Grimshaw decided to call first on Major Hindle. Apart from the fact that he knew no one else in the village, Hindle had struck him yesterday in the pub as a pragmatic and literate character who was likely to have a pretty shrewd finger on the pulse of Marldale.
To find where Hindle lived he had to ask in the super-market, where his very entry caused something of a knowing flutter. And a group of opinionated theorists at the check-out were keen to raise their voices for his benefit.
“Mark my word, it will be one of the freaks.”
“She used to be in and out of the Old Glasshouse as if it were her second home.”
“It was a bad day for Marldale when that lot moved in.”
“And she was wanting to move them up here, wasn’t she?”
“We wouldn’t have been safe in our beds.”
“If you ask me, none of us are.”
Major Hindle lived in a small, neat cottage up the cul-de-sac hill that is known in Upper Marldale, for no reason that anyone can remember, as Tinkler’s. Mrs. Hindle (Mrs. Major Hindle, as she was known in the village) was a little woman, hoovering in a mob-cap, who behaved as if she was afraid that every word she spoke would turn out to have been the wrong thing to say. The Major, she told Grimshaw, was in his workshop at the back. But he had already come into the house at the sound of Grimshaw’s voice. Forced now to abandon yesterday’s anonymity, Grimshaw introduced himself by his rank and station.
“Well, who’d have thought it? Must say you were on the ball, old chap—up here asking questions before it happened. Pity you didn’t stay on a few hours. Might have been able to put a spoke in someone’s wheel. I suppose it is foul play—otherwise, obviously, you wouldn’t be here.”
Grimshaw decided that he must not be too free with information. Hindle was quick to notice his pause before replying.
“Or perhaps it’s early days, Superintendent—”
“Can’t really say until the pathologist has done his thing. But what I’m here for is anything you could tell me about Mrs. Cater—”
“Bea Cater? Well, of course, we’ve got to start speaking well of her now, haven’t we? Got to say I didn’t greatly like the woman, though. Don’t know anyone who did. I told you that yesterday, so I must be consistent, mustn’t I?”
“What was wrong with her?” Grimshaw asked him.
“Too big for Upper Marldale: that’s your truth in a nutshell. Not that anyone in Marldale is prepared to admit that anybody’s big, but in this case they’ve been getting it shoved at them too much of the time. And they haven’t liked it.”
“Too big in what sense?”
“In every sense. In everything she did. She had to be different—and she had to draw everybody’s attention to herself. Let me think of an example. When she first came here—oh, it would be three years ago—it got along the vine before anyone had even seen her that the Old Tollhouse had been taken by a sculptress. She wanted the place because the annexe would make an ideal studio. Has a northern light, which is a good thing for an artist to have. Then there was a hell of a to-do with a special surveyor she called in to make sure the floor would stand up to damned great slabs of marble. Art-school trained: but I ask you—I expect you’ve been in the place already? Did you notice the thing she’s got on her easel at the moment? I saw it at one of her charity coffee mornings. Great big black circle with a few blobs of purple slapped here and there. Imperial haemorrhoids, that’s what I heard somebody call it. Not that I have anything against art and artists, you understand.”
Hindle put on a self-deprecating grin.
“Bit of an artist myself, in my own small way—well, craftsman, anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Got to do something as an honest pension-eker-outer.”
“Paint yourself, do you?”
“Oh, no—nothing so clever. Make walking-sticks. Don’t earn a fortune from them, but manage to sell one now and then, through the Craft Shop. Anyway, I was saying—Marldale’s got nothing against painting. In fact, the locals like to see somebody with a brush in their hand, immortalizing one of their cottages or a stretch of hillside. Especially if there’s a sheep on it. You’re as good as an RA any day of the week in Marldale, if you can paint a sheep. But when it comes to doing a diagram of Nero’s piles—”
“I don’t go for abstracts much myself,” Grimshaw said. “But I’ve yet to hear of them as a motive for murder.”
“Ah, yes, don’t get me wrong. I’m just trying to put her together for you. Everything she did, you see, had to be off-beam—off other people’s beams, anyway. You know, if she was into something fresh—which happened on the average about once a fortnight—she’d drop it like a hot poker if she found it didn’t put her into a minority.”
“Like what?”
“Well, there was a footpath that a farmer had tried to close over on Marldale Nab, and she threw herself into that as if no one else in Marldale cared. That’s something Marldale didn’t like. It was their footpath, not hers, her not having lived here all of three years yet. And when the Parish Council called a public meeting about it, she didn’t want to know. If it had been her committee, with her stirring it all up—see what I mean?”
“That’s still not enough in my book to string her up from a beam.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Superintendent. I’m not suggesting that. It was you who asked my opinion of the woman—”
“Yes—and I see I couldn’t have come to a better source. Sorry I interrupted. Do please go on.”
“Then there’s the Open University. She has to have a degree. Got that before she came here. Not that I have anything against education, you understand, but is right for these people to be using public funds to spread left-wing balderdash? And you switch your set on in the morning, hoping to hear the overnight score against the Aussies, and what do you get? A bloody talk about Jane Austen.”
“You mean that Mrs. Cater held extreme political views?”
“Oh, good God, no. True blue as they come—though she played around with this that and the other. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth—you mention it, she’d been a member of it—for a month or so. But she wouldn’t join the Conservative Association—though I’ll wager she always voted Tory. So why not sail under her true colours, I ask you?”
“But how are you so certain what her views were?”
“Had to be, didn’t they, with her background? You know—leopards, spots and all that stuff.”
Grimshaw did not want to admit that he did not know what Beatrice Cater’s background was, but he did not have long to wait for Hindle to tell him.
“I mean, her husband—died fifteen years ago, poor devil—a top man in the Foreign Office, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Warsaw. Well, if you ask me, he was a bit more than an office-wallah. So she must have spent the inside of her life rubbing shoulders with the corps diplomatique.”
“You did say yesterday that you thought that this local witchcraft nonsense had to do with politics.”
“Local politics, old man—purely local.”
“To be precise?”
“To be precise, a field, Superintendent. Known to all and sundry here as Ned Suddaby’s—though Ned Suddaby died before Prince Albert did. It belonged to the District Council, who bought it years ago for possible council house development. Well, you know this government’s policy on council houses, and who the hell wants any more of them in Marldale? Anyway, they decided to put it on the market and they’d had a bid from one of these private health insurance companies who wanted to build a convalescent home. That got our village red-raggers going—not that there are many of them. This social worker woman who’s come to live here, some damned woman who’s married to a scientist on the industrial estate in Pringle—and, of course, the redoubtable Priscilla Bladon.”
“The chief witch?”
“Well, don’t ask me what’s going on there, Superintendent. That woman’s so damned twisted it’s a wonder she can pull her stockings on. But these three tried to call a protest meeting to get something done about Ned Suddaby’s. Said they wanted it for a playing-field. What do we want in Marldale with a playing-field? And especially on Ned Suddaby’s? If they tried to play football there, the uphill team would have to wear crampons. And as for cricket, I doubt whether they could find a wicket from which the batsman could see the bowler. Anyway, nobody went to this meeting except those three, and the convalescent home deal looked as if it was going to go through. Till Madame Cater discovered that here was an act that she wasn’t in on. So she started bruiting it abroad that the sale of Ned Suddaby’s had never been put out to tender in the proper way. She wanted to put in a bid to build a hostel on it, so that she could move in all that rag, tag and bobtail who are living in squalor in the old military detention camp down in Lower Marldale. And I must say, I can’t think of a more appropriate place for them than a glasshouse. I don’t know where she thought she was going to raise the money. She talked about getting a grant from the Arts Council, a contribution from Shelter and God knows where else. I’d like to think that nobody would offer her a penny. But the Council had to take her seriously, because there was some doubt on a technicality as to whether this tendering business had been done quite according to Hoyle. So although nobody believed for a moment that she was going to raise the funds for her damned hostel, she gummed up the works as far as the sale to the insurance company was concerned—at least for the time being.”
“And for that matter, I suppose, she gummed up the playing-field?”
“Nobody cared two hoots about the playing-field, except Priscilla Bladon and company.”
“So Miss Bladon really has gone over the top, as the saying goes.”
“You could put it that way.”
“I’d better have a little chat with Miss Bladon.”
“Well—take a tip from me, Supertendent. She’s a difficult woman—very difficult indeed. And she has a stronger hold over a lot of people in this place than you’d think. Before you go and see her, have a word with a friend of yours. He’s been handling her for years.”
A friend of his? Grimshaw waited for it with introspective dread. Was it possible for him to move anywhere among these hills without someone implying an invidious comparison between himself and Mosley—his underling? He waited for the name to be uttered.
“It’s funny: everything I’ve just said to you, I said to Jack Mosley an hour ago,” Hindle said.
“An hour ago?”
“Oh, yes—an early riser, Mosley. He bought a walking-stick, too.”