It meant an early start for Beamish, because for one thing, as he had expected, Mosley had nobbled him to do his chauffeuring, which added three quarters of an hour to the first leg of his journey. And for another, Mosley had insisted that they must be on Herbert Garside’s land by seven.
So they were pulling out of Bradburn while Grimshaw still had an hour of restless and unfortifying sleep in front of him, and they were climbing into droplet mists while sheep were still under the illusion that no motorist was likely to be on the road.
Marldale Nab Farm was a mile out of Upper Marldale, on a prominence that overlooked the first dip of the dale itself. It was true that there was a right of way through Herbert Garside’s fields, but as a link it was vital neither to society nor commerce, since it went nowhere that could not be more conveniently reached. Once a year the Footpaths Association sent a member to walk along its length, thereby establishing its continued usage, but no one in Upper Marldale would have dreamed of treading it. It was only when Bert Garside appeared to be denying it them that they held a public meeting and brought out cogent reasons why they could not live without it.
Beamish and Mosley trod it. They had not taken many paces before Beamish saw the wisdom of Mosley’s insistence that they bring their gumboots. One length of the path was a minor watercourse, inches deep at certain seasons of the year—and this was one of those seasons. Beamish made a detour and found, in different places, three lengths of old guttering that at first sight looked as if they had been casually discarded. But when he examined them in context, he saw that they had been skilfully placed so as to direct a further two-pennyworth to the downward flow.
Mosley seemed unsurprised, in fact uninterested.
“Shouldn’t bother my head too much over that, lad. We know he’s doing it. We’ve been told so, haven’t we?”
As if the word of any Marldale informant was a sacred revelation.
They found a tree, a scarred and arthritic hawthorn, freshly broken from a jagged stump and lying across the path at one of its narrowest stretches between walls. The marks of the axe were clearly visible.
“Not done by squirrels,” Mosley said.
They found a stile that had been stopped up, the new coping secured by recent mortar.
“He doesn’t seem to be making much effort to conceal what he’s up to,” Beamish said.
“Why should he? He wants everybody to know that this is an awkward way to come—and everybody does.”
Beamish stopped for breath and looked around all the compass points. A boundary across a dew-pond was declared by the head and foot of an old brass bed-stead. There was a mess of soggy wool and bones that had been a stillborn lamb. There was a short length of electrified fencing that was connected to nothing at either end.
“How does a man make a living out of this?” Beamish asked.
“Ask Herbert Garside’s accountant. In fact, HM Inspector of Taxes would give his ears to know the half of what Herbert Garside’s accountant knows. He’s a good farmer, is Herbert, has a good eye for an animal.”
“But he has to take the rough with the smooth. And it seems to me there’s a hell of a lot of rough about here.”
“Herbert holidays in Gran Canaria. He’s been to the Costa Brava and Sorrento, but he prefers the Canaries. Even in years when the Inland Revenue have had to bring forward his last year’s losses.”
They were close to the farmhouse now and arrived at the stretch that Upper Marldale had the most to complain about: thirty yards between a field-gate and the milking-parlour which he was accused of swilling down before the passage of his herd. It was the sort of morass that sucked a man’s wellingtons off, and it was in prime condition at the moment because the herd was actually passing. Mosley waited for the last slow, slobbering beast to go through into the yard. A fifty-year-old man in a leather jerkin was standing arms akimbo, waiting to close the gate.
“Morning, Jack.”
“Morning, Bert.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“The pleasure’s one-sided,” Mosley said, indicating the slough.
“I don’t know what’s got into folk. They ought to know farms are mucky places.”
“And should they expect stiles to be stopped and mortared?”
“Folk can still climb them, if they want to cross badly enough.”
“Yes, well, some of us do. We want to know what’s going on.”
Mosley had Beamish precede him into the yard. Garside closed the gate.
“If this were on the telly, I’d ask to see your warrant.”
“Well, it isn’t. And we haven’t got one. And we’re here.”
Garside looked into the milking-parlour. Each cow had gone in leisurely fashion into her accustomed stall.
“You’d better make it smartish then. I’ve this lot to milk.”
By way of answer, Mosley turned his back on him and stumped stiff-legged in his gumboots down to a gated track that led round to the front of the house. At the back the farm had the neglected appearance of an old Norse longhouse. On the other side some early-nineteenth-century yeoman had pushed out a mock-Palladian double front so that his wife could have her drawing-room and dining-room. The lawn, which was going to have to be laid afresh, was piled with builder’s materials: a good deal of brise, lengths of piping and stacks of glazed slabs.
“So what are you building here, Bert? Tractor-shed or swimming-pool?”
“Both,” Garside said.
Beamish noticed that he had made no effort to dissimulate to Mosley.
“What the hell do you want with a swimming-pool on Marldale Nab, Bert? Your knackers will shrivel up.”
“They bloody won’t. Because I shan’t be putting as much as a bloody toe-nail in it. Anyway, it’s going to be heated. The youngsters want it—for when we have the Young Farmers here. And it’ll add to the value of the property if ever I have to sell up.”
“You’ll want a boiler-house, a filter unit. You’ll need planning permission.”
“You don’t for a tractor-shed.”
“So you’re hoping that one will mask the other? You’re making trouble for yourself, Bert. It will go on for years.”
“By which time I shall have my pool.”
“Why don’t you keep ducks in it? Then you can say it’s purely for agricultural purposes. Honestly, Bert, you’ll save yourself years of argy-bargy, by going through the channels.”
“That’s what it’s all about, Jack. I can’t afford to go through the bloody channels. I can’t raise the premium.”
“Why don’t you ask for a swimming-pool on your Supplementary Benefits, Bert? Of course you can afford it. The fee’s only nominal.”
“That shows how little you know. Do you know how many palms I’d have to cross to get this through in less than bloody years? How many times would the plans be chucked back at me, by committee after committee, because they don’t like this tile or that keyhole? It starts at the bloody bottom, Jack. It starts with the clerks. It starts when you hand your papers in, if you don’t want them stuck for ever at the bottom of the pile.”
“Which clerks?”
“Nay, Jack. You’re not going to ham-string me with that one. I only know what’s happened to other people.”
“Which other people?”
“You’re not going to catch me that way, either.”
“Why don’t you behave like a model citizen, Bert—put in a complaint, if you think you’ve got one.”
“Because I want a swimming-pool. Within the next two years. As simple as that. The Old Chap up There helps those who help themselves, I’ve always been given to understand.”
Mosley turned to Beamish.
“Treasure this moment, Sergeant. You’ve just had a front-row seat at an exhibition piece of Marldale thinking. Well, thank you, Bert. I’ve been. I’ve seen. I know.”
They started off back down the obstacle course, were in sight of the blocked stile when they saw an unathletic female figure rolling over the top of the wall. She picked herself up out of the wet grass and commented on the situation in terms which made Mosley pretend to cover his face—and Beamish stare away at an angle. She had discarded yesterday’s bib-and-brace and was wearing a long, loose, orange-turtlenecked sweater that deprived her of what shape she had.
“Morning, Deirdre. This your daily Keep Fit course?”
She repeated the tenor of her previous comments, though in a bowdlerized, less vitriolic spirit.
“It’s gone like wild fire round Marldale that you’ve come up here, so I’ve come after you. Because this is important.”
“Good,” Mosley said.
“Sergeant Beamish asked me last night to find something out for him. I’ve found it out.”
“Let’s go down to the bottom of this field, get that corner of wall between us and the draught.”
“I was hoping to keep personalities out of this,” she said, when they had found stones to sit on. “But I know now that that’s impossible. I’m not daft. This is too big. Merle Cox and Kevin Kenyon. But I’d ask you to do what you can to keep their names out of printer’s ink. The Coxes and the Kenyons are the Montagues and Capulets of Little Hawdale.”
“I know them,” Mosley said. “Their parents and grandparents, anyway. I couldn’t put names and faces to all the kids.”
“Well, you’ll know then we don’t want more ructions than happen in Hawdale in any normal week. And Merle and Kevin aren’t kids any more. He’s nineteen, she’s seventeen. They’ve been going steady for eighteen months, and when their glandular secretions get out of hand, they tend to home in on the Old Glasshouse. That’s all right,” she said, catching the look on Beamish’s face. “She’s on the pill. I’ve seen to that. And don’t look so shocked, Sergeant. While they’re stuck on each other, he isn’t catching a dose in Bradburn, Saturday nights, and she isn’t hawking her greens in Little Hawdale churchyard.”
“You mean they’re the couple that spent the night in that disgusting little cubicle?”
“No, no. No, no. Not them. But they know who did. At least, I’m pretty sure that three people they met are the ones. And they gave me an interesting description.”
“Where and when did they come across this bunch?”
“Smoky Joe’s, the night before they booked in at the Glasshouse.”
Smoky Joe’s was a cafe on the Marldale-Pringle road—or, at least, on a forgotten loop of it that had been superseded by a stretch of dual carriageway. Having lost its heavy-goods clientele, the place now catered frankly for the amateur Hell’s Angels of the district, for whom it provided Coke, hamburgers, chips, tomato sauce ad lib and the comfort of a juke-box.
“You don’t see many strangers in Smoky’s, and these three were asking Joe if he had accommodation, which shows how green they were.”
She looked as if she thought that the squalor of Joe’s was beyond the experience of Beamish and Mosley.
“It frightens me sometimes,” she said, “what these kids know. No one would put Merle Cox up as the Brain of Pringle, even after three years in the Remedial stream. When she left school she could only write one English word: to. And she spelled that ot. But she remembers things she’s heard people like her grandmother say. “You know,” she said. “If you want to know how old a woman is, it isn’t her fizzog you look at. It’s her hands. Look at the veins at the bottom of her fingers, the cracks and wrinkles between them. This woman was old: thirty if she was a day.”
“And Kevin Kenyon had his eyes peeled, too. ‘There was one of them,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know at first whether it was a feller or a tart, they all had that much eye-shadow on. But then when he uncrossed his legs, you could see the shape of his tool under his jeans. Like a bloody great banana, it was. And he had these dimpled scars under the corner of his jaw.’ That ought to be something for you people to go on. I know what these scars were. There was a girl in college who had them: surgery for TB glands, when she was a kid.”
“It’s more than we’ve had to go on up to now,” Beamish said. “But it’s still far from proof that they went anywhere near the Tollhouse.”
“They asked Merle and Kevin where there was to doss round here. So they recommended the Glasshouse, and told them to tell Joe Murray they had sent them.”
“That only gets them as far as the cubicle.”
“And there’s one more thing. When they got up to leave Smoky Joe’s, these three picked something up from beside one of their chairs—a radio cassette-recorder-player, wrapped up in dirty newspaper and tied round with grotty string. But Kevin reckons to know a bit about that sort of thing, largely through looking at them in shop-windows. He said that this was a special job: stereo, four speakers, must have cost a small fortune. The girl was nursing a black poodle, too.”
“Useful pointer,” Beamish said, “but it doesn’t put anyone in the dock yet.”
Deirdre was impatient with his professional caution.
“It points the right bloody way, I would have thought. I mean, it makes sense to me. Any stranger hanging about for a day and night in Marldale at this time of year would stand out like a two-shilling piece up a chimney-sweep’s bum. The only way not to be noticed would be to go rock-bottom and stick around with the rock-bottom set. I think that was clever.”
“But not clever enough,” Mosley said. “Thank you, Deirdre. I think you may have put us on to something.”
When they got back to Upper Marldale, they saw from the top of the High Street that someone was hammering bad-temperedly at the door of the Community Centre. Beamish was for hurrying, but Mosley held him by the shoulder.
“Don’t let him get us excited.”
It was Major Hindle. They knew at once he was uncomfortable about whatever he had come for, because he started making heavy jokes from the outset.
“You call this an Incident Room? There’s nobody here.”
“There’s a caretaker. He’ll take any messages.”
“Old Hardcastle? He’s as deaf as a post.”
“You’ll be complaining next about the lack of incidents,” Mosley said.
He tapped gently with his knuckles and Hardcastle pulled the door open at once, the upper part of his body at its midway point between nearly upright and almost parallel with the ground.
“There’s no need to break the panels in.”
The grey wooden floor was embellished with loops and overlapping circles where Hardcastle’s last token wielding of his mop had been allowed to dry out. One of the heavy plum-coloured curtains on the diminutive platform was hanging from only three of its dozen brass rings, and the main furnishing was a dozen or so baize-coloured card-tables. There was a chill in the room, as if its four walls somehow managed to perpetuate the lowest mean minimum temperature of the region.
“Do you think we might have some light?” Mosley asked.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
They went and sat down at one of the card-tables. Hindle looked as if he had been losing sleep. He was as small a man as Mosley, not an inch taller than him—but Mosley was at least fleshed out. And he was wearing a thirty-year-old greatcoat of heavy herringbone pattern into which he seemed to be visibly shrinking as he sat.
“Inspector—there are one or two things I feel I ought to clear up.”
He looked desperately unhappy. His was the surrender of a man who had come to lay his whole persona, such as it was, on the line.
“Inspector, I’d far rather, far rather, if there’s anything else that you feel you have to talk to me about, that you don’t come to the cottage to do so. I mean, don’t think for a moment I’m trying to dictate your approach to your work, but try not to, if you can possibly avoid it, if you see what I mean, there’s a good fellow.”
Beamish and Mosley were both sufficiently steeped in the manners of men to remain frozen, waiting for what might come next.
“I mean, I’m not saying that I have anything particularly to be proud of, but by the same token, I don’t regard myself as a moral reprobate. Life might perhaps have been easier if certain things hadn’t happened, but they have happened and one has to take what comes in train. But they have a saying in these parts, ‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve,’ and I’ve always said to myself, that’s not a bad motto for a man. What I am getting at is this: I’m not making moral excuses but the only thing, to my mind, that makes an offence inexcusable is if a third party gets hurt in the process. Now the little woman, you see, can’t be hurt by what she doesn’t know—and I wouldn’t have her hurt at any price. We are in the twilight of our days, Inspector, shadows lengthening and that sort of thing. I do not want us to spend our last years in misery and recrimination.”
It was possible to look at him and picture the hours and days of guilt and unforgiveness in their cottage on the hill: Mrs. Hindle asking herself where she had gone wrong, the Major’s psyche sapped even of the creative urge to make a walking-stick.
“It all started, you see, the year the war ended. I was the Commandant, as you know, of a transit camp for politically sensitive internees, among them Miss Lowther, as she then was. I didn’t know any detail, of course, but there was obviously a lot of string-pulling and attempted string-pulling going on behind the scenes, the Lowthers not wanting the family named dragged through any more mud than it was caked in already. My confidential instructions were to make sure that she did not escape and, that apart, to make her as comfortable as circumstances permitted. Well, you can see how things happened. I was still a youngish man, not past my physical prime, she was not unattractive and hadn’t had the society of a cultivated Englishman for years.”
No comment.
“I know it was unpardonable, but if I hadn’t slept with her, I dare say my Company Sergeant Major would have. I’m telling you all this, Inspector, making a clean breast of it all, so that you’ll see when I come to the end of this sorry story that I have missed nothing out.”
At that moment something odd seemed to happen to the Community Centre. It became illuminated by a single forty-watt bulb hanging somewhere among the roof-girders. Hardcastle had remembered to switch it on—or had succeeded after experiments in doing so.
“Of course, if it had ever come to light, the repercussions would have rattled from Aldershot to Chelsea. Even now—”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Mosley said, taking pity on him at last. “I can’t tell you without the book how it goes, but there must be a Statute of Limitations, even on courts martial. This was only just short of half a century ago—”
“It isn’t that, old chap. It would mean the loss of everything I’ve ever worked and stood for. They still remember now and then to invite me to a Mess Night at the Depot. I have more than once been honoured with a place on the podium at a ceremonial march past. Then there’s the Royal British Legion. I’ve been working for years to get a branch going in Marldale.”
“Yes, well, I see your point of view,” Mosley said. “And I see nothing up to now that should isolate you under the arc-lights. Always provided, of course, that we don’t have to keep coming back to you every day for further information.”
“But that’s the whole point. Inspector Mosley. I am here to see your sergeant write down in his notebook every damned thing that I know, every detail I can remember. You see, five years ago, I happened to come across Mrs. Cater in Bradcaster. She was up in the district house-hunting. It stands to sense I was interested to see her—old times, damned good laugh, took her into the Feathers for a gin. And you know how your tongue sometimes carries you away, you don’t think of consequences. I happened to tell her the Old Tollhouse was on the market, just the place, I told her, for a sculptress, which was what she said she was nowadays. Didn’t think another damned thing about it—till she bloody well turned up here. And then—”
And then she had blackmailed him into sleeping with her. It was not necessary for either side to crystallize it out in unpalatable words. Beamish looked at the Major without blinking; in this case he was becoming accustomed to the images of grotesque physical relationships.
“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been the milkman or the window-cleaner,” Hindle said.
“I’m more interested in the times you took her to Bradburn in your car,” Mosley interrupted.
“I’m coming to that.”
“How many trips did you make?”
“Three in all.”
“And the dates?”
“Couldn’t be sure at this range, old man. First was a month ago, then another a week later to the day. Then a third about ten days after that. I’m surprised my little woman didn’t start getting suspicious.”
“And each time, Mrs. Cater went to the County Offices?”
“Only on the first two occasions. Perhaps if I were to tell the story chronologically—?”
“Not a bad idea sometimes, Major. Did she give you any idea what she was going to County Hall for?”
“Oh, yes—she prattled away like a burst pipe. Always did. One got into the way of not listening. It goes without saying that she tried to involve me. It was all about this field, and this footpath, and bribery and corruption that she reckoned was going on in high quarters. As if I’d want to get my fingers burned by dabbling in things like that!”
“But she felt she was definitely on to something?”
“She always felt she was on to something. Whatever else you can say about Bea Cater, she never lacked confidence. Even in her most crack-brained schemes she was confident from the word go. I’ve even known her to change her mind in mid-stream and be equally confident against what she had been saying two minutes previously. A funny woman, Inspector. Not unintelligent—but hare-brained.”
“Bribery and corruption?”
“She’d somehow got the idea into her head that you had to pay through the nose, all along the line, if you wanted planning permission for anything from a dog kennel to your own multi-storey car park. Otherwise you were subject to months of delay at every stage. She did tell me how many tens of thousands of applications they have outstanding. But ten quid here, twenty there, fifty there, and you’d got the builders in tomorrow week. What’s more, she seemed to think that Harry Whitcombe was in this up to the elbows. Harry Whitcombe! As transparently sincere a councillor as ever sat in Bradburn or Pringle. Damn it—the man has the Territorial Decoration.”
“So at what level did she propose to enter the fray?”
“She had that all worked out. Senior clerical, in the first instance. Poor devil—young fellow who runs the outer office of the Planning Department. She said she wasn’t going to waste time on counter-clerks—and she wasn’t going to wait all day for this young fiddler to declare himself, either. What was his name? Roger Something-or-other—Roger Smallwood, Norton, Carruthers— something like that. She had a great-nephew serving his time in some drawing-office and she’d got him to sketch out plans for an extension to her studio. She took these in, handed them over, insisted on seeing somebody senior to the first two minions who appeared, told Roger What’s-his-name that if any sweeteners were needed anywhere up the ladder, money was no object as far as she was concerned. Naturally, he wasn’t going to touch it with a boat-hook. Told her this was a public department, every file and every stage open to democratic scrutiny, and her plans would go forward through the machine without let and without favour. I had it in the car all the way back to Marldale. My ears were ringing with it. She seemed to think that the most vicious thing about young Roger was his refusal to play ball.”
At this juncture old Hardcastle came shuffling and oscillating into the room with a tray bearing the largest and most battered-looking metal teapot that Beamish had ever seen; it must have held a gallon.
“I thought perhaps you gentlemen—”
The tea was thickly orange in colour and bitter from the years of deposits in the pot.
“Well, a week later, Bea Cater nabbed me again and wanted another trip to Bradburn. She hinted darkly that from some source or other she had got on to something else to young Roger’s disadvantage, and this time she really was going to nail him. Now I’d seen enough of Bea Cater in my time to know that when she was reduced to dropping dark hints, it meant either that she had no information at all—or that she was merely trying to be intriguing, and the next thing one knew one was up to the ears in something or other. It paid not even to ask questions—and I didn’t. But when she came out of the Offices, she was beaming like a summer’s day. I thought perhaps that she’d tripped Roger up at last—but he’d given her something. I can only suppose that she’d worn him out under weight and spate of words, and that he’d dug something complex and innocuous out just to get rid of her. It was in one of those large buff envelopes that they use for shunting files about in—a brand-new one, and I remember saying to myself, there’s no wonder the rates are what they are.
“‘I’ve got something here,’ she said, ‘that’s going to set Bradburn and Marldale on fire.’
“But I staunchly refused to ask her what it was, and although that wouldn’t in the normal run of things have stopped her from telling me, she got annoyed with me, because she said I was anti-social. We parted in a definite atmosphere. Then ten days later she begged to be taken to Bradburn again. I asked her when her own car was going to be back on the road, and it seemed that she had become so peeved with the people who were supposed to be getting it up to MoT scratch for her that she had had it towed to a different garage and had started the whole process again from square one.”
And this time, Mrs. Cater had not been able to resist telling the Major what was in her buff envelope, although he repeated emphatically that he did not want to know. It was a desk diary, she said, not a principal’s, but a secretary’s desk diary—a top secretary’s desk diary—the sort of diary in which she had made, for her own guidance, notes of the kind that her boss would have been cautious about committing to paper: like certain trips he had made, appointments to meet certain people—things that he might not have cared to broadcast among some of the watch-dogs on his committees. It was, in fact, Councillor Harry Whitcombe’s personal assistant’s desk diary of some years ago, in which she had scribbled odd reminders to herself about where Whitcombe was likely to be on given days.
“I know three women in Upper Marldale,” Mrs. Cater had said, “who would sing incantations round a mess of pottage to get their hands on this diary.”
But it was not to County Hall that she had Hindle drive her on her third visit. It was to a house on the Dales Estate, Bradburn’s most patrician residential area. And she did not even allow him to know, within fifty yards in any direction, which one she was calling at. She had him put her down and wait for her at the corner of Wharfedale Avenue and Wensleydale Close. She kept him there for three quarters of an hour, and when she returned she was quite silent about where she had been and what had taken place there. In fact she was altogether subdued, which made Hindle think that something had happened to cast her down.
“In fact I came to the very satisfying conclusion,” Hindle said, “that just for once, dear Beatrice had met her match.”
“She met her match right enough. She met it with a rope round her neck, standing on a table that had been dragged in from her studio.”
“You really think there’s a connection, Inspector?”
Mosley examined the back of his right hand with such intensity that it looked as if he had never seen it before.
“Let’s say we have to bear the possibility in mind. Sooner or later something is going to connect with something else. I hope. Well, now, Major Hindle—is there anything else that you feel we ought to know?”
“I think that’s about it, Inspector. If there’s anything that you think needs clarification—”
“We’ll be in touch.”
“Discreetly, I implore you.”
“Discreet enough to ask for discretion in return, Major. I would greatly prefer you not to discuss with anyone else the things we have talked about this morning—”
“There is really no need for you to remind me of that, Inspector.”
“Otherwise somebody else in Marldale might be getting a nocturnal visit in the near future,” Mosley said.