As soon as Hindle had left them, Mosley went for a short walk round the interior of the Community Centre, looking at its few exhibits as if they held some deep-seated interest for him: an engraving of Napoleon on the Bellerophon, foxed and askew; the tea-making roster of the ladies of the Dorcas Club. It was the first time that Beamish had ever seen him immersed in a thought process that did not seem to be leading to any immediate conclusion. Beamish remained respectfully silent and seated, waiting for something to be evolved. Mosley remained standing for a long time under the portrait of a Chairman of the Parish Council who had died in 1923. Then he came back, seated himself opposite Beamish at the baize-topped card-table—and stood up again to get pipe and tobacco out of his over-stuffed pockets.
“You know, Sergeant Beamish, I keep coming back in my mind to something that Priscilla Bladon said on her own premises last night. ‘That lightning won’t strike here again.’ Always a dangerous sentiment, though in private, in this case, until now, I’ve been inclined to agree with her. The people who killed Beatrice Cater are professional, efficient, sophisticated killers. Carnal-minded, too, I grant you, but that goes hand in hand. To come back here and do another killing would be taking a risk at which I’d have thought they’d have jibbed. But if Harry. Whitcombe’s secretary’s desk diary was worth killing for once, it might be vital to kill for it again.”
“But who knows about the diary? Major Hindle does not know what was in it. He does not even know which house on the Dales Estate Mrs. Cater went to.”
“True. But are the killers aware of that?”
“If they were in any doubt, they would surely have got rid of Hindle while they were up here liquidating Mrs. Cater.”
“It was not Major Hindle I was thinking of. I was thinking of the three ladies, who were drinking Mrs. Cater’s chartreuse only an hour or so before Mrs. Cater died. Mrs. Cater apparently ended up by telling them nothing. Because they could not agree on terms: that was the phrase that Miss Bladon used. But the killer—the man who commissioned the killings—cannot know that. He is bound to assume the contrary.”
“So you think that our friends from the NCOs’ annexe at the Glasshouse will be back?”
“I doubt it. I think they would set their price too high for a second visit. But they are not the only contract killers on the books of whichever Job Centre these people use.”
But now Beamish, who was sitting with his back to the main entrance, was aware that someone else had come in. Mosley rose politely and Beamish followed example, turning to see Priscilla Bladon bearing down on them with the skirts of her outdoor coat billowing majestically. She came and sat down at their table, lifting the lid of the teapot in casual inspection.
“God! Who made that?”
“Dick Hardcastle.”
“So we have competition? I’ve always said that man was a warlock. Jack Mosley, we’re in difficulty. Now is the time for all good men and true—or, rather, for both good men and true, since there are only two of you—to come to the aid of the party.”
“What’s the trouble, Miss Bladon?”
“The challenge from the Morning Herald. Their reporter’s just been round to see me, given me a memorandum of the conditions. Want to see it?”
“Not particularly. Give us a rough idea.”
“The Editor of the Herald, a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and a Senior Lecturer in Parapsychology at Brunel University are to act as adjudicators and their judgement will be final. A national security organization has guaranteed to prevent access to the church. The clock tower will be guarded inside and out by dogs.”
“So starting the clock’s going to be quite an achievement.”
“We must get it started, Jack—on two counts we must. We can’t afford to lose face. And we’ve got to win Ned Suddaby’s field from the Herald, together with all the equipment they’re throwing in with it.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult. My guess is there’s nothing much wrong with the clock. It only wants winding.”
“I dare say. But who’s going to get through a battalion of security men and several nests of hungry Alsatians to wind it?”
“Makes me wish I was a younger man,” Mosley said.
“Do be serious, Jack. I am. Deadly serious.”
“But it does need a younger man.”
“A young man with more ideas than I’ve got at the moment.”
“We’re getting youngsters with all sorts of technical knowledge in the force these days,” Mosley said.
Then he turned to Beamish, with the most genial and idiotic smile on his face that Beamish had seen there to date.
“Sergeant Beamish, I’m putting you in charge of getting the Upper Marldale church clock going again under the conditions prescribed by the Morning Herald.”
Beamish opened his mouth, then decided against saying anything. He would deal with Mosley when Miss Bladon had gone.
“As soon as we leave here, Sergeant Beamish, I want you to go down to the hospital at Pringle. Mention my name in the Matron’s office, and ask if you can have a sympathetic word with Peter Muller.”
“Who’s Peter Muller?”
“The regular Marldale clock-winder. Bear in mind that he is a very sick man, and that the Marldale clock is very dear to his heart. Do not under any circumstances allow him to think that you are usurping his seigneurial rights over the clock tower—but find out from him how to wind the clock. And give your mind to any other attendant difficulties that might occur to you. We will have another little talk about this later.”
“We will indeed,” Beamish said, trying not to clench his teeth.
Sometimes in the evening, the citizens of Bradburn looked up at the tower block of their controversial new County Offices and saw lights blazing from every window on the many floors. The more naive may possibly have thought that this denoted overtime devotion by faithful local-government servants. Others realized that it merely meant that the vast acreage of car park had cleared and that the cleaners had moved in, switching on everything in sight and leaving the ratepayers to face the quarterly electricity bill.
Police headquarters were not in County Hall itself but in a cold, echoing, stone-floored building that had been the pride of Bradburn when a Royal Duke had declared it open in the 1880s. From his desk, looking obliquely backwards over his left shoulder, Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw could just see a narrow triangle of the upper tier of County Hall, framed by the back of Woolworth’s, the rear of the Odeon Cinema and the mock battlements and turrets of a nineteenth-century mill. He saw the cleaners’ lights go on and knew that another day had passed. And what had he to show for it? Since this morning early he had been showered with the problems that his underlings in the divisions were finding insuperable. And in every case his solution had been a holding operation, an avoidance of risk, a maintaining of the comfortably familiar, a counselling to eternal patience, so that tomorrow men could hang up their outdoor clothes on their office hatstands, pick up the phones from their desks and set the whole process in motion again.
For the last twenty minutes Grimshaw had been endeavouring to comfort the Chief Inspector, Q Division, about his chronic shortage of experienced sergeants. There was nothing that Grimshaw could do about it—except wait for sergeants to gain experience. He had found at least two dozen ways of saying this—and all the while he was talking, he saw the chances diminishing of his consulting the Chief Executive Officer before the cleaners had mopped up every other island of resistance and dislodged even the top man.
“Tod” Hunter had promised faithfully that he would contact Grimshaw before the end of the working day about the file that he had wanted him to see, and that his Registry had apparently mislaid. And the CEO had not kept his promise. So should Grimshaw take the initiative and ring the CEO? Why was it that the higher one reached in one’s lifelong pursuit of promotion, the more terrifying the pettiest of decisions became? As a young and ambitious officer, Grimshaw had often wondered why all his seniors were perpetually worried men. He did not know the answer yet—but he knew that he was in danger of becoming a perpetually worried man himself.
So he whipped himself into action, got his clerk to dial for him, and thanks to the technology of two complex switch-boards a quarter of a mile apart, was eventually connected to a sympathetic, mature and homely female voice that said that she was sorry, she was only a cleaner.
“Was it something that you needed in a hurry, sir? If you’ll tell me what it’s about, I can have a look on his desk and see if I can find anything.”
But then came unexpected progress.
“Are you still there, sir? I don’t think he’s gone home yet. I think I can hear him in his lav. I’ll go and see if I can waylay him for you.”
So Hunter and Grimshaw were brought together; but Hunter did not seem to know what Grimshaw was talking about.
“File? I’m sorry. What file was that?”
“This morning—” Grimshaw began to say.
“I’m sorry. We’ve got a terrible line. Look—can you meet me in ten minutes in the Carders’ Arms? I wanted a chat with you, anyway, and some things go down better over a jar.”
The Carders’ Arms was a pub in a lane behind W. H. Smith’s wholesale warehouse. It claimed—along with several others—to have the smallest bar in the kingdom. It was not disputed by the many customers who had been there only once that it had the dirtiest pumps, the most corroded pipes and the worst beer in Bradburn. For this reason it was deserted when Hunter and Grimshaw went in, except for two immigrants who were talking in their own language. Hunter kept his voice low.
“This has been going on for several years. We don’t expect you to get a result the first day you’ve worked on it, you know.”
“No—but if you’ve a file missing, the sooner we move in, the better chance we stand.”
Hunter laughed that off with mock horror, not meant unpleasantly.
“Move in? May Heaven forfend: what consternation would that cause in my dove-cotes? I mean, don’t think I’m spelling my rights out, Grimshaw, but I haven’t invited you to move in yet. Until I do—”
Was this the man who this morning had been so keen to see Councillor Whitcombe get his?
“You and I are friends, I hope, Grimshaw. I can’t quite think how we’re going to handle this if things don’t stay like that.”
“Of course things must stay like that.”
“And as for a missing file—you can safely leave that to me. It’s not entirely unprecedented, in offices the size of ours, for a file to go missing.”
No, Grimshaw supposed not.
“As a matter of fact, I know perfectly well where this one is. That bugger Whitcombe has it.”
That was more like it.
“Got it unofficially. Corner-cutting. Nothing on the record. Some Registry clerk’s going to have to have his knuckles rapped for connivance. But the file will come back. Slipped back where it belongs—or somewhere near to where it belongs. They’ll say it was a misfile. But I’ll catch the buggers this time. There’ll be papers missing from it of course, and we shall never know what they contained. Whitcombe’s got it out to weed it. He must be crossing palms, down in Registry. But I’ll have them, when they try to slip it back. I’m ready for them, this time.”
“Well, I’m always grateful to anyone who saves me work,” Grimshaw said, without energy. He was sick to the back teeth even of his own catch-phrases.
“Glad to be of service. No, seriously, Grimshaw, let’s get all the decks clear between us: there’ll come a day, and may it be soon, when you’ll come in through our main door with warrants. Until then, we mustn’t have Whitcombe and his pals scared into inactivity. I’ve got a feeling that it’s their next crime, not their last, that we’re going to get them for. Forward planning may be easier to spot than past history. And we are not going to catch them by issuing plain warnings that we’re lying in ambush.”
“I’m with you all the way, Hunter.”
“Good. I didn’t think we were going to have serious difficulties. So you’ll call your people off?”
“My people are not on.”
“Oh, come now! One minute you say we’re in full agreement, the next—”
“I’m handling this myself, in close collaboration with my Chief. The reason I wanted to see you again today was to clear everything with you.”
“But isn’t Inspector Mosley one of yours?”
“Mosley is more than fully occupied with murder and magic in Marldale.”
“Mosley was fully occupied this afternoon in the County Offices. He was in the Planning Department asking to see Councillor Whitcombe’s secretary.”
There were no messages in from Mosley. Mosley had been in County Hall this afternoon, if Hunter said so, but the sly old devil had been nowhere near police headquarters. Just for once, however, there was consolation. Just for once Mosley had so far compromised with contemporary practices as to establish an Incident Room. Grimshaw settled for an evening drive to Marldale.
But first he bought an evening paper: he always liked to inform himself early of public criticism of his Department and his colleagues. Yet tonight he had to search to find the word “police” in print. Even the name of “Crafty Jack” Mosley had not earned a reference. The hideous murder of an isolated old woman, relict of a family once considered influential, appeared to have devolved into a bet about church bells, the deployment of a pack of Alsatians and some obscure—and much-resented—threat to interfere with forthcoming Sheep Dog Trials. Grimshaw pictured the Assistant Chief Constable at home with that newspaper untidily unfolded across the arm of his chair. But this was what the ACC had said he wanted, wasn’t it: Mosley in Marldale, diverting attention from County Hall, spraying the horizon with sensational irrelevancies as field-labourers in the old days used to fan out horse-manure? The trouble with the ACC was that he did not always remember what he had said he wanted. And what were the chances, anyway, that Mosley would have Councillor Harry Whitcombe’s name in front-page headlines by tomorrow morning?
There was plenty of room for Grimshaw to park in the cold, deserted square of Upper Marldale, though he felt concerned about a gang of juvenile cyclists who were practising wheelies dangerously close to his cherished panels. It did not do for a Detective-Superintendent to drive about looking as if he had been scraped in street traffic.
“Where is the Incident Room?”
“What’s an Incident Room?”
“Where’s the Community Centre?”
“Over there. But there’s nothing on tonight.”
Nor was there, that was only too evident. And since no one had the lamp over his front door switched on tonight, Grimshaw had to go over to the door of the Centre to read the roughly lettered card that Mosley had pinned there. Grimshaw tried the door, though all was darkness inside. He hammered on the door; but Dick Hardcastle had gone home to watch snooker on telly.
So what now? Call in at the Crook, in case anyone in there was talking about the murder? No: stay away from the Crook. In case anyone in there was talking about the murder.
Had they not agreed that it was a good thing to leave everything in Mosley’s hands? Well—everything was in them.
Grimshaw went home.