“I want to see the kid first, Mosley.”
Mosley did not exactly nod; he made a sort of bow in the direction of Hunter. He turned on his heel in an elderly person’s parody of the parade-ground movement and halted to put another match to his pipe with his back to the house.
Then he walked slowly towards the car. The door of the house opened. Mosley did not turn to see what was happening. Matthew Longden came out carrying the gun, broken open at the breech, in his other hand a faggot of dynamite sticks, looking like a bundle of fasces. The house door remained ajar. Hunter had not yet made himself visible.
Mosley had reached the car, began to open the rear door. He leaned in to help the boy out, masking his slender-legged figure.
The cottage door opened and Hunter stood framed in it, in a rough working shirt with his buttons undone. Yet his hair was incongruously brilliantined.
“Send him over!” he shouted.
“Come and fetch him,” Mosley said.
Hunter began to come down the short length of his garden path.
“If you try anything, Mosley!”
Mosley waited, the boy still hidden behind him. Hunter came out on to the pavement, began to cross to the car. And that was when Joe Ormerod sprang. The way Joe was crouching looked awkward. It seemed about the most inept possible position for a man contemplating action. Surely he was cramping himself out of all hope of mobility. But there was more than one respect in which Joe Ormerod did not seem to be made as other men are. He did not seem to need to flex his muscles. They uncoiled like steel springs and hurled him ballistically at Hunter from obliquely behind him. He took Hunter’s knees in a rugger tackle, brought the big quarryman down in the dust. Then Ormerod’s hand swept and Hunter’s face was crushed into the tarmac. Ormerod clouted Hunter behind the ear, following that with an uppercut under the nose. His third blow dislocated Hunter’s jaw from behind. By now, Spears was calling Ormerod off, coming up with his handcuffs.
Mrs. Hunter, agitated, was now out on her path.
“Hey! That’s not my boy!”
It was very obviously not Bernard Hunter. It was that product of the Ormerods’ union who resembled his father to the point of burlesque. Mosley had brought him off the shoppers’ bus.
“Bernard was not available at such short notice,” Mosley said. “But I think you’ll be getting him back, once his father’s arrived where he’s going.”
Then he turned to Spears.
“Run me down to Bottom Farm, will you? I have a date with two interesting women.”
Chapter Seventeen
Spears drove Mosley into Oldham’s farmyard—a yard seemingly deserted of all activity save for three or four self-supporting pullets who were scratching for brandling worms on a dunghill. Hunter was in the back seat, manacled, alternatively moaning about the injuries he had received from Ormerod and making wild efforts at self-justification. Spears and Mosley might have little in common, but they snapped at him simultaneously to hold his peace.
“It’s Kestrel Hole you want to be watching, Mr. Mosley. You’ll have a few tons of stone to shift, and you’ll find what you’ll find. I could tell you a thing or two—and I’m in the clear. Can’t we go somewhere where we can talk, Mr. Mosley?”
“You’ve talked before—and what did it amount to?”
“You talk to Betty Longden. She’ll tell you. I saved her life.”
“Oh, aye?”
There were a few cars parked about the yard of Bottom Farm and the adjacent fields had been used as a right of way by the sightseers who had flooded in to see the cameras at work. Small groups of these were already beginning to drift back from the scene of the filming, which they had begun to find slow, repetitious and disillusioning.
“It’s faked from start to finish,” someone was saying.
“You can’t believe a thing you see on the box.”
“If that’s a dragon, I don’t know what the fuss is about. It looks half asleep to me.”
“And did you see who else was up there?”
“And how about her for a Princess? Fair, fat and past it. Not my idea of Fairyland.”
“I can’t see what they’re thinking of.”
“And the other one, too—”
“I noticed Longden wasn’t showing his face.”
Mosley got out of his car, and Spears drove off for Bradburn. One of those who was not going to let his daily round be upset by a troupe of strolling players was Oldham. Mosley could see him, still working on his bridge, some three hundred yards away, and removed from the main axis of traffic. Mosley made his way over to him.
“Nah, Isaac.”
“Nah, Jack.”
“Looks a bit like Easter Monday with these crowds.”
“Aye—and I’ve seen who’s come too. I’d just gone back to my shed for another yard of sand when their car drew up. Who’d have ever thought of seeing those two together? What’s it all about, Jack?”
“I don’t know yet, Isaac. But it’s to do with the Hole.”
“Aye, well—it’s a hole that’s been there a long time, Jack.”
Mosley stumped across the tussocky grass towards the collapsed cave mouth that men called Kestrel Clough. Teagle had somehow managed to shepherd the sightseers on to an opposite flank, leaving the heap of fallen stone free to serve as his stage. The crowd was remarkably silent, as if what they were observing demanded respect.
A cardboard cut-out, a profile of the dragon, had been propped up against a wooden framework, behind which had been fixed a cylinder of gas and a flame-throwing nozzle. But this was not in use at the moment. The cameras were fixed on a scene which, according to the figures on the clapper-board, was about to be shot for the twenty-eighth time.
Lottie Pearson was bound to a pillar of stone, and Teagle was urging her to register horror as she caught sight of a paint-mark on the rock-face where the dragon was later to be superimposed. It had been a bold stroke, picking Lottie as heroine. She was very far removed indeed from the popular conception of a medieval female lead. Buxom, broad-boned and broad-featured, and not so very long ago past the forty-year watershed, she was undeniably on the sunset side of youth and beauty. In casting her, Teagle had shown a touch of real genius. She was quite candidly sexy, with a hint of drowsy repletion against a well-upholstered shoulder. Teagle had found her a blonde wig that recalled her hair-style of twenty years ago. She was big-bosomed, conveying a sense of matronly luxuriance, of maternal as well as conjugal loving. Was this what she had taught Matthew Longden to enjoy in the prime of their time together? Was this what she had offered Teagle, knowing that all that interested him would be short-term transports—while she won him to her cause?
Mosley thought he could see at last the answer to a question that had been troubling him: why had Teagle been so irrationally insistent on denying that Lottie would be joining his party here? Why had he expressed such unconvincing surprise that Mosley should connect her with him at all? It could only be because Lottie had promised him something that had to be kept from the knowledge of the police until the critical moment. And what could that be but the chance, as a film-making man, to shoot some sequence that would rank as an epoch-shaking scoop?
And it had to be concerned with Krestrel Clough. Only a few minutes ago, Isaac Oldham had been saying that. Jack Pearson, when Mosley had questioned him recently in his remand cell, had pointed in the same direction—after a fashion.
Mosley was uneasy about Pearson. There had been something strange and untypical about him on this occasion. It was rare for Mosley to fail with a criminal as naïve and gullible as Jack. If he had been using his normal methods, Mosley would not in fact have judged it a failure—yet. All that was wanted was more time. Mosley had usually all the time in the world, where all that was needed was time. In the normal run of events, he would have paid another visit to Jack Pearson—and another and another, until such time as Jack had come round to his way of thinking. Had he not taken his time with Ernest Weatherhead?
&nb
sp; Jack Pearson had always been so easy in the past: but this time he would not allow himself to be tripped. He was drawing strength and staying power from a pocket of fear such as Mosley had never seen in him before. It was a pocket of fear that was tapped whenever the talk veered towards Betty Longden’s last night at Hadley House. It was a mainspring of fear that set Pearson’s forearms and wrists and fingers visibly trembling. And it always happened when Mosley mentioned Kestrel Clough. Mosley had believed then that he still had time, that another night of solitude would do its own work on Pearson, with a great consequent saving of nervous energy. Now Mosley knew that time had run out on him.
He looked again at the Clough, stripping it of cameras, floodlights and microphone booms. There were fossils here that charted pre-human history. Men had unearthed here the bones of the sabre-toothed tiger and woolly rhinoceros. The crucial fault in the rock had happened before any man had set foot in these hills. And there was something else that had happened more recently, that was known only to the eyes of those who had perpetrated it. Jack Pearson? And Ted Hunter? While Matthew Longden pulled the strings—and Isaac Oldham, ignoring the whining of his dogs, made sure he knew nothing of it?
Was it all going to devolve into anti-climax? Would they be sweating and straining and rupturing themselves shifting a mountain of stone, only to retrieve a bundle of Betty Longden’s old clothes?
Mosley thought not. Lottie Pearson would not have brought Teagle here for that. Teagle would not have come; he would not have been an easy man, even for Lottie, to convince. It was not hard to see now how Lottie Pearson could have come by a lot of knowledge that could embarrass Matthew Longden. She was an intelligent woman, and not only might Longden sometimes have talked indiscreetly while he was under her spell, she had also been married to Jack Pearson. She had listened to his empty boastings when he was sober and to his surrealistic droolings when he was drunk. She had not just put two and two together: she had added together bits from two sources, to complete her sum.
In the meanwhile, Lottie Pearson was doing anything but well on the film-set. She was unable to give Teagle what he was asking of her. She was supposed to catch sudden sight of the dragon—who was not there—and that was to strike her palsied with fear. But her conception of fear looked like a combination of constipation and pop-eyed comicality.
“Cut!” Teagle shouted for the twenty-eighth time, and followed that with a service-burst of obscenity that stunned the prim, bucolic watchers on the hillside.
“All right, sweetheart. Try again. Take twenty-nine!”
Mosley slipped unobtrusively away from the group, back a short way towards the farm, then—apparently impervious to stings—through a nettle-bed that brought him up a never-trodden gulch behind and below the natural platform where the lascivious princess was becoming desperate about her own ineptitude.
“Move your head slowly, sweetheart. Catch sight of the dragon on my slow count of three. And then jump—one—two—”
She moved her head and saw, not a dragon, but Mosley’s face, scowling hideously at her through a cleft in the rocks but a yard or two from her, where she had no reason to expect any face to be. She started. The foot on which she was partly supporting herself slipped and she sagged into the ropes that were holding her.
“Perfect!” Teagle shouted. “I knew you could do it, darling!”
Mosley withdrew and spent a minute or two scanning the ranks of spectators. He could not see Betty Longden among them: it was hardly likely she would be. Nor would she have gone up to the House—at all costs she would want to avoid any confrontation with Longden. And there was no habitation between here and the House where she would want to call for old time’s sake. Mosley made a guess, moved quietly between the cameras and the crowd, and followed the path up to the rusty gate that he had climbed the first time he had come down to talk to Isaac Oldham. He clumsily climbed it again.
A short way farther up, there was a side-track through the trees that led before long to a ledge which commanded a magnificent view of the valley below, and the hills beyond that, and beyond them the interlocking folds of valley after valley after valley, the panorama spreading like a stereoscopic map. It was the sort of spot, not much more than a half-hour’s walk from the House, to which Betty Longden might well often have come for consolation during the least tolerable months of her marriage.
And she was here now, sitting on her folded cardigan, looking out across the vertebrae of England. She saw Mosley approach, and was so unstartled that she might have been expecting him. She moved herself to make room for him to sit beside her. At close quarters he was able to confirm the quick impression he had had as Lottie had driven them past the afternoon siege of Hadley Dale. The greying of her hair might have aged her, but the serenity that she had never wholly lost in the bad years had now come fully into its own. Moreover she had a fluency, an initiative in conversation that he had not known her to be capable of. In every way she struck him as a woman who had found herself.
“Well, thank goodness you’re still king of the hills,” she said. “You’ll have a lot to ask me, and I’ve been telling myself since we set out, what a mercy it is you’ll be asking the questions. There are things that would have come hard from a stranger. In fact, if Lottie hadn’t assured me that you were still about, I don’t think she could have persuaded me.”
“How did she find you?” Mosley asked. “And why are you here?”
“She found me because a man was fickle,” she said.
And whatever she meant by it, it was totally without bitterness: a private joke, which she went on at once to explain.
“Dear devoted Ernest Weatherhead. We used to see so much of each other, you know, sometimes for two or three minutes at a time, when he was doing unpaid clerical work for my husband and I came into the room with beer and cheese for his supper. And he was so hopelessly in love with me—oh, I don’t mean that he ever said so, or that he was untrue to his steady Margaret. It was all on the highest of possible planes. Totally suppressed, totally silent—though I’m sure my husband suspected. He would, of course. I didn’t have to look at a man—even if a workman passed my kitchen window, he didn’t think it was an accident. But by the time Ernest was ready to turn himself into my slave, I’d have thrown the moon over the sun. I’d decided to leave. That was almost as good as having gone. So I was even prepared to rurn Ernest’s two or three minutes into a naughty five or ten. I did it on purpose. Oh, a change had come over me, Mr. Mosley.”
She turned to him and laughed. “Is this likely to bore you? There’s still enough of the old me left for me to want you to see the true picture.”
Mosley wanted nothing more than for her to go on talking. He conveyed that with his own rugged version of serenity.
“When I left here, you know, it was not without some sort of wrench. I’m not as inhuman as that—I’d been here a long time. I said I’d like to get news, now and then, cuttings from papers—births, marriages, deaths, all the scandals—especially if any of the bigwigs ever came unstuck. So I entrusted that to Ernest, and never was there a more faithful correspondent. He was the only one who knew where to write to me. Never did I think that he would prove faithless.”
But she was still laughing about it.
“But then I reckoned without the day when Lottie Pearson would ever want to get my address out of him. I take it that Lottie has never needed to make a set at you, Mr. Mosley?”
“Not so far,” he said, making himself sound a shade rueful, entering into her mood.
“She might, even yet. My advice is, make the most of it. I am sure that resistance would be a waste of your time, in the long run.”
And then, as if reading his mind, she added, “You must think that I’ve grown into an awful person. Where’s all that old respectability gone? Was this abandon trying all the while to get out?”
“Just tell me first why you’re here,” he said.
“To give evidence—if what Lottie thinks is the truth. But, reall
y, it’s too horrible to think about …”
She shuddered—and there was nothing theatrical about that. It was a sudden change of mood, suggesting that behind all this gaiety there lay a seam of apprehension. It had been no light decision to come here. She was not sure yet that she had done the right thing. Lottie must have nagged her without respite.
“Shall I begin at the beginning? I should like to feel sure that you understand, Mr. Mosley—that someone up here understands absolutely.”
“Take your time, Mrs. Longden.”
She shrugged again—in a different way.
“That name! And yet the right way to begin is as Mrs. Longden. Surprisingly enough, I can still remember how I came to be in love with him. I’m not just excusing myself for the sake of my pride. I know why I married him. He seemed so much my sort of person. Rectitude, reliability, integrity, a man who loved all the things, as the Prayer Book says, that are honourable and of good report. To live a lifetime with goodness, without strain. It was no easy thing, in this day and age, Mr. Mosley, to find a partner from whom one’s integrity was safe. Do I sound like a prig? Did the people of Bradburn think I was a prig? I was what I was, what I was brought up to be. I was comfortable that way, and it was an unexpected joy to find a husband who was even a step ahead of me in the things that I stood for.
“When did I find out what a flaming hypocrite he was? It’s easy to look back and see danger signs that I missed. Even on our honeymoon I saw that he wanted everything the right way—and that the right way was his way. He would never have claimed in so many words that a man was the owner of his wife. But he would sulk for days, if that wasn’t the way things were working out. There wasn’t even elementary democracy in his conception of marriage, Mr. Mosley.”
She looked at Mosley to see that he was with her. His solemnity said that he was.
Mosley by Moonlight Page 15