‘Christ!’ from between his wife’s clenched teeth. Without seeming spectacularly rude, Dickie ignored her.
‘He was his own man. He was so outstandingly his own man that you had to respect him for it. When we were at school, Upper Peel Street, he’d be about fifteen and I’d be three classes lower, but everybody knew Kevin Toplady. I remember once the headmaster caned him in front of the whole school – he was the sort who still did that kind of thing. You could see old Weightman taking aim on the palm of Kevin’s hand, cut and come again, determined to make it hurt, and make Kevin show he’d been hurt. And Kevin was equally determined to show nothing.’
Avril Holgate’s face was that of a woman wondering how many more repetitions of that story she could stand.
‘Who won?’ Beamish asked.
‘Kevin came down from the platform smirking.’
‘You haven’t told us what he’d done to deserve it,’ Avril said.
‘That’s entirely beside the point. It doesn’t matter. It was Kevin Toplady against the System – as it always was Kevin Toplady against the System – because the System was always against him.’
‘You’ll have Sergeant Beamish wondering what we’ve come to tell him,’ Avril said.
‘This all has to do with what we’re here to tell you, Sergeant Beamish, because it’s only fair to me for you to know my attitude to Kevin Toplady. I don’t know how much you know about the Topladys. To call them toffee-nosed is not doing them justice. They’ve got brains. They work as if their greatest ambition is to run their own sweat-shop. Whatever trees they climb, they get to the top. Their Eric is on his way to becoming a headmaster before he’s forty. Their Charles has his knapsack bulging with whatever wand of office university professors have. Their Grace is practically executive manager of a symphony orchestra. All out of a two-and-a-half-bedroomed semi on the East Ward Estate. And all except Kevin, who never did fit in – maybe because nobody ever asked him what he wanted. Nobody knows what niche they had in mind for Kevin. It’s always been said that it’s Primrose Toplady’s secret sorrow that none of her brood went for medicine or the law. They had their kids for their own glorification, did the Topladys, that’s the whole truth of it. But Kevin didn’t want to know.’
‘Perhaps from the first day he could walk he was on the look out for somebody like Bootsie Bateman,’ Avril said.
‘Let’s be honest. He was in trouble before Bootsie Bateman came into his life. When he was about thirteen there was something about shoplifting from Woolworth’s, and Kevin landed in the juvenile court. His mother briefed a barrister to defend him – no mere Bagshawe solicitor for her boy. She spent her tea-caddy savings on a wig and gown from Manchester. He got the lad off on some smart technicality which, I don’t need to tell you, did him no good at all.’
‘Had he any ability?’
‘I’m not sure whether Kevin has a brain or not. I strongly suspect he could match any of the Topladys, but he’s always been damned if he’d use his ability the way they wanted. He’s basically lazy too, and that’s something that’s been reinforced by habit.’
‘And Bootsie Bateman.’
‘And now I’ll come to the nitty-gritty. Kevin gave me some bits and pieces in payment of token rent. He’s also sold me the odd trinket from time to time, when he’s been broke. And I’ve accepted them, without as much thought as I ought to have given it. But there were one or two things, as Inspector Mosley is well aware, that came from Henry Burgess’s. I’m not making any accusation. This isn’t even hearsay. But if I were you and the inspector, I’d be walking all round the possibility that Kevin and Bootsie spent some time squatting in Garth: while his mother was working there. That was how Kevin knew how to twist the knife. Maybe they squatted in other houses too.’
‘Now tell me something about this young Bateman lady,’ Beamish said.
‘There was this rattling about in the kitchen,’ Toplady said.
‘And you have to give mother her due: she has nerves like steel cabling. You wouldn’t have caught me going into that kitchen without a poker in my hand.’
‘Once when we thought we had a burglar at home, I was first downstairs,’ Mrs Toplady said.
‘Mother was in there in a stride –’
‘As I had been darting about the house a dozen times within that last week, chasing noises, real and imaginary.’
‘And who did she find there but, I am ashamed to say, our Kevin treating the place as if it were his own. And that young woman. And, I am further ashamed to say, both of them drunk, out of an enamel mug, with a bottle of spirits on the table. Mother thought at first they had come in to see her, knowing her working hours, and that they were simply making themselves free of Henry Burgess’s property for the morning. But she gradually put it together, from one thing or another, that they had been there several days. At first they had taken possession of one of the empty upstairs rooms and only used the kitchen after Mr Burgess had gone to bed. But then they found that him being as deaf and infirm as he was, they could take chances. They started living cheekily. It makes my blood run cold. I blame the woman entirely. I think they must have begun to look on it as some sort of game, leaving things until the last minute, shutting one door of a room the moment he opened the other. Playing loud music, then dashing into some other part of the house with their portable stereo.’
‘Anything more unlike the Kevin we used to know, I can’t imagine. He’d never have done anything like that before he met that girl. Of course, Mr Burgess did catch them in the end. They must have got careless, or else they were so full of drink that they didn’t know what they were doing.’
‘I can’t think why Mr Burgess didn’t go to the police. I can only think that they must have threatened him, terrified him, told him what they would do to him.’
And this was at the time when the old man was still turning out for his daily sandwich at Bert Hardcastle’s, less willing than ever to talk to anyone. In fear of a broken skull?
‘Neither of you thought of coming to the police yourselves?’ Mosley asked them.
‘Mr Mosley – he was our son.’
‘I know that, Mrs Toplady. Don’t you think it would have been better for him in the long run if –’
‘Mr Mosley – I told him what sort of trouble he’d find himself in. I left him in no doubt about that.’
‘And you gave up working at Garth?’
‘What would you expect me to do?’
‘Where do the two china dogs enter into the story?’
‘Mr Burgess had them on his kitchen mantelpiece. I told you about them. One day, when I was trying to get on with my work, Kevin was capering about, showing off, and I told him to be careful, or he’d knock one of them down. I should have kept my mouth closed, because of course he picked them up one at a time and smashed them on the floor. That was why I bought a pair and put them in place of the others.’
‘Tell me what you know about Miss Bateman.’
The question was out of their reach. To them Bootsie was irretrievably bad. They gaped at the suggestion that anyone could think otherwise.
‘She’s evil, that’s what she is,’ Primrose Toplady said. ‘ “He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith”.’
‘What sort of things does she talk about?’ Mosley asked.
‘How should we know what she talks about?’
‘You’ve not ever invited her to your home?’
Primrose Toplady performed an interesting paradox, theoretically impossible. She both cringed and drew herself haughtily together in the same movement.
‘Mr Mosley! What sort of people do you take us for?’
‘Mindless sex,’ Avril Holgate said. ‘When they’re not working up to it for all to see, they’re getting over the last bout. They think about nothing else. They talk about nothing else, in a sneering, secret-code sort of way. And they seem to think that everybody else conducts their lives along the same lines. And when their vibes, as they call them, are in the doldrums, then t
hey can’t stand the sight of each other. Then they’re Kilkenny cats, spitting and clawing. I don’t know how many times they’ve split up – but up to now they’ve always come together again.’
‘Drugs?’ Beamish asked.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re into everything that’s unclean and self-destructive.’
‘That isn’t fair, Avril,’ Holgate said. ‘I don’t doubt Kevin’s smoked grass in his time, when he was at the Technical College. So did I, for that matter, when I was that age – once. I take it for granted that they’ve both been on at least one hard trip, but that would only be experiment. The stuff’s there. The experience might be interesting. I can’t imagine they’ve never tried it. But during the time we knew them, and whenever I’ve caught sight of them since, I’ve seen none of the classical signs. I’ve never seen them in junkie company. Alcohol, yes – a good deal too much of it – but even that’s more than they can usually afford. I mean, it looks to me very much as if their criminal activities would be hardly enough to pay for their groceries. But they know more about the small print of their social security entitlements than the girl behind the DHSS counter does. And it seems to me that it’s when they’re running out of vodka that they look round for something to knock off.’
‘And you’ve always leaned over backwards to keep him out of trouble,’ Avril said.
‘Because one lot of trouble could only plunge him deeper into more. As for the times they’ve split up – what happens when they do? They wander about like lost souls, looking for each other, because even if it’s nothing but in-fighting when they’re together, they like life even less when they’re apart. They give each other something, even if it’s something that wouldn’t do for Avril and me.’
Then Mosley entered the room, looking contented and affable, and showing no trace of his recent dissatisfaction with Beamish. He came round to Beamish’s side of the table, picked up and glanced casually at Beamish’s notes.
‘I asked someone else this question just now, and got no sort of an answer. What sort of things does Miss Bateman talk about?’
‘Sex,’ Avril Holgate said. ‘Every variation of it. Ad nauseam.’
‘Other things, too,’ Dickie corrected. ‘Bootsie has three A levels. But only two Grade As. She was a little too experimental, she said, with Keats’s Hyperion, and that brought her Eng Lit mark down to a B.’
‘So she outclasses Kevin Toplady?’
‘By a mile and a half. I don’t know how many O levels Kevin got – one, I think: woodwork. He went to the Tech when he left school to try to do running repairs – but he did less work there than he’d done in Upper Peel Street. He’s had jobs, market research once, door-to-door. That lasted a week.’
‘You’d say she was a cut above the Toplady lad socially, too?’
‘The sort of distance you’d need seven-league boots to cover,’ Dickie said. ‘That to me has always been the oddest thing about the partnership.’
‘Who is she, then? And where’s she from?’
‘She talks as if her father is some sort of professional man, but I’ve never heard her say precisely what. She talks as if she can’t stand him or her mother. Her home’s somewhere in Yorkshire, north of here. Pontefract, Selby or Ripon – somewhere like that.’
‘Ripon? That’s where the milk bottles came from. It looks as if she sometimes brought her own milk to Garth, then. Have you anything else to tell us, young man?’
‘Only about these one or two things that I’d have handed over months ago if I’d been wider awake,’ Holgate said, and showed Mosley the things he had given to Beamish. Mosley did not need to look at them closely.
‘Better check to make sure – but I think we shall find these connect with Soulgate Manor and Lytham.’
The Holgates were dismissed. The Topladys had already gone. ‘The next thing will be the ransom note,’ Mosley said.
‘But I don’t expect anything in that line before tomorrow morning. In the meanwhile, we’d better be looking for house property that has recently become unoccupied.’
‘It’s beginning to look as if that’s their regular pattern,’ Beamish said.
Mosley looked at his watch.
‘It’s not too late to ring Timothy John Fawcett at home. He knows everything that’s on the market – and not just what’s going through his own office.’
He made a move towards the phone.
‘There’s just one thing, sir,’ Beamish said. ‘Are we friends again now?’
Mosley looked at him uncomprehending.
‘You gave me a rough time, earlier this evening, Mr Mosley.’
‘Oh – that!’
Mosley shoved it to one side without embarrassment.
‘I had to take it out of the Topladys. Just had to level them flat before I could make a proper start, and with me it’s all or nothing. If I have to act bad-tempered, I have to be bad-tempered.’
Chapter Twelve
‘What are we going up here for? This isn’t the way to Hadley Dale.’
‘We’ve got another call to make first,’ Bootsie told her.
They were driving towards Hempshaw End.
‘My mum’ll have gone home from my Auntie Eunice’s by the time we get there,’ Janet Morrison said.
She had so far showed no fear, but looked querulously critical. She was sitting with Bootsie on the broken springs of the back seat of the brown battered car that had at one time been parked on the edge of the Westlands Estate. In places the upholstery had been torn away and the window-ledge behind them was littered with felt mascots, grease-sodden takeaway cartons and screwed-up potato crisp packets. Under their feet there were dry leaves, sand, pebbles and Pay-and-Display parking tickets. Janet Morrison had not commented on any of this. The look on her shining scrubbed face was such as had no need for recourse to words. There was a conscious superiority about her that spoke for itself.
Kevin Toplady steered them up an unmade road between two fields, that did not look as if they were usable for anything.
‘This doesn’t go anywhere,’ Janet said.
‘It’s time to put the blinkers on the kid,’ Kevin said.
Bootsie drew out from under herself a musty old blanket and threw it over the girl’s head, pulling a corner of it down under her buttocks and knotting two corners over her thighs. Janet struggled violently, which had the unreasonable effect of making Bootsie angry with her. Bootsie had been up to now very civil, even convincingly friendly to the child. But now that she had a sacked octopus on her hands, she applied the force necessary to subdue it. In the wrestling bout that was involved, her hair fell even more wildly than usual about her face, making her a fair match for a schoolgirl knotted into a blanket. There was an ominous sound of bone meeting resistance as Janet’s head knocked against what had once been an arm-rest and for nearly twenty seconds there was a worrying silence.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Bootsie said to herself.
Then Janet spoke with foul blanket stuffed into her mouth.
‘Tell her to stow it,’ Kevin shouted.
‘Not to worry, Kev. She’s shouted.’
Yet when Bootsie came to untruss her at their journey’s end, Janet was still remarkably undishevelled – or, at least, she seemed able to restore herself to normality with no more than a shake of her shoulders. She was red in the face, it was true, but her high forehead still glistened. She picked off an inch of thread here, tweezed away a bit of fluff there, put her hand up behind her pig-tails, wriggled inside her clothes – and was almost as immaculate as she was at her bus-stop.
‘What have we come to this effing hole for?’ she asked.
‘That’s no way to talk,’ Bootsie said. ‘Swear if you want to. But if you’re scared of saying the words, don’t try to sound big.’
Kevin had gone on ahead to wrestle with a doorlock.
‘For Christ’s sake get her into this shit-ridden house,’ he said.
‘Don’t you bloody start. I was hoping this was going to be a civi
lized party for a change. Let’s keep it clean, shall we?’
‘Oh, Christ!’
‘What now?’
‘The bloody key’s broken.’
‘I told you to get another cut. You could see it was cracked nearly through.’
‘We’ll have to break a back window.’
‘Go and do it, then. And don’t wake the neighbourhood.’
Which was silly, because there did not seem to be another house in sight. Dusk was advanced. Kevin stumbled over rubbish as he made his way down the side of the house. It was a remote property, had once been a tied labourer’s cottage on the edge of an intake farm, now abandoned – an intake being a parcel of land that has been reclaimed from the moors above.
At least Kevin did not play about with the job, made one loud noise – a shattering of glass that offended the twilight – cut his hand as he climbed in. Bootsie removed the splinters from the edge of the frame before ordering Janet through it.
‘Oh, Kevin – why did you have to choose the kitchen window? I’ve got a meal to cook. I’m going to be frozen rigid.’
‘Christ! What an effing dump!’ Janet said.
Bootsie performed the rare gesture of parting the tangle in front of her eyes and gave Janet the benefit of a one-to-one facial confrontation.
‘Now look, young lady. I said just now that I want this to be a civilized operation. We don’t like doing what we’re doing. It’s forced on us by the ramifications of a laissez faire economy. But since it has to be done, let’s do it with the makings of refinement. I thought you were a young lady of some polish. That’s one of the reasons you’re here.’
‘Arseholes!’ Janet said.
‘What an articulate infant you are, to be sure. Now, as you can see, this isn’t the Ritz. You can have beans on toast, spaghetti on toast, fish fingers or a boiled egg.’
‘How far is it to a chippy?’
‘You’ve heard the menu. Make up your mind.’
‘What brand’s the spaghetti?’
Janet ate with surprising appetite, putting herself at the maximum distance from the other two at a dirty little table covered with threadbare oil-cloth. She had stopped talking, and her silence seemed infectious. The three munched until there was nothing left on their plates but smears.
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 9