind it, shouting uselessly.
There were two women in the front seat. Lottie Pearson was driving. At her side sat a figure who had changed since Mosley had last seen her: grey hair, perhaps, a more colourful, more youthful summer frock than she had been accustomed to wear about Hadley Dale village. But she was still stately by nature and by breeding: Betty Longden.
The car shot away wtih an impudent bleep of its throttle. Spears turned round, still infuriated, looking at Mosley as if it had all been his fault. Joe Ormerod came up from somewhere.
“What’s to stop me from working my way round the hummock, to try to break in at the back?”
“Both barrels.” Mosley said shortly. “Sometimes when I look at you, Joe, I wonder whether you’re mortal. I’ve no wish to put it to the test this afternoon.”
He turned to Spears.
“You’ll have a radio on net in your car? I’d better get in touch with Tom Grimshaw. Maybe it’d be worth asking him about bargaining with young Hunter.”
Spears did not object to this—as long as it was Mosley who was sticking his neck out. Throwing responsibility on to a senior was familiar ground to him. One of Isaac Oldham’s cows lowed beyond the horizon. The ducks on the pond did not seem to care how many rolls of high explosive Hunter was harbouring behind his front door. One of Tom Appleyard’s pigeons was working hard, but without response, trying to gain the attention of his lady-love.
Mosley stood for a moment and studied the ducks: he always found ducks irresistible. Then he walked without haste towards Spears’s panda, his coat swinging behind him to give an illusion of nonchalance. He might have been some rural insurance collector, about to tick off weekly industrial contributions at cottagers’ doors.
But no sooner was he inside the car than things started to happen. The starter motor failed twice, then the engine fired. The panda leaped forward, three-point turned, then came back past Spears and Ormerod, driving with wide throttle in bottom gear past Hunter’s house. Hunter, firing now from a window, scored his first hit of the afternoon, a double delivery of shot that wrought havoc with the immaculate panels of Spears’s rear door, but did no other damage. Spears winced.
Mosley did a right-angled turn that had the Escort lurching as he drove out of Hunter’s effective range, while Hunter was still fumbling with his breech. Spears and Ormerod, now alone in the village street, were left to interpret as best they could such sounds as carried in to them on the hot afternoon air.
They may perhaps have deduced that Mosley did not travel more than a few hundred yards out of the village before pulling up again, at the bottom of the hairpins, where he did a U-turn and parked on a verge that danced with campion and cow-parsley.
There was then nothing for them to interpret except an hour and a half’s summer silence, until a labouring heavy vehicle began the slow climb from Crawdon. Did the waiting policemen know that it must be the Saturday shoppers’ bus returning? Did Joe Ormerod realize that his wife must be on it, accompanied by a selection of their offspring? Joe may even have been salivating at the thought that his weekly sea-food ration was approaching.
But then something happened that apparently imperilled, or at least delayed his treat. The bus stopped at the foot of the hairpin approaches. Was it being hi-jacked by some bandit ravenous for cockles? Or might Mosley be standing out in the road, holding up his hand?
Did Spears—who did not know his Hadley Dale—realize that if someone did not intercept the public service vehicle, the square would in a very few minutes be an untidy sprawl of housewives and children, a sight likely to excite Hunter, or at least dangerously to disturb him? There was no telling what Hunter might do, piqued by the sight of a crowd of normal people, caught at an insouciant moment in their normal lives.
The engine of the bus did not start up again, but the car-engine did. Spears braced his body to a stance of alertness by a corner of wall beyond Hunter’s arc of fire. This had now become a sort of tactical HQ, with Joe Ormerod parked close to him, sitting on his motor-cycle, which was up on its back-stand.
Five o’clock passed. From behind the window of the old woman who had refused to leave her home could be heard the announcements of sports results. A pair of Tom Appleyard’s doves flew from one flank of the square to the other, and then flew back again. In spite of all Spears’s warnings, the old woman now came out of her house and went to knock on a neighbour’s door, in full view of Hunter. Spears fulminated, but nothing happened. Getting no reply, the woman went home again. The car could be heard climbing the hairpins. It would soon come in sight. The barrels of Hunter’s gun appeared again at the window and steadied themselves. Spears signalled to Ormerod with a wave of his gloves and Joe silently unstraddled his cycle to take up a crouching position b
etween Spears and the forthcoming arena.
The car appeared at the top of the road that led down to the square. It was being driven-slowly, and stopped some forty yards away. Spears thought he could see more than one person in it, though at the distance he could not make out who it was that Mosley had with him. After the shortest of halts, the panda began to come on again, very slowly indeed, turning at right angles some twenty yards short of Hunter’s. Mosley’s silhouette was now clearly identifiable by his hat. The gun barrels were now in full command of Mosley, the car and its passenger.
The car now carried out a curious manoeuvre, first veering to the right, then coming round to the left in the tightest turning-circle of which it was capable. At a snail’s pace it pulled up level with a manhole-cover which was almost the spot on which Hunter had his gun trained at the ready. Then the angle of the muzzle changed and there were the sounds of the drawing of bolts. Joe Ormerod, still on his haunches, looked sleepily sideways, as if something of interest might be going to happen soon. The gun changed its axis again, obviously drawing a bead on Mosley’s head. Ormerod did not stir.
Mosley opened his door, and his legs issued forth with about the same athletic agility he had shown when climbing the gate in Kestrel Clough. He turned his head to say something to someone inside: a boy, who appeared to be trying to withdraw his body into himself, as if frightened to death. Mosley shut the car door and came out alone, walking slowly until he was half-way between the manhole-cover and the house. There he stopped to take out his pipe and fiddle about in its bowl with the spike of his knife. He fumbled for a box of matches. Shreds of over-packed tobacco fell over his clothing.
“Longden is to come out first. He’s to carry your gun—and any other weapon you have in there. I shan’t let the lad out until I have those in my hands.”
Hunter did not comply. His gun moved from side to side indecisively. Perhaps a conference was going on in the house. Perhaps Longden was trying to be persuasive: it was possible to imagine that his arguments might be ponderous.
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