The orientation that Mosley offered Beamish as the sergeant drove them down to Lower Marldale was by no means as succinct as some of the explanations that had been exchanged in the Chief’s office. For one thing there were interruptions. Beamish was called on to stop more than once: to examine the painted cabbalistic sign on the back of a sheep, which Mosley suspected of having been rustled; to examine the debris of a picnic—and to clear up the litter into a plastic bag in Beamish’s boot; and once simply to admire the scenery, where a low-hanging cloud was clinging to the flank of a green clough.
“So really, you’re on the side of these three women,” Beamish said.
“They are honest and diligent strivers after something.”
“One at least of them must be pretty clever. There are things that don’t exactly explain themselves.”
“Having difficulty, are you?”
“Some. These cats, for example. Don’t think for a moment, Mr. Mosley, that I hesitate to take your word for anything you’ve told me. But here we have—and you tell me that you have carefully cross-checked the evidence—a community of cats who refuse to leave their home premises—and yet one solitary exception among cats goes out and does just the opposite. She refuses to cross the doorstep that at one time must have represented all she wished for in the way of warmth, food and cosseting. Now if you were to ask me to get cats to behave like that, I’d have to take advice.”
“Really? It would depend on who you knew.”
“How come?”
“Lion piss,” Mosley said. “That’s what they’ve been using.”
“Easy to come by in these parts, is it?”
“It is if you’re married to a man who can make Chitterling Chews, Rhino Horn Bitters and Larkspur Lollies. I happen to know that Flavour Control, Ltd. do not limit their activities to the taste-buds. They also cater for the olfactory nerve. An after-shave lotion that makes a man smell horsy. A spray which if applied behind the ears will render any woman irresistible to a Pekingese. No need therefore to import the urine of the greater cats direct from the savannah.”
“You think that’s how it was done, do you?”
“Something like that. Some sort of synthetic essence. I tremble to think what’s going to happen to Sal’s Lad at the Hadley Dale Trials. If he should mistake one of the sheep for a bitch of his own species on heat—”
“You think this could be done, do you?”
“I’m sure it could. I once went to a zoo, Sergeant Beamish, where a woman had been so scatter-brained as to introduce a small domestic pet under cover of her coat. A spry little Schipperke, he was, and when she got him into the Large Cat House, he nearly did his nut, catching the message of smells outside the range of human perception. God knows what the little dog thought was going to happen to him. And I’m quite sure that Mrs. Susan Bexwell, as the party was leaving the Old Tollhouse after Beatrice Cater’s liqueurs, took the opportunity of doctoring the doorway. I hope so, anyway, because Susan Bexwell does not strike me as a woman devoid of good taste, and if the trio had had anything to do with executing Mrs. Cater, she’d never have played a practical joke as non-U as that. Oh—they’re a bright little bunch of vigilantes. have no doubt. My only fear is that their efforts are going to be discouraged before they have broken this case for us.”
“You mean they’re going to take fright?”
“Not of us, Sergeant Beamish. But last night’s goings-on are going to bring the press here. I can picture the cellars of the Crook being drained dry at this moment by young men and women accompanied by cynical photographers. And in the Crook they are going to hear sundry stories. The witches of Marldale are going to get more publicity than they will care for. We shall have to keep a close eye on them. The last thing on earth we want is for them to suspend their campaign: whatever it’s about.”
They stopped talking as they ran down into the village. Lower Marldale was only about a fifth of the size of its more highly placed neighbour and did not look as if it was considered worth a tenth of the care. It lacked any domestic building later than Edwardian and there was nothing to try to live up to. It was not just that the paintwork of too many of the houses was a decade overdue for renewal. It was not that too many curtains needed to be taken down and washed. It was not merely that, unlike Upper Marldale, the village had no pavements. These things were all true, but it was untidiness that gave the place its dismal air. A public waste-bin, filled to overflowing by last season’s tourists, had not been emptied: it would be, perhaps, before next Easter. There were cola tins lying squashed in the main street and rutted tyre-marks proclaimed the use of the green as a casual car park.
But even this seemed cheerfully civilized by comparison with the next vista towards which Mosley told Beamish to drive. The land flattened out at the bottom end of the valley, losing the relief of rolling flanks and now occupied largely by the widening of the river, which had grown sluggish and held in suspension the milky residue of some rurally sited industry. And by the water’s edge was a cantonment of army huts, many of their windows boarded over, their guttering sprung, some of the doors missing and a pile of domestic rubbish, including stinking rags, smouldering lethargically on a corner of the one-time parade ground. Here and there round the perimeter were rusty remnants of triple-coiled barbed wire.
“Imagine the abandonment of hope by all who entered here,” Mosley said.
“They were criminals,” Beamish reminded him.
“Military criminals—which means you could wind up in a place like this by sheer bad luck; or by being so hard-pushed that you forgot to hold your tongue. Can you picture wintering here, Beamish?”
One or two of the hut chimneys were giving out smoke. A few people had made a braver show with curtains than some of the villagers. Some of the occupants had had a go at gardening, edging border beds in the sorry soil with bits of broken tile. Mosley seemed to know his way about the residents, was apparently known to most of them, and resented by none. In one grubby workshop a man was making bamboo pipes of Pan, in another a man and a woman were blowing glass baubles: little elephants and swans. One man sat unhappily behind a stack of unfired ceramics.
“Vicious circle, Mr. Mosley. Can’t get the kiln repaired till I’ve sold this lot. Can’t complete this lot till I’ve had the kiln repaired.”
In a woodwork shop, Joe Murray, a man in a butcher’s apron, was working at a lathe with a dedicated steadiness that suggested relative success. Mosley spent some time examining his stock.
“I might be back again before we go to buy this salad bowl, Joe. What is it? Walnut?”
“Pear-wood.”
“You’ve certainly made the most of the grain. But I can’t make my mind up between wood and pewter. I’ll have to go first and see what Richard has to offer.”
“Richard’s gone. Got a short lease on a lock-up site in Bradcaster.”
“Has there been much coming and going recently?”
“One or two casuals. I don’t pay much attention these days. They come and go without me noticing.”
“How many permanent residents have you now?”
“Thirtyish, give or take a few, and not counting kids. Christ knows how many kids.”
“I expect he does,” Mosley said. “I’ve no doubt he keeps some sort of list.”
Mosley led Beamish across the former parade square.
“Takes all sorts. There are some good craftsmen here. Others would be misfits in any environment. You’ve seen enough to know they’re not all freaks.”
“How well organized?”
“They have a loose sort of constitution, try to protect themselves against trouble-makers. No specific religious tie-up. General morality’s a bit come-and-go. Some personalities are obviously stronger than others, but what they’ve always lacked is effective leadership. Let’s see if there’s anyone in the office.”
He led Beamish across the crumbling asphalt of the square towards a wooden building with a veranda that must once have been the Orderly Room. Now most of its windows were broken, but one sector was in use as an office. There was a notice-board outside the door that flapped with posters relating to DHSS benefits, Legal Aid facilities and slogans for minority causes: anti-vivisection, anti-bloodsports, transcendental meditation.
A man was leaning on the rail of the veranda with the slow-limbed idleness of an extra on a Western film-set. When they came within earshot of the office, they heard a woman’s voice raised within its walls.
“Hullo, Mr. Mosley,” the man on the rail said. “I’m out again.”
“Try and stay out,” Mosley said without looking at him.
The woman’s voice was short-tempered in the precise but flat vowels of the West Riding, the unvoiced consonants of Bradford.
“If you think you can come to me with a bloody tale like that, you bloody little arsehole-crawler—”
“It helps if you speak the language of the natives,” Mosley said.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to bloody do, Cartwright. Jobs are bloody hard to come by and there aren’t all that many strings left for even me to pull. But I’m going to do for you the worst that anybody’s done for you in years. I’m going to see you into a job, if I have to perjure myself to an employer. Work, Cartwright: it comes to us all in the end. And if you don’t sodding well hold this job down, I’ll make sure your file gets lost for six bloody months. And I’ll tell Mavis where she can find you.”
Mosley knocked and pushed the door open. The woman who had been speaking was of deceptive age. She was actually thirty-four, but seen full face and from a short distance, she could momentarily have looked about sixteen—an overfed and unco-ordinated sixteen, with a pasty complexion relieved only by acne. Her contours suggested an exclusive diet of sweetened starches and she was wearing a bib-and-brace overall in dirty purple corduroy, its shoulder-straps uneven.
“Did you hear what she said to me, Mr. Mosley?” said the man to whom she had been speaking.
“Piss off!” she told him.
“Miss Deirdre Harrison,” Mosley said. “Local liaison officer for the Welfare State. That’s not the way she always speaks to her clients. Sometimes she gets quite cross with them.”
“We’re not supposed to become emotionally involved,” she said. “But sometimes—”
“Deirdre, there are one or two bits of things—”
“Yes. I thought there might be.”
“The first’s a quickie. Casuals in this place—any short-stay clients within the last week?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t bloody well live here, you know—come in once a week when I can’t find an excuse to go somewhere else.”
“No—but they’ll tell you more readily than they’ll tell me. You can always pretend you’re looking for some character who’s due for back-benefit.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I need this information fast, Deirdre.”
“So where am I going to find you when I’ve got it?”
“I’ll be around your place this evening.”
“Bang goes another bloody reputation. You think that was an outside job, last night, do you, Mr. Mosley?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a contract on Mrs. Cater. I think that’s the current idiom. And that brings me to my second point. What went on up there last night?”
“It’s no use coming to me about that.”
“Come off it, Deirdre. We know you were up there slurping Mrs. Cater’s liquor. That fact’s out.”
“Have you been to see Priscilla?”
“Not yet. Joy to come.”
Deirdre Harrison thought for some seconds.
“Come on, Deirdre. I know you’d like the chance to co-ordinate your stories. I’ve got a rough idea what you three are up to and it’s going to face the light of day before so long.”
“You’re going to bugger it up for us.”
“Not if I can help it. How do you know I’m not working on the same thing myself? I do know, by the way, that you went to the Tollhouse on Mrs. Cater’s invitation. That means she had something to tell you—for a change.”
“God, I hated that woman,” Deirdre said.
“I know you did. Feel differently about her now, I suppose?”
“A bit mixed up, Mr. Mosley, to tell you the truth. She’s been murdered, and any woman has the right not to be murdered. But she was so bloody false, that’s what got on my wheel. Nothing about her was what she cracked it on to be—nothing. And yet she didn’t tell lies, you know. She just had a crafty way of causing lies to be thought. Sometimes I think she even believed every latest bit of falseness that she put out.”
“Folk have been known to do just that.”
“Husband in the Diplomatic Service? Well, I’ve been through every Whitaker’s Almanack since the war, and every Statesman’s Year Book, and I can’t find him.”
“Maybe he was ex-directory.”
“And maybe he bloody wasn’t. We heard she was a sculptress, didn’t we? But when has her studio ever seen a lump of stone? Art College trained? Have you ever seen a specimen of her work? She couldn’t put a wash of bloody colour on. She hadn’t an inkling of design, of composition, light and shade—When I was at such-and-such a College—that’s how she drip-fed it out of the side of her mouth. In point of fact, she probably went to an evening class or two on the premises: I’ll bet she never completed a course in her life. In my Open University days—I heard her say that myself. Meaning what? That she’d watched a few broadcasts, maybe even got as far as sending for a course book. But she can’t have had a degree, Mr. Mosley—she can’t have! She hadn’t the intelligence of a bloody rabbit.“
“Maybe so. I know you didn’t like her. And I think I know why you didn’t. If ever a couple of women were incompatible, it was you two. But someone’s killed her, and as you’ve just said, we prefer that sort of thing not to happen. And she was killed because of something she knew—something that she’d sent for you three to tell you.”
“I wish you’d talk to Priscilla about this.”
“I shall be doing.”
“Well, take me with you when you do. Let’s go now—”
“What is this, Deirdre? Esprit de corps? Witches’ honour?”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Mosley.”
“I think I do. Well—I shall have seen Priscilla by the time I come round to see you tonight for that other piece of information. And maybe we’ll all end up in Priscilla’s sitting-room before the night’s out.”
Both men were quiet as they drove back up the valley. Beamish was waiting for Mosley to volunteer some commentary on what they had been listening to. Mosley was smoking his pipe to a slow rhythm, saying nothing. The cloud that he had admired on the way down had now drifted lower and was completely obscuring the clough.
“So that’s a Social Welfare Officer,” Beamish said at last.
“A young lady who has done a great deal of unsung good in her time.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“But frustrated. Which breaks out now and then. Put yourself in her position, Beamish, in the wake of what’s happened.”
“Oh, yes, sir—I can see all that. The only thing—”
“Is that you think I let her off too lightly? Let her call the tune?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. But you’re excused for thinking it.”
“So what have they got on their minds, these three?”
“Nothing that they’ve cause to be ashamed of. Something that they think is going to be ruined if it falls into our lap before it’s ripe. Everything in your manual, Sergeant Beamish, would tell you not to let them confer before you put the pressure on. Everything in my manual tells me that once they’ve conferred we may not have to use much pressure. Basically they’re honest. We mustn’t force dishonesty on to them.”
They began to climb a series of hairpins that showed them Upper Marldale’s roofs and chimneys from a shifting range of angles.
“We’ll go and see Priscilla Bladon now. She’ll be expecting us. And if you think you’ve met some characters in the last few hours, they’ll have paled into nothingness before you’re much older, Sergeant Beamish.”