Priscilla Bladon’s house was a big one by Upper Marldale standards, built in the later Georgian years. Miss Bladon led them through an expanse of entrance hall into an even more spacious drawing-room with a handsome bow window overlooking a large walled garden now beginning to sink into first twilight.
The room needed to be spacious not to be overwhelmed by all that was in it. It was incongruity on the grand scale rather than actual disorder that set the tone. African tribal masks kept company with warriors’ shields and drums. An exquisitely carved Polynesian paddle lay athwart a Renaissance bass-viol. A fruit-bowl in Hindu brass contained half a dozen immobilized hand-grenades. There were urns, bowls and ewers in earthenware and porcelain, as well as vessels fashioned from gourds from every latitude. The empty shell of an armadillo lay upside down as a receptacle for thimbles, lace-makers’ bobbins, wax fruit and lumps of coral.
There was something abysmally depressing about the collection, some over-riding influence that deadened the room. Beamish decided that it emanated from the ubiquity of stuffed animals, almost every one the craftsmanship of the less sensitive breed of taxidermist. They ranged from squirrels, parrots and a forest pig to a moronic wallaby who had a boomerang between his teeth, as if, ironically, he had just retrieved it. In her scholastic days, Miss Bladon had made every class she taught “adopt” a merchant ship, which led to voluminous correspondence—and a gift from every home-coming master who made landfall within visiting distance of Marldale.
One effect of the melancholy miscellany was to dwarf two of the three women who had been waiting here for the police to call. Priscilla Bladon was not dwarfed. In crossing the room to show the two men in she had, as it were, imprinted an enduring impression she accommodated her physical size by exaggerating it, rather than by an attempt to draw the eye away—she was wearing a long, flowing dress that made very little contact with her body below the bust and its floral pattern was bold and colourful. She was sitting now on a chintzy armchair, was clearly not truly at her ease on any other chair in the room. Susan Bexwell was at the opposite side of the hearth, her long pony-tail drawing her hair tight across her scalp, her round, slim-rimmed spectacles seeming to proclaim her an honours mathematics graduate. Deirdre Harrison sat with her trousered legs curled up on a priceless strip of Kurdistan carpet, the straps of her bib-and-brace even more awry than when Beamish had last seen her.
Mosley came to the point.
“Well—who killed her?”
“Outsiders,” Priscilla Bladon said, her voice a confident contralto.
“You sound sure.”
“If it had been someone local, somebody would have known.”
“So why kill her?”
“Because of what she knew.”
“And what did she know?”
“That’s what we couldn’t find out.”
“I thought she invited you three up there to tell you.”
“She did. Subject to terms. Which we couldn’t agree.”
Slight pause; end of first phase of question and answer.
“Aren’t you going to tell us her terms?” Mosley asked.
“No.”
“You mean that you three still mean to go it alone?”
“We stand a better chance than you do.”
“Only by withholding information,” Mosley said.
“Have we withheld information in the past? Our difficulty has been getting information listened to.”
“You haven’t had the sort of information that people are prepared to listen to. You don’t know what someone wants with Ned Suddaby’s field. You don’t know why Herbert Garside wants to keep people off his footpath. Now, I suppose the implication is that Beatrice Cater had found out.”
“She thought she had.”
“She must have come pretty close to the mark,” Mosley said, “for them to have killed her for it. What price they’ll try to kill you next?”
“That lightning daren’t strike here again.”
“A very dangerous assumption, Miss Bladon.”
End of second phase.
“So,” Mosley went on. “You’re going it alone. Only you can’t. Because you won’t be alone. I’m on the road too.”
“We’re not in competition, Mr. Mosley. We just want to make sure somebody gets there.”
“Which means more conjuring tricks, I suppose?”
“Conjuring tricks, Mr. Mosley? You should be more respectful.”
“Well, what were they but conjuring tricks? Putting dud eggs under some poor smallholder’s broody. And obviously you sent someone up the old church tower, whilst you diverted attention with your Danse Macabre round the gravestones.”
“Wally Brewer, from Chapel Burton. He does their clock.”
“It’s obvious what sort of contribution Flavour Control, Ltd. made to local unfeline behaviour. And while we’re on the subject, I must warn you—watch what you’re doing with toxic substances at Hadley Dale Dog Trials.”
“We will, Mr. Mosley.”
“I must admit that you have our police laboratories puzzled over those withered cabbages.”
“We whipped the good ones out and planted dead ones.”
“Very commendable social behaviour, that, I’m sure. And I’m still perplexed by the winning darts throw.”
Miss Bladon nodded gravely.
“That was touch and go—the only real risk we’ve taken up to now. That was the only stunt that rose above the strictly materialistic plane. But Harry Akeroyd’s a very good darts-player—and also very highly suggestible. I should know: I taught him from the ages of five to fourteen. I taught him all he knows—bar playing darts. I took a chance, I’ll admit. I put it firmly into his mind what he was going to do. He believed it—and he did it.”
“Thank God!” Deirdre Harrison said.
Mosley brought Beamish into the conversation for the first time since they had come in.
“My friend and colleague here is an unsophisticated man by Upper Marldale standards. I don’t think he has fully grasped yet why you’ve had to turn to magic.”
Priscilla Bladon turned patiently to Beamish. He expected her to have a slightly amused contempt for him, if not the superior conviction that he could be ignored altogether. At the best he expected to be patronized, but on the contrary she treated him with the same sort of respect she might have given to a child who wanted the answer to an intelligent question.
“Because it’s a waste of time talking sense to people,” she said, and waited to see if this sank in. “People don’t believe in magic, but wouldn’t they just love to? Given the opportunity, they’ll even pretend to. They loved that business with the church clock, even though every man jack of them knew it must be a fiddle. But if we’d tried to persuade them to bring Wally Brewer in to wind it up, they’d have gone on arguing for weeks. Somebody would have heard that Wally was no good. Somebody else wouldn’t have wanted to bring talent in from Chapel Burton. Somebody would have known a better man. Somebody would have argued about how much to pay him, and what fund it was going to come out of. Somebody would have asked if we’d got him insured while he was up the tower. I’ve always been one for getting on with things.”
Once she got into full spate, it was difficult to interrupt Priscilla Bladon.
“Look at television advertising. It must work, or they wouldn’t spend on it what they do. But do they talk sense? If they want you to give yourself lung cancer with a new brand of cigarette, they show you a girl standing by a waterfall. Does anybody think there’s any connection? No: but they smoke the cigarettes. If they want you to buy a petrol of the same chemical composition as anybody else’s petrol, they show you a tiger prancing along a sea-shore. Have they listened to me when I’ve tried to warn them about Suddaby’s field and Garside’s footpath? No: when I tried to present a reasoned case at the parish meeting a sigh went round the room—that daft old woman’s on her feet again. But when I dance to a gramophone round the Mawdesley vault, they start paying attention.”
“But what do you want them to do with Suddaby’s field?” Beamish asked her.
“We want a recreation ground for our children,” Susan Bexwell said.
“Or something for somebody. The point is, that field is a public asset. It belongs to Upper Marldale. A few square inches of it belongs to me, because I was a ratepayer when the Council bought it. Then we suddenly hear it’s on the market, with what they call outline planning permission—which shows that somebody in some Council office has been scheming it out for months. Is it going to make an atom of difference to next year’s rates, the price they’ll get for Ned Suddaby’s? No—any transaction that involves public property in this county is done for one reason only—because somebody stands to gain from it.”
“And we do want a playing-field.”
Mrs. Bexwell must have said her piece on every available platform in Marldale.
“They’ve got the notion in Bradburn and Pringle that country children don’t need amenities. If a child lives in the country, his life’s made—that’s what people think. Well: take a walk round Upper Marldale any evening: not even a street-lamp to sit on the kerb under. A child in the country has nothing—but nothing.”
“So somebody on the back row of the meeting tells her she doesn’t have to live here.”
“And it isn’t only Marldale,” Deirdre Harrison said. “It’s going on all over the country. What happened to the Evenlode Home up Bradburn Brow? What about the hypermarket on the Bradcaster by-pass? What about the new sports centre? And what name comes to mind whenever you see a theodolite being lifted out of a county van? Harry Whitcombe.”
“It’s all right talking like that within these four walls,” Mosley warned her. “Don’t forget you’re a public employee.”
“That’s why we feel we need a touch of witchcraft here and there, Mr. Beamish.”
At that point the door-bell rang—one of those simple wire-pulled mechanisms that set up a jangle in the hall. Priscilla Bladon got up and swept out of the room with a flourish of her dress that endangered a rich variety of relics.
“Of course, we do realize that there could be other ways of setting about this,” Susan Bexwell said. “But it’s been—well— amusing, until now.”
“It looked as if it was going to work, too,” Deirdre Harrison added.
“Past tense?” Mosley asked her. “You mean that what’s happened to Beatrice Cater is giving you furious second thoughts?”
“Public opinion in Marldale is not going to care for monkeying about for some time to come.”
“You’ve put that to Miss Bladon?”
“She’s got some idea of her own. I wish I knew what it was.”
“Did Mrs. Cater want to be associated with your witchery?”
“Far from it. She regarded it as in bad taste, pointless and in some vague way, I think, blasphemous. No sense of humour, of course. A silly woman, in fact, though she would stick at things once she got an idea into her head.”
“Obviously she was working on this alleged corruption from some angle of her own. Have you any idea what the angle was?”
“Not for sure. She made a number of trips into Bradburn. Major Hindle ran her up in his car.”
“Hadn’t she a car of her own?”
“Off the road. And what with one thing and another, Hindle was hardly in a position to refuse. We think she was cultivating someone in County Hall.”
“But no idea who?”
“Priscilla’s been working on it.”
Then they pricked up their ears at the sound of voices in the hall. It sounded like an invasion in force: the media. Beamish wondered how Mosley would manage to get rid of them.