“I had given up a comfortable independence. I had known that to make any marriage work, I would have to be flexible. I told myself there had to be some disappointments; I had to adjust. I suppose I even got some sort of pleasure out of the knowledge that I was making admirable sacrifices. But there was another thing. It did not really worry me until it began to be a bore. I discovered that in spite of his saintliness, he was absolutely obsessed by wrong-doing. I don’t just mean that he read two or three crime books a week from the library. That could be anyone’s escapism. He came across dubious practices in the course of his work. He never stopped talking about them. He seemed to delight in rooting them out; it seemed the real reason why he loved pulling columns of figures apart. I know that you, Mr. Mosley, were never under any illusions about the way he treated poor Ernest. And there were other cases, more than one: tax fiddles by men who were moral beacons in the community. It wasn’t at first that I realized that he wasn’t beyond using his knowledge to serve ends of his own. Blackmail is a strong word—but it’s the only word for the way he treated young Weatherhead, and there were others. There was an enquiry agent in Bradcaster, a man called Watts, a failed solicitor, or former solicitor, or something, who traded under a high-sounding multiple name. He called Matthew in as his tax consultant—and you can bet that Watts is going to come into this story again before it’s finished.”
She went on to tell how Longden had first gone in to consult Percy Allnut, Chymist. There had been something amiss with his porridge one morning. He had had a book in the house about Victorian poisoners, and he asked her if she had happened to pick it up and read it. She thought it was one of his lumbering jokes when he then asked her if she was regularly doctoring his food. She did not know that it was a serious accusation until he started insisting on cooking his own breakfast. It reached a stage where he was going to all sorts of lengths not to leave her alone in the kitchen in the early morning. She began to wonder about his sanity. But she knew that it was useless expecting any medical man—especially the family GP—to take her seriously if she went for advice. It seemed to be only in his relationship with her that this irrational streak in him came out. As far as the rest of society was concerned, he remained the model of probity, tranquillity, decency—and ever welcome good sense. Then one morning he left the kitchen for the front door, hearing the post fall on the mat—and she caught sight of their fragile little egg-timer. She crushed the glass in her hand, concealing the injury she did herself, sieved the sand through her fingers into the pan. He grimly took a specimen to Allnut to be analysed.
After he had received Allnut’s report, he never mentioned the incident again. He knew he had been proved in the wrong; he knew the trick she had played on him. And she for her part knew that he would never admit himself bested. It was moral cowardice on her part, she said, not to have it out with him—but by holding her peace she bought domestic peace of a kind. She knew what this kind of life was doing to her, but saw no way of breaking out of it.
Then came the move to Hadley Dale. He had made comfortable money—including, in their early days, some judicious exploitation of interest-free loans from her capital, which he had scrupulously repaid. He began to enthuse about their forthcoming country life as she had never known him enthuse about anything. He seemed to think that he was going to be God’s gift to Hadley Dale. During this dream period, revelling in advance in the freedom of the hills, he treated her with courtesy and consideration—formal and over-conscious—but easier to live with than the alternative. He did not even seem to remember the sand in the porridge. Then he learned that Hadley House was vacant, and his life’s ambition seemed about to fall into his hands. She resolved not to skimp anything to make him the sort of life he was craving.
But the truth declared itself during their first winter of isolation on the hillside. Her attempts to enter into the social life of the village became the subject of a new domestic fracas; not that the social life of Hadley Dale was worth falling out over. She was becoming more outspoken now when they quarrelled. She presented Longden with an analysis of his character, his delusions of majesty. Forced back to defend himself, he became more rigid than ever. She began to think of the detail of leaving him, but the obstacles seemed enormous. She was now physically weary, and it seemed a massive upheaval.
Then came the affair of the man in Marley’s cafe. It was no accident that her dental appointments in Bradcaster coincided with Longden’s weekly commitment to his old Rotary friends, useful miles away in a different direction. There was something paradisical about her weekly escape, even if it did mean sitting under the drill. Even the smelly, jolting, dirty bus was a way into a world that she had been beginning to forget. Stupid ordinary things about that world had become strangely attractive: like the sight of a pair of elderly pensioners, eating chips out of a paper; like a colourfully dressed Negress carrying a creamy white baby in a papoose. She had never been given to lying, but she had no qualms about stretching the truth about her dental commitments. And she met the man at the upstairs cafe table. She met him once—and then only because there was such a peak-hour crush that the waitress asked her if she would mind sharing.
He was some years younger than her. He was pleasant, well-spoken and interested in things that had not interested other men that she had met for some years: like Betjeman’s poems and Lowry. They liked each other and talked—talked long after it was fair to keep other people waiting for places. They never saw each other again.
But sitting at another table were two or three women who had been to a convention of some Christian organization, one of whose particular concerns was the sanctity of marriage. They—or one of them—sent an anonymous letter to Longden. Longden employed a private eye—his wife believed it was Watts—to try to find out at the cafe who the man was. Whoever it was—and whatever was later told to Mosley—the agent produced a name: Martin Bleasdale. There was a furious and infuriating scene, in the course of which Longden dropped that name in front of Betty.
She continued her visits to Bradcaster: fortunately there were two or three genuine appointments still on her card. She made Marley’s an inviolable habit, partly in the hope of meeting Bleasdale again, but also now for the incipient tingle of rebellion.
Now she was doing something more than toy with dreams of leaving Matthew. It had begun with day-dreams, but they led her to the thought that it was up to her to realize them. It dawned on her that this could be more than an image dancing on eddying air. It could be made to materialize—if only she were not so damned lazy about it. It was a prime example, she told Mosley, of what the scientists meant when they used the word inertia: a natural disinclination to disturb present conditions.
“Up to now,” she said, “I’d stuck steadfastly to the marriage ceremony. Did I say just now that I was a prig? There are people to whom such things are solemn—and I was one of them. Until suddenly I saw a new angle of the God to whom I’d made my vows. If he was merciless enough to hold me to them in my set of circumstances then what the hell was Christianity all about? Could he really be harsher with me than he wanted me to be with my neighbour? I don’t know whether that’s sound theology. Mr. Mosley—but I came out of it liberated. Call it what you will—playing with conscience, if you like. It worked, and when I had a second round of doubts, I pushed them adamantly down again. I started planning in concrete terms—and though I say it myself, pretty artfully.”
Did it seem real? Stretched in front of them lay the living map, in an infinity of greens and browns, extending to a blue blur of distant trees. Something had excited a congregation of rooks nearer at hand, and they were wheeling about each other in what seemed to be communal anger.
“Aren’t they supposed to be holding judgement over one of their flock when that happens?”
“That’s what I’ve always believed,” Mosley said. “And I suppose at this stage your husband had been told that you were still meeting Bleasdale?”
“He began to behave horribly. Of course
, I can see that if he really believed I was deceiving him, I could hardly expect placid forgiveness. But I began to wonder whether it was turning his mind. We had that terrible business about the car-wheels. In a way, it was the gritty porridge all over again, but this time was so horribly worse. In the case of the porridge, I could say he was making a mistake—an absurd one, a nasty one, an insulting one to me—but still genuinely a misjudgement. But in the case of the car-wheels, it was something he must have organized himself, with the help of that irresponsible lout Pearson. It was paranoia, and I was frightened. I flogged my brains for ways of getting away more quickly than I was planning.”
“Stop a minute. Didn’t he sack Pearson over loosening those wheels?”
“He did. Or he appeared to. It was one thing one minute, another the next. He’d say he knew for certain I was planning to kill him. But it wouldn’t have killed him. He’d not have got far from the garage, with the wheels as loose as they were. I wanted him out of the way so that I could use his life’s earnings to set myself up with this man. Then he’d have doubts, and say it was Pearson who’d done it, trying to get even for having been ticked off about something. To say that my head was spinning is the understatement of this century. He said it all again and again.
“I was desperate to be away, to put distance between myself and Hadley. I was never without funds, and I was hoping to buy a property a few miles south-west of my childhood home. I had a solicitor down there, pressing on with the deeds. But it all had to be done with such secrecy. I was going to change my name. I thought I needed time to get myself a self-respecting job. But everything seemed held up until I was actually there, and there seemed so many things to do before I could go. You may think I was slow. I had got out of the habit of being anything else.”
She was not serene now. She was a trifle flushed, and it was obvious that behind her words the chaos of those days was re-creating itself.
“It was Ted Hunter who launched me. Tell me, is he in trouble? I’m not surprised. I don’t suppose that in the last count anyone can help Ted Hunter. In the last count, he wouldn’t let them. Ted Hunter was a mixed-up man, but speak as I find, in the time that he worked for us, I had no cause to complain. He liked me, or seemed to, and would do anything for me. And one day he called me over to the edge of the plantation—he was putting in a couple of hours one evening—and told me for God’s sake to be out of the way next Tuesday. Whatever lies I had to tell, whatever I could manage to concoct, I mustn’t be in Hadley House next Tuesday night. I asked him what he meant, got really shirty with him when he refused to be more explicit.
“I said if he was going to talk nonsense like this, I would call Matthew to come and see what it was about.
“‘For Christ’s sake don’t do that, Mrs. Longden. You’ll have him in one of his rages.’
“‘Well, is it a job for the police, then?’
“‘Oh, no—God Almighty! Keep them out of it!’
“I thought that perhaps we were going to be burgled. Perhaps Hunter had heard something. He was a man one believed to keep all kinds of company. And perhaps he did not want the police in, because he did not want his friends to be caught—or to think he’d betrayed them. Isn’t it marvellous what you’ll believe, when you don’t want to face up to the truth? I thought of taking Matthew into my confidence. I don’t know whether you’ll believe me when I say that that just wasn’t possible? He wasn’t talking to me. We weren’t eating together. I was getting what food I could when he was clear of the kitchen. That was the sort of situation we had got ourselves into. It was no sort of scene for trying to talk to him about a lunatic message from an odd-job man. I took the easy way out—or at least my brain did—or whatever was doing relief duty for a brain. I decided to disbelieve the story.”
The rooks had settled down now, and in the distance they suddenly heard a cheer. Some herd triviality must have appealed to the crowd watching the filming. Perhaps Lottie had pulled off another scene to her producer’s satisfaction.
“For the next day or two, and over the weekend, I did nothing. If I picked up the phone to make a booking at a hotel. Matthew was bound to hear the touch on the bell, and saunter into the room to see who I was contacting now. Then something happened that sent me scorching into action. On the Monday morning I came across Matthew in our all-purpose workshop-shed, cleaning a gun. Now shooting was one of the things he had always promised himself in the country, but it had never come to much. About the only time he had seriously gone out with a fire-arm was when we had an influx of rats round the sheds—and we’d no complaints on that score recently. I asked him as amiably as I could whether he thought we were going to be attacked, and he sullenly told me not to be childish. It was then I decided I was taking no chances. I would take Ted Hunter at his word. The bedlam that this home was becoming was sufficient for flight.
“I took a chance with the phone. I asked Ernest Weatherhead to meet me that evening at Crawdon in his car. To get there I lost myself at the end of an afternoon walk. I packed two suit-cases and hid them in an undersink cupboard. I wrote a note to Hunter asking him to get those for me. He never did. I don’t know whether he ever got my message. It cost me a fortune in new outfits and that was the msot satisfying spending spree I ever went on. I think that you know all the rest—”
“Do I?”
“Did you never cotton on that it was Ernest who went through with that business of the airline tickets in the call-box?”
“I didn’t know he was doing it under your orders.”
“It was my own, my entire idea. I am proud of it to this day. Though I doubted whether Ernest would have the nerve to carry it off.”
“He did. And he stayed loyal to you. I think I would actually have had to produce a charge of murder before he’d have admitted that it was for you that he did it.”
“God bless him.”
“But one of the private eyes, you know, that your husband employed, a Scot named Houston, was convinced you had gone off on the London train. He had even been loaned a photograph—of some other woman—who really and truly was on Bradcaster station.”
The blood came into her face again.
“I didn’t know that. But there’s the proof, don’t you see? He had a photograph of some other woman. He was clearly in league with that woman. I can’t help thinking—it’s my nasty mind—it’s the sort of arrangement he’d have Watts put in hand for him. Watts wouldn’t know what it was about. There was no reason for him to suspect he was covering a murder. But it was going to be murder, wasn’t it, Mr. Mosley, if I’d stayed in Hadley that Monday night? The woman on the London train was to be proof that I was still alive. Lottie will dance a fandango when she hears this. She’d worked out such a lot, but not that—a fantastic woman. She had her knife in Matthew’s ribs, and she was twisting and twisting.”
“But the woman on the plane to Amsterdam superseded everything else. Thanks to her, Matthew Longden was cleared—and Jack Pearson and Ted Hunter, and anyone else who might have helped them—”
“For the time being. Until he started treating Lottie Pearson the way he had treated me.”
“So tonight,” Mosley said, “we are going to be treated to a sight from which brave men will want to turn their eyes. A disinterment—of your two old suit-cases?”
Betty Longden looked away to the horizon before she replied.
“Let’s hope it’s a false alarm—however much face Lottie loses.”
“I’d better be moving,” Mosley said. “There are one or two things that I ought to be doing.”
“And Lottie will be wondering what’s happened to me.”
For the first part of their walk back to the Clough they did not talk much. Then Betty Longden started to prattle, as if inconsequentially.
“You’re falling down on your detective’s routines, Mr. Mosley. You haven’t asked me where I live, how I live, what my arrangements are, whether there’s a man in the offing …”
Mosley gave no more than a gr
unt. It was possible that his brain was juggling with the night’s dispositions.
“I have a lovely house, in a place where I’ve longed to be since I was a girl. I am chief receptionist at a busy group veterinary surgery. Oh, and there is a man in the case. It will solve various minor problems, when this dust has all settled, if we are in a position to marry in the orthodox way. He is already free.”
The crowd loosed off an ironic cheer, and as they came in sight of Teagle’s arena, they saw that a knight in chrome-painted armour was standing with a hilariously buckled sword. The plot of the commercial—if plot is not too portentous a word—was that two knights were going to be in trouble after attacking the sleepy monitor with inferior metal. The flames from the cylinder and nozzle were going to melt the first blade and curl the second one up like macaroni in a casserole. Then along would come the true esquire, with a brand of the same tempered steel that went into the thinking man’s brand of twentieth-century razor-blades. Still roped to her rock, Lottie Pearson was waiting with unlimited favours for her rescuers. She was having a good deal more success with her innuendoes of intimate generosity, than she had had with her panic.
Teagle, often faced with a budget, and with the problems of putting together an act at short notice, had had troubles in the past with the actors’ union. He was notorious for the strokes of luck he had had with amateur talent. Brad Oldroyd had performed as knight number one. Tom Appleyard had followed him into the dragon’s lair. But Joe Ormerod had proved difficult to direct in the role of the triumphant swashbuckler: when it came to translating emotions into nuances of reaction, he could not be called a natural. Teagle, his tones enriched by an amplified megaphone, as well as by the resonance of the Clough, said a few more words that were received in expressionless silence by the inheritors of Hadley Dale’s puritanism.
Then Teagle caught sight of Mosley.
“Can you spare a few minutes, Inspector?”
Mosley looked for a few seconds as if he were considering the pros and cons of it, then he plodded over to the production platform. It did not take him long to master the few simple charades that were asked of him.
Mosley by Moonlight Page 16