‘All right, Inspector. Be like that.’
Then he caught sight of the fragments of china dog that Beamish had just brought out of the bag to examine more closely.
‘Here – what are you doing with those? They belong on the kitchen mantelpiece. I could have got a good price for them.’
‘One of them’s still in mint condition,’ Beamish told him.
‘It needs to be a pair.’
‘I’ve a feeling they weren’t yours to sell in any case,’ Mosley said. ‘But I’ll accept your plea of innocence in this particular instance.’
‘Mr Mosley –’
It seemed to Beamish that Mosley was going out of his way to rib Holgate, and Holgate was playing into his hands by letting his irritation show. The young dealer stamped into another room and came back carrying various objects which he set down noisily on a table under Mosley’s nose. They included two small mantel decorations in butterfly-wing, a set of pewter spirit-measures and a silver-plated musical box surmounted by a now wounded Dresden ballerina.
‘You were on at me about not studying your loot lists properly, Inspector. It’s a pity you don’t read them yourself before you send them out. I’ve been doing a bit of belated homework, and I think you’ll find that these have all figured in the last twelve months.’
Mosley glanced at the objects as if they did not greatly interest him.
‘Beginning to develop a conscience, are you, Master Holgate? Or getting cold feet?’
‘It seems to me,’ Beamish said to Mosley afterwards, ‘that you stuck a lot of pins into that young man’s bottom just for the hell of it. He stands high on the suspect list, does he?’
‘He doesn’t appear on it at all. As honest as you could expect a man in his walk of life to be.’
‘What, then?’
Mosley stopped to scrape dottle from his pipe into the gutter. They were walking back along Dickinson Road.
‘You think I’ve got my fingers on the pulse of this town, don’t you, Sergeant Beamish?’
‘Well, I’d say that if anybody has –’
‘There are men who will talk to me. Some of them may even talk to you, once they’re accustomed to your face. They will tell us many things, perhaps even some things that they believe to be true. But what they tell us will be restricted to what they care for us to know. You and I are due to get a great deal of help in the next few days – but some of it is likely to be misleading help. Because the key men in Bagshawe Broome do not themselves know what has been going on. That is beginning to worry them. They will need to satisfy their own curiosity before they can decide how much it is safe to pass on to us. Therefore I want young Mr Holgate to think he is in imminent danger of a miscarriage of justice. He will quickly come to the conclusion that he has only one really reliable defence, and that is to find out for himself who has been trafficking in this stuff. You do see, don’t you, sergeant, that he is in a much stronger position to do that than we are?’
Mosley hiccoughed. He was still having trouble getting a draught through his pipe. He stopped to do further, fundamental excavation.
‘And Holgate isn’t the only one who’ll be trying to get down to taproots. Another will be the character we met while we were on our way to Bowland Avenue.’
‘The big chap?’
‘There’s no need to be scared of Miley Morrison. He’d crumble like a house of cards if you waved a paper fan at him.’
‘I’m sure he would.’
‘Good! I’m glad you think that. Because you might have to wave something more than a fan at him before we’ve finished.’
Chapter Seven
By the morning, Beamish had thought his way into a minor anxiety state about a number of things. It was all very well Mosley treating him as if his transfer to Bagshawe Broome were already a fait accompli. He knew very well from experience how facts came to be accomplished by Mosley’s Law. They could not always be managed with similar equanimity by an ambitious young officer who did not wish to compromise himself irreversibly with the top office. Beamish walked into Bagshawe Broome police station intending to talk firmly – though of course in the friendliest fashion – to Mosley. It was true that a few minor items from Soulgate had turned up here, but they were only peripheral to other aspects that Beamish had in hand. There was, for example, the plaster-cast of a sole-print that he was still trying to narrow down through manufacturers and retailers. There was a sheaf of local statements that might still be made to deliver something under computer analysis: if he could only think of the right questions to programme in. There were various sightings of an ancient brown Ford Classic saloon. And all this seemed more likely to bear fruit than did a pompous little woman carrying two china dogs in a plastic bag whom he had scared into thinking that he was a streaking mugger. And that was saying nothing about the sort of future that lay in needling a six-foot, barrel-chested hoodlum surrounded by his sycophants in a one-horse market place. So Mosley had to be reasoned with. If Mr Grimshaw thought that he could be usefully employed for a day or two in Bagshawe Broome, then that was all right by Beamish. Otherwise –
But Mosley remained in command of the situation by one of his favourite devices, which Beamish had known him put to devastating use in the past. He was not in Bagshawe Broome police station at the hour when he had told Beamish to meet him there. Bagshawe police station did not know where Mosley was. Beamish hung about for half an hour, desperately unhappy to be idle.
So Beamish decided to get on with the first chore that Mosley had given him: to ask around in the few houses on the unfinished estate west of Westwood Park. Could anyone remember anything about a suspiciously parked car? An unspecified period of months ago?
Beamish walked out to the estate. The central avenue and its partial herringbone of closes (all named, without any thought of geographical juxtaposition, after United Kingdom mountains) looked if anything more dispirited even than the area left derelict by the bankrupt builder. Even inhabited walls seemed to exist in an envelope of suspended animation. There were people about: mothers returning from taking their children to school, wheeling their younger infants back home in tin-wheeled buggies. A window in someone’s upstairs room had been broken and repaired with a side of potato-crisp carton. The beginnings of disrepair had encouraged a spreading negiligence. One or two gardens had been pathetically planted with shrubs now leggy and undernourished. In others a start at cultivation had been abandoned. In some no effort had been made to clear away the initial dressing of contractors’ rubble. Here was a child’s swing. There a clutch of moulting pigeons was perched on blistered roofing felt. An eclectic gang of dejected dogs chased each other from garden to garden, reverting already to pack-law.
Beamish approached a knot of women who seemed unable to part from each other on the corner of Skiddaw and Carnedd Dafydd. He introduced himself and saw that one was dark-skinned but of European feature and had one black and one creamy-white baby. A white woman, on the other hand, was pushing two piccaninnies who might have stepped from the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The others were local lasses who had been at the neighbourhood comprehensive not so many years – or months – ago. The ethnic assortment did not affect Beamish, but the women might have been talking in code, for all he was able to make out about the subject of their debate.
‘I’m here making enquiries about a car.’
They looked at him without interest, without curiosity. One of them was already making ready to move away, jockeying to straighten her wheels on the up-rising slabs of the pavement.
‘Have any of you ever noticed a car that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone on the estate?’
They were not only silent – there seemed something mournful about their silence. He nodded his head in the direction of the park railings.
‘Maybe it was parked down there, a long way from any of your houses.’
None of them seemed to care whether such a vehicle had ever existed.
‘What I’m talking about may have been
some time ago.’
There was not even a look of consultation between one pair of eyes and another. He was aware of the ineptitude of his questions. The women failed to show even a willingness to think about them.
‘Do you often see strangers on or about this estate?’
One woman, surprisingly, did reply to that. She had an unusually high-pitched voice, in which the local vowels and glottal stops sounded oddly out of place.
‘A new tallyman came collecting dues last week for the Golden Treasury catalogue. He doesn’t look as if he’ll last even as long as the last one did. It’s a firm that likes results.’
Laughter: they were not entirely devoid of wit.
‘There was a mini parked all night one night last week outside Felicity Wood’s. Her old man’s in hospital with gallstones.’
You’re only jealous because it wasn’t parked outside yours, Kathy.’
More laughter. If only he could keep them in as happy a frame of mind as this –
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ Beamish said, ‘of anyone actually coming to your doors. Somebody who’d drive down there past the last house, then perhaps go off through the Park.’
No one had anything to volunteer.
‘No?’
He gave them another chance for some memory to vibrate. Nothing emerged. Nothing was going to emerge.
‘Well, thank you, ladies.’
They laughed a third time, unified again by the sight of his ineffectiveness as he turned his back on them and walked down through the wilderness of the unbuilt zone. He came to the opposite side of the fence where he and Mosley had stood looking outwards yesterday. And there he did see something. It was a patch of bare earth between two scraggy clumps of ragwort. Some vehicle had stood there, leaking from sump or crankshaft. Beamish thought it might be an idea to take a small sample of the oil-soaked soil. There were circumstances in which he could see it coming in useful. He had an optimistic faith in forensic science. It had never brought him a miracle result yet, but he lived in hope. He was stooping to fill one of his little plastic envelopes when a voice from behind him startled him.
‘What’s this, then? Sherlock Holmes himself?’
A bald-headed man in a shabby brown pullover: Beamish did not know him at the time, but he was to hear plenty about him later in the day at the police station.
E. Jones, thirty years timekeeper at Caudwells’, made redundant when they went on short time. E. Jones, who had not done a paid hour’s work (that they knew about at the Labour) since he was in his late forties. E. Jones, busybody, prodnose and malcontent. E. Jones, whose volume of correspondence in the local press ought to have come to the notice of Norris McWhirter. Scarcely a week passed but that the Bagshawe Guardian published a letter signed by their obedient servant, E. Jones. I feel it is my duty to inform you was his favourite opening formula, and E. Jones’s sense of duty had in its time been called to action stations by pavement-fouling Labradors, unlighted street-lamps, over-illuminated electricity showrooms and the moral decadence he had observed behind a shrubbery in Westwood Park through his cross-channel binoculars.
‘You’re not from round these parts,’ E. Jones informed Beamish, fishing for information.
‘County CID.’
‘You’re about five months too late, that’s all.’
E. Jones’s sense of duty was already composing a paragraph about police procrastination.
‘That was when a car last stood there?’
‘Five months – give or take half an hour or so.’
‘Can you tell me anything about the owners?’
‘Never saw them. Must always have come by night.’
‘They came often, then? Regularly?’
‘Three or four times altogether, perhaps a month or two apart. Must have stayed a week or so each time. I can’t give you all the dates, but you can get an idea if you go and consult the Guardian files. I wrote them a letter, complaining. I felt it my duty to draw the attention of the authorities to car-dumping. That’s what I thought it was, car-dumping. If you’d asked me, I’d never have said the damned crate would start again. It certainly hadn’t many more miles in it.’
‘I hope you took its registration numbers?’
‘It had none. No plates, even. No licence disc. Not even a door-handle on the front passenger side: tied up with string. Odometer said 90,000 odd miles – but who knows how many times the bugger had been round?’
‘Did you not report it to the police?’
‘Aye. They came and looked, said something about having it towed away. Next morning it was gone, and I thought that’s what they’d done. Till it showed up afresh.’
‘Did you report it a second time?’
‘What was the bloody point? It didn’t seem they’d taken any notice the first bloody time.’
‘You can tell me what make it was?’
‘Ford Classic. Brown. Shit brown. Like this pullover.’
Beamish began to think that there might be some point in hanging round Mosley until further notice.
Mosley was at the police station when Beamish returned there, laughing his head off with the desk sergeant.
‘Ah,’ Mosley said, incorporating into the single sound an unanswerable refutation of everything that Beamish might have had it in mind to say.
‘Ah,’ Beamish agreed, conscious that he had conveyed no meaning in the syllable.
‘This is what I like to see – a sergeant up and on his rounds betimes.’
‘And well worth while, as it happens.’
With typical rising eagerness, Beamish told what he had unearthed on the Mountains Estate. Mosley, unexpectedly, set in at once to douse his enthusiasm.
‘You’re talking as if you’d closed the case-file, sergeant.’
‘No – but I regard this as an achievement – dare I say, a breakthrough?’
‘If you consider this a breakthrough, I’d hate to see you when you’re stuck. All you’ve done is confirm what we already know: that Garth was used as a transit camp and store by some unknown person.’
‘Nevertheless –’
‘What you are really trying to say is that you have discovered for yourself – or rediscovered – what I as good as told you yesterday.’
‘But I’ve come across reports of this brown Ford Classic before –seen by witnesses near the Soulgate Manor on the night in question.’
‘It would be a little surprising if it hadn’t been seen by somebody, wouldn’t it? All you’ve got to do now is to circulate the details and wait for some patrol to pull it in.’
‘Yes, well, I know, of course, that we need more –’
‘We need much more,’ Mosley said. ‘And your next call has to be on Primrose Toplady.’
It was unusual for Mosley to treat him as pugnaciously as this. Beamish was tempted to think that he was trying to show off in front of the Bagshawe station staff.
‘I’m on my way to the Topladys in the next five minutes. But there is one thing, Inspector Mosley. Don’t you think that this ought to be cleared with Mr Grimshaw?’
‘What do you want to go clearing things with Tom Grimshaw for?’
‘I am answerable to him.’
‘Do you want to be whisked away from Bagshawe Broome before the morning’s out, Sergeant Beamish?’
‘Naturally not.’
‘Then leave me to do the worrying about Grimshaw. Now about the Topladys: a very worried couple, Sergeant. So you have everything made for you. Five or six times already they’ve tried to get in touch with me this morning. That’s why you may have had a little difficulty in contacting me. I prefer not to be available to the Topladys for some little time.’
‘Why is that, Inspector?’
‘Because their relief when they finally do get hold of me will be so great that they’ll be ready to tell me anything. Especially after they’ve had the traumatic experience of a visit from you.’
‘I don’t see there’s any call to put it quite like that.’
�
��That’s how it had better be, though, if you want to get anywhere.’
Before the ladies of the Mountain Estate had set out for school with their children, one figure familiar in the Bagshawe landscape was already setting out on her daily journey.
Janet Morrison, scrubbed, her hair drawn tightly into pigtails, immaculate in her neat grey uniform and velvet-banded pudding-basin hat, was waiting on the pavement for the Bradburn bus.
It was a trying journey on the icy-draughted, frosty, foggy mornings that were prominent in the Bagshawe climate, and Janet always looked chilled and peaky, a perpetually unhappy child. She never spoke to anyone. Sometimes people wondered whether she even spoke at home or school. Some thought she was toffee-nosed, but this was a phrase that they never allowed to rise to their lips, her father being who and what he was. No one knew precisely what future Miley thought he had lined up for his daughter, but it was evident that he did not permit any aberration from the narrow uphill path that he saw as leading to it. She seemed to have no friends: no other child from Bagshawe went to St Christopher’s private school in Bradburn. It was not clear what researches had led Miley to prefer its educational advantages. Perhaps it was because it was several walls removed from Bagshawe Broome.
There was seldom an unfamiliar face on the early bus from Bagshawe to Bradburn: it was not a service used by anyone who was not compelled to. But there was an occasional exception, and today was one of those days. There were two strangers, sitting on the opposite side of the upper deck from Janet Morrison, and obliquely behind her, so that if they had wished to position themselves to keep her under observation, they could scarcely have done better.
They were young people, perhaps in their early twenties. The man had a giant and brilliant green cockade of hair, and a pair of nail-scissors hanging as a modest ornament from the lobe of his left ear. The girl’s hair totally obscured her face and she was wearing a very long and very dirty sleeveless patchwork coat whose hem flopped over her hobnailed boots.
Such phenomena were not entirely uncommon in Bagshawe Broome nowadays, but they still caused passengers on the buses to draw a little more tightly into their own seats.
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 5