Three women whose looks and figures would not have qualified them for Veronique’s payroll, came into the Square and ambled the length of it three times, taking in the identity of the few bystanders, then changing direction with the confident intent of a skein of geese and homing in on Mosley. The ensuing conversation might have looked casual to some.
‘We are not given to minding other people’s affairs, Mr Mosley. Howsoever –’
‘And begging your pardon if we are wasting your time –’
‘Not that we make a habit of spying on our neighbours’ visitors –’
It all led up to a denunciation of Kevin Toplady’s escape down a drainpipe and across a series of twilit gardens, heading obviously towards the short length of uncompleted by-pass that would take him out of the town without his having to pass through it.
Mosley looked at them mournfully and did not even nod. Some thirty yards after they had left him, one of them looked back and saw that he had not moved a limb.
Bootsie’s state of nerves surprised Janet.
‘I hope you’re right about your father. If he’s in cahoots with the police –’
‘He won’t be. If I know nothing else about him, I know that. He wouldn’t work with coppers if somebody had threatened to murder him.’
It had been a long day. They had sensed each other’s tension, and had avoided friction by occupying themselves in different parts of the Hall. Janet had combed every bookshelf in every room and helped herself to an armful of erotica, every volume of which she found as unsatisfying as she had found the Decameron, which to her mind was childishly inexplicit. Bootsie spent the day in an upstairs room with a view of green hills ribbed by dry-stone walls, motionless in meditation that might have been transcendental. Neither of them wanted more than a nominal bite to eat.
Late in the afternoon Bootsie came looking for Janet, thinking she had better run through the changes she had made in their operational plans. In case Miley had proved untrue to form, the police would have taken steps that had to be foiled. She was going to leave a note under the yellow-painted stone fixing a different rendezvous for Janet to be picked up, and Janet had to go there by a carefully devious route that Bootsie had made her memorize.
‘Janet?’
Bootsie had got used to shouting up and down the big empty house; it had seemed dangerous at first – and unmannerly.
‘Janet – where the hell have you got to?’
But the question was not answered. Janet was nowhere to be found.
Penscar Wood was a plantation of some twelve acres that had been conceived in late Victorian times by a countrified industrialist keen on improving the view from his rural barracks. It was Janet who had told Bootsie about it, and it was ideal for their purpose. The wood was something of a joke in Bagshawe, and Miley was one of those who had found the retreat variously useful as he grew up. As a schoolboy he had gone there with others to smoke cigarettes in safety and to poke with sticks at the abandoned contraceptives in the notorious glades and dells. A few years later he had himself contributed to this litter.
He entered now like a man afraid of the dark, distrustful of the army of trees, disorientated not to have bricks and mortar round him and unresilient surfaces under his feet. The last time Miley had been here had been a moonlit summer night, more than a quarter of a century ago, in the company of a switched-on young lady who had been even more eager than he was to reach the heart of the vegetation. There had been rabbits on the edge of the wood that night, but now he could not identify the animals whose sudden movements startled him among the fallen leaves. The creatures whose proximity he most hated to think about were plain-clothes policemen, and once he was startled to see a bogey watching him: but the phantom turned into a dead tree that had lost its bark and most of its limbs to a stroke of lightning. There was, in fact, a disconcerting absence of the law: he had not spotted a single representative, and that worried him too: what the hell was everybody playing at?
His sense of direction was deficient, and several times he unknowingly circled the rock-face to which he was supposed to go, ending up on its top edge and almost falling twenty feet.
It had never been worked as a commercial quarry, but merely to provide stone for local barn-building. Miley clasped the packet that Sergeant Harman had given him and switched on his torch to look for the stone under which he had been told to deposit it. He could not find it at first, but then he saw where a small rectangular cavity had been dug to the depth of about a foot. A stone that could conveniently have covered it was lying a few feet away. Miley picked it up, turned it over and saw a daub of paint that in daylight might well appear yellow.
It was clear that the hole had been interfered with. Miley was not at the peak of his mental powers. He could not work out what might have happened Had some passer-by turned the stone out of curiosity? But what passers-by were there in Penscar Wood in the dark at this time of the year? Had it been someone who knew about the stunt that was going to be played, and had come early to lift the loot?
An owl flew silently over the quarry-space. Miley did not like owls. He did not like anything that impugned the security of civilization as he understood it: the unmenacing drabness of Bagshawe. Undergrowth stirred for no discernible reason: there must be someone behind there, another plain-clothes jack not ten yards behind him, another in front, obliquely to his left. But no, that was the stump of sycamore, its season’s new growth waving like tentacles. Then loose stones slipped somewhere away to the right. Miley knew that he was not alone in the wood.
Field-Marshal Grimshaw sat on the front edge of the back seat in his staff car and made a finicky alteration to the chinagraph line on the talc over his map. There was all the difference in the world between his Chevette and the wartime Humber Snipe in which he pictured himself. He had read somewhere that Montgomery had been able to sleep in baby-like peace throughout a night in which his massed army-groups were going to launch a major assault. ‘I need my rest,’ he had said. ‘The planning’s done.’
That had never been Grimshaw’s temperament. On the eve of battle he could not have brought himself to switch off the light, let alone close his eyes while there remained a chance that something might go wrong.
But like that other great commander, he had looked at, looked at again and better-looked at every detail in his plan. And as far as he could see, all those details had been as admirably executed as they have been thought out. A substantial task-force had been mobilized, briefed, deployed and had gone to ground in slit-trenches dug that morning to curround both Penscar Wood and the Fiveways Crossroads. The concealment of his troops was as perfect as could be. They had been told in six different ways – and had been made to repeat individually – that whatever happened in either place, no move was to be made against anyone until the safety of the child had been absolutely assured. Miley, Kevin, Bootsie, or any of the as yet unknowns who might be involved, were not to be accosted until Janet Morrison was in friendly hands.
Grimshaw was parked out of sight and without lights, in a lane off a B road. By daylight the spot overlooked the northwest corner of Penscar Wood. Thinking that Bootsie and Kev were the sort who might play about with CB radio, he had ordered wireless silence, so he was frustrated by almost total ignorance of what was going on over there. But he had been here since before the light began to fail and had seen Bootsie come along the B road, climb a gate and cross a field towards the trees. He had never met her, knew her only from her description, but even without her hair he had no doubt about who this was. She had to go into the wood early to paint her stone and prepare her cache. She did not return until the light was becoming all but impossible – and not improved by the binoculars through which Grimshaw was trying to survey the field. By the time she was back on the road, he was seeing her as dimly as Miley had seen spectral policemen at the quarry face.
She appeared to be about to walk west along the road when she was suddenly floodlit by the headlamp of a motorcycle. The rider was a f
amiliar type – huge, the jazzily painted helmet, the leather jacket, the roar of machismo exhaust. As he came abreast of Bootsie he slowed down with his clutch out and an orgasm of uninhibited throttle. He U-turned and pulled up beside her. Grimshaw assumed that this was Kevin, whom he had also never seen, but who he felt sure would own a motor-cycle. But if this were Kevin, he would have expected Bootsie to leap at once astride the pillion to be whisked away to where Janet was being held prisoner.
This did not happen. As far as Grimshaw could see, they were having an argument that went on for minutes rather than seconds, and the girl seemed to be keeping her distance from the bike.
Then she changed her mind. She mounted behind the rider, who turned again and rode off the way she had been walking. Grimshaw told his driver to start his engine.
‘There are two things that could go badly wrong,’ he said. ‘We might lose them – or they might spot that we are after them.’
On the Market Place Mosley actually varied his stance. After the three women had gone away, he swung first one leg, then the other, brought his hand from behind his back and exercised his shoulders in a circular motion. Then he came away from the spot sanctified by Miley, to Bert Hardcastle’s kiosk. He bought himself a sandwich that must have contained a quarter of a pound of ham and walked up and down a ten-yard beat as he ate it. He took it for granted that Beamish was still keeping an eye on the boutique. He had seen nothing at all of the sergeant for the last half hour – had not even looked in his direction.
When he had finished eating, he moved over in casual fashion towards the boys with the bicycles, who were still congregated committee-wise about the horse-trough. He examined one of the more sophisticated-looking of their machines, and even asked if he might ride a few yards on it, which he did to universal delight with his knees splayed out and his coat flapping. But then they heard the heraldic arrival of the first mighty engine of the evening. The boys began to disperse. There was a clear-cut delineation of who was entitled to pride of place in the Market Place, and between what hours.
It was the most natural of sequences for Mosley to continue the same easy relationship with the young men when they began to gather. They knew him by reputation. It was common knowledge what he was involved in in Bagshawe Broome and it tickled their pride when he seemed to be taking a genuine interest in the lethally powerful machines which they straddled.
‘What sort of bike does Kevin Toplady ride?’ he asked.
There was the sort of laughter that proclaimed them a secret society.
‘Kevin Toplady? Him?’
‘He couldn’t ride a kid’s bloody tricycle.’
‘Kev with a thousand cc between his knees? Mr Mosley, you’d have to get your lot to clear the roads.’
They clearly held Kevin Toplady in unqualified contempt – but Mosley did not give the impression of wanting to exploit this. He grinned and went on listening.
‘That’ll be the day, when Kevin takes off.’
‘Bootsie’ll have to hang on!’
‘I saw Bootsie hanging on the other day,’ one of them said.
‘What – hanging on behind Kev?’
‘No. Behind Len Saunders.’
‘That randy sod! Where was this, then?’
‘Up at Steve’s, on the Waterbrigg road.’
‘What – he picked her up there?’
‘No. She picked him up. I heard Steve telling someone. She went off on the back of his bike. Then later on he was parked outside that old barn of Redfern’s.’
‘Well, there’s more than one of us has had reason to be grateful for Redfern’s. But she was taking a chance, wasn’t she, using Steve’s? Isn’t that hers and Kev’s usual hang-out?’
‘In the evenings. This was in the middle of the morning. I don’t know where Kev was.’
‘Perhaps they’ve broken up again.’
Mosley saw – without appearing to take notice – that Beamish had come out of his alley and advanced into the open Square, ready to catch the old man’s attention when it suited him.
‘Well, when they’ve broken up before, it’s generally in Steve’s that they’ve come together again.’
Mosley moved over towards Beamish. Beamish was in a mood of pristine eagerness.
‘I can see a feasible way round the back. I can easily get round there – and a cover story’s no trouble.’
‘Leave it,’ Mosley said, almost curtly. ‘There’s a bigger and better fish than Bessie Bullough hiding in the reeds.’
‘You hate everything,’ his mother had said.
That had been the principal message of last night’s very long talk. For although in the eyes of the rest of the family she was being absurdly soft over Kevin, the burden of what she had had to say to him had been bitter, vituperative – and hopeless.
It was true and he knew it. He hated everything and everybody, not least on the horizon himself. As he crossed the garden at the beginning of his targetless bid to escape, he hated the garden – hated it for its memories of infant discipline and adolescent frustration. He hated the garden next door, which he had to cross – because he hated the people next door – because they hated him – for the same reason that he hated everybody else – because everybody had got hold of the wrong end of every stick.
He did not know where he was going. He had practically no money on him: Bootsie had wormed her way into handling what she called the privy purse when they were together. Were they ever going to get together again? He thought of going to Steve’s, but there was the unbearable thought that this time the magic of Steve’s was unlikely to work. Because what he had done at the Cottage Hospital had been unpardonable in any man’s code. In panic when the kid had run for it, he had abandoned Bootsie, had left her even without wheels.
He came out on the Bagshawe ring-road. In the car-park of a trendy out-of-town pub he found a Volkswagen Beetle carelessly unlocked. He did not carry a comprehensive ring of car keys, but he had a few and miraculously one that worked on the VW. He drove off: towards Steve’s. He could think of nowhere else to go.
Bootsie was wondering why, after initially stalling, she had let Len Saunders get her in tow again. Because she needed a man? No; she could not stand Saunders’s style. Because she needed a strong arm if things got rough? No; when it dawned on Saunders who she was and the trouble that she stank of, she knew she wouldn’t see his dust. For the sake of mobility, then? That was more like it. She needed to be able to get about. And riding on the back of a more or less anonymous Yamaha was good first-line cover: she thought.
She realized too that it wasn’t going to help matters, being unable to produce Janet Morrison– especially if it came to a lone encounter with Miley. Where the hell was the kid? In a moment of feeble optimism she tried to make herself believe that all she’d done was cut and run: could even now be sipping a hot milky night-night drink at home, before her father pissed the fire out.
Don’t kid yourself, Bootsie. You know bloody well what she’s done. The little bitch!
Saunders rode on full throttle, heading inevitably for Steve’s. When she saw the graffiti, the helmets spread about the tables, the ketchup crusted on the spouts of plastic dispensers shaped like garish tomatoes, she was reminded of a line of Housman’s:
Then on my tongue the taste is sour of all I ever did.
‘Oh, Christ – it’s Miley!’
Hatless as always, his almost bald head close-cropped, brawny arms swinging angrily, no jacket, despite the chill of the night, his shirt open at the neck and for two buttons down, a chest like a bullock’s – Miley was striding it out from Penscar Wood to Comstock Fiveways, still carrying Sergeant Harman’s false packet. Emily Morrison sank back into the passenger seat of Ben Eagle’s old banger.
‘Do you think he saw us?’
‘Couldn’t have,’ Ben Eagle said. ‘You can’t see people in cars at night.’
‘But he’ll know this car.’
‘Not him. You can’t even see the colour of a car in this li
ght.’
Miley’s wife held her peace – not because she was persuaded, but because all her life she had always known when she had said enough.
If Miley knew! If he knew that she had begged a lift from one of his friends! If he knew she was alone with a man in a car under cover of darkness! If he knew what she had done–!
She had drawn £500 from the building society account, that Miley did not know about. She had been out to Penscar Wood earlier than the time ordered in the ransom note. Because she had no room for bringing the police into this. She did not trust them – and who would tell what the kidnappers might do to her Janet, if they found out about this duplicity?
If she could get there first, she argued that she might be able to deposit the payment in time to get Janet back before there was a payoff for treachery –
She had got there first. She had found the yellow stone and a note from Bootsie under it. She put her money down and replaced the stone. The kidnappers had changed their rendezvous. Janet would be handed over in Redfern’s barn. Emily Morrison was on her way there now.
Thank God her husband was walking in the opposite direction!
Grimshaw asked himself for the thirtieth time whether his radio silence had been such a good idea. At the moment of decision it had seemed the obvious only choice. After all, Penscar Wood and the Fiveways Crossroads were negotiable places, and he had five hundred men out on the ground against two of them.
What his imagination had failed to deliver to him was a picture of what it would be like in a dark (and cold) car, with only the monotonous breathing of his driver for company, completely out of touch with anything that was going on.
He had sent scouts out to get reports from his outposts. The man he had sent to Penscar had not returned yet, but he now knew that Emily Morrison and Ben Eagle were unaccountably driving about the countryside. He knew that Miley was heading on foot for Fiveways. And he himself had safely followed Bootsie and Saunders and seen them go into Steve’s. Twenty minutes later he had seen a Volkswagen Beetle arrive and watched Kevin Toplady enter the café. Grimshaw parked behind a stack of oil-drums in the farthest corner of the waste ground outside Steve’s and kept watch. There were many things he would have ordered differently if he could have the chance to make up his clipboard for the evening afresh, but there was one principle to which he remained firm: there was to be no move on the part of any of his men until he was absolutely certain that the girl was in no danger.
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 14