Mosley by Moonlight Read online

  In principle and on paper, he was entitled to a car. In practice, his was always the vehicle that was borrowed or seconded, its gaskets blown by drivers he barely knew by name.

  “Think of how much more you can see,” Tom Grimshaw once told him, “when you do your rounds on foot. And I’ll see that you never miss out on boot allowance.”

  When he was a young policeman, an old policeman had given Mosley two pieces of advice. One was to contrive to be taken for a bit of fool: information came more readily to your ears if people did not think you mattered. The second principle was never to hurry to a job: give yourself time to see things on the way.

  Grimshaw spent much time in last-ditch exasperation with Mosley, but knew that he was not a fool. The Assistant Chief Constable remained open-minded. Over the years, Mosley had covered prodigious distances by the use of his limbs, knowing by heart the ever-diminishing bus and train time-tables, occasionally covering urgent stretches on a bicycle. Sometimes he cadged lifts—in private cars, on farm lorries, milk-floats and tractor-drawn trailers; once, memorably, on a steam-roller. There were hundreds of drivers in Mosley’s part of the world whose feet went to clutch and brake at the sight ahead of them of the stubby little figure in homburg and flapping raincoat.

  But this afternoon nothing and no one seemed to be going his way up Hadley Dale. Only up the last stretch, the punishing gradient past the ruins of Thurstock Manor, did he ride amid a load of returning milk-churns. He knew that he would hear something unique in the Plough this evening. Tonight, the communal imagination of the Plough would have had something to set it going. It would have been here in the Plough that the inter-stellar raiding-party would have broken off for lunch.

  And it proved to be so. While management had gone down to the Good Food Guide recommendation in Bradburn, the rank and file, with eye-stalks where their chins ought to have been, had consumed the landlord’s entire stock of Wensleydale. The eight-footer who had alarmed Joe Ormerod had parked his stilts in the porch and shown himself a dab hand at darts, his stalk oscillating off-puttingly as he took aim.

  “Saw you on the telly, Mr. Mosley. Have you started charging for autographs?”

  “You’ll be getting an autograph on the bottom of a summons, if I see anybody else riding on your crossbar.”

  He was in no mood for banter, but there was no way of staying out of it.

  “By God, they could shift some ale, that lot could.”

  “Women pinting it, too.”

  “Pinting ale—and the rest. Arthur says it’s the first time he’s ever had that Pimm’s bottle down off the shelf.”

  “It was Lottie Pearson who asked for that.”

  Mosley edged closer.

  “What was Lottie Pearson doing in here?”

  “Oh, they did some scenes up round the big house, you know, and somebody must have spotted her talent. She had what they called a walking-on part—well, a bit more than walking-on, the way it worked out. Then at the end of the morning, they all came down here. They had a drink or two, then Lottie went down to town with the nobs. I reckon they went to that new-fangled Tudor place.”

  “And what had Matthew Longden to say about that?”

  “Do you know, I haven’t set eyes on him since?”

  “Nor Lottie Pearson either. Funny, that. She makes an excuse to come down the street most days, as a rule.”

  “Some of the hangers-on seemed to think the world belonged to them. In and out of Toby Warhurst’s henhouse as if it was a free-for-all.”

  “Broken down a length of Billy Halliday’s fencing with their cable.”

  “Two lambs chased, over on Bundock’s. One of the producers had a dog that had been yapping in the back of his car all the morning. Straight up the hillside when he let it out.”

  Mosley fought to memorize details: he never liked producing a notebook in a public bar. He’d have to corner one or two and ask the sort of question they didn’t like answering. He asked for a room for the night. Then Joe Ormerod came in, his backward-sloping, beetle-browned forehead beamed in on the beer-pumps like the warhead of a rocket.

  “Had you for a bit of a sucker, didn’t they, Joe? Saying you couldn’t understand the language? The man was only a Geordie.”

  Ormerod scowled in a manner that would have had strangers looking for cover.

  “You’ll not have found any more Daleks out rabbiting, then, Joe?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Ormerod said. Mosley did not join in. If they had made a monkey out of Joe, they had not done too badly out of John Miller Mosley, either. It was merciful that this company knew how to shift subjects at a tangent.

  “They’d no flies on those bull-frog costumes, you know. Had to strip right down when they wanted a pee.”

  “It’s all right laughing,” Ormerod said. “They did a lot of damage. One of their vans backed into Isaac Oldham’s gatepost, snapped it clean off at ground-level.”

  “Aye. And they say that post’s stood there since Saxon times.”

  “I’d better have a word with Isaac,” Mosley said.

  It all needed to be recorded, which was why Mosley, not five minutes in bed, stretched out his hand to put on his light again. It was never safe to leave note-taking till the morning. And contrary to all forms and forecasts, he was in the office the next day before either the Assistant Chief Constable or Grimshaw. When the two senior statesmen came in, Mosley was sitting at his trestle-table, his hat upside down beside a pile of reports to which his pen was just putting the finishing touches. He had not taken off his coat, and the general impression he gave was of a man who intended to be away to his hills the moment he had scratched out a couple more syllables.

  But it was there that any resemblance ended to a man of pristine vigour. Mosley had slept badly. His eyes were bloodshot and hazed. His razor had missed bristles. The ACC—in full dress uniform, for some reason that only his desk-diary knew about—exchanged head-jerks with Grimshaw. And Grimshaw, laying his hand on Mosley’s shoulder in a manner meant to be encouraging, ushered the inspector into the sanctum.

  “Why the hell didn’t you make it clear, Mosley, that you knew this was only a television commercial they were making?”

  As a rule, Mosley listened to rebukes from the ACC in a silence that might be taken as contrite, if the ACC cared so to interpret it. He seldom uttered an argument in self-justification: simply waited until the spate of words was spent, then shuffled off about his next interest as if nothing had been said. Today he surprised even himself by the words that came out of him.

  “What else could it have bloody well been?”

  The ACC digested this. He was not a man who had ever imagined himself tolerating insolence. Now that it had happened, he could think of no immediate thing that it was safe to do about it.

  “A pity you couldn’t have used that tone to Ellerman Tovey.”

  “I know I was on the slow side,” Mosley said. “I thought it was only a trial run. They’d finished before I knew they’d started.”

  “Has the mob departed?”

  “Yes, sir. They were only up there three days.”

  “What the hell do they hope to advertise by landing Martians in Hadley Dale?”

  “After-shave lotion.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Half each advertisement shows people who don’t need after-shave. Martians don’t, because they have eyes where their chins ought to be.”

  The ACC looked at Mosley through narrowing eyes.

  “Are you trying to take the piss out of me, Mosley?”

  “That’s how it was. Some of the village women were shown cuddling them, stroking their chins.”

  Including Lottie Pearson. One could hope that Matthew Longden did not know. But Mosley said nothing about this angle.

  “I’m not looking forward to the next few days up in Hadley,” he said.

  “Then stay away from the damned place. Go somewhere where there’s some danger you might find something to do.�
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  “That’ll be Hadley Dale, sir, Thursday afternoon.”

  “Why Thursday afternoon?”

  “Early closing in Bradburn. People flocking up to Hadley.”

  “I don’t see why they should. Everybody knows Martians haven’t landed.”

  “With respect, sir—everybody doesn’t know that. There’s always somebody who only half hears any story. People will be going up there for picnics. We shall have lost property, litter, walls broken down, wild flowers dug up by the roots. Last Spring Holiday, the viper’s bugloss was stripped completely from Wellman’s Bank.”

  “These are hardly matters of top priority for a criminal investigation department.”

  The ACC took slow, deep breaths. He seemed to be exercising no guidance over the confrontation at all.

  “I hold you responsible for seeing that there’s no trouble of any kind, Mosley.”

  And in the outer office, Grimshaw had picked up Mosley’s small stack of reports.

  “I take it these were destined to reach me eventually. How long is it since you last brought a charge against anyone, Mosley?”

  “Late last year. Unlawful possession of unstable gelignite.”

  “I can see that even you could hardly overlook that. Now we suddenly get this lot. Quite a day for brainstorms, yesterday. And are you hoping to get clearance to travel down to Kent to pursue some of these?”

  “I can see there could be objections to that.”

  “Why Kent, all of a sudden? What have you suddenly got against the garden of England?”

  “They’ve moved down there to make their next film.”

  “The hordes of Venus moving in where Hitler recoiled?”

  “They are going to shoot a sequence of King Lear on Dover cliffs.”

  “What’s that in aid of?”

  “After-shave lotion. King Lear didn’t need it. They’re going to show his beard blowing about in a Channel gale.”

  “We might, Mosley, ask Kent to take these things up for us. To try to find a cameraman who stole four eggs, value twenty pence. Critical damage done to a brass bedstead, temporarily in use as a fencing-length, valued at ninety-five pence. That isn’t criminal damage.”

  “The farmer had asked the engineer to desist.”

  “Failure to stop and report damage to a Saxon gatepost, valued at forty pence. Who has a Saxon gatepost in Hadley Dale?”

  “Had one, sir. Isaac Oldham.”

  “And where does he think he’ll get another for forty pence? Or was that the Saxon valuation? Is that what he’d got it insured for? This is going to add astronomical digits to our retrieval statistics, Mosley. It comes to over one pound fifty on the first three cases alone.”

  “There’s also the question of the producer’s dog. Protection of Livestock Act, 1953. It doesn’t pay to drag our feet over that kind of thing, up in my part of the world.”

  “You don’t state that any animal was killed or even injured.”

  “Two lambs very frightened. Two witnesses. Chased in such a way as might reasonably be expected to cause suffering within the meaning of the Act.”

  Something came into Mosley’s tone that was akin to his explosion in front of the ACC.

  “How can we expect people to behave if we ignore the first complaint they’ve made for thirty years?”

  “I’ll have a word with the Assistant Chief. But I wouldn’t be too optimistic, if I were you.”

  Mosley screwed up his pen and made ready for Hadley Dale.

  Lottie Pearson. Matthew Longden. Sand in Lottie’s porridge. Out of an egg-timer. A few years ago there had been sand in Matthew’s porridge. Mosley had better make sure that all parties understood each other. Better still, he’d cast a quiet eye over them first. Tomorrow morning, Bradburn market.

  Chapter Three

  Matthew Longden and Lottie Pearson were one of the market-day features of Bradburn, a sight less charitably interpreted by those who knew them than by the increasing number who didn’t. There was something striking about them. Casual observers found their companionship touching.

  Matthew Longden was an elderly man, not far short of seventy, though older in appearance than his birth-certificate attested. He suffered from a medicine-defying strain of osteoarthritis. But though he was a cripple, he always managed to keep himself going—with Lottie Pearson’s help. He moved unhurriedly, suggesting dignity rather than pain. He was from all aspects a dignified man. He had dignified forbears. In his working years he had followed the dignified profession of accountancy. The more dignified stratum of Bradburn’s merchants would trust no one else with their books. When he had been forced to retire, and had moved up to Hadley Dale, a year before his wife left him, the removal van had climbed the hills with dignity. The village had been impressed. He did not merely exude dignity—he appeared to confer it on others.

  The woman who came shopping with him was twenty years his junior. She was well-built and German, with something about her bearing that suggested she had been pretty in youth. She was robust and becoming chubby, though without any hint—yet—of negligent obesity. Her ampleness was of the kind that gives German men pride, satisfying them that they are feeding their women properly. She had greying hair that still showed streaks of its Gretchen-like origins, and which arranged itself in natural waves. She had a shining country complexion and, it seemed, a boundless vivacity. She was a woman who would not acknowledge that any fellow-human was a stranger. She talked to all and sundry, refusing to differentiate divisions of class or any other supposed distinguishing qualities. For some people that she waylaid, this could be a weird experience, for, although she could speak in rapid English on any subject that presented itself, there were strict limits to the range of the language that she had learned—or ever intended to learn. Her command of idiom was not infrequently quaint, and whenever she was defeated by vocabulary, she simply inserted a word from her native tongue, irrespective of the linguistic capacity of her hearers. Once, for example, in a supermarket, she gave an unsolicited cookery lesson to the file of housewives at the check-out, urging them to make their husbands a bodisome German pudding based largely on cornflower, which she called Gries. And, since the dish appeared to consist of grease in extraordinary quantity, there were doubts about her sanity.

  But she was an ideal comrade in the High Street for an almost completely immobilized Matthew Longden. Together they had developed the minutiae of co-operation needed for the weekly household shopping.

  They always parked on a waste space behind the Congregational Chapel, and, while Matthew Longden was switching off the engine, turning off the car-heater and pulling up the handbrake an extra notch, Lottie Pearson was going to the boot for her shopping-bags and his walking-stick, arriving at the door in the nick of time to help his left ankle over the sill without drawing undue public attention to his disability. They then walked together. she guiding him by the arm above the elbow, along the alley which led behind the backs of the shops into Cross Street—a perfect combination of adagio and suppressed brio.

  Those who did not know them even wondered if they were father and daughter—or, more probably, a niece out with a favourite uncle. There was a fresher, more spontaneous glitter of friendship between them than is common between separated generations who are compelled to live together.

  Matthew Longden and Lottie Pearson were not related to each other. Nor were they married. There was something slightly strange about that. It was now all of eight years since Betty Longden had deserted her husband. He could have freed himself from her as a simple matter of form, and Lottie Pearson could equally easily have got rid of her current legal spouse. Yet there seemed no signs that either of them wanted to put their relationship on a more orthodox footing. Not that that mattered from any material standpoint. Matthew Longden had made properly attested provision for Lottie and no one believed that it would not be a generous one. The hill-folk knew of many a common-law partnership that had outlasted blessed and sealed unions. Matthew Longden had tal
ked to Mosley about it once, though it was none of Mosley’s business. Clearly he had wanted a man of Mosley’s standing to know that his mistress had nothing to complain about. There were no other contenders for his property, and if she chose not to remain with him for the rest of her days, she would still not be meanly treated. The line that Matthew Longden took—or said that he took—was that as she was not tied to him by marriage, her freedom was assured. Smiling wryly, he told Mosley that if he wanted to keep her, he had to behave himself; but if she found that she had been mistaken about him, she would not find herself locked in.

  Every Friday morning they visited the shops in an order that never changed. In Teape’s Lottie took her voluble turn at the bacon counter, while Matthew edged his way towards the cheeses. Then Lottie wanted bits and pieces of haberdashery and Matthew needed tobacco and pipe-cleaners. They went to the library together, they both knew what they were looking for in the supermarket. And if they were temporarily parted at any stage, they came upon each other again with smiles that might have signalled the end of a long lovers’ parting—Matthew’s always tinged with a hint of sad gratitude, while Lottie scintillated with controlled geniality. Finally they would go to the Black Boy, Matthew for a pint of mild and bitter, and Lottie for whatever she fancied, usually a bottle of one of the sweeter brews of stout. After this she would go alone to the Congregational vestry, which was turned into a rudimentary coffee-bar on market days. There Mrs. Pearson Senior would be sitting with a cup of tea.

  Mrs. Pearson was the mother of the second English husband from whom Lottie had been lucky to escape. She also lived in Hadley Dale, but was a woman of ill-tempered independence who always came down by bus, refusing a lift in the car. She would, she said, have missed the company of the other passengers.

  Lottie always went across for a chat with her before going back to the Black Boy for Matthew. And she always took the old woman’s heavier items of shopping home for her in the boot. This was a physical convenience so invaluable that even Sarah Pearson had not the bad grace to refuse it.