‘I’ve seen them about. They don’t have anything to do with us. Clever lot, aren’t they?’
‘Think they are. Only Kevin isn’t like the rest of them, as I think you’ve seen for yourself already. But the image he had to fit in with was there before he was shagged for.’
‘Now who’s talking rough?’
Bootsie held a hand-mirror to the side of Janet’s head.
‘Do you want it any closer than this?’
‘That’ll do fine.’
‘You have a mother, too, I suppose.’
‘Pitiful. Trodden on and lets it happen. Has about three ideas in her head and comes out with them every ten minutes.’
‘You’re lucky. Mine hasn’t got three – but that doesn’t stop the flow. What are you going to do with your share of these earnings?’
‘Savings bank. I’m leaving home as soon as I can get away with it, and I don’t mean to rely for my bread on parked Yamahas.’
There was no more that Bootsie dared do to Janet’s hair. She walked all round the child. She had not done a bad job and it was what the kid wanted. But the teenage cranium was too small to stand up to the close-sculpted effect. Her high forehead looked somehow absurd without a fringe. Janet’s eyes were sharp and sardonic, but there was a lot that was beyond their experience.
When Miles Morrison went to the police station with the ransom note, he was ready with a wealth of scathing wit about the inactivity of the fuzz, but things worked out differently. He was seen immediately by a young detective-sergeant, a stranger on ad hoc secondment to Bagshawe Broome, with a hint of college training behind his fluency and a range of vowels that neither Lancashire nor Yorkshire would have owned. Even Miley had to concede that he knew what he was talking about. Miley did not even have to announce who he was. He did not have to remind Sergeant Harman of any detail. The sergeant knew the case and the people inside out.
‘The old quarry-face in Penscar Wood. I dare say you know the place?’
‘Can a duck swim?’ Miley answered brightly.
‘You’re to go there between eight and nine tomorrow night, taking five hundred pounds in used notes –’
Bootsie had reduced the demand without consulting Janet. She believed she was being realistic.
‘We have prepared a package for you –’
This work of art was the triumph of one of the Bradburn backroomers. On the top and bottom of each wad there were real notes. Glued together in the middle there were false ones, with convincing edges. The packet would not stand up to close examination – but in Penscar Wood there would be not time for counting.
‘You will deposit your parcel under a stone that will have been marked with a lick of yellow paint. Your daughter will be waiting for you at the Comstock Fiveways crossroads as soon as the payment has been collected. Mr Morrison, you do understand, don’t you, that things are now in our hands? Do not try to take any initiative, or something could go catastrophically wrong. You’ll be under our discreet – I hope, indeed, invisible – surveillance both in the Wood and at Fiveways.’
Miley was none too happy about this.
‘There was that bit in their note where they say what they’ll do to our Janet if I don’t come along –’
‘Ignore that. They’ll do nothing.’
‘Won’t they be desperate?’
‘They’re not the sort of people we’re greatly worried about, Mr Morrison.’
A ripple of adrenalin enlivened Miley’s veins.
‘Is it true that one of them is that young Toplady? If I get my hands on him –’
‘And do you think he doesn’t know that? This is not an intelligent crime, Mr Morrison. We do not expect difficulty. Our main concern will be to avoid accidents. And I know what you must be thinking. I’m sure I would feel the same in your position. But it will be over when you get your daughter back.’
‘If they’ve marked her in any way – if they’ve upset her, Mr Harman –’
‘You mean you saw the Bateman girl in the grounds while you and Grimshaw were in Waterbrigg Hall?’ Sergeant Beamish said.
Mosley nodded unexcitedly.
‘I spotted this movement in the vegetable garden, you see, and kept myself within spitting distance of the back windows.’
‘And you didn’t tell Grimshaw? We had enough men on the grounds to have picked her up there and then.’
‘And what would we have gained by that?’ Mosley asked, in a tone that had Beamish doubting his own intelligence.
‘We’d have arrested a kidnapper.’
‘There are two kidnappers, Sergeant Beamish, one of whom we can trust to look after the child, if only in her own interests. In a corner, the other might do anything. At the moment, those two are apart. Presently, they’ll get together again, as they always do. That’ll be the time to strike.’
‘But wherever she is, you’re leaving the child at risk.’
‘She’s survived living with her father. If you were trying to earn your keep in the Bateman-Toplady fashion, you’d watch how you treated Miley Morrison’s daughter, wouldn’t you?’
‘Buying this big tin of salmon this morning,’ Mrs Selby said. ‘Then in the afternoon she’s round at the building society. Do you reckon they’ve come into money? I’ve heard of nobody dying – and we would have, wouldn’t we, Mrs Hinchcliffe?’
‘Do you reckon she must have been drawing some out, then?’
‘I’ll find out, Mrs Hinchcliffe. I’ll find out.’
While his mother was out withdrawing her savings, and his sister had gone out to visit some girl she had been at school with, Charles Toplady could have sworn he heard music coming somewhere in the house: not the sort of music that the Topladys patronized – a faster-than-pulse beat with the bass drum dominating a core of amplified guitars, and with a lyric that was a single short phrase, repetitiously shouted rather than sung.
He started to climb the stairs, stopped to listen again. Now there was nothing to hear. He went up to the landing and put his ear to the panel of the suspect back bedroom door. He heard something in there: a light book, falling from the bed to the floor, perhaps the back of a hand catching against the bed-post. He thumped with the side of his fist.
‘Kevin – are you in there?’
There was now the emptiest of silence. In all truth, the door was no daunting obstacle. The panels were of threeply, as flimsy as one might expect from mass-building in the early thirties. He did not believe that the lock had been repaired. He did not believe that it was repairable. The door must be held by a bolt inside, probably of the kind that could be bought at any ironmongers and fixed with half a dozen half-inch screws.
‘Kevin – I’m breaking in.’
He judge what run-up he could take. But his mother and Grace came back into the house at that moment.
‘Charles – what are you doing up there? Come down those stairs at once.’
It was the voice of a woman who discounted her husband, who had rod-ruled five sons and a daughter, and had sent all bar one of them catapulting to success in a world that she barely understood.
‘Charles, come down. I want to talk to you. In this family, when one is in trouble, he knows that the rest of us are standing by.’
Mosley announced, without giving Beamish time to compose himself for the strain, that they were going to the launderette. All this staying away from home wrought havoc with a man’s intimate apparel. It was essential for Beamish to accompany him, because he always got muddled up over all this damned powder and stuff.
‘I don’t know how you come to think I’m an expert on detergents,’ Beamish said.
‘I always look upon you as a contemporary man, well up in microchips and what-not.’
‘I hardly think any laundromat in Bagshawe Broome will turn out to be the last word in high tech, Mr Mosley. I heard a woman in the street saying that one of the machines broke down last week because it was clogged with dead fleas.’
‘Any contraption that can disinfest the co
mmunity on that scale is performing a vital public service.’
In working fact, there was an attendant who rose magnificently to the challenge of seeing that the old man knew which buttons to press and handed him a smeared paper cup two thirds full of a dirty-looking grey substance. And there was by now not a woman in the establishment who was not ready to leap to the inspector’s rescue in case of overloading, stoppage or flood. Pretty soon Mosley’s pipe was bubbling like a hookah as he sat, darkly amorphous in hat and overcoat, apparently fascinated by the vortices performed by his disreputable woollen undergarments as they tumbled about behind a glass panel.
Alongside him, Beamish was doing his best to look as if he and Mosley were strangers to each other, thrown together casually in the hurly-burly of modern aids to living. It was Mosley’s woollens from which he most wished to disassociate himself: yellow long-johns, with buttons of various styles and histories; a vest so hairy that one could have done penance in it; a pair of socks, darned diligently and often with whatever shade of yarn had been on hand at the moment. Beamish was not quite tempted to stand on his chair and broadcast his non-involvement, but he would have liked to assure the unknown woman on his left that nothing on display belonged to him.
Mosley seemed to be transported into some illusion of Nirvana. Before long his presence was no longer an event in the launderette and the conversation had picked up to its usual level.
‘It turned out I was right, Mrs Hinchcliffe. It was money she was drawing out. Harriet Armstrong was there, and she told me – a great wad of notes, enough for many a crate of tinned salmon.’
‘Well, I never did, Mrs Selby.’
‘And she was not the only one. Do you know who else was in there, Mrs Hinchcliffe?’
‘Search me, Mrs Selby.’
‘Mrs Morrison, that good-for-nothing Miley’s wife. Mrs Armstrong told me she drew out even more than Primrose Toplady.’
Chapter Sixteen
‘I still don’t see it,’ Janet said. ‘I wouldn’t give him five more minutes of my time, and I wouldn’t have needed five minutes in the first place to know what he is.’
‘That’s the difference between you and me,’ Bootsie said. ‘You’re –’
‘Don’t start that again.’
A rapport had grown up between the two, promising, almost amounting to, a brittle friendship. But they had begun to get on each other’s nerves.
‘He’s not nearly good enough for you,’ Janet said.
‘Haven’t I already told you that that doesn’t enter into it? Well: not much. He needs my help, and I need his.’
‘I can believe the first part. But you only mean you’re sorry for him.’
‘I don’t deny I am. It’s all part of it. But it isn’t everything.’
‘From what you’ve told me about him, he can’t help himself.’
‘Ever heard of a late developer?’
‘So when’s he going to develop?’ Janet made a derisive noise in the back of her nose. ‘At least, I’m not going to earn my living thieving.’
‘Bully for you. You’ve said that before. And I’ll admit I sometimes feel a bit fed up with this way of life. I wonder how much longer I can stand it. I got a kick out of it at first. I suppose I thought I was getting at my father and his friends, who are nothing but large-scale, pompous and self-righteous bloody racketeers. I don’t mean to go on for ever like this. I don’t know what I shall do.’
‘Have a family,’ Janet said, not without mischief.
Bootsie shuddered.
‘That’s if you don’t get caught tomorrow night.’
‘That’s the key question. I know the risk. Yes or no. Touch or go. Fifty-fifty. Bagshawe Broome roulette. I’m banking on your father not putting his trust in the police.’
‘He won’t.’
‘And then he picks up that yellow-painted stone and finds your pig-tails and my note, he won’t hang about long in Penscar Wood.’
‘And I’m telling you it’s your duty as a member of this family to do what I’m asking, Charles, and that’s to get him away from Bagshawe Broome until the fuss has died down. Get him away from this town before something terrible happens to the girl. Then he can’t be held to blame.’
‘It seems to me that everything that matters has already happened, mother. The girl’s been abducted.’
‘But we haven’t heard that she’s come to any harm so far. If something goes wrong now, we can all swear we knew where Kevin was. I’ve got money for you to find him somewhere to stay.’
Primrose Toplady, on the downward grade of middle age, was looking jowly and mean-eyed – positively ugly in her effort to persuade her son. Charles was not her eldest. She knew better than to have sent for Eric. There were disconcerting signs that Eric was developing a mind of his own, but she still believed she could rely on Charles. Yet she knew intuitively that she was coming to the end of her ability to reason with him, and that she had so far failed. There was nothing left now but a sententious appeal to what a boy owed his mother. If that failed too, then the whole of her life’s efforts were in ruins.
Charles Toplady, for two years now a sought-after tutor of final-year students, recipient only last week of a hint that the Holderness Fellowship was his for the application, sat avoiding his mother’s eyes, and it was still not certain whether he was weak enough to do her bidding.
Kitchener Toplady, who had been the last of them all to learn that Kevin was in the house, sat in inarticulate misery. The dispute was beyond him. He knew that his wife’s scheme was absurd and dangerous, but he did not know how he could influence her. Grace sat in one of the fireside chairs, picking automatically with a crochet hook.
‘Mother – I’ll not do it.’
The decision was made. The words were out. His mother looked at him, haughtily hurt and disdainful.
‘He’s not worth it, mother.’
‘You’re all worth the same to me,’ she said.
‘Is that why you won’t have his picture on the wall?’
But saying that was a mistake. It was too cruel – and too true.
‘What goes on my wall and what stays off it are my business, young man.’
‘I’ll not argue with that.’
‘Let me tell you this –’
She was out of her corner for the second round.
‘When I let your brother in, in the middle of last night, we had a very long talk.’
She spared a second for a derisive glance at Kitchener.
‘He didn’t even know I’d gone down to the door.’
How many very long talks had she had with Kevin in the past, Charles wondered. Had there ever been one that hadn’t made current matters worse?
‘Kevin has promised me –’
Had she never had promises from Kevin before? It wasn’t worth saying anything.
‘If you’d been there, Charles, you’d have seen how sorry he was.’
How scared –
‘How he wishes he could do what you’ve all done.’
‘He’s had the same chances.’
She looked at Charles with a hatred he had never seen turned on him before.
‘And how you’ve always preened yourself whenever he’s been in trouble,’ she said. ‘You and his sister both.’
‘Bring him down,’ Charles said. ‘Let him tell us for himself how he thinks he’s going to get out of this.’
Mrs Toplady looked at them in turn, as if she suspected new ridicule.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said.
She went upstairs and they heard her knock on Kevin’s door. Then she was halfway down again, calling for Charles with the shrillness of panic.
‘He’s not answering. Oh, Charles – you don’t think –?’
‘Stand back, mother.’
Charles’s shoulder did what he had contemplated this afternoon. The back bedroom window was open and a savage draught from the November night was blowing the curtains into the room. The bed was a crumpled mess. The room still bore
evidence that it had once been his sister’s: he had used her powder-bowl as an ashtray. But Kevin had gone.
Chapter Seventeen
It was Miley’s habit to leave the Market Place half an hour before the shops closed. At that hour people were flocking out of works gates, where there were instalments to be collected and reminders to be issued.
The Market Place bore a different look at this hour. Miley’s staff officers had gone home for their tea and the horse-trough was surrounded by juveniles on BMX bicycles who would later have to yield the place to their older brothers, angling for girls with the bait of their powerful Japanese machines.
On the day the ransom was to be paid, there was an additional change in the configuration of the square. Someone else had at last taken over Miley’s square yard of strategic superiority. It was Mosley, standing some five yards south-south-east of Bert Hardcastle’s sandwich stall, his heels nine inches apart, his feet at an angle of thirty degrees and his fingers lightly intertwined behind his back – a stance ingrained in him by the drill instructors of World War II. But in all other respects Mosley’s bearing was unmilitary – as indeed it had been in World War II. He wore his hat with a stolid lack of panache. His shoulders were rounded. His chest was submerged in the shapelessness of his greatcoat and his abdominal muscles were relaxed to the point of sagging.
He had only one minion attendant on him, and he was not in sight. Sergeant Beamish was in the shadows in an alley leading to the rear areas of shops, from where he would keep an eye not only on Mosley, but also on Veronique’s Boutique, which he saw another man approaching. This was Mr T. Howard Pendelbury, the heavily moustached and wearisome pompous clerk to the Bagshawe Broome justices. ‘Veronique,’ otherwise known as Bessie Bullough, fifty-five and looking it, let him in. The odd thing was that Bessie’s absurdly large staff of ravishing young ladies – Beamish had counted eight of them – had already gone home. Was a night shift awaited?
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 13