‘It’s no use rushing at things, mother.’
‘I don’t want to find myself up in court at my age.’
‘It’ll not come to that, mother.’
‘Once these people get their teeth into you, they’ll stop at nothing. I should never be able to hold my head up in Bagshawe Broome again.’
‘I don’t see what they can say we’ve done.’
‘That Mr Mosley was talking about me obstructing him.’
‘Nay, mother – all we’ve ever done is to protect our own.’
‘And be let down for it.’
She started to cry. Only four or five times in her married life had she ever cried.
‘So you’d better make your mind up,’ she said.
‘You mean, what we’re going to tell them?’
‘We’re going to tell them everything,’ she said. ‘Everything they need to know, anyway.’
‘I’ll turn it over in my mind.’
‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ll go upstairs and get yourself changed this minute. We’ll strike while we’re in the mood. And there’s another thing: when we do get to the police station, I don’t want to sit there doing all the talking, same as usually happens. He’s your son as well as mine. And don’t put that shirt on you wore last Saturday. It has tobacco-burns down the front.’
As they left the house, she suggested turning left and taking the footpath between their estate and the top end of town.
‘That way we shan’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry working out where we’re going and why.’
Mosley was in the middle of a less than reasonable interview with Miley when the first of his other callers was announced.
Miley was moving unpredictably from phase to phase of drunkenness. One minute he was maudlin with affection for his saintly Janet, the next he was cursing the ineptitude of a Force that had not brought her back yet. Then he was forecasting the violence that he would perform on her abductor when his identity became known. Then, remembering his humiliation in the Market Square this morning, he turned his vehemence on Mosley.
Mosley did not take offence. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to take official cognizance of the state that Miley was in. Miley’s bellicosity dissolved. He laid a muscular arm round Mosley’s neck and leaned his seventeen stone on Mosley‘s shoulders. Mosley had difficulty in remaining upright.
‘Besh bugger I could have on the job. Besh bugger from Hadley Dale to Bradcaster. Every bugger shays sho. “If Jack Moshley can’t find her, can’t be found.” Tell you wha’, Mr Moshley: you get that bugger, and before you shlam him in, give me five minish with him.’
He moved the crook of his elbow, so that his weight shifted and all but brought Mosley down.
‘Now look, Miley,’ Mosley told him. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you went home? Sergeant Beamish will drive you.’
‘I’m staying here, Mr Mosley, till something comes through.’
‘That’s a bad idea, Miley. We’ll send a squad car for you if anything crops up.’
Not many months ago, Beamish would not have regarded the safe-conduct home of a drunken lout as an appropriate use of his talents. But sorties under Mosley’s oblique and sometimes grotesque tutelage had taught him to take pride in the diversity of chores to which he could apply himself. The trouble was that Miley’s volatility of spirit was such that no consistent strategy worked. Miley seemed to cotton on to the idea at first, even to take to Beamish. As they left the police station, a wave of sweating bonhomie took possession of him. Beamish controlled his reeling motion by the varying pressure of an elbow. As they crossed the front office, his attitude to the constabulary was in one of its upswings. He took an admiring interest in such incidents of professional activity as he recognized en passant. He smiled benignly on the efforts of a sergeant to explain to a motorist the consequences of refusing to give a specimen. He greeted a young man who had just been brought in with a consignment of stolen jam in catering-size tins.
Beamish steered him across the transport-yard, and once he was in the passenger-seat, Miley went into a state of serene coma. But as they were turning right at the Lansbury Street lights, they had to brake suddenly for a Mini that was trying to beat the amber. The whiplash was enough to wake Miley, who was alarmed to find himself in a strange car, askew and stationary in the middle of a crossroads. He had forgotten who Beamish was and put into operation at once his belief in attack as the best means of defence. Beamish completed his right turn and parked by a convenient strip of nearside pavement.
‘Now listen, Morrison – get hold of yourself. You may not be able to remember much of this evening, but try to put some of it together. You’ve been to see Inspector Mosley of your own free will, and I’m taking you home.’
‘You a scuffer? What’s the bloody law coming to?’
‘Your daughter’s missing – remember? We’ve got every stop out, and every manual coupled. I’m taking you home, because that’s where a ransom note is most likely to arrive.’
There were people in Miley’s front room who, Beamish could see, were not accustomed to be there. He recognized faces from the Market Square – staff officers of Miley’s. There were not many of them – in fact, only two – but they appeared to fill the room – and for some reason, Miley took virulent exception to their presence. They had been to the Lansdowne to tell him something, and not finding him there had decided to come and tell his wife. It was an act of derring-do: Miley did not encourage visits to the privacy of his home. He glowered at them with incredulous rage.
‘These gentlemen have something to tell you, Miles,’ his frail and pallid wife said.
This convinced Miley that she was in treacherous collusion with them. He took an aggressive half-step towards them, and one of them sidestepped so adroitly that he almost knocked his wife down.
Half an hour later, Beamish arrived back at the police station with Miley handcuffed to his wrist. He announced to the desk-sergeant that he proposed to charge him, and that in the meanwhile he should be kept in custody, deprived of his bootlaces, belt and braces, and anything else with which he might damage himself or anyone who came into his bilious field of vision.
Chapter Eleven
Mosley was outraged when it was reported to him what Beamish had done. He rushed downstairs and with bloodshot eyes ordered the station sergeant to refuse to accept any charge against Miley.
‘What do you think the press will make of this – arresting a man who’s beside himself with grief and anxiety?’
‘It wasn’t safe to leave him alone with his wife,’ Beamish said.
‘That was the only safe thing to do. Emily Morrison would have known how to handle him. She does it seven nights week.’
Beamish was visibly abashed at the rebuke, but Mosley did not relent.
‘Unnecessary paperwork and a bad reputation with every informant in the district – that’s what you’ll get for arresting Miley. And now, if you can tear yourself away from him, do you feel like doing any useful work this evening?’
‘There are one or two things you ought to know – things that two men came to his house to tell him. There were people who saw Janet Morrison leave on the Bradburn bus this morning.’
‘Very clever of them. She does that every morning.’
‘And they recognized other people on the bus.’
‘The same people have travelled daily on that bus since Noah and Japheth,’ Mosley said.
‘Yes. But there were two this morning who aren’t usually on it – who aren’t often seen in Bagshawe Broome. Couple of hippies, one with a pair of nail-scissors hanging from the lobe of one ear. And he had a woman with him with hair all over her face. They didn’t know her, but people are pretty sure who he was.’
‘And how much longer are you going to keep me waiting for the dramatic climax?’
‘Kevin Toplady with female escort.’
‘And what’s news about that?’
‘They were looking at Janet Morrison.’
>
‘Oh, aye? And don’t people look at her as a rule, then? Is she a sight from which bus-travellers usually avert their eyes?’
‘These friends of Morrison’s said they were looking at her very curiously – talking about her – in a peculiar way. Secretive.’
Mosley grunted.
‘Then when they got off the bus, they seemed to be following the girl – as if they wanted to know where her school was.’
‘And this has enabled you to formulate some theory, has it, Sergeant Beamish?’
‘I think it might be worth following up, sir.’
‘Follow it up, then. And in the meanwhile, there’s a couple waiting somewhere about the station to see me. I’ve got my hands full with a pair of beauties of my own. See what this other pair want.’
Mosley turned away, then looked back.
‘And I doubt if there’s any call to arrest the buggers.’
Mosley stumped away into the bare-walled interview room, where the Topladys were waiting, straight-backed and comfortless, for the continuation of a dialogue that they were wishing they had never initiated.
‘Some interesting titbits are coming to light, one at a time,’ Mosley said.
If he had been unusually short with Beamish, he was being continuously spiteful with the Topladys.
‘You didn’t tell me that your Kevin has been in Bagshawe Broome in the last twenty-four hours.’
‘We didn’t know he had,’ Primrose Toplady snapped back. And Kitchener, who in spite of her injunction, had scarcely been able to contribute a word, made a pathetic attempt to enter the conversation, with something of the appeal of a reprimanded spaniel.
‘Inspector – you can’t hold us responsible for what he does. He’s passed the stage where we can account for him.’
‘That’s as may be, but you’ve not passed the stage of telling lies to stop the neighbours from talking, have you? I’m going to do it,’ Mosley said. ‘I’m going to do what I said I would: something I’ve never done to man, woman or child in my working life. I’m going to do you two for wasting police time.’
Lightning had been flashing in his eyes, but they suddenly withdrew into their sockets with a lustreless intensity. While he had been out of the room, the Topladys had evidently conferred. They were utterly incapable of handling the situation as he had stirred it up.
‘Look, Mr Mosley – if only you’d let us begin at the beginning and tell it in our own way –’
Primrose Toplady’s eyes were bulbous in desperate appeal.
‘It seems to me you’ve begun at the beginning fifteen times already and we’ve still not got as far as the middle of the story.’
‘If only you let us talk, Mr Mosley.’
‘You seem to have done nothing else since you came into this room. Why not let your husband have a go for a change?’
Kitchener looked as if the interview was having the worst possible effects on his gastric.
‘I only wish he would talk, instead of sitting there looking like Guy Fawkes.’
She promptly closed her mouth with dramatic finality, her lips becoming a long, straight, narrow slit out of which all colour had been pressed. Kitchener blew out his cheeks to suppress a gastric manifestation.
‘Looks as if she’s giving you the go-ahead,’ Mosley told him.
‘It’s hard for us, you know, Mr Mosley. We can’t think where we’ve gone wrong.’
Mosley looked at him for some seconds with sad appraisal.
‘Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you that you haven’t gone wrong,’ he said at last.
They were the first conciliatory words he had spoken in an hour and a half, but they were far from trusting him by now.
‘We’ve made our Kevin what he was,’ Kitchener Toplady said.
‘No. God did that.’
It was unexpected. Toplady eased his bottom in his chair. His wife did not yet relax her lips, but she began to look as if that possibility might exist.
‘That’s not how we look at things,’ Toplady said. ‘That would be sheltering.’
Mosley muttered something that neither of the Topladys could make out.
‘I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mr Mosley.’
‘I said that I don’t see why a couple shouldn’t shelter. It depends what you’re sheltering from. Are you sheltering from facts that you can’t avoid – or are you sheltering from what Bagshawe Broome might say about them?’
‘All along, we’ve only wanted to do what’s right. We’ve never treated Kevin any different from any of the others.’
‘So what if he is different from the others?’
Kitchener Toplady wriggled.
‘Right’s right and wrong’s wrong. Every one of the others has been a credit to us. Eric’s head of his department and next in line to be deputy headmaster. They think the world of Charles in his physics department. His professor has told him that his thesis on wave motion could become the basis of an international textbook.’
‘I know. Everybody keeps telling me all this. You’ve every reason to be proud. But none of that is a substitute for telling me the truth about Kevin.’
‘Mother told you the truth.’
‘No. She didn’t. She waltzed all round it, trying to hide it from herself.’
‘You don’t make things any easier by getting on at us, Mr Mosley.’
‘Well, I’m not getting on at you at the moment – I’m doing my best to see things how you see them. And I’ve come to a new conclusion,’ Mosley said.
Kitchener looked at him hopefully. Primrose let her mouth relax at last.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you haven’t told me the whole truth because you don’t really know it. You don’t know it, because you won’t let yourself know it. And in any case, you’re too near to it to understand it.’
‘If only we could have our time over again.’
‘Well, you can’t, Mrs Toplady. But are you going to try to help me get at the truth?’
‘We won’t try to hide anything, Mr Mosley.’
‘If you do, it’s from yourself that you’re hiding it,’ Mosley said. ‘And on the whole, I’d still prefer your husband to do most of the talking, from now on.’
It was not a return to his previous irascibility, but the promise was writ hugely that any relapse would be irreversible.
‘Mother didn’t tell me at first,’ Kitchener said. ‘She didn’t tell me for days. I couldn’t make out what was wrong with her. I could see she had something on her mind. You see, she’d heard this rattling, out in Henry Burgess’s kitchen –’
In the other room, Beamish knew he was not doing well. He was not fully concentrating. He was still smarting from the slapping down he had had from Mosley. His relationship with the Inspector had always been an eccentric one, it was true – everything to do with Mosley was at least slightly off beam. But it had also been one of the most richly formative factors in Beamish’s maturing. Beamish would always be in the forefront in admitting that, but it was difficult to see how their friendship, even a working understanding, was going to survive this recent onslaught. It was so unregardful of fact, so unfair. And sitting at the table in front of Beamish, not exactly nervous, but with a sense of one-off occasion, were the Holgates, who had quite obviously come after much heart and future-searching. He could see that Dickie Holgate was tense. At his side, his wife had the makings of a good-looking woman – but her looks were playing second fiddle to her state of mind. Avril Holgate’s eyes were glistening with the determination behind a recent decision – and with the stubbornness to see it through. Beamish told himself – without strong conviction – that what was a comparative non-event for him, a routine interview in a difficult but scarcely top-line case, was something unique for this pair. It behoved him to treat them as unique.
‘You have something to tell me, I believe. Which of you is going to start us off?’
Avril did not flash a signal to Dickie, nor did she play about with embarrassed introductory passag
es. Dickie went straight into the meat of the story.
‘When Avril and I bought our house – that was between two and three years ago – it was in a disgusting state.’
His wife looked as if she might have had something bitter to say, but she disciplined herself.
‘We also had squatters. Kevin Toplady: does that name mean anything to you?’
‘You can assume that I’ve heard it. We can mop up any secondary questions later.’
‘Kevin Toplady and his girlfriend, Bootsie Bateman. Maybe it would be better if we left her till later, too. Let’s get the main facts first. They were living in infinitely worse conditions than we would have put up with at our lowest ebb.’
‘Believe it or not,’ Avril could not restrain herself from muttering.
‘They asked for time, in the first instance a week, to look for somewhere else to set up their sticks.’
‘Their sticks? They were able to carry away their entire possessions in a couple of dustbin-liners,’ Avril said.
‘I gave them that week. They even offered to pay me rent – not in money, but in kind.’
Holgate opened a sports-bag he had brought with him and produced a stoppered decanter and a carved ivory medallion.
‘And there were one or two other things that I’m afraid I’ve already sold. I’ll admit that I’ve not always been very careful about going over your official lists. That was not dishonesty. I’ll ask you to believe it was sheer lack of time.’
‘I shall still want the details, before we’ve finished.’
‘To cut a long story as short as I can, he pleaded for more time, another half a week, then a couple of days and finally, after the last twenty-four-hour postponement, I practically threw them out. They weren’t ideal lodgers.’
‘Dickie,’ Avril said, ‘has a very kind heart – where Kevin Toplady is concerned.’
‘This is a point on which Avril and I have always differed. It isn’t that Kevin and I have ever been friends, far from it, but there’s always been something about him that – well, it’s difficult to explain.’
‘Very,’ from Avril.
‘Something fascinating – more than that. Something you had to admire.’
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 8