When the last shot was on the video-tape, and the engineers had begun stowing their apparatus away with practised agility, Teagle turned to the crowd, and in his best Bugs Bunny manner announced, “That’s all folks.”
But Hadley Dale seemed reluctant to return to their hearths. It was almost as if no one believed that the entertainment was done. Some sightseers even climbed over the boulders to see from close quarters the rock to which Lottie had been tied, as if a lump of stone that had been with them all their lives had taken on some vital new entity.
But eventually the last stragglers in the column were disappearing down the hill towards Isaac Oldham’s fences. Teagle came and stood at Mosley’s side, surveying the now deserted scatter of rubble. Mosley had extended his arm, and was making strange and inexplicable movements with his fingers, as if he were conducting an orchestra.
“How many hundred tons of that do you suppose we shall have to shift?” Teagle asked him. “And what do you suppose the technicians’ union is going to say, when they learn they are going to do scab labour in stone-breakers’ country? Is there anywhere near here where we can hire a mechanical digger?”
“Won’t be necessary,” Mosley said. “I happen to be reasonably well acquainted with the couple who disposed of what’s down there, and they wouldn’t have expended any energy that could be saved. They wouldn’t have moved more than one or two rocks.”
He traced another arabesque in the air with his right arm, as if taking the range first of one fallen slab, then of another.
“It’s rather like looking at the pattern of balls in a snooker game, and trying to work out how they lay before the last stroke.”
“A bit tough, I’d have thought,” Teagle said. “It’s seven years since it happened. You won’t find many signs of what slid and what tumbled.”
“Oh, I don’t know …”
It was true. There was nothing that struck the eye with immediate significance. If it were true that a sepulchre had been sealed, as it were, by the landslip of relatively few boulders then moss would have been torn away as they slithered. Lichens would have been scraped from rock-faces. Surfaces would have been chipped, and there would have been variegated colours where stone had been exposed. But moss and lichens had had more than time enough to replace themselves. Weather and blown dust had restored an uninformative uniformity to all surfaces.
“I’m going down to fetch Isaac,” Mosley said. “He’s lived here since he was a lad. He’d know if a pebble had shifted.”
Isaac did know. Some cynics might have thought that Isaac Oldham had never not known. But he went through the motions of examining the rubble from several angles, then scratching his head.
“I’d say, you know, that big bugger there—the one that’s the shape of a ram’s arse—that used to lie on its side. And the one that’s half under it—that’s come right down from the top. I reckon if you turned that right over, you’d find Tom Appleyard’s name carved with a heart and an arrow. That’s from the time when he was courting Brenda Pogson.”
Mosley made a last esoteric sweep of his arm.
“You’ll just have to move six big stones,” he said. And he showed Teagle which ones. “Whatever it is you’re thinking of doing tonight—of course, I don’t know anything about that, any more than you know what I’ve got on hand—whatever it is, I wouldn’t start too soon, if I were you. They’ve a way of getting to know things in Hadley Dale. Shall we say a quarter past midnight?”
“As late as that?”
“Let them get well into their first sleep.”
“Synchronize watches, then?”
There was drama inherent in Teagle. His wrist swept to the winder of his watch as if it were under a close-up lens.
Mosley went back down to the village. He went to Joe Ormerod’s house, and was behind uninformative doors for the whole of the evening.
“At least we’ll have somebody else doing the digging for us tonight, Joe. None of that hands and knees stuff scraping soil with our finger-nails.”
“Oh, aye?”
There were times when it was difficult to know whether Joe Ormerod had the faintest inkling of what was in the offing. At others, one wondered whether he did know, but just staunchly disbelieved it. But he never uttered a word of scepticism, never a syllable of complaint. And orders, in so far as they could be injected into him, and in so far as he ever understood them, were something that you knew he would carry out in the face of assault, battery, physical pain, darkness, storm or holocaust.
At the right hour, Mosley led him, not to Bottom Farm and the Clough, but up to Hadley House by the open way, the main drive and the front door. There was a single light burning in the house, a table-lamp in Longden’s sitting-room—perhaps the conventional way of persuading a housebreaker that there was someone at home. Or it could have been a signal to help a man find his way home again. For Matthew Longden was not there. Mosley toured the outside of the house and peered in at several windows before jerking the bell-push. It was an ancient system, with wires that pulled actual bells, hanging on metal coils in the hallway. They echoed in empty spaces, calling forth no life other than a skidding of mice-feet on deserted linoleum.
“He knows,” Mosley told Ormerod. “He’ll be down there. He might hurt someone.”
He conducted Joe through the plantation at the back of the house, down the track that could lead them all the way to the Clough. But long before they reached the rusted gate, even before the track down which Mosley had gone this afternoon to find Betty Longden, he took a path to their right, over tree-roots, loose stones and an occasional glutinous puddle. He had insisted on sparing use of their torches ever since they had set out, but he now banned any use of them at all. Very soon he touched Joe’s sleeve, to stop so that he could listen.
There were sounds in the night—a witless owl, some quadruped in the undergrowth, fur among leaves. But beyond this there was a more distant sequence of activity, that carried to them only intermittently round tree-trunks and contours. There were the ingredients of a hubbub, men’s voices, the clank of metal, once a brief tumbling of scree. They had not gone many more yards when the rounding of a bend and the descent of a shallow dip showed them a diffused light, shining up from the next fold in the terrain before them. And the voice came up specially clearly now, a picturesque improvisation that could only have originated on Teagle’s lips. Teagle was displeased with something unimaginative that a menial had just done.
A few tens of yards farther down the escarpment, they emerged into a clearing edged by an exposed scar—in effect the tapering edge of the upper end of the Clough. Free from tree-tops and overhanging branches, they now had the benefit of a moon that had thrown off lace-like edges of cloud. Ten seconds from now, they would be in a front-row, dress-circle seat from which to observe the labours of Teagle and his gang.
But they could not move down there directly, for away on their right hand, Matthew Longden was lying on the cliff-edge with an uninterrupted view of the spectacle. By his left side his stick was lying askew in the grass. His right hand was supporting the stock of a sporting gun, and his right elbow was positioned to give him control of bolt and trigger.
Mosley motioned Ormerod to follow him silently in an arc to their left, so that they could get to the other extremity of the scar without alerting Longden.
Teagle was working by generous floodlight. The lie of the stones suggested that it had been a much bigger job shifting them than Mosley had let him believe. There must have been a near-rebellion in the ranks of his labour-force. (In fact, they had stopped work to negotiate a bonus fairly early on in the operation.) But progress had been made. Two bashed-about but distinguishable suit-cases stood on a ledge apart, sequestered from incidental damage by the stone-shifters. And the main effort had clearly been directed down a deepish chasm that had now been opened up.
Mosley stared down tensely. It was a tricky business, raising a skeleton, even one that had been laid to rest fully clothed. Its connect
ed ligaments were no longer in a state to do much of a holding job. Teagle called for a tarpaulin in which to roll up the cadaver.
And Mosley rolled over on his side, shouted brusquely to Longden.
“Drop it, Matthew. What good can you do? Do you think you can kill twelve of them, with that thing at that range? There’s not one man down there has the faintest notion what any of it is about.”
Papers in his wallet supported the obvious first belief that this must be the young man from Marley’s cafe. His name was Martin Bleasdale. He was one of those tens of thousands who annually disappear without trace—a knowledgeable peripatetic consultant in those specialized regions of private banking and insurance that have to do with the capitalization of promising ventures. In the final clearance of consciences, Matthew Longden admitted that he had rung Bleasdale—not risked writing to him—falsely claiming to be Isaac Oldham, and asking him to call one evening to discuss the finance of diversification. But Bleasdale had not reached Bottom Farm. He had been waylaid by Pearson and Hunter—though it was Longden who was the actual killer. The other two were mere labourers. They both agreed, when the stage was reached where that was the only option, that Betty Longden would also have been in on the act, if she had not thought to get in touch with Ernest Weatherhead. Hunter seemed to think that his warning to her ought to exonerate him from the whole issue.
Tom Grimshaw and the ACC were watching television in desultory fashion when they saw two knights’ swords devastated by the breath of a monster that looked as if it had escaped from Hammer Films. Then a third knight arrived and slaughtered the monster. Then he hacked rumbustiously at the bonds that held an extremely mature-looking Princess on the rocks. Then she was throwing herself at him with lascivious abandon, stultified by the fact that he could not get his visor open.
But in the last shot, he had got it open. His knightly service done, he was freshening himself up, standing at a wash-basin, looking into a mirror, and shaving himself with gallant but delicate sweeps of a four-foot blade set in a jewelled hilt.
A round, idiotic face looked out from under the shining chrome helmet.
“I always said that man was nothing but a clown,” the ACC said.
“I must confess that I sometimes wonder if he has missed his vocation.”
Copyright
First published in 1984 by Quartet Books
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © John Greenwood, 1984
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