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  Contents

  John Greenwood

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  John Greenwood

  Mosley Went to Mow

  John Greenwood

  John Greenwood is the pseudonym of John Buxton Hilton. He was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring in 1970 to take up full-time writing.

  He wrote two books on language teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer – his works include the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series.

  Chapter One

  ‘It had better be looked into,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said. ‘The Hemp Valley Advertiser? Who’s our man in the Hemp Valley?’

  ‘Mosley,’ Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw said, with that look of reluctant apology that drained his features whenever he had to admit that responsibility. ‘And he’s just started his annual leave.’

  The relationship between Grimshaw and Mosley was not entirely straightforward. More than once in the past, against all the canons of sane judgement, Grimshaw had found himself defending Mosley in indefensible positions. And Mosley was not beyond finding himself in an indefensible position, even on holiday. The ACC, on the other hand, had never taken any chances in his defence.

  ‘Well, that’s a good thing from everybody’s point of view,’ he said. ‘You’d better slip up there and cast an eye over it yourself, Tom. Just to be on the safe side. Find out who owns this thing. Ask him what the hell he’s been doing with it. And if he’s had any answers to his advertisement, find out who’s shown any interest. Try to fathom his motives. Just in case, Tom.’

  ‘Mosley could probably tell us,’ Grimshaw said. ‘He does have a habit of knowing what’s going on in those parts.’

  ‘All the same, let’s wallow in such luxuries as Providence affords. Let Mosley recharge whatever it is that’s doing relief duty for his batteries. Where has he gone for his leave?’

  ‘The Hemp Valley, I believe.’

  ‘Is he mad?’

  The Assistant Chief Constable had more than once provided a spontaneous answer to that question.

  ‘I’m speaking figuratively, sir. What I mean is, he usually does spend his leave dodging about in his own area. But he always takes strong exception to being treated as if he were available for duty.’

  ‘All the same, you could just find him and ask him –’

  ‘I think I’ll nip up and see for myself, sir.’

  He looked down again at the newspaper cutting that the Chief had passed him.

  FOR SALE: GALLOWS. In good working order. £10 o.n.o. Box No 862. HVA.

  Grimshaw looked in his diary, to see when he could spare a couple of hours.

  Chapter Two

  From the diary of Elizabeth Stirrup for Thursday, 7 April

  Drove the last sixty miles in increasing anxiety. Is there any wisdom in trying to revive the ambiguous past? Felt more comfortable within an hour of arrival. Miss Crane (she wants me to call her Georgie!) has changed, but she is brisk and alert, despite ageing joints. And she has become astoundingly worldly. Or perhaps worldly is hardly the word to use. The world is different in the Hemp Valley.

  Wild countryside – I had expected its reputation to be exaggerated. The landscape is untamed (untamable?) and the wind round the Old Schoolhouse last night was of the sort that taught primitive man to believe in evil gods.

  Except for drystone walls, subsiding in places into their own rubble – many of them dated from the earliest Enclosure Acts – it was possible to take in whole quadrants of landscape unscarred by man: except for man’s sheep, who wandered as they would have done if they had belonged to no one. And except for the Old Railway, so overgrown that one could barely guess where the tracks had lain. Georgina evidently had a soft spot for the railway. She slowed up on a crest – a brow, she called it, almost childishly proud of the way she had adopted local words – so that they could look at a gritstone bridge that carried a farmer’s track over a cutting. Two parties of young people were strung out along the bank, one of them of schoolchildren in bobbed woollen caps, carrying haversacks. The other, smaller group was of older adolescents, carrying more portentous equipment: clipboards, a theodolite, measuring chains and surveyors’stakes.

  ‘You see, it’s all come and gone. The Industrial Revolution gashed its way even across this fell. But the fell has claimed its own back. Those youngsters are looking for traces of what their grandparents grew up with.’

  It was Friday noon. They were doing Meals on Wheels, had driven to a dye-works canteen in a grimy valley bottom, where the food was cooked, and were going the rounds of isolated old people in frighteningly remote hill cottages. How did anyone survive a winter up here? There seemed to be a superabundance of characters – or was the Heron romanticizing as of old? A woman called Emily Smithers had an arthritic hip and could barely get across to the ancient side-oven in which she was warming her plate. Yet Miss Crane said it would be wrong to make any move to help her: she needed to believe in her independence. And the old girl laughed like a middle-school educationally subnormal over some X-rated horror she said she had seen last night on the telly.

  At another home they stopped, not to deliver food, but apparently just to pass the time of day. It was a modern building, but in the local stone and with the local lines: squat, defiant, uninformative about itself. And it was swarming with children, snotty-nosed and broken-kneed, sturdily unaware that they had just passed through one of the harshest winters in Hemp Valley memory. The sole responsible adult seemed to be a dirty old crone in her advanced seventies, who was even less mobile than the woman with the bad hip.

  ‘Squatters,’ Georgina Crane said. ‘But respectable. All the adults are out working – or looking for work. The house was built for themselves by a married couple who have never lived in it – who, in fact, have never cohabited at all. That’s a tale for tonight –’

  ‘But are those children safe?’

  ‘Perfectly – and loved. Grandma can cope. I look in twice a week: Age Concern. Just to keep track. But we don’t like to interfere with any domestic set-up that is obviously working.’

  They called at a cottage two hundred years old, the prototype of the squatters’place: a dead garden, littered with the detritus of survival – abandoned cold-frames, an upturned old copper boiler, rhubarb pushing up through the holes with which it was riddled, a museum-piece gas cooker, lying on its back.

  ‘The Protectorate’, it said over the door, in home-pain
ted lettering, unevenly spaced and inconsistently styled.

  ‘His name’s Cromwell,’ Miss Crane said. ‘Given names John William, but known in our little world as Noll. A Roundhead, warts and all. He will do his best to be insulting. If he says anything gross, say something gross back at him. That’s what he’s angling for – stimulus.’

  From the back of the house came the sounds of a mower – a strenuous rhythm of short jolts and jerks, as if the blades were jammed, clogged, or worn beyond redemption. The worker was a short, stubby man in a black homburg hat and an unbuttoned raincoat that flapped shapelessly behind him as he pushed at a machine which refused to go more than a yard at a time without human attention to its cogs. Miss Crane gave him good morning. But the first reaper of the season, undaunted by the temperament of his machine, pushed stubbornly on with his back to them, deaf to her voice.

  Indoors, the latterday Protector was sitting at his kitchen table, eating from a plate a rough-hewn wedge of bread, which he had plastered with soft yellow butter. He was another character in his seventies, and he was wearing an ancient felt hat.

  ‘Did you forget we were coming today, Mr Cromwell?’

  ‘I was hoping you weren’t,’ he said, extracting the maximum ill grace from the situation. ‘I thought the schools were on holiday, kitchens closed.’

  ‘They are. This has been cooked at the dye works.’

  ‘It looks like it. In the bloody dye. What’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s an excellent casserole.’

  ‘I shall try it on the bloody cat first.’

  ‘If you waste it, I shall see you get no more. Ever. And watch your language. I have a lady with me.’

  Cromwell gave Elizabeth Stirrup the advantage of a lewd rolling eyeball.

  ‘Feed her up a bit. She could be good for a tumble in a hayrick if she had a bit of flesh on her bones.’

  ‘Don’t be so disgusting. I see you have free labour outside.’

  ‘That interfering bugger!’

  ‘You ought to be grateful. And why do you have to keep swearing? Can’t you use some world like flipping? Why is Mr Mosley mowing your lawn?’

  ‘It’s do-flipping-good week, for some flipping club he flipping belongs to. I told him, if he could get the flipping wheels to flipping turn, he was welcome to try to push the flipping thing.’

  ‘Self-educated,’ Georgina said, as they let themselves out. ‘Quite remarkably well read – though unselectively, of course. A married man. I was best man at his wedding.’

  She was hardly recognizable as the Miss G. Crane, BA (Hons), who had fired E. Stirrup with enthusiasm for Keats and Jane Austen in the Lower Sixth.

  ‘Best man at his wedding,’ Elizabeth said. ‘That’s not a bad throwaway line.’

  ‘Somebody had to make sure he knew where to look for the altar.’

  ‘And where’s his wife?’

  ‘We shall be calling on her next. They are the couple I told you had never lived together.’

  ‘You mean the ones who built the house that the squatters are in?’

  ‘Correct. He had been courting Janie Goodwin for eighteen years.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘More than one thing. And there’s more than one theory. Almost everyone in Hempshaw End has a separate version. Good morning, Mr Mosley. You didn’t hear me when I spoke to you just now.’

  The mower was manhandling his contraption for a return trip across the prairie, and was now facing them. He waved with what might have been merriment, except that his face wore the expression of concentrated ferocity that the rusty machinery demanded of him. He was a man in his fifties, fell-weathered, and with something hobgoblinish in the tilt of his eyebrows. He stooped to ease back the cutting-cylinder and removed a large chunk of badly bruised grass.

  ‘He’s a Detective-Inspector,’ Georgina whispered. ‘We don’t see a lot of him. They never seem to provide him with proper transport, so he has to walk the fells from one crime to another. Not that Hempshaw End has contributed to the Chamber of Horrors.’

  They got into her car and skirted the village. Hempshaw End had rather fewer than a thousand inhabitants, settled about the spider’s legs of three cloughs and the brook-valley that they fed. There were elderly couples here who remembered having to live off what the soil had to offer. Nowadays most people commuted to Bradburn, where they made some sort of livelihood out of selling things to each other. There were one or two who, in pursuit of some far-fetched dream, had come here to retire. Janie Goodwin lived in a small and expressionless cottage at the lower end, set in a stony triangular patch, which she had trimmed into a well-informed rock garden.

  Georgina pulled in close under Janie’s wall. Why, Elizabeth wondered, was she still called Goodwin if she was married to Cromwell? Presumably Hempshaw End was either immovably conservative or bluntly realistic.

  Georgina went to the boot to get Janie Goodwin’s stew and supporting stodge. Elizabeth waited for her by Janie’s gate, looking idly at her rather natty lace curtains, oddly at odds with the card bearing the roughly sketched outline of a fish, which stood on the upper ledge of the window: a rudimentary design, with a V mouth, a round eye and deformed fins – incongruous against the generally well-cared-for window-space. There were luxuriant growths of epiphyllum, potted hyacinths and a wealth of pedestalled greenery. Georgina, when she reappeared, was curiously startled by the sight of the diagrammatic fish.

  ‘She refused to participate. She was bitter and blasphemous when we spoke to her about it.’

  There was no time for an explanation now. Georgina eventually told Elizabeth the facts. The fish sign – the younger woman had a feeling of mild guilt that she ought to have known – had apparently been widely used as a call for recognition and succour among the early Christian churches and it had been adopted as a cry for help by one of the twentieth-century organizations with which Georgina busied herself. In case of emergency, old people were implored to put their fish sign in their windows. Janie Goodwin, whatever her crisis, had evidently had to sketch her own. She was a woman as scornful of society in her own way as her husband, John William Cromwell, was in his. There were certain strata with which she did not care to be identified, and she apparently found little to admire in professed Christians.

  So if she was appealing to them now …

  It looked, when they opened the door, as if they were already too late to be of effective assistance. Janie Goodwin’s living-room had been hurriedly and furiously wrecked. Pedestals had been knocked about the floor. A Wedgwood urn was in fragments, vases had been shattered, upholstery ripped and a sofa and two armchairs were lying on their backs. The first impression was that somewhere under all this destruction, Janie Goodwin must be helplessly pinned, and the women’s first action was to manhandle broken furniture to see if they could find her. But there was no sign of the owner of the wreckage.

  Miss Crane went into the other rooms calling Janie by name, but without response. In the meanwhile Miss Stirrup had gone into the kitchen, where she found what she believed to be a patch of blood, still slightly tacky, on the strip of coconut matting in front of the sink. She also found an empty quart Guinness bottle of obsolete pattern, whose label was stained with what seemed to be the same sticky substance. To this congealment there adhered a few wisps of grey hair.

  Georgina Crane remained in admirable control. She forbade Elizabeth Stirrup to touch anything more than they had already touched. She drove them fast back to the Protectorate, hoping to enlist Mosley’s expertise.

  But Mosley was no longer there. Giving the decrepit old mower his best, he had apparently gone off to do unspecified good elsewhere.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Does anyone know where I can find Mosley?’

  And a delighted chorus informed Grimshaw of what he already knew.

  ‘He’s on leave, sir.’

  ‘But doesn’t anyone know where he is?’

  It was well known that Mosley never travelled far on his hol
idays. As often as not, an overdue bout of interior decoration in his own home brought him back to duty refreshed after only a few days.

  ‘Put out discreet enquiries, someone.’

  It was not that Grimshaw felt that he needed Mosley. Indeed, he was tempted to agree with the ACC that Mosley’s absence from a major enquiry was more than they had the right to hope for. But Hempshaw End was exclusively and peculiarly Mosley country. And – though not much of it had to do with crime – Mosley had a habit of knowing a good deal of what went on in his country. Moreover, Grimshaw had not yet had the time to trace the gentleman who had no further use for his gallows. And Mosley was bound to know.

  But you could never be certain how Mosley might react to an attempt to interrupt his leave. He might resent being omitted from debates about people whom he regarded in some obscure sub-tribal way as belonging to him. He did not exactly comport himself as a minor chieftain, but there was more than a hint of the witch-doctor about him. He did not like other people trying to mix medicine on his patch – but on the other hand he might vehemently refuse to be dislodged from his repose.

  But the Assistant Chief Constable was surprised that Grimshaw should even momentarily want Mosley out on the ground.

  ‘Unless of course you have some private reason for wanting the case to be strung out over a year or so.’

  ‘It’s not that. I scent an eccentric.’

  ‘That’s like “The Leith Police dismisseth us”. We ought to remember that one, in case they ever revive the old type of drunken-driving test.’

  ‘What I mean, sir, is that Mosley does have his friends.’

  ‘There is no accounting for people’s tastes in people.’

  The on-the-spot evidence was not at all helpful. Like everyone else in Hempshaw End, Janie Goodwin lived with her back door unlocked. She put it on the chain only when she went to bed. People in Hempshaw End were not thieves. So there had been no difficulty of access.