Mosley Went to Mow Page 5

  When he came back, Mosley played Box and Cox with him several times round the clothes-line, then stood captive a moment.

  ‘Of course, I’ve never met Billy Birkin’s mother,’ Beamish said.

  ‘She always wanted Billy to apply for the job of assistant hangman – when he was a youngster, that is. She used to say that every man ought to learn a useful trade.’

  ‘Albert Pierrepoint got his redundancy money years ago.’

  ‘That’s why Billy’s selling up – this latest vote in Parliament. He’s given up hope, you see. His mother had made him put in for it, in the days when there were vacancies. She said the job would make a man of him. And he was sent for interview, but he didn’t do too well at the tests that they put him through.’

  Mosley put a clothes-peg in his mouth, which did not make his croaking whisper any easier to catch.

  ‘Billy couldn’t bring himself to pull the lever, you see – even when it was only a dummy on the trap. He was too nice, that was the whole trouble. Too mild a man. Then he got into difficulty with the Home Office Weight Tables. When they asked him a test question, about what sort of a drop he’d give a man of nine stone three, he worked it out at forty-five feet. So he wasn’t taken on.’

  ‘And his mother had the gallows made so that he could get into the way of it, and try again?’

  ‘That’s right. Noll Cromwell put it together for her: beautiful job – counter-weights just so, thirteen steps up, handrails for the screws to hold on to. But this last free vote in the Commons has knocked the stuffing right out of Billy. Hence the sale.’

  ‘Superintendent Grimshaw and the Assistant Chief Constable are very anxious to know whether anybody’s made an offer for it yet.’

  ‘Oh, yes – there’ve been several. Seller’s market.’

  ‘Who?’ Beamish almost shouted, then asked again, a mere flutter of breath, ‘Who?’

  ‘Billy’s thinking of letting it go to Sarah Bramwell.’

  ‘I see. And do you know whether Sarah Bramwell has any specific activity in mind?’

  ‘Well, it’s a consortium, really. Sarah, Millie Hunter, Peggy Norton. But it’s Sarah’s money: she’s only letting the others have nominal shares. Sarah took her lump sum out of the Sick and Divide Club at the Hempshaw Fleece last week.’

  ‘And what use do these ladies propose to put a gallows to?’

  ‘Re-enactments, Sunday mornings, in Sarah’s shed. Crippen first, Bywaters and Thompson coming up – that will obviously be a double bill, probably an Easter special. Private showings only of course. The Vigil Aunties, they call themselves. Not very funny,’ Mosley conceded.

  ‘Harmless, I suppose.’

  ‘Compared with some things that are happening – and are likely to happen in the near future.’

  If this was a veiled acknowledgement of current events, it was the first that Mosley had made.

  ‘Mind you, if you’ve got an hour or two to spare, I dare say this gallows business would bear looking into. Billy’s still considering Sarah’s offer. There are others in the field. I may not know about them all. And it’s not the sort of apparatus I’d care to see fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘I’ll pass that on to Grimshaw. He wants to see you, by the way.’

  ‘I was afraid he might. You’d better tell him I don’t see how it’s possible. I’m just filling in with a little neighbouring, waiting for a standby flight to Nairobi. I’ve a sister out there, you know.’

  ‘Will you be able to get a flight back in time for the end of your leave?’

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘I’ll certainly tell him that …’

  So if Grimshaw started importuning Mosley, Mosley had his escape-story tidily ready? Even so, there was nothing in his tone that made the Nairobi story sound at all probable.

  ‘But in the meanwhile, Mr Mosley –’

  In the meanwhile, Beamish had better extract something coherent to take back to Grimshaw. But at the moment they were interrupted by the arrival of Emma Rawlings, who wanted one of her less reputable curtains moved to where it could not be seen from the road.

  ‘Seriously, Beamish – neighbouring. It’s only in the spring and early summer that we mount a really intensive campaign. But one or two of us are always on call for emergencies – like humping coal, unstopping drains, or even doing a bit of shopping, if somebody’s off-colour. How about it?’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what – I’ve got a lot on my hands this next day or two: that’s if I’m not suddenly called off to Kenya. If I tell you where I’m likely to be, could you drop round and lend me a hand, if you can get yourself free?’

  Beamish wondered whether he was getting the right message out of all this. Was it an invitation to stay in touch generally?

  ‘Tomorrow morning I shall be in Hadley Dale, teaching Steve Blamire to ride a bike. That’s a long-standing promise.’

  ‘Got no father, hasn’t he? No uncles?’

  ‘Not for some time now. He’s sixty-seven. But he’s always wanted to get going on two wheels. Tomorrow afternoon, dig Walter Needham’s patch. Sunday morning I’m taking two old ladies to chapel in Higher Stoneley. I shall stop for a pint in the Angler’s Arms when I’ve run them home again.’

  Beamish worked like a mental dynamo to memorize the detail.

  ‘Sunday afternoon’s free so far. There’s no telling what might have blown up by Sunday afternoon.’

  Mosley had now rearranged the clothes-line to Emma Rawlings’s satisfaction, and she was on her way back indoors.

  ‘Mr Mosley,’ Beamish said. ‘Superintendent Grimshaw –’

  ‘Far be it from me to come between Grimshaw and his pleasures.’

  ‘Superintendent Grimshaw has a pipe that he thinks belongs to you.’

  Mosley patted his pocket, as if he had so far not missed it. Beamish handed it to him to examine, and he put it in his mouth immediately.

  ‘It is yours, is it?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘Do you know where it was found, Mr Mosley?’

  Mosley looked inanely vacant.

  ‘In Janie Goodwin’s garden,’ Beamish said.

  This did not seem to strike Mosley as in any way a grave matter.

  ‘Mr Mosley – perhaps you don’t know what’s happened today at Janie Goodwin’s?’

  Beamish gave him a succinct account, to which Mosley listened without excitement.

  ‘I’m not quite sure I understand,’ he said, when Beamish had finished. ‘You say there was a fish in the window?’

  ‘Yes – the fish is a symbol of –’

  ‘Yes – I do know about that. But when is the fish supposed to have been put there? Is the man who wrecked the room supposed to have left it to draw convenient attention to himself? Or is Janie supposed to have put it there after she’d been hit on the head with a bottle?’

  ‘I don’t think anybody’s followed up that line of thought.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit fishy to me.’ Mosley cackled idiotically. ‘It’ll give Grimshaw something to cudgel his brains with, won’t it?’

  ‘Mr Mosley – are you sure you don’t know anything about what’s being going on in Hempshaw End?’

  Mosley shook his head solemnly. ‘I’m on leave,’ he said.

  There was a danger signal in his tone. Beamish knew from experience that once Mosley felt driven to consolidate, you might as well give up all hope of digging him out again.

  ‘Tomorrow, Sergeant Beamish, if you can see your way to meeting me somewhere, perhaps you’ll be able to bring me up to date about all this. I’d hate to think that anything untoward has happened to Janie Goodwin.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Beamish said. ‘And it’s not for me to express opinions. You’re an older man than I am, Mr Mosley – but can you go on ignoring Mr Grimshaw?’

  ‘I’ve been doing nothing else for years.’

  Emma Rawlings’s shrill voice called from the farmhouse kitchen door, telling the
m that she had just mashed a pot of tea. She sounded as if this were some punishment she was meting out to them for the upheaval of her domestic peace. That signalled the end of tactical discussion between Mosley and Beamish. Beamish stayed long enough for common courtesy – not that Mrs Rawlings let herself be seen to be influenced by that – then drove back to Hempshaw End to look for Grimshaw.

  During the course of the previous case that they had worked on together, Beamish had at intervals believed that he was beginning to understand Mosley.

  Chapter Six

  Continuation of Elizabeth Stirrup’s diary for Friday, 8 April

  I did not think that Georgina would ever be ready for bed. She simply could not stop talking and I had to sit straight-faced pretending to be enthralled – and becoming more befogged as each quarter-hour passed. I completely fail to understand the love of vulgarity that seems to have taken possession of her.

  ‘I grant you the man is gross,’ Georgina said. ‘But you’ll have to take my word for it: when it comes to coarseness, he is well past his prime. There was a time when he was matchless. I think he is getting too tired to be as offensive as he used to be.’

  ‘It’s people’s fault for putting up with him.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Elizabeth – people like it? He has never done anybody any harm. His vulgarity is cathartic – it purges the soul of other emotions. There was a time, when his business was in full swing, when he had the monopoly of funerals for miles around, when he lived the part. Even hale and hearty people weren’t free from his banter. He would go about assessing people’s weight, asking them for their measurements, telling them they all had to pass through his hands in the end. Little Madge Mason, at the post office – her husband stood six feet seven in his socks, and every time he saw her, Noll used to say, “Don’t forget, Madge, send over and let me know any time your Walter’s feeling at all seedy. I shall have to get an extra length of pine for his box.”

  ‘But old Emma Rawlings – that’s the richest tale in his repertoire. Noll always used to take pride in getting a smile out of the bereaved before they’d left the churchyard. He used to say that was included in his estimate, but he knew in advance that Emma was going to be a challenge to him. Emma never was by nature the smiling type. He said he knew he’d have to be satisfied if he could get her to bare her teeth for him.

  ‘And that turned out to be the trouble: her teeth. He just couldn’t say anything that would get her to curl her lips back. All his usual little quips failed. She went back to her house in faceless misery – and Noll wasn’t much happier, feeling he’d not come up to his self-appointed standards. “If they don’t get over the worst of it at the graveside,” he used to say, “happen they never will.”

  ‘Then that evening there came a knock at his door, and he saw Emma Rawlings standing out there in the dark, looking at him with a mixture of pleading and despair.

  ‘“Come on in, Emma,” he told her. “How have you got here? It’s good six miles from Barker’s Clough.”

  ‘“I’ve walked it,” she said. “I don’t know whether I’m too late.”

  ‘Normally Noll would have said that, short of offering to bring her husband back, there was nothing he wouldn’t have a go at. But he judged that that wasn’t quite the approach for this occasion. Emma’s troubles were more practical than that.

  ‘“It’s me teeth,” she told him.’

  Georgina rather fancied herself at the dialect. Elizabeth found it degrading.

  ‘“Your teeth? I’ve got a book on dentistry up on the shelf, but I’m not halfway through it yet. Of course, I’ll tackle anything to oblige.”

  ‘“I know you will, Noll. But I’m not sure you can manage this – have you filled our Sam in yet?”

  ‘“Oh, aye. I always like to get the filling-in done before nightfall. People have enough to contend with, without getting up in the morning to catch sight of an open hole.”

  ‘”But they’ve buried my teeth with him.”

  ‘And Noll said it was a fact that he thought Sam had looked fuller-faced in death than he had done latterly in life – his mouth and cheeks less sunk in.

  ‘“He’d borrowed them to bite on a bit of toast-crust he’d asked me for, just before he went. And with all the fuss that followed, and me being off my food, I forgot to get them back. It isn’t the money that worries me, Noll, it’s all the bus rides to Bradburn, and my mouth full of plaster, then the hanging about, and all the soreness waiting for the new lot to settle down.”

  ‘“Not to worry, Emma. You’ll have your own set back by morning.”

  ‘And she did. That’s the sort of man he is, Elizabeth. Those are the lengths he would go to for a friend or customer. He dug Sam up, and he filled him in again, and he had those dentures over at Barker’s Clough by sunrise. As he told Emma, she’d have faded away from starvation if she’d had to wait for a Home Office Exhumation Order.’

  ‘That’s the most disgusting story I’ve ever listened to,’ Elizabeth Stirrup said.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time that Beamish got back to Hempshaw End, Grimshaw had set up the beginnings of a Report Centre on classical lines in the village hall. The one-inch map was pinned to a table-top, and the staff at the moment consisted of a uniformed sergeant in charge of the filing system, which so far consisted of one clipboard.

  ‘You found Mosley.’

  Beamish answered with a slight nod. He had given a good deal of thought to how much or how little he would have to tell Grimshaw. The only conclusion he had come to was to play things as they came.

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘In Barker’s Clough, sir.’

  That was safe enough. Mosley would be well clear of Barker’s Clough by now.

  ‘And what the hell was he doing in Barker’s Clough?’

  ‘Neighbouring, sir.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Actually, he was laundering an old woman’s curtains for her, to her considerable dismay. Mosley belongs to a club that eases old people out of winter into spring. I rather think that he’s a foundation member.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Grimshaw was testy. He was clearly up against frustration on all fronts. One of his difficulties was going to be to raise the manpower that he could see himself needing.

  ‘Your orders were to tell him to report to me, Beamish.’

  ‘He’s standing by for a flight to Africa, sir.’

  ‘Africa?’

  Grimshaw looked at him through narrowed eyes, as if he suspected him of treachery.

  ‘That’s what he said, sir.’

  ‘And you believe him, I suppose?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘And what did he say about what has happened here?’

  ‘Very little, sir. It wasn’t clear whether he knows anything about it or not.’

  ‘Does he, Beamish? Does he know anything or doesn’t he? You’re not going to tell me that you couldn’t make your mind up.’

  Beamish hesitated. His loyalty to Mosley, after all, had to depend on crosswinds. He felt that Mosley had shown only limited loyalty to him.

  ‘I think he probably does, sir.’

  Then Beamish brightened. He remembered that he had at least achieved part of his assignment.

  ‘I have found out whose gallows have come on to the market, sir.’

  Billy Birkin and Sarah Bramwell; Crippen – and the double bill for Easter: Beamish made everything that could be made out of the story – a good deal more than Grimshaw had patience with. It was as an afterthought, after Grimshaw believed he had got him away from the subject, that Beamish added, ‘And I believe they call themselves the Vigil Aunties, sir’.

  ‘You are working in collusion with Mosley, aren’t you, Beamish? You’re on his side, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You had better be, Beamish. He is your superior officer.’

  ‘Sir – it is less than fair to put me in a situation in
which –’

  ‘You are not being put in any situation, Beamish. What do you think this is – an employment agency? This is a police force, and I sent you to liaise with Mosley. He is on to something, isn’t he?’

  ‘I rather think he is, sir.’

  ‘He is actively pursuing it.’

  ‘That was my impression, on balance.’

  ‘Under cover of these geriatric good works?’

  ‘I gather that he is usually fairly busy in that direction at this time of year, sir. He was hoping that I would be able to lend him a hand with some of his tasks over the next day or so.’

  ‘He really thinks I can spare you to help him to mow lawns, with all the flap that there will be going on here?’

  ‘He merely expressed the hope, sir.’

  ‘You sound like Jeeves. Mosley is a fool, Beamish.’

  Beamish was silent.

  ‘I have heard many men say that, Beamish. I have said it myself. Once or twice in his career – just once or twice – he has turned the tables on us. I do not trust him, Beamish. The question is – is this one of Mosley’s genuine brainstorms? Beamish – give me some sort of answer.’

  ‘It is difficult to be sure, sir.’

  ‘I have no doubt that you and Mosley have made surreptitious arrangements to contact each other?’

  ‘If you wished me to speak to him again, sir, I do not think it would be too difficult for me to find out whose plot he is digging at any given time. I believe he said something about teaching an elderly gentleman to ride a bicycle.’

  ‘What was that foolish word you used? Neighbouring? Do you fancy washing people’s curtains and scraping out their rabbit hutches, Beamish?’

  ‘I will turn my hand to anything in the path of duty, sir.’

  ‘Then turn it to neighbouring – tomorrow. But Beamish – I shall want to see you personally with a progress report tomorrow evening. Tomorrow is Saturday. We will consider Sunday’s deployment in the light of whatever you have to tell me.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Chapter Eight