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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

  John Greenwood

  Mosley By Moonlight

  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

  Mosley laid out on his bedside table all that a man could need for a night’s repose: his clasp-knife, his dented tin of black shag, his matches, his notebook and his leaking pre-war fountain pen. He hung his clothes over the chair, pulled the lap of his grey shirt as far over his knees as it would reach, slithered between the cold pub sheets and switched off the light. Five minutes later he switched it on again, scraped out his pipe, charged it and began to write.

  Events in Hadley Dale had turned his mind at once to Lottie Pearson. They would have done, even without the revelations of Percy Allnut, Chymist. It had never been far from the top of his mind that one day Lottie Pearson, through no intention of her own, was going to disturb the peace of Hadley Dale. He had felt even more concerned since she had shacked up with Matthew Longden. That, he believed, was the contemporary phrase. Lottie Pearson would probably never have heard it, and Matthew Longden would certainly not use it if he had.

  Percy Allnut, Chymist (he still had the archaic spelling in marbled lettering over his shop-front) had beckoned him in, the last market day he had been in Bradburn: a pair of knowingly suspicious eyes peeping between the Latin-labelled bottles of his window display. Percy sadly missed the day when his job had been to mix ingredients to the quantities prescribed. Now it was all brand names and trade leaflets. But his machines for pressing cachets and rolling pills, his cork-borers and suppository-moulds still lay handy on his bench—either in memory or as a symbol of hope.

  Secretive and elliptical in speech, old Percy missed out whole stages in his arguments, but expected his listeners to stay with him, which they might have done if he had reached his conclusions by the same logic as other men. Mosley always did his best to follow Percy. His conclusions were often worth hearing, however he had come by them. Today he showed Mosley a half-inch of greyish sludge in the bottom of a glass beaker.

  “Porridge.”

  It was safest not to comment too early.

  “Arsenic,” old Allnut added, his head nodding. “Reads too many books. Always did. Used to have four or five a week from the library when he lived in Bradburn. These writers are always slipping arsenic into people’s porridge. Wouldn’t work, you know. Too gritty. They’d notice.”

  Percy stopped talking, and for a moment Mosley faced the possibility that this was all.

  “Whose porridge?” he asked, after a long enough silence.

  “Matthew Longden’s lady-friend’s,” Percy said. “Brought it in this time last week for me to analyse. Very discreet. Not a word to a soul. Nods, winks, blind horses.”

  “And you found arsenic?”

  Allnut reached for a test-tube containing something cloudy in suspension.

  “Sand. Very peculiar, you know. Last time, it was the other way round. Not Scarborough sand. Not Blackpool. Egg-timer, I’d say. Fine stuff. Take the enamel off your teeth. Just about the right amount for the average egg-timer. And I ask you—why should history repeat itself—backwards?”

  They both knew what he was talking about: Matthew Longden’s first wife—well, his wife. He had never divorced her and, of course, had never been married to Lottie Pearson. His wife had put sand in his porridge. That was what had been assumed when he had brought a sample to be analysed by Percy Allnut. And Percy had tipped Mosley off, just as he had now. As was to be expected, no complaint had been put in. Matthew Longden was unaware that Mosley knew about it.

  “Mind you,” Percy said funereally, “when a man takes up with a foreign woman twenty years younger than himself, we must expect to find sand in somebody’s porridge.”

  The Assistant Chief Constable and Detective-Superintendent Thomas Grimshaw sat separately by their private hearths watching the early-evening television. The news of the day was unfolded: an armed conflict in Old Testament country and a parliamentary by-election reported on the dramatic lines originally developed by football commentators. During the ensuing magazine programme, the two men became traumatically attentive. Not only was one of their own uniformed constables being interviewed, but it was PC Joseph Ormerod, whom it was firm policy not to parade in the public view more than was avoidable. It was for this reason that Ormerod was stationed in a remote village in the very area where Mosley was the reigning genius and where, except for the oversight of compulsory sheep-dipping, it could be assumed that he would seldom have anything to do. Joe Ormerod, a burly, slow-moving, slow-speaking man in his late twenties, had a brow which sloped backwards like that of a certain species of ape, and which was almost totally obscured by a frieze of black eyebrows. It was this face that now looked out from their screens at Superintendent Grimshaw and the Assistant Chief Constable. Ormerod’s fierce concentration seemed to banish from his eyes any grain of intelligence that loyal friends might have claimed to discern there in his brighter moments.

  “Well, aye,” he was saying, with an uncharacteristic leaning towards enthusiasm. “I’d have said in my opinion, personally, meself, that it had one eye on a luminous stalk, about four feet long, waving about in front of it. Only it was not growing out of its head, where you’d expect a thing to have an eye on a stalk. It was growing out of where its chin would have been, if it had had a chin.”

  This was an extraordinarily long statement for Joe Ormerod to undertake. Tom Grimshaw guessed he was reading from a teleprompter, which might account for his expression of tortured application.

  “It was about half as big again as an ordinary human, and it had big feet—big, webbed, feet, like a frogman’s flippers.”

  “Did it speak to you?” the interviewer asked: Ellerman Tovey, a longstanding non-friend of the county force.

  “A few words.”

  “What were they?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t cotton to the language.”

  “And you weren’t afraid of this thing?”

  “I saw no cause to be. It had the look—well, it looked as if it had just been out rabbiting.”

  “Is it normal for creatures half as big agai
n as an ordinary human, and with eyes on stalks, to go rabbiting in Hadley Dale?”

  “It’s a situation I’ve not come across before,” Ormerod said.

  “And what have your superiors had to say about this?”

  “I haven’t reported it yet,” Ormerod said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that any offence has been committed, as far as the law of the land is concerned.”

  UFOs had not previously disturbed the peace of this shoulder of the hills. Then, a couple of nights ago, men returning home from rural hostelries had reported a luminous crystal dome in the middle distance.

  “You don’t think, for example,” Ellerman Tovey was saying, “that this might have been a fancy-dress cover-up for something like illegal immigration or drug traffic?”

  “We get very little of that sort of thing up Hadley Dale,” Joe Ormerod informed the viewing public. The Assistant Chief Constable’s face bore an expression that impelled his wife to bring him an unsolicited whisky and soda.

  Hadley Dale consisted of some thirty-six square miles of uncultivated fell and intake farmland. Bits of it that had once been in Lancashire were now in Yorkshire; and other bits vice versa. Commissions had redrawn boundaries and fuelled hostilities that the history-books said had come to an end in 1485. Hadley Dale was part of the vast, largely sterile tract for which Detective-Inspector Mosley was answerable. According to the latest census, it accommodated 503 of Her Majesty’s subjects, who did not constitute one of the Chief Constable’s major headaches. Should they ever constitute a minor one, it would undoubtedly suffice to farm the problem out to Mosley, in whose hands such things had a habit of vaporizing out of human knowledge. Mosley appeared to know every one of these 500-odd characters by their Christian names and had never been known to haul one of them out of the Dale for formal correction.

  Few would have called the men of the Dale imaginative but there was a poker-faced exaggeration of their run-of-the-mill story-telling. There was, for example, old Tom Appleyard’s yarn about reaching out with the crook of his stick for a field mushroom so well-developed that he found a sheep sheltering beneath it. There was Brad Oldroyd, returning home from the Plough through the private cemetery of the now derelict manor of Thurstock, who had seen not one, but forty-nine ghosts sitting on the edges of open graves. He had assured himself by counting their heads twice, in the archaic cardinals used in the neighbourhood for the numbering of flocks: eena, deena, pithera, pimp—

  Beneath their dour exteriors, Mosley’s people, with the possible exception of Joseph Ormerod, were a sensitive race, their lives constantly in fee to such imponderables as whether the changes in the country border might affect the climate. The unpunctuality of brewers’ deliveries also occasionally worried them. And they were somewhat remote from the real world, since they lived in the marginal reception area of several TV networks, which flickered across their screens in a jazzy haze. It seemed improbable that their inventiveness would extend to intergalactic scouts, yet here was PC Ormerod, casually assuming that Martians, Venusians, Betelgeusians, Alpha Centaurians or whatever had come here simply to trespass in search of coneys. And since he saw no way of bringing them into a court of law, he had not considered them worth reporting.

  Inspector Mosley was therefore sought, and, due to some atypical unpreparedness on his part, was located within less than half a day. He was ordered to go at once to Hadley Dale to scotch all rumours, and to prevent once and for all the fermentation of any myth or legend. Above all, he was to get hold of Joseph Ormerod—not in order to talk sense into him, for the ACC took a pragmatic view of mortal limitations—but to remind him in memorable terms of standing orders with respect to statements to the media.

  The evening after Mosley’s mission, the Superintendent and ACC were again sitting hypnotized by their tubes at a few minutes after six o’ clock. The regional newscast opened harmlessly enough. This time, the cameras were out in the field, on a relative plateau amid the slopes of Hadley Dale, panning in on six marks in the grass which might conceivably have been made by the landing-gear of a circular object some ninety feet in circumference. So far, innocuous enough: the furrows could have been made by almost anything. But the shock was still to come. A lecturer from Bradcaster Poly was called on to draw comparisons with other sightings of UFOs. The ACC snorted at his wife, and Superintendent Grimshaw laughed hollowly. A few seconds later, both men were sitting forward on the edges of their chairs.

  For the next expert witness was none other than Mosley. Mosley was being interviewed in the open air, standing by a broken gate between limestone walls: Mosley with his black homburg clamped absurdly straight on his head; Mosley with his buttonless raincoat flapping open to reveal his shiny blue suit and disreputable woollen cardigan. Mosley’s eyes, singularly sapped of life, were gazing inanely into the wrong camera.

  It was true to say—though they would not have conceded the point without reservations—that Grimshaw and the ACC set a certain value on Mosley. In his weatherbeaten bailiwick he was an accepted figure, though those who accepted him might not all be representative of the latter decades of this century. But the Force had to consider its prestige, and it did not care to advertise Mosley gratuitously outside his own proper corner.

  “I’d be grateful, Inspector Mosley, if you would tell viewers what you were telling me just now.”

  The ACC had tightened his grip on the arms of his chair. It was like seeing the approach of a dentist who is making a bad job of hiding the forceps in the palm of his hand. Mosley was staring into some tens of thousands of north-country living-rooms like a man taken unawares by the incomprehensible.

  “You actually encountered one of these creatures?”

  Mosley found his tongue.

  “That is correct.”

  “My God!” Tom Grimshaw said. “Did you see that jerky shift in the close-up? They’ve chopped this all over the place. God knows what Mosley actually said—but even God doesn’t know what the cutting-room will have made of it. Tovey’s turned this into a farce.”

  Mosley was goggling out of the screen like an imbecile. Ellerman Tovey helped him out in his kindliest kindergarten manner.

  “Could you describe him for us?”

  “He stood about seven foot three inches tall,” Mosley said.

  “With an eye on a stalk?”

  “Five eyes,” Mosley said. “On five stalks. Growing up out of the back of his neck. They came up and over the back of his head.”

  The ACC got out of his chair and began to pace up and down. In another, slightly less sought-after suburb of the same city, Tom Grimshaw was holding his breath.

  “And have you been able to form any theories, Mr. Mosley?”

  “It seems obvious to me—” Mosley was rattled—and he had never been an easy man to rattle—” it seems obvious to me that he had been left behind by the main body.”

  “You mean, he’d missed his saucer?”

  “He’d missed whatever he came by.”

  “And I understand you actually spoke to the creature?”

  “The creature spoke to me,” Mosley said, not without truculence.

  “You had no difficulty in understanding him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And what did he say to you?”

  “He wanted to know where was the nearest pub that’s in the Real Ale Guide.”

  Cut to “Nationwide.” Sue Lawley was sitting in the studio with a young man at a table loaded with dates. He was trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records for a stone-spitting marathon. Superintendent Grimshaw was already halfway across the room. He knew the phone was going to ring.

  “Does that bloody idiot,” the ACC wanted to know, “really think that extra-terrestrial beings come charging across several million light-years, having attended WEA classes in English, and with their CAMRA subscriptions paid up?”

  “I’m afraid Mosley was out of his depth,” Grimshaw attempted.

  “Depth? Depth? Mosley hasn’t got a depth. Hi
s Plimsoll line is round his ankles. He’s only got to step in a puddle and he’ll capsize. I want him in front of my desk at nine sharp in the morning, Tom.”

  “That might not be too easy,” Grimshaw said, he hoped persuasively. It was rare for him to side openly with Mosley, for fear of becoming too closely identified with him. But he had some sympathy with the way Mosley had fallen victim to Tovey.

  “It had better be more than easy,” the ACC said. “Nine sharp.”

  “I’ll try. But I have a feeling that Mosley’s going to be more than usually difficult to run to earth for a week or two.”

  “I expect the silly bugger will be up all night waiting to get away on the next saucer.”

  Chapter Two

  Mosley was aware that he had done badly, but had no way of knowing yet how badly. He knew that he had allowed himself to be overawed by technology. He did not realize how ruthlessly he was going to be edited, but he did know that the thing had been all over before he had said what he wanted to. He knew as well as the next man that this had nothing to do with astral reconnaissance. Even after half an hour of the Pennine wind on his cheeks, he still felt unsettled. It was rare for Mosley to be unsettled. He spent most of his time settling other people.

  Mosley was normally as integral a part of his environment as any tree, chimney-cowl or drystone wall. Now everything his eye lit upon seemed somehow alien. He had let his environment down at a time when it was under threat. He was under no illusion about these characters who had come to Hadley Dale. They brought disruption to the quiet, resigned lives that Mosley’s people wanted to be allowed to get on with. They had come up and shot their film on Matthew Longden’s land. If there’d been any trouble up there, Lottie Pearson would be at the hub of it. Lottie Pearson was trouble-prone. In the next few days he was going to have to be unusually mobile. He was going to listen unseen and watch unheard in places a long way apart. And this brought him up squarely against his never-vanishing problem of getting about. Now into his fifties, he was beginning to feel long in the tooth for the transport war that he had been waging for years with the Force.