‘And to replenish her milk supplies?’ Mary Carlyon murmured, with no hint of provocation.
‘That was another thing. Her mother had a coffee morning in aid of Bangladesh, for which she had ordered three extra pints. Young madame departed without a hint of leave-taking, and the milk went too. All of it.’
Mr Bateman got up from the table and crumpled his napkin over his side plate.
‘Has she been stealing milk elsewhere, then? Or are mere parents not entitled to know why their offspring are of interest to the police?’
‘I don’t really know any details, Mr Bateman. This is a routine enquiry. But if she does come home again in the near future –’
‘We shall be happy to do all we can to help you to get her off our hands. And now, if you’ll excuse me –’
Everything that happened in Bagshawe Broome was duly noticed by somebody. At least seven shopping housewives saw Primrose Toplady take a large tin of middle-cut salmon from a supermarket shelf and pay for it at the check-out. There was still a generation in Bagshawe who could remember the day when a tin of salmon was the standard, indeed the only permissible central offering on the upper working-class Sunday tea-table: soft spinal bones that melted between one’s teeth as the juices and vinegar were being soaked up by the sprinkled pepper. But these had only been small tins. A large tin was unheard-of, save for a massive family visitation.
But since the war, eating habits had changed. In many a household high tea had been replaced by a later meal and tinned salmon had vanished as a regularity – a change in community ritual brought about mainly by price.
And here was Primrose Toplady buying a large tin in the middle of the week. Each of the seven housewives reported the event to an average of 1-5 others and it was not long before the Topladys’ salmon was a talking point in their part of the town.
Janet Morrison could not understand why Waterbrigg Hall had two staircases, one central and imposing, one obscure and poky, and between the second and third floors, not even carpeted. When she saw Grimshaw and his storm-troops approaching the front door, her first instinct, like theirs, was to ascend rocket-like to the top of the building. And when they reached the third storey, by the main stairs, she went halfway down the servant’s route. When they came down to the next floor, and one of them was detailed to investigate those backstairs, Janet was already back at the top and flattening herself into an alcove.
She could hear them talking loudly from room to room. They were not slow to conclude that intruders had been here. The keyholder was most concerned when he discovered how unceremoniously the dust-sheets had been treated. Grimshaw pounced on evidence of occupation: one of Bootsie’s fresh cigarette-ends, the bed in which Janet had slept, still unmade. The consensus of opinion was that two of the fugitives had overnighted here, that they had gone off elsewhere and that they would be too cunning to return.
Janet heard them start their cars. She unflurriedly sat down with the Decameron.
Miley stuck his thumbs into his buckle-belt and surveyed the Market Place. His statement of vengeful intent had gone some way towards reasserting his position, but he knew that to make sure of it, he needed to master a memorable event. But then there was a freezing of eyes all round him. A spare but resolute figure was crossing the Square in a deliberate line towards him: Emily Morrison. She had never before been known to come here except to buy from stalls. And even then, she was careful to ignore her husband.
He looked at her neutrally, perhaps even prepared in certain circumstances to forgive her her trespasses. She handed him a sealed note.
‘This was fixed to the clothes-line with a peg,’ she said.
Miley tore the note open, read it and spoke to the world in general rather than his wife.
‘I’m taking this to Mr Grimshaw. We’ll see if he acts as big as he can talk.’
Mosley and Beamish were in sight of Waterbrigg Hall when they saw Grimshaw’s convoy leave the front gate.
‘Sit back in your seat,’ Mosely said, and Grimshaw thus missed seeing who was in the taxi. But he was properly inquisitive about anyone approaching the Hall. He called his driver to stop, ordered his smaller car, by radio, to reverse and intercept the cab.
‘Oh, it’s Mr Mosley,’ the messenger said. ‘Mr Grimshaw’s compliments, and would you be so kind as to come over and have a word with him?’
Beamish set his features. This was one to be played as it came; to be left, in the first instance, with crossed fingers to Mosley’s inventive genius.
‘And may I ask, Inspector Mosley, what brings you here at a time when I could have sworn I had assigned you a task elsewhere?’
‘Indeed we are well on with that,’ Mosley said.
‘And are ready, no doubt, with an explanation of your less than desirable presence here?’
‘Matching candlesticks,’ Mosley said curtly. ‘One of a pair at Holgate’s. We’ve come looking for the other.’
And to Grimshaw’s – and Beamish’s – surprise, Mosley produced a candlestick from his overcoat pocket.
‘And what makes you think you’re likely to find it here?’
‘Seems pretty obvious to me,’ Mosley said.
‘You know something that I don’t, do you?’
‘I would never suggest anything as bold as that, Mr Grimshaw.’
‘No? And how, may I ask, had you hoped to gain entrance to the Hall?’
‘I worked it out from first principles that this would be one of the first calls you’d be likely to make this morning. I’d been relying on you to let us in.’
‘Had you now? But we’d already come out, hadn’t we? Mosley – the assistant chief constable and I have made it plain on numerous occasions what the official policy is towards gaining unlawful admittance.’
‘Blind spot in my mind,’ Mosley said. ‘I was overlooking the fact that you’d have locked up behind you. I suppose I would have had to send Sergeant Beamish haring after you for the key.’
‘You and I, Mr Mosley, will go back together and look for that candlestick.’
‘Aye,’ said Hair-in-Rollers over her garden fence to Maroon Slacks. ‘Full-sized tin, middle-cut. Must be expecting company.’
‘Oh, she’s got company. Arrived in the middle of the night. Headlamps on, doors slamming, shouting goodnight to the taxi-driver. Their Charles, I reckon, the one that’s nearly a professor. He’s the one she always sends for when they’ve trouble – especially when it’s trouble over their Kevin. Then not above an hour ago the girl arrived, the one they crack on is musical.’
‘I don’t know where they put them all, in that house. If you ask me, it can’t be decent.’
‘Why’s the back bedroom locked, mother?’ Charles Toplady asked.
‘I’ve got so much stuff stored away in there these days and what with all the crime there is about – Do you know there’s four houses in this road been broken into in the last twelve months?’
‘There never was a key to it in my time,’ Grace said. ‘I’d have given anything to have been able to lock myself in.’
‘I got your father to fix it.’
‘You got dad to fix it? You mean he actually got round to a job? Started on it, and finished it?’
‘Now that’s no way to talk about your father.’
‘Well, how did he fix it? It’s not a new lock. The old one’s not been moved. From the state of the paint, I’d have said it’s never been touched. How did he set about making a new key?’
‘I don’t know how he did it.’
She began to be as bad-tempered as she had been once when Charles had asked her a sex question at the age of eight.
‘He’s very clever with his hands, is your father. You children always did underestimate him.’
Grace sniffed noisily. Her eyes were fixed on a new photograph of her parents on a coach outing to Bolton Abbey. The Toplady children always reacted with subconscious unease if they came home to find anything different in the house.
‘If you wouldn’
t mind moving up to the corner, Grace, I’ll lay the table for your father. He’s always home on the dot of five-and-twenty past twelve, and I like to have his plate on the table by the time he’s washed his hands.’
Kitchener opened the door punctually, went up to the bathroom the moment he had hung up his coat.
‘What’s come over the back bedroom?’ he asked, as he tested shepherd’s pie with his fork.
‘I’ve locked it,’ she said. ‘There’s been a man I don’t like the look of hanging about the street every morning this week.’
‘You’ve locked it? It won’t lock.’
Neither Grimshaw nor Mosley saw any reason to worry about noise when they entered Waterbrigg Hall less than five minutes after Grimshaw’s last visit. Janet Morrison therefore had plenty of warning time in which to skip up to the highest flight of back stairs.
In the vegetable garden behind the house, Bootsie had emerged from cover when she heard Grimshaw’s team drive off. Now she again retreated behind last year’s bean-sticks.
The only candlesticks that Mosley and Grimshaw could find were in unparted pairs.
Chapter Fifteen
Janet and Bootsie cut each other’s hair. Exploring drawers and dressing-tables, Janet had found a roll-up holdall containing scissors, combs and clippers.
When Grimshaw and his satellites were clear of the neighbourhood, Bootsie came in from the back garden, full of adventure and only partially exaggerating her exhaustion. She had had a long walk to reach a main road, had failed in her attempts to hitch-hike through fear of raising her thumb. She had felt hunted in her life before, but this was the first time she had heard her own description on the morning radio, as a person the police wanted to talk to. Moreover, for the first time in her life she felt something else – something not at all unlike a cloud of guilt. And it seemed to her that every driver must be on the look-out for her.
Then she came to a transport café where a 1,000 cc Yamaha was parked. She went in for a sludgy coffee and a sausage roll and went through the rituals with the rider, Len Saunders, a bull-chested man of her own age who told her early on that he had not yet had sex that day. Unambivalently she let him understand that he would not have long to wait if he would carry out a few simple commissions for her. Her terms were strictly payment on completion but he refused to leave her at the café to wait for him.
So she had to ride to the outskirts of Bagshawe Broome on his pillion, the exhaust proclaiming his macho qualities as if the overpowered machine were an extension of his reproductive system. She did not dare show herself on the pavements of Bagshawe, so got him to stop in a village where, with his co-operation as diverter of attention, she filled the poacher’s pockets of her patchwork coat with eggs, beans, spaghetti, cheese and meat-loaf.
This was necessitated by the parlous state of her finances. Last night, after she had caught Janet at the cottage hospital, there had been nothing for it but to go to a telephone kiosk up the road and ring for an all-night taxi. She told the driver that she had taken Janet into casualty with a foreign body in her ear – all of this taking place in the ten minutes’ grace before the hue and cry became effective. She had then had them driven, not to Waterbrigg Hall, but to an address some five minutes’ walk from it. The fare had left her without the price of another convenience meal in her purse.
Now, having restocked, she sent her escort into Bagshawe, telling him how to get into the Morrisons’ yard-garden, and giving him the note to peg to the clothes-line. Then he drove her to a deserted barn, known commonly as Redfern’s, for the pay-off.
‘Was it good?’ Janet asked.
‘Was it hell! To tell you the truth, I hardly knew it was happening. There are times when you have to close your mind to it. You’ll learn.”
Her knight errant started to be sarcastic when she declined his offer to shack up with her for a week or two’s permanency. She only got away from him by thumbing a lift in a Granada that stopped with screaming tyres – it was less than fifty yards from her when she signalled. The driver, a lecherous old sod in his fifties, looked sideways at her with an interest that she thought had something in it besides lechery.
‘Did you let him do it too?’
‘I did not. I wouldn’t have. If it had come to the push, I could have run faster than he could. But I didn’t think he was going to stop when I asked him to. I had to whip out his ignition key. That’s the ploy, by the way, that’s worth practising. Once the key’s in your hand, you can always threaten to throw it over a wall, or into a pond or something. You can even actually throw it. So – here I am.’
She took her ungainly boots off, threw her socks across the room and eased her anything but clean toes.
‘Do you know, I think I’ll have myself a bath before I’m much older. I’ll have a look at the central heating and get some hot water going. And I want you to cut this bloody hair off, before I’m picked up on the weight of it alone. Without it, nobody would know me: it’s bloody years since anybody saw my face. Do you know anything about cutting hair?’
‘Shouldn’t think there’s much in it, is there? I trimmed one of my dolls once, when I was a kid. Caused a hell of an effing stink at home. I’ll tell you what: I’ll have a go at yours if you’ll do mine.’
‘What do you want yours done for? You’ve got nice hair.’
‘Who the hell wants to be bloody nice? It makes me look about six. Do you know how long it takes to do every morning?’
‘Please yourself. It’s all the same to me.’
‘We could post these damned pigtails home, if they don’t come over with the cash the first time of asking.’
‘That’s a thought. Even if it has been done before, it must be a bit of a shock, when they open the parcel. If it doesn’t work, we could always follow up with one of your ears.’
‘Sod off! You know what you can do to yourself.’
‘It’s some time since I was reduced to that strait.’
They did their hair-dressing in one of the bathrooms. Janet began by parting Bootsie’s curtain, then hacking it down to something that she could tentatively sculpt. Bootsie shook her head and shoulders when they were free of the tangle.
‘My God – why’ve I been carrying that load around with me?’
‘Is that what your Hell’s Angel said this morning?’
‘Don’t be so bloody revolting, Janet. Honestly – don’t be so revolting. Do you think we could live together for a few hours without talking like a pair of dirty-minded toddlers?’
Janet went silent, stood back and assessed the shape of what was left on Bootsie’s head. She then began clipping here and there, stopping frequently to see what sort of a balance was evolving.
More clipping. Janet clammed up.
‘I hope you’re not going to sulk, just because I made a civilized request,’ Bootsie said. ‘If you want to look grownup, you’ve got to show a bit more maturity than you have up to now. There’s nothing wrong with sex. Sex is there. With the right fellow, in the right place at the right time, sex can be fine, bloody fine. But it’s hardly news. But don’t you worry, kid. I was like you once.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me a kid.’
‘Sorry. You’re more grown-up for your age than some I’ve come across.’
Bootsie examined the interim handiwork in a mirror.
‘Funny. I only let it get this way out of pig-headedness. The reason I left home, my hair was. Well – I’m not saying there weren’t a few other things. But my hair was the last straw. Always being told to get it out of my eyes. Christ! I had hardly any in those days. Then I didn’t keep an appointment they’d made for me to have it done – then came the shoot-out. I told myself I’d never have a pair of scissors near me for the rest of my days. And I’ve stuck to that till now. How bloody stupid can you get? OK. Clip on.’
‘You need a neck-shave.’
‘I expect her ladyship has a twee little razor she digs out her armpits with.’
They found one, and
Bootsie started laughing.
‘I’m a smart bloody kidnapper, aren’t I – letting my victim loose on me with a razor.’
‘I’m not your victim. We’re in this together.’
‘We are now. For pretty much the same reason, I should imagine. You’re pretty fed up with your folk too, aren’t you? They’re rolling in money, I suppose?’
‘My dad’s a tinpot crook. And he pisses the living-room fire out every night before he goes to bed.’
‘Charming. What’s his line, then? Land development? Stock market? Or cat burglary?’
‘Street-corner monkey business.’
‘My old man’s dead respectable. Works out ways the well-off can claim for capital expenditure they’ve never expended. And always on about what the youth of today is coming to.’
‘My dad’s been to prison.’
‘Mine only ought to have.’
‘For grievous bodily harm.’
‘Thanks for warning me. I’ll try to keep my distance. What’s he going to do to you when he gets you back?’
‘Buy me some sort of present, I hope. He’s never going to know I was in on this. He thinks I’m purity and innocence.’
‘How do you want your hair?’
‘Close to my scalp, but not skinhead.’
‘It’s a pity in some ways,’ Bootsie said. ‘You have marvellous hair.’
‘That’s what they all say. That’s why I want rid of it.’
First one, then the other pigtail fell to the floor.
‘You know,’ Janet said. ‘I wouldn’t have said that Kevin was your type.’
‘That’s something you wouldn’t understand. No, sorry – I’ll unsay that. I believe you might understand. A girl meets somebody, and that’s it. It has nothing to do with similar tastes or background – or even your honest opinion of the man – if you’ve got one. It’s something to do with chemistry – bio-chemistry. Vibes. There are such things. We spend half the time fighting like two cats with their tails tied together over a clothes-line. We’ve split up a dozen times – and couldn’t stand it. Neither of us could sleep or eat till we got together again. You’re from Bagshawe Broome. You must know the Topladys.’
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 12