Mists Over Mosley Read online

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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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  John Greenwood

  Mists Over Mosley

  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

  “Marldale?” the Assistant Chief Constable asked. “Whose pigeon?”

  “Mosley’s.”

  “Oh.”

  The Assistant Chief Constable bore the look that might cross the face of a woman who sees a cherished ear-ring swilled down the plug-hole of a bath.

  “In that case, perhaps, you yourself—Tom—”

  Detective-Superintendent Tom Grimshaw’s stomach was beginning to behave as it had done on the only occasion when he had gone down a coal mine. He suspected that the ACC had recently enjoyed a round of golf. The ACC did not play frequently or well, but he invariably returned to the office refreshed and rededicated—and as often as not charged with some piece of delicately confidential information that was worrying him stiff. It seldom had any bearing on any case-work that Grimshaw had in hand. Most usually it had nothing to do with any crime of a nature that ought to be concerning a Criminal Investigation Department at all. And without fail it required something difficult, protracted and unpleasant to be done with elegant diplomacy at once. But a sortie into Mosley’s jealously guarded territory behind Mosley’s back was a refinement that the ACC had not brought from the clubhouse before. Grimshaw adjusted his mind to impending disaster.

  “Witchcraft,” the Assistant Chief Constable said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A witches’ coven in Marldale.”

  The ACC’s eyes were becoming bulbous with the effort of willing the head of his CID to take him seriously.

  “I don’t know that there is anything still on the Statute Book—” Grimshaw began to say.

  “Oh, please, Tom—don’t think that this is official. This isn’t a complaint—an early warning, rather.”

  The ACC spread his hands as if he were disowning the very thing that he was talking about.

  “People get disturbed, you see. I dare say no law has been broken—but there are other sides to life, besides crime.”

  Grimshaw decided there was nothing for it but to listen solemnly for the next five minutes.

  “When you say witchcraft, sir—you mean the evil eye? Black Mass—that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, good God no, Tom. Nothing as sickening as that. Just hints of things that were not dreamed of in the philosophy of that fellow Horatio. A church clock, for example, that rewound itself after leaving the village ignorant of the time for three weeks.”

  “That must have wrought havoc with the pace of life in Marldale.”

  “A Rhode Island rooster who refuses to service his concubines.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t fancy them. I’m not sure whether it’s possible for a cock to be a queer—”

  The ACC displayed that expression of tolerance which allowed his subordinates their little joke not more than one per session.

  “And there is the very odd case indeed of a man who was able to predict to a nicety the score of each of his last three darts in an inter-pub league match.”

  “I should have thought that that was the object of the game, as played by most perfectionists.”

  “Ah, but this strains credulity.”

  The ACC brought out his pocket diary, on one of the back pages of which he had written down the details. He must be taking the matter very seriously indeed to have gone to the length of taking notes.

  “Seventeen, treble nineteen and double six.”

  “That seems a rational goal for a man with eighty-six to get.”

  “Ah, but how was he able to announce in the bar of the Crook Inn a week previously that eighty-six was what he would need to get, and that that was the combination by which he would achieve it?”

  “I don’t know. How was he?”

  “Priscilla Bladon told him.”

  “Priscilla Bladon?”

  “Old maid of the said parish. Occasional poet, whose verses appear gratuitously from time to time in the pages of the Marldale and Pringle Gazette, who has for many years read the tea-leaves at the Marldale annual Church Fête, but whose previous life has otherwise been blameless. It is in Miss Bladon’s house that the coven regularly meets.”

  The idleness—well, no, better call it the leisureliness—of life in villages like Marldale did, of course, give rise to gossip of a remarkably inventive character. But the ACC, having embarked upon his thesis, would resent interruption.

  “It was Priscilla Bladon who predicted that the church clock would spontaneously wind itself and return to duty. It was Miss Bladon who forecast the impotence of Tommy Robinson’s rooster. It was Miss Bladon who told Harry Akeroyd not only how many he would have to score at darts, but by what precise digits he was going to score it.”

  “I am sure that all these things admit of a rational explanation.”

  “And so am I, Tom. What sort of an idiot do you take me for? What I want you to do is find out what that rational explanation is. It might help you to know—”

  The ACC picked up his diary again.

  “—the names of Miss Bladon’s associates. The coven meets regularly under her roof, and the two other participants are a Mrs. Susan Bexwell and a Ms. Deirdre Harrison. Mrs. Bexwell is an ordinary housewife who has somehow fallen under Priscilla Bladon’s spell—she is married to a research chemist in Flavour Controls, Ltd., down in Pringle. And Ms. Harrison is a social worker operating in Pringle—a professional young woman who certainly ought to know better.”

  Ought to know better than to be a social worker? Grimshaw wanted to ask. But he knew from experience that the ACC was unlikely to find that funny.

  “You are suggesting that I should give this priority?” Grimshaw asked. “The muggings in Bradburn are taking up a deal of time.”

  He knew what pressure certain district councillors were putting o
n to get that beastliness cleared up.

  “The Bradburn muggings always happen at night, and you can pop up to Marldale in the daytime,” the ACC said, as free as ever with other men’s time. “This sort of nonsense disturbs a community, Tom—and I do not care for my communities to be disturbed.”

  His communities: he was becoming as patriarchal as Mosley.

  “Sir. But do you not think that Mosley—?”

  “I do not want you to put Mosley on to this. Mosley is too likely to make a heavy meal of it.”

  “What’s the betting, sir, that Mosley knows all about it already? Very little goes on on Mosley’s ground that he can’t account for.”

  “I do not want Mosley to be involved, Tom.”

  “For my money, he’ll already be involved.”

  “I mean involved by us.”

  The Assistant Chief Constable looked uncomfortable. He was a man who displayed his tensions and uncertainties in every tic.

  “I was very fortunate to come by this information, Tom. I do not want my informant to be harassed in any way. The way Mosley would be likely to handle it—”

  “I don’t suppose, sir, that I might talk to your informant?”

  Dangerous ground.

  “I think on the whole better not, Tom.”

  He always resented the convention that allowed his officers to keep the names of their narks and grasses secret. He pounced on any opportunity to pay them back. Besides, he always got a kick from playing the detective: it happened rarely enough in his life.

  “It will be much more interesting to see what conclusions you can reach starting from scratch.”

  Any assignment originating from this desk was guaranteed to be as difficult as pre-conditions and secret saving clauses could make it.

  Chapter Two

  Marldale has a triple connotation. There is the dale itself, a swooping declivity, generally mist-ridden and clad in forty greens of heather, bracken and tufty grass. It defies the elements in a tract that Boundary Commissions are forever shunting about between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Upper Marldale, not unreasonably, is a village at the head of the valley. When men in towns as ignorant as Bradburn and Pringle speak of Marldale, it is Upper Marldale that they mean. Lower Marldale lies at the bottom end of the decline, a distinctly lesser place, seldom spoken of even among the well-informed. Older men who did a spell of their wartime service in Lower Marldale usually prefer not to recall the fact: the hamlet was host to an army Glasshouse, whose barbed-wired and Nissen-hutted compound is now decrepit and insanitary, and houses a commune of creative artists whose talents remain for the most part unacknowledged.

  When Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw considered British winters, he often marvelled that any human tribe should have chosen to make its home on this offshore island. It could only have been some subtle act of race penance that had inspired a branch of it to settle under the dominating nebulosity of Marldale. And yet newcomers were still arriving—and remaining.

  Why, in fact, did Upper and Lower Marldale exist at all? Grimshaw knew the answer—in theory: sheep. Sheep could maintain themselves on the flanks of the valley without the import of foodstuffs, and the men who managed and tended the sheep had to house themselves. Other men had come to quarry stone, then others to build more houses and attend to defects in the health and plumbing of those living in them. Others came to trade in victuals and ale, in postage stamps and coal—and some to burgle, defraud and do violence to their neighbours. But crimes of more than ordinary ingenuity were relatively rare in the dale and were well within the professional capacity of Detective-Inspector Mosley, to whom the locality was assigned, together with a great many square miles of similarly occupied territory.

  Mosley’s patch gave little administrative anxiety to Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw, but this was not because he considered it safe in Mosley’s hands. On the contrary, such petty wrinkles of unrest as Grimshaw did suffer on account of Mosley’s area almost always derived from the fact that Mosley had been temporarily active in it.

  When Grimshaw paid working visits to his subordinates’ domains, he considered it a point of decency to let them know his intentions in advance. In this case he had omitted to do so, prompted not only by the Assistant Chief Constable’s orders (which he was capable of ignoring) but by the intuitive, niggling certainty that if there was trouble on Mosley’s patch, Mosley was likely to be found somewhere close to the nerve-centre of it.

  Grimshaw was never entirely at his ease in country of the kind that he assigned to Mosley. He knew himself, objectively, to be a good policeman: clear-minded, sincere, informed-to-date and systematic—but he was half-consciously aware that he lacked something. Whenever trouble occurred, people in settlements like Upper Marldale swarmed from their cottages and crannies to tell Mosley all about it; they kept out of Grimshaw’s way. When Mosley went into murky drinking-shops like the Crook Inn, Upper Marldale men became jovial at the sight of him; when Grimshaw entered, they quietly finished their drinks and slipped off home. There was something missing in his make-up. Was it the common touch? Or was it that he was secretly afraid of his intellectual, hierarchical and social inferiors? (Come to that, did Mosley consider himself superior to anyone at all—except possibly his Detective-Superintendent and the ACC?)

  Grimshaw went to the Crook Inn. He had to—there was nowhere else to go. And he knew nobody in the village, had no back-up informants to help assess the veracity of anyone who, in defiance of all natural laws, was prepared to linger and talk to him.

  He was quite unexpectedly relieved to see that he had the bar almost to himself and even rose within grasp of joy to see the quality of the only other drinker. For he was a man in well-preserved early old age, with retired officer written all over him: in his moustache, in the hair cropped close at the sides of his largely bald head, in his ancient sports-coat with its cuff and elbow leathers and in his Western Desert corduroys. This was not the sort of man who would talk to him in some recondite dialect, then laugh at him for failing to understand it.

  Major Hindle—as Grimshaw was later to identify him—nodded politely when Grimshaw came in. Clearly he regarded the pub as his regimental mess and himself under obligation as the senior officer present. Grimshaw ordered himself a half-pint of mild, then put into effect a set-the-ball-rolling drill of which he was rather proud—it showed, he considered, a creditable resourcefulness. He stepped out of the front door, looked up at the church tower and then came back in again.

  “Is your church clock right?”

  “Back it against any chronometer in the kingdom, sir.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Mind you, thereby hangs a tale, as the kitchen-maid said to the gardener’s boy. Rum bloody do altogether. Not that I believe all the claptrap that was talked at the time, you understand, but a man has to accept things when they happen. Still, you mustn’t let me bore you.”

  “I assure you—I love local yarns—bit of a connoisseur of them, as a matter of fact. I say—what are you drinking?”

  The Major patted an empty inside pocket.

  “Bit of an embarrassment, actually. Left my wallet at home. Never come out with the price of more than one pint in my pocket before lunch. So I shan’t be able to reciprocate. Unless of course—”

  He looked hopefully at the man behind the bar.

  “Unless Len here will allow me to sign a chit.”

  Len nodded agreement—not happily.

  “Well, then—let me tell you this tale. And Len here will stop me if I utter a syllable that’s not true.”

  Len pulled him a pint, which required no consultation.

  “This all happened last March. Marldale church clock has always, it seemed, had a reputation for temperament. Vestry records are full of complaints, going back to the month that the thing was put in—and that was early eighteenth century. And so it went on, through the Napoleonic wars, the first war and the second. Until Peter Muller came to live here—oh, that’s all of thirty years ago
. German—ex-prisoner of war. They’d put him out to work as a farmhand, and he married a local girl, opted to stay on. But he’d served his time as a clock-maker in Stuttgart. And the work he did in this village on people’s time-pieces was nobody’s business. Nobody’s business. Brought him in a small fortune. I’ll swear every watch and mantel-clock in Marldale has been spot on to the second since the second world war. So one day the parochial church council had the notion of putting Peter Muller in charge of our church clock. They paid him an annual honorarium—fifteen quid—and for that he had to keep it oiled, wound, and going. Which he did. Until last March.”

  Major Hindle flushed his organs of speech with bitter beer.

  “And last March the poor bugger had a stroke. They stuck him in hospital in Pringle. And the first thing we know here, he hasn’t been away forty-eight hours, the church clock stops. I might say it caused great inconvenience.”

  He looked mischievously at Len.

  “We didn’t know when it was closing time.”

  “You never bloody do,” Len said.

  “And there was local controversy. There were voices in favour of putting the job out to tender, going as far afield as Bradcaster, maybe. Others said no, that would be unfair to Peter. Besides, word might get round to him, down in Pringle—and if he felt he’d been done out of the job that he loved, it might set him back no end. So finally we decided that we’d live without our clock until such time as Peter Muller comes home.”

  “If he ever bloody does.” Len said.

  “But that was reckoning without Priscilla Bladon.”

  “Gentleman doesn’t know who Priscilla Bladon is.”

  “No, well—she’s Priscilla Bladon. I’m sure the gentleman will take my word on that point. What matters is that she and a couple of others—their names wouldn’t mean a thing to you—had been giving it out that they were going into witchcraft. Friday nights are special occasions, at Miss Bladon’s place. Load of old cod’s-wallop, that stands out a mile—but they did tell Tommy Robinson he was wasting his time putting that clutch of eggs under his broody. Didn’t they, Len?”