What Me, Mr 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

  John Greenwood

  What, Me, Mr 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

  Bagshawe Broome: an 1860s town hall whose solid neogothic furbelows proclaim the venerability of the borough fathers of the day. A century and a quarter later it is a grimy pile, though it is at least three decades since soot has been dispersed from any of the town’s mill chimneys. Indeed, all but one of those chimneys has by now been caused to bite its own dust, the exception being Bowland’s, up Mere Brow, which, although visibly idle and unsafe, has enjoyed several stays of execution, thanks to the efforts of the litigious members of the BIAS, the Bagshawe Industrial Archaeology Society, to have a preservation order slapped on to it.

  Bagshawe Broome: a Saturday in October. A three-ton lorry, loaded with ironmongers’ sundries, is endeavouring to retract over the cobbles between market stalls, to the voluble and profane distress of the driver of a greengrocer’s van who has been trying for the last ten minutes to reverse out. Housewives are compelled to reverse their shoulders into piles of Common Market apples and a small child on a tricycle runs over the foot of the deputy mayoress. A uniformed constable, scenting a situation, disappears up an alley between the Midland Bank and The Cheapest Discount Stores in the North-West, where there is no situation.

  But another member of the same force is in the thick of the trading. A solid little man with his greatcoat flapping open, a black homburg jammed tightly and evenly on his head, is gazing at a stall from behind a band of enthusiastic pickers-over of the goods on offer.

  Two things may be giving him food for thought. One is the merchandise itself, which includes a single (left-footed) dancing shoe, possibly abandoned by a Cinderella in some Palais de Danse of the late 1920s; a wooden smoothing plane, perfectly usable if its purchaser can find a wedge and a blade to fit it; a silver-plated Edwardian writing-stand, complete but for one of its inkwells; and a small, heavily gilt-framed oil-painting, so patinaed with a century’s escape of smoke from a coal-fire that it has acquired a certain superficially Rembrandtesque quality.

  Dickie Holgate, General Dealer, a young, charismatically energetic, cheerfully bantering man in shirt sleeves is in no way apologetic for any defects in his stock-in-trade. As Found has become the commercial motto of his stall. Every emptor speculates under this perpetual caveat, and the second thing that may possibly have impressed Detective-Inspector Mosley is the eager acquisitiveness of Bagshawe. A middle-aged woman, who looks affluent enough to toast by electricity, has just given fifty pence for a metal toasting fork. Manufactured between the wars, its prongs are bent and stained, as if it has been used for unclogging something. A man is tendering two pound coins for a Number Two Brownie box camera that looks as if it has spent some years under a pile of rotting leaves. And two women are about to fall out over an ebonite letter-opener with a furry handle fashioned like a goat’s foot.

  There is reason behind Bagshawe’s herd desire to invest in wartime civilian respirators, cockle-shell-encrusted cameos of blue skies over Morecambe, pre-steam-age flat-irons and walking-sticks with gun-metal knobs. Three months ago television’s Antiques Road Show set up shop in Bradcaster Corn Exchange. Staid couples from as far afield as Hadley Dale and Lower Pattershaw travelled to the city clutching brown paper parcels. An OAP from Upper Crudshaw had a blue and white Lowestoft porringer, now valued by the experts at £2,000, from which a dynasty of cats had been lapping up meanly watered milk for the last forty-five years. An elderly brother-and-sister from Bradburn brought in an elegantly French eighteenth-century bread hutch, bought two world wars ago by their great-uncle for half a crown at an auction in Cleckheaton. They were now advised to insure it for four figures. A Martin Brothers mask jug, which had been catching drips under a leaky roof up Lanthorn Hill, was reserved for special exhibition at the end of the programme: Jug of the Match.

  The programme had given Bagshawe Broome food for thought. For years, as elderly relatives had departed, Bagshawe Broome had been disposing, sometimes with secretive ingenuity, of just such trifles as were now changing hands at stratospheric figures. Systematically they began to reacquire such similar objects as they could find on sale at As Found valuation. In every market place from Rawtenstall to Settle there was now a stall run by men like Dickie Holgate, some of them palpably more honest than others, who were keeping potential treasures in circulation at keenly competitive prices.

  And it seemed that even Inspector Mosley was in the field for the appreciation of once-despised junk. He positively elbowed his way to the counter’s edge and put his hand on a Victorian leather correspondence-case for which a woman in a hand-knitted tam o’shanter was just reaching out. She looked at him murderously and he removed himself rapidly to another sector of the display, where he picked up a George III butter-knife. Then he went for the incomplete inkstand, whose tarnished silver plaque bore the engraved initials WFH.

  Dickie Holgate, who considered himself on excellent terms with the Inspector, watched his acquisitive keenness with some amusement.

  ‘That’ll be eleven pounds altogether, Mr Mosley.’

  ‘You’ll have to be satisfied with a receipt,’ Mosley said.

  Dickie laughed.

  ‘Well, if the credit of the law isn’t sound, I don’t know what is.’

  Mosley did not answer. He looked at the stall-holder with the sort of intensity that froze his smile.

  ‘I won’t hang about now. I’ll come back and see you before you pack up.’

  He hurried away, as if he did not want to interfere with the trade: in the presence of their most unpredictable policeman, there was a noticeable tendency of people to retreat a few yards. He did not go far, but sat down on an empty box at the end of Jimmy Brigg’s fruit-stall and came back with three official slips that he handed to Holgate. He was about to turn away again, but Holgate did not want to be kept in suspense.

  ‘You’re not worried about those bits of things, are you, Mr Mosley?’

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ Mosley said, almost ventriloquially, as if he did not want to
be heard by any of the curiously watching customers.

  ‘What, me, Mr Mosley? I can tell you where I got these. House clearance. Garth. Bowland Avenue. Tim Fawcett, the auctioneer, put it my way.’

  ‘I’ll come and have a word with you before you’ve packed up.’

  Chapter Two

  Garth, Bowland Avenue: Henry Burgess. Mosley had known him, as indeed had anyone else who had at any time strolled the streets of Bagshawe Broome.

  Bowland Avenue was an unmade-up cul-de-sac leading out of the middle of Dickinson Road. Dickinson Road, which lay between the town centre and its outer ring of newer houses, was a haven of substantial red-brick Victorian villas that at the zenith of Bagshawe Broome’s prosperity had been the preserve of mill-owners, senior professional men and the type of negotiant who commuted daily to Bradcaster or Manchester. Bowland Avenue served a single house, set back and apart from the autocratic residences of Dickinson Road as if it disdained them. It was vaster than any of them and set in jealously enclosed grounds that dwarfed them all – as indeed had done its founder-resident, the Bowland of Bowland’s, whose now smokeless and perilous chimney the die-hards of BIAS still wished to preserve. When Bowland died in the early 1920s, his house was bought by Henry Burgess – to be more exact, by Henry Burgess’s newly acquired wife – and there were few in Bagshawe Broome now who could remember anyone but Henry Burgess living at Garth.

  Mosley knew Henry Burgess by reputation, and indulged in polite small-talk with him on several occasions: Henry Burgess was prepared to accede to polite small-talk with anyone whom he had seen about for a minimum of twenty years, or for whom he had ever cashed a cheque at the Midland Bank. Mosley also knew that Burgess had died a few weeks ago, of natural and not unexpected causes, on the threshold of his ninety-fourth year. Burgess was a former bank clerk, whose forty-odd years of service had not elevated him beyond cashier, and who had retired before computers and credit cards. True, he had come in a little later than Dickensian hand-ruled ledgers, but he carried the look of those days about with him. It was three decades since Henry Burgess had last double-counted a stack of notes, so there was no one in Bagshawe under the age of fifty who could picture him even doing that. It was sixty-three years since he had become a widower, so no one in the town could truthfully remember his wife. It was still said that he had been inconsolably grieved by his bereavement, and that that accounted for his inaccessibility and lack of friends. In fact for the last twenty years, most of those who might have been his friends were themselves already dead.

  The wife of whom present-day Bagshawe could speak only notionally had brought significant funds to their union: hence Garth, which even at the Midland Bank was said to be absurdly above his station. But he continued to live there, alone, for more than sixty less-than-glorious years and had managed the house without help until after his seventieth birthday, when the awe-inspiring Mrs Toplady had started coming in to do for him. That arrangement had finished abruptly about two years ago and no account of the supposed breach had been released by either side. There was speculation by the curious, and rather more by those with a taste for the grotesque, but no one really believed the stories that were current for a time. It was generally thought – not that anyone cared – that what had happened was simply a clash of inflexible temperaments. Various welfare workers had inserted toes round Henry Burgess’s front door, but he had resisted all attempts to get a helpful footing into his regime. At one time his GP bullied him into suffering meals on wheels to be delivered to him twice a week, but he complained querulously about the quality of the food and was eventually so rude to a voluntary helper that the team refused to enter his premises again.

  He was a dark-suited, lantern-cheeked man with a jaw like a snow-plough. He belonged to a distant past and his gait and bearing made it clear that he did not want things otherwise. Until he was eighty he had had acquaintances whom he was prepared tacitly to tolerate, and one evening a week he would make his slow way across to Bagshawe Broome’s grossly misnamed Literary Club to play a few hands of nasty-tempered bridge, the cards mattering to him more than did anyone at the table. For many years his midday meal was a sandwich or pie from Bert Hardcastle’s kiosk, which he ate standing in a corner of the Market Place, only on the foulest of days taking the food home. It was at times like that that a few accepted men like Mosley could sometimes draw him into conversation, but never on topics deeper than the weather or the insane pronouncements of some politician to the left of ultra-conservative.

  Whenever he had to eat in Bagshawe, Mosley was also a loyal customer of Bert Hardcastle’s. Bert’s sandwiches contained a prodigious quantity of ham, cheese or cold roast beef, and housewives often took them home to serve their contents as the major item of their husbands’ supper. Bert argued that he made swingeing profits on his cups of tea, and that the food he sold was a loss-leader to get clients to his counter. But there were many who believed that no business could stand such a loss and that Hardcastle was subsidizing his sandwiches to gain himself an improbable reputation: there are men in Mosley’s country who vie with each other in that kind of eccentricity.

  Mosley was still clutching the bric-a-brac he had requisitioned from Dickie Holgate as he stood eating a sandwich nearly an inch and a half thick outside Bert Hardcastle’s kiosk. Alex Balmforth, retired manager of one of Bagshawe’s other banks, and an erstwhile younger member of Burgess’s bridge school, came up for bread and cheese.

  ‘Old Henry’s no longer with us, then?’

  ‘It hardly came as a surprise, you know,’ Balmforth said. ‘You could see the old man failing, these last few months.’

  ‘Slowing down, you mean?’

  ‘He could hardly have slowed down without actually stalling. No. I mean he was crumbling mentally. He was more distant, more deeply entrenched in his own world – I know that hardly seems possible. Yet the last time I spoke to him he suddenly remembered how I once over-called when I was partnering him, all of fifteen years ago. He still took it as an indication of my mental inadequacy.’

  Then Mosley ran into Arthur Murgatroyd, traffic warden, who had earned a personal relationship with Henry Burgess by pulling him back from a close encounter with an articulated lorry. Old Henry had never forgotten him for interfering.

  ‘He didn’t like me drawing attention to his carelessness in public, thought I was trying to show him up. Of course, the old man hadn’t been himself for some time.’

  ‘Healthwise, you mean?’

  ‘Not only that – though I suppose his whole system was packing up, really. He wasn’t entirely with it any more. Only natural, I suppose we’ve got to say: senile whatever-they-call-it. He was preoccupied, looking into outer space. Yet in some respects he was still on the ball. You could set your watch by him shuffling up to Bert’s for his lunch, coming out for his evening paper, turning up for the Friday night pint he always treated himself to in the Lansdowne.’

  ‘He liked his pint still, then?’

  ‘Once a week. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he liked it. He never looked as if he was enjoying it, but apparently it had started with one or two of the other clerks from the Midland in the thirties, and he had always kept it up. Habits died hard with old Henry.’

  Mosley dropped in at the Lansdowne Arms, the hours being extended for market day.

  ‘Came once a week. Stayed half an hour. Talked to no one. Once or twice the youngsters tried to pull his leg, but they gave it up when he didn’t want to know them.’

  The landlord of the Lansdowne got up an annual Christmas party for old-age pensioners – he had a collecting-box on the counter all the year round. But he had never been able to persuade Henry Burgess to come. The old man had seemed to resent the offer as an intrusion.

  ‘Well, last year we started delivering goodies to those who were house-bound, and some of the chaps tried taking a parcel to Henry. But if they hadn’t looked smart with their feet and elbows, they wouldn’t have got past his front door.’

  The landlo
rd was called to serve a round in another bar. When he came back, he was still pulling the same face he had been pulling when he left.

  ‘Mickey Darwent and Harold Hawthorn were the two who went. You ought to have heard what they had to say about it. They couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on. How well do you know that neighbourhood, Mr Mosley?’

  ‘Not down to the last stick and cranny.’

  ‘It’s not a stone’s throw from the centre of town, but when he built that house old Bowland took care there weren’t going to be any Peeping Toms. There were fields at the back, and it was not till after the Second World War that the council got their thieving hands on the land at the ratepayers’ expense and turned it into Westwood Park. So really, it isn’t all that much different now. As for Henry Burgess’s back garden – the shrubs haven’t been cut back for so long, they’re more like trees. And it’s the same at the front: you can hardly see the house from the gate. And when Mickey and Harold had shut the gate behind them, they could hardly believe their ears. There was pop music blaring out full pelt. Hard rock, so bloody loud they wondered if old man Burgess had gone stone deaf. It sounded as if he was giving a party for half the punks and rockers in the district.’

  The landlord was a man who did not take his story-telling lightly. His eyeballs threatened to burst with the effort of putting this one over.

  ‘But when they pulled the bell – it was one of those that works on a rusty old wire – all this racket suddenly stopped.’

  ‘There may not be anything all that wonderful about that,’ Mosley said. ‘You can produce silence at the turn of a knob. Maybe he’d gone out of the room and hadn’t realized what programme he’d switched on.’

  ‘That’s what I tried to tell them. But Mickey and Harold said it was weird. Henry Burgess lived mostly in his kitchen, didn’t really use any of his other rooms. We know that, because of what Primrose Toplady has told people up and down. I don’t think there’s a soul in Bagshawe Broome who’s ever seen the inside of one of his other rooms. And come to that, there’s not many ever been in his kitchen – only the plumber, when he’s had a winter burst, and the men who read the meters. Henry Burgess always did for himself, till Mrs Toplady started going in, and Mickey and Harold said that the kitchen was pretty run-down. There’d been no interior decoration for years. He’d sat on his cushions so long that he’d flattened them.’