Mosley Went to Mow Read online

  After they had gone, Hempshaw End did not hear regular, precise news of them. They went to settle in a part of the country that was not even a reality to Hempshaw End. But the news that did come to them from time to time suggested that the Goodwins were not doing too badly. The son had got into the headlines in an interesting social scandal: there were still occasional adventuresses from the lower orders who took chances with young men who looked as if their families might be in the money. And those had certainly been the appearances that young Goodwin kept up. One would have thought that primogeniture would have been little more than a token in the lives of the Goodwins. What is the point of managing property intact for the monopoly of the eldest son when there is nothing to monopolize? Nevertheless, the committal of all eggs to one basket was a concept natural to the family temperament. The Goodwins were always scrupulous about form, even where content was lacking. And perhaps the relic of the family fortunes was a good deal greater than the Official Receiver had ever got to hear about. If young Wilson Goodwin was leading the sort of life that Hempshaw End heard of him leading, it was clear that something must have been retrieved. But the rest of the Goodwin offspring had had to fend for themselves. The girls – except for Janie – had fought desperately to make sound marriages, which one or two of them actually did. But none of them achieved Janie’s marital distinction.

  Janie must have been something near the twenty mark when the Goodwins left Hempshaw. The property was sold to a Manchester unit-trust broker, who sold it to a whizz-kid solicitor, who lost personal interest in it when his fiancée called off their marriage. And so the estate eventually changed hands again, being bought by the County Education Committee, who transformed it into a Field Studies Centre. Hence the two parties of students whom the two ladies had seen in the cutting of the Old Railway that morning.

  And to the surprise of those who had not forgotten her, Janie Goodwin had come back to Hempshaw End. Janie had always been known as the sport of the family, not because she had fun – thought that, too – but in the sense that a botanical specimen will sometimes show itself to be at variance with its genus. Janie was the only Goodwin who managed to get herself well known in the village. Even in her very early teens, she had seemed to spend as much time on the corners of the village streets as she did in the grounds of the Hall. There were apocryphal tales of monumental reprisals against her at home for her wilfulness. But opposition only seemed to double her determination to strike out alone.

  She was not made unreservedly welcome. The people she loitered about with were mostly about her own age, and therefore less affected than their elders by the vestiges of protocol. They laughed at Janie when she was slow to understand their vulgarisms – and thought of new and more striking vulgarisms with which to broaden her horizons. They took pleasure in getting her to say things disloyal to her home culture. And she kept steadily coming back to them for more. The leggy girl from the great debt-ridden house seemed fascinated by what she saw outside the park gates. And there were forces outside the park that saw her as a weapon with which the arrogance of the big house might be assaulted. She began to find one or two of the older people indirectly and insidiously making ‘friends’with her. She was invited into poorish homes for extravagant north-country high teas: brawn and pigs’trotters, savoury duck, mountains of bread and dripping – all of which she wolfed as if they were on a starvation diet at home. John William Cromwell’s mother was one of the hospitable ones, for some long-range and devious purpose of her own.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Georgina said, ‘what went on between Janie and Noll when they were in their teens. Tales are told, but I wouldn’t rely on them. It’s pretty certain that Janie always did have a strong streak of curiosity – and that Noll’s seam of Rabelaisian coarseness has been, if anything, mellowed by time. But the Goodwins left, not quite by moonlight, but in the moonlight spirit. And Hempshaw End lost individual track of them. Goodness knows, our London connection is tenuous enough even today. In the pre-war depression years, people might as well have been living on different continents.’

  Georgina got up, went to the window and looked out at the amorphous jumble of lighted village windows.

  ‘Of course, you never thought of me as someone who had north-country connections – or even north-country sympathies.’

  ‘I must say, it never occurred to me – to any of us.’

  ‘Well, don’t look as if you’d have rejected me for it if you’d known. Between the Goodwins’ going and Janie’s coming back there was a gap of nearly thirty years. What she had been doing in the meanwhile, how she had passed the war, what sort of living she had made for herself – these are things that nobody knows – except, one presumes, Noll Cromwell – and he’s never talked about her. It was about 1932 that she left. She returned in about ’ 58, aged round the forty mark. I was still teaching in the south in those days. She was already dug in in her cottage when I came here.’

  She went and put logs on the fire.

  ‘From all accounts, no one knew at first who she was. There were a lot of new faces in the village – not many who remembered the Goodwins – and even fewer who cared. Janie was just another from town, people thought, buying up village property, fancying the peasant life.’

  Georgina laughed.

  ‘Like me. I bought the school, when the Authority said they had no further use for it. But, of course, the name Goodwin rang bells. And if people did not know her, she knew some people. She talked to them – not prying, but showing an unaccountable interest – and knowledge. And when someone at last nailed her down, she did not try to conceal who she was.

  ‘But she would not talk about the rest of her family. She was always a strange woman. She took a penetrating interest in people, and yet she preferred them at a certain distance. I don’t think she ever considered herself superior, but she liked to be one apart. She dressed peculiarly – long skirts with costume jackets, antediluvian button-boots, hats out of the ark. It wasn’t at all, though, as if she had equipped herself at a jumble sale – there are plenty of people in Hempshaw End who do that. Everything Janie wore was in immaculate condition – but it was always at least seventy years behind cut and fashion. Not merely seventy years behind the fashion – she wore clothes that were seventy years old. I think she did it to cock a snook at conformity – the conformity of any class, of any period. You’d have thought to look at her that she was colour-blind, texture-blind, pattern-blind and impact-blind. But I’m sure that was all deliberate. It was to make doubly sure that no one missed her oddities. I don’t know what grievances she was harbouring – but I think they were pretty bitter. She hit back by making it aggressively clear that she was her own person.’

  Georgina looked again out of the window, this time as if something in the night outside had caught her attention. For a moment whatever movement it was held up her story. But presently she turned back into the room again.

  ‘Then there followed this wild and eruptive friendship with Noll Cromwell. Love-hate: the cliché never had a more clinical illustration. There were nocturnal comings and goings between their two cottages; nobody pretended there was anything platonic about it – and people were delighted to be scandalized. She would noisily throw Noll out of her place in the middle of the night. More than once she came tearing furiously out of his. And yet they kept going steadily back to each other. I can’t tell you, no one knows, all that really went on. Sometimes I wondered if they liked getting together just for the joy of fighting. Obviously, each was supplying something that the other needed. Noll Cromwell was a builder who hadn’t put a house up for years. He used to make coffins as a sideline, and became the man people turned to for funerals. His gravedigger obscenities were – are – out of this world – but that’s another story. He pretended to take an ebullient joy in burying people. And somehow this suited the local temperament. People seemed to find something comforting, a sort of familiarity, in his grossness.

  ‘Then Hempshaw End woke to find he was putti
ng the footings in for a new cottage. He’d been down to Bradburn for planning permission. When it was finished, he and Janie were going to be married.’

  ‘And you were best man.’

  ‘I was indeed. A highlight in my life.’

  ‘You encouraged them.’

  ‘My dear child, you say that as if I were doing something irresponsible. What world are you living in? Would my disapproval have made a ha’porth of difference to Janie and Noll? I liked both of them – in a way. They were different. They had the nerve to be different – to be themselves. What if they did play now and then to a rowdy gallery? What if their eccentricities were as outrageous as they could make them? They were only showing what they thought of society. They needed each other, though what precisely it was that they did need in each other, God only knows. Yes: I encouraged them – but that did not make them my responsibility. They were master and mistress of their own fate. And even over the brink, they scrambled back. I think they realized before they reached their front door that they could never live together.’

  ‘And now she’s dead – isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m afraid it looks horribly like it.’

  ‘And he killed her?’

  ‘How can he have? Mosley was mowing his lawn. Noll Cromwell was pinned down in his own house over the whole of the operative time. I suspect that Mosley knew something. And I don’t somehow think that he is very far from Hempshaw End at this moment.’

  Chapter Five

  Beamish scanned the map as if there might be something in the greens and browns that could tell him where Mosley was. There were isolated farms with defiant names, clinging to narrow contour-lines and reached by trails of faint dots that were alleged to be footpaths: Starvelings, Stony Acre, Whistling Jack’s. Sometimes the theoretical roads stopped for no ascertainable reason in the middle of unpopulated valleys. The blue meanders of moorland trickles emerged, merged, and in some cases came absurdly to an abrupt end. Sawmill. Ruins. Ford. Square mile upon square mile of storm-ruffled heather, a resilient stubble of bilberries. Inn. Post office. Old mineshafts. Mosley’s country.

  And where, in this wilderness peopled by cranks, scarecrows and red-faced, bull-necked defiers of the elements, was Mosley likely to be found? Why should Mosley, on his precious annual leave, be lingering in surroundings where he was likely to be trapped back into work at any moment: work which he did not want to become involved in – officially?

  Grimshaw had ordered Beamish to find Mosley, and Beamish liked to be seen achieving the impossible. He drove out of Hempshaw End not entirely at random. Mosley must have gone uphill. If he had gone downhill, he would have passed Janie’s cottage while the women were parked outside it – or very soon afterwards, perhaps while Miss Crane was rushing round looking for him. They would have run into him. He could not have helped becoming involved at once. Presumably Mosley on leave would be using his car, a specimen Ford Popular which he stubbornly refused ever to drive on duty.

  So Beamish opted for uphill. He drove up the narrow road that flanked the Cotter Edge escarpment, where the principal traffic hazard was an unexpected sheep round a blind corner. In about three miles he reached the unaccountable hamlet of Barker’s Clough, six houses deposited without symmetry or any imaginable purpose where the road dipped to a splashing brook. One of the houses had turned itself into a rudimentary shop, even bore a metal placard proclaiming itself to be the parcels agency of a bus service that had stopped running in the 1930s. Beamish pulled off the road and went in to buy something for a snack lunch, found biscuits and a box of processed cheese. He asked if any other travellers had been through recently. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if she did not believe in giving information to strangers.

  ‘I was thinking of a stubby little man. Black hat. Raincoat.’

  ‘Do you mean Mr Mosley?’ A faint smile seemed about to raise the corners of the woman’s mouth, but she disciplined it at once. ‘Are you a friend of his, then?’

  ‘I am a police officer.’

  Another faint flicker stirred her eyes and mouth – but this time it was a ripple of uncertainty.

  ‘He’s on holiday,’ she said.

  Did everyone, even in the remotest corners of this bleak end-of-world, know the fine details of Mosley’s life? Had every man, woman and child on this hillside a brooding loyalty to Mosley?

  ‘I’m not sure he’d thank me for having him disturbed.’

  Beamish, to whom it was unthinkable ever to be at a loss, was at a loss. One wrong word and this woman would become his enemy. And that would mean that within an hour or two, the whole tract would be enemy territory.

  ‘I think you might find the opposite is true,’ he found himself saying, though he knew that such speech was formal and would probably be counter-productive.

  ‘Oh, aye?’

  The eyes scanning his face, disbelieving, yet hankering to believe, were prepared to obstruct him, yet by nature she was unwilling to offend.

  ‘You’re on holiday too, perhaps?’ she suggested.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And are you neighbouring too?’

  ‘Neighbouring’? Was she asking him if he lived near here? Whatever she was getting at, she evidently hoped that he would say yes. He said yes.

  ‘It’s a wonderful job you men are doing – that neighbouring. Mr Mosley’s gone to clean up Emma Rawlings’s windows for her. Then he was hoping there’d be daylight enough for him to go and do a bit of digging for Isaac Perry.’

  ‘I don’t know either of them,’ Beamish said. ‘But I’ll go and lend him a hand, if you’ll tell me where I can find those people.’

  And that was how Beamish found his way to Widow Rawlings’s home, a diminutive farmhouse that was no longer part of a diminutive farm. The widow was an octogenarian with the complexion of a withering apple. She also had a patent hostility to unknown quantities – of which Beamish was clearly one. It was his impression that it would take a couple of decades for anyone to earn a guarantee of her goodwill. Mosley had obviously been in her good books in his time – but he was in trouble with her today. She did not want him to do the work that he was doing for her, though to the continuo of her protests, he was simply getting on with it. He had not only cleaned her windows inside and out, upstairs and down, but had taken down her curtains and was at the moment washing them in her kitchen sink. Her objections were implacable. She was put to shame by having all this done for her. And she was even more put out at having her windowpanes laid naked, even though there was no habitation from which they could be observed.

  Mosley at the sink was a sight for a connoisseur. He had taken off his raincoat – in itself a rare event – and even his jacket, exposing the shiny back of his waistcoat. He had rolled up his shirt-sleeves and was wringing out the heavy material with his hands. But he still had his hat on, the Anthony Eden model, which he wore without any nuance of chic or verve.

  ‘I’ll pin blankets up at the windows before I go,’ Mosley told the old woman. ‘And Mr Beamish here will be round very early in the morning to take them down for you and put your curtains back up. If you are nice to him, he might even iron them for you. I can’t come myself, because I’ve promised old Neddy Wardle I’ll plant his cabbages out.’

  Mosley must have been observing Beamish’s final approach for several minutes. He did not turn to pay proper attention to him now. Beamish had no idea at all what the chances were that he would be free to come back here tomorrow.

  ‘Just doing an afternoon’s sightseeing, then, Beamish, are you?’ Mosley asked, cheerful and casual, the look in his eye demanding an answer in the affirmative.

  ‘I thought I’d have a look round between jobs,’ Beamish said brightly. ‘Got a busy week, for a man on leave, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’m neighbouring,’ Mosley said. ‘Easter to Whitsuntide, that’s our main season. It’s a little organization that a few of us have got together. There’d be room for you in it. We need young blood – and muscle. Bit
of spring-cleaning here, turn over the top soil there.’

  ‘Mow an undertaker’s lawn now and then?’

  But Mosley did not rise to that one in any way.

  ‘I might consider lending a hand now and then,’ Beamish said.

  Mosley moved back from the sink to carry the curtains out to the clothes-line. Beamish was in his way, stepped back and got in Emma Rawlings’s way instead. He followed Mosley into the yard, stepped among the relics of the former farm: a corroded milk churn, a broken pump.

  ‘Mr Mosley – who’s offering a gallows on the open market?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. She’s not as deaf as she makes out.’

  Then, loud enough for her to be certain to hear, Mosley said, ‘I’ll put your name forward. And if you’d care to anticipate election to the Neighbours by giving me a bit of help this weekend, I could certainly do with it.’

  ‘Whose gallows?’ Beamish whispered, as loud as he dared.

  ‘Billy Birkin’s. Hempshaw Fold.’

  ‘What does anyone want with a gallows in Hempshaw Fold?’

  ‘Practice,’ Mosley said.

  ‘So why’s he selling it? Has he had practice enough? Does he feel he’s got all the skills he needs now?’

  ‘Not much call for that sort of talent, down in the Fold.’

  ‘Come to think of it, we don’t hear of many executions on your patch. Of course, that might just be a case of bad communications. Did you know there’s been trouble today in Hempshaw End?’

  ‘That had nothing to do with Billy Birkin.’

  Mosley disappeared suddenly round the other side of the curtain that he was hanging out. Beamish followed him.

  ‘Billy’s fair boiling over with resentment,’ Mosley said. ‘He feels he’s never had a chance.’

  ‘I dare say there are some in Hempshaw Fold who are grateful for that.’

  ‘Not that Billy was ever keen on hanging folk. It was his mother’s idea. Go in and ask old Emma if she’s got any more clothes-pegs, will you?’