Mosley Went to Mow Read online

  ‘I’ve never understood how they managed it,’ Georgina Crane said. ‘There wasn’t anything to be salvaged, was there?’

  ‘I don’t understand it either, Miss Crane, and I don’t think Janie ever did. For that matter, neither did the Fraud Squad – you can bet they must have taken more than a surface interest. There must have been holdings that did not stand up to be counted among the assets. They must have used a nominee – someone they knew they could trust –’

  ‘That’s something else that I’ve never understood, either – how the nominee system works. What’s to stop any nominee with red blood in his veins from running away with the lot?’

  Cromwell assumed a cunning look – not difficult for him, since when he was himself, he was certainly the most cunning man over a wide radius.

  ‘There’s more than one kind of hold you can have over a man.’

  ‘You mean blackmail?’

  ‘Blackmail – fear – physical and worse –’

  ‘So everything that was salvaged went to the son?’

  ‘The girls were a sore disappointment to their father. He’d thought that they were going to turn out to be angels of culture and grace – the most sought-after young ladies on the marriage market. I think there must have been a lot about Wilson Goodwin that wasn’t far above simple-minded. It certainly didn’t work out that way. Where the hell did he think they were going to get their culture and grace from, that’s what I want to know. As it turned out, a couple of them did marry men with handles to their names, but they were the sort who had to work for a living – not what you and I would call aristocracy, Miss Crane …’

  He looked at her as if he did not doubt that she shared his social outlook. He seemed unaware that there might be anything incongruous in his sitting there expressing confidently final judgements on the quality of blue blood.

  ‘At least, your Janie used to make her escape now and then,’ Georgina said.

  ‘You mean the way she used to sneak out and smoke Woodbines with us behind Tommy Scragg’s garage? Yes – even when she was no more than thirteen or fourteen, Janie had had her fill of that household. She could see right through them.’

  ‘And couldn’t her sisters?’

  ‘They were different. There wasn’t one of them with Janie’s guts or wit. They were taken up by all sorts of internal intrigues, which kept them fully occupied. It all bored Janie stiff. So she used to come out and muck about with us. That’s how it all started.’

  Cromwell’s eyes now were looking out into some personal remoteness.

  ‘Yes. I was sweet on her right from the start. And my mother used to ask her into the house at meal times. That was not for the good of anybody’s soul, I might tell you. My mother had an infinite capacity for mischief-making. She even knew how to invest in mischief for the future.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Not that anybody would ever have taken us for sweethearts. We were at each other’s throats even in those days. “William Cromwell, you disgust me,” she used to say to me. “Don’t you have a mirror in your house? I suppose you’d be frightened of looking into it if you had. When did you last shampoo your hair? And you’re going to lose all your teeth before you’re much older.”’

  Noll Cromwell looked solemn.

  ‘I’ve not given up hope yet, you know. That’s if nothing has happened to her.’

  The thought sent him into an internal spasm of helpless rage.

  ‘If I find –’

  Georgina hurried to interrupt him. ‘And Janie completely lost track of her brother?’

  ‘To all intents and purposes. She has an idea that he got to be something during the war – a Major, or something of that sort. Then he went overseas – she thinks it might have been to South America. You can bet it would be somewhere where the sun shines, and where he doesn’t have to work with his hands.’

  ‘And you really think that if he turned up round here for some reason, she might do something impetuous?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Don’t you think that Janie would be above that sort of reaction nowadays?’

  ‘She never talked much to me about her brother but I never cared for the look that came into her eyes when she did.’

  Georgina gave it some seconds’thought.

  ‘But is all this something that Mr Mosley would know anything about? We are talking on the assumption that his fingers are probing into this somewhere. Inspector Mosley wouldn’t be in a position to recognize Janie’s brother, would he?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. But I gave up thinking I knew anything about the working of Jack Mosley’s mind a long time ago.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t claim to know everything about the working of yours, either, Noll Cromwell. You’ve something else on it, haven’t you?’

  Cromwell was clearly now less at his ease. She thought he was on the threshold of the subject that he had really come here to discuss, and now that the actual moment had arrived, he was reluctant about it. Georgina thought it best not to try to prompt him again at this stage.

  ‘Aye, well – there was another thing – another time in her life. Like all the Goodwin girls, there came a day when she’d her living to earn. Not that Janie was work-scared, you understand – but it had to be something that wouldn’t sully the family name: not waitressing, or a shop counter, or anything where folk might come across her. She’d been sent to one of those jumped-up schools – oh, not a boarding place – there wasn’t money for that for the girls, that was reserved for young Wilson – a private school on the outskirts of Bradburn, a snob place if ever there was one. They’d filled her up to her earholes with who she was supposed to be, and what she was supposed to do about it. It made Janie sick. And yet …’

  Cromwell spread his hands in disavowal of values that he could not countenance.

  ‘I suppose if you’re exposed to something often enough and for long enough, something of it will rub off on you.’

  There were differences between himself and Janie that he still resented. Georgina could not help wondering if he held it against her that she had retained a preference for some degree of personal cleanliness.

  But immediately he was moved by his indestructible sense of fairness to correct himself. ‘No – what am I saying? There was something special about Janie. It was in her bloodstream. I was telling you, she had to do something to make herself self-supporting, and what she did was to get taken on as companion by one of those old biddies who are rolling in it. When she first took the job, she did not mean to stay long in it – just long enough to see if there was anything in it for her. If she found she couldn’t stand the old girl, she wasn’t going to stay at all. She’d play it as it came. It did at least get her away from home. There was some talk that they’d be spending part of each year abroad – and Janie saw possibilities in that. She’d get herself somewhere worth being, fare paid, then cut herself loose, according to what opportunities she spotted. That wasn’t the way things worked out. As you probably know, she stayed with the old girl for years – including the war.’

  Georgina did not know that. To the best of her knowledge, no one in Hempshaw End other than Cromwell did know where Janie had spent that interim period.

  ‘Lady Rimmington, that was her name. She seems to have been a ripe old bird. Not that Janie ever really told me much about her – and even when she was talking, if ever she thought that I seemed to be listening a bit too attentively, she’d always shut up and start about something else. It was almost as if she felt afraid that I’d go getting the wrong idea. This Lady Rimmington was the widow of some starchy bloke who’d been somebody in the government service. And when he left her high and dry with enough to get by on, she seems to have come to the conclusion that she’d wasted enough of her life doing as she was told just to keep up government appearances. The time had come to please herself what she did with herself, and how she did it. And what she was looking for in a companion was someone to help her do just that –
someone with an elastic attitude to things, someone young enough to be able to make a few spicy suggestions of her own – someone who’d encourage her to behave as if she were a youngster herself.’

  Cromwell flexed his upper limbs, as if his shoulder-blades were beginning itch under his Sunday suit.

  ‘I’m not trying to say that they behaved as some of us might if we were let loose on the waterfronts of Europe with enough in the bank not to have to worry about paying by cheque. When it comes to kicking over the traces, a lot depends on what sort of a bearing-rein you’ve been held under up to now. It was a question of high living when they felt like it – or eating in a cheap café if it suddenly looked naughty enough to be interesting: which meant one that her husband would not have let her go into. They didn’t spend enormous amounts of money in the long run, Janie always insisted, but if something did happen to catch their eye, then they’d go for it without having to face a sermon on extravagance. A flutter on the gaming-tables once in a while – then a liqueur too many after dinner if one of them had come up with a fifty-franc bonus. They travelled about Switzerland in the 1930s looking like Punch cartoons of English tourists – that’s how Janie described them – getting their own way with everybody, because they looked so eccentric that nobody dared to thwart them.’

  Noll Cromwell had never been out of England in his life, but his reading had familiarized him with some unexpected backwaters – and so had some of the things that Janie had told him.

  And another image came into Georgina’s mind – a picture of Janie Goodwin in the absurdly old-fashioned clothes in which she used to go about Hempshaw End. Was this role-playing – the caricature English tourist in Interlaken – a copy-book maxim learned from Lady Rimmington? If so, it might well be that something had happened somewhere in upper-class holiday Europe that had had rather too abiding an effect on her. You couldn’t help looking at Janie Goodwin and wondering if she were unhinged; yet you’d only to talk to her for five minutes to discover that she very patently wasn’t.

  ‘And for her years – the old girl was into her seventies – she was not beyond dolling herself up if there was a man in the offing whose company might help to while away an empty evening. That’s the point that I’m coming to.’

  He paused to look Georgina straight in the eye, as if he felt the need to prove to her that he could look a fact in the face.

  ‘Janie had her men-friends too. She never talked to me about them in so many words – but it stands to sense, doesn’t it? And I do know that there was one who meant a lot to her. Well, again, it’s what you’d expect, isn’t it, in any girl of that age living that kind of life? But I’ve always had the feeling – one of those feelings that goes down inside a man’s boots – that this man let her down – badly. This isn’t the green eye, Miss Crane – how could it be, over something that happened when I wasn’t in her life, anyway? But she’s had a bad deal in a lot of places, has Janie Goodwin. She’s been having bad deals all her life, and I’ve been one of them. But this was as rotten a blow as she ever took. It was one of those things that make an everlasting mark on a woman – on most women, anyway, I suppose. There was a letter came for her one day, oh, five or six years ago, and she rushed to hide it away when she saw me coming in – not that I’d ever go poking about in her post, you understand – and she was irritable for the rest of the hour or so that I spent with her that day. Her mind wouldn’t stay on everyday things, and it took her a day or two to get over it. I was on tenterhooks for a week or more – expecting something to happen, I didn’t know what. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the village streets, waiting for some stranger to arrive, someone who was going to deprive me of such of her company as I was still managing to get.’

  ‘You know, you were jealous, Noll.’

  ‘Of course I was. And even worse was wondering whether she might be persuaded to take herself off somewhere. It was a bad time, I can tell you.’

  Georgina was wishing that she had not finished off the Scotch in the only round she had poured.

  ‘And now maybe she has taken herself off somewhere – or been taken off – for better or for worse.’

  ‘Well, let’s not make up our minds it’s for the worse until we know, Noll.’

  It sounded hopelessly lame to her as she said it.

  ‘I feel better now I’ve told you, Miss Crane. I know there’s nothing either of us can do about it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  He looked at her with pathetically childish anticipation of something miraculously optimistic. She wished she had not said it, but the need to offer some sort of solace had been strong.

  ‘Well, you might try to get hold of Inspector Mosley, for one thing. You seem pretty sure that he knows more about all this than he’d care to admit – and I’m certain you’re right.’

  ‘And where in hell’s name is Mosley? He’ll not be coming here in the open to sort the case out. He’s on holiday.’

  ‘Oh, come, Noll – surely a man who knows this place and its people as well as you do could put his finger on Mr Mosley in a couple of hours?’

  The suggestion brightened up Cromwell perceptibly.

  Chapter Ten

  From the diary of Elizabeth Stirrup for Saturday, 9 April

  I don’t think I can bear to stay any longer in this village. There is a latent barbarism here that I would never have thought to find in twentieth-century England. I could hardly believe my eyes this morning when I saw children of eight or nine years old being paraded in the lane outside this house, prior to being led out in search of the corpse of the poor woman who was murdered yesterday.

  As I saw them in their gaily-coloured, bobbed woollen caps, I wondered which of them would suffer the trauma of finding that body, badly bruised as it must be, to judge from the state we found that bottle in; probably hideously mutilated. And they were laughing andjoking about it, as if it were some game they were going to play.

  I told Georgina that I found it nauseating, but all she could find to say was, ‘Oh, they won’t find her.’

  Georgina is out at the moment, organizing village women to cut sandwiches for the large and uncouth search-party that has been recruited. Hempshaw End has entered into this as if it were their annual fête. My mind is made up. As soon as Georgina returns, I shall ask her to drive me to Bradburn. I don’t know how the trains run, but I really think I shall get on the first one I see with its buffers pointing south.

  Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw came out to Hempshaw End to take personal charge of the search-party. The amount of uniformed help allocated to him was even less than the Assistant Chief Constable had promised. The lecturer in charge of the Technical College group looked as if he had been up half the night trying to do justice to a particularly demanding seraglio. And three quarters of his students looked as if one more erotic encounter would be the death of them. One couple in particular struck him. The boy was making constant whispered appeals to the girl from the corner of his mouth, and it was obvious that her answers were affording him little satisfaction. Several times she tried to sidle away from him and tack herself on to the main body. When they started allocating squads for the work ahead, she quite deftly managed to get herself parted from her would-be escort at last. But Grimshaw, a soured impishness in him this morning, stepped in to reorganize and put them together again.

  Then he saw the teacher in charge of the Junior School bearing down on him with a merry cohort of potential corpse-hunters. Grimshaw knew, of course, that that would not do. Technical College students were permissible. Small boys with unbroken voices and little girls with their hair in pony-tails were not. He could foresee the national press, the television cameras, the country up in arms against the cynical callousness of its law-enforcers. He could hear in his brain every syllable of the one-sided interview that would take place in the Assistant Chief Constable’s office.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the teacher in charge, who had an Afro hai
rstyle and a gold (or brass) ring in one ear.

  ‘It’s good of you to offer to help. But, you know, it wouldn’t be suitable. The sights that we are likely to come on –’

  ‘We don’t try to shield them from the realities of life these days,’ the teacher said.

  ‘This might be the reality of death.’

  ‘All the better.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Last month we took them to a stud farm. They really did see action.’

  ‘I hope it will come in useful to them in due course. But this would hardly be the thing. Besides – it’s difficult country, could be dangerous. Bogs. Fast-flowing streams. Crumbling cliffs.’

  ‘Whack-oh! Some of them are looking forward to coming to grips with the Duke’s Award.’

  Grimshaw thought of the paucity of his line abreast, and he weakened. Rationalizing, he thought he saw a way.

  ‘All right, then – I’ll use you strictly as a reserve – a sort of line of whippers-in. The adults and the college students will be first over the ground, but there’s no telling what they might miss. It would be a great credit to your children, if they were to pick up something that’s been overlooked.’

  A sergeant came up and reported that the flanks of the task force were in position. Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw drew a whistle from his pocket and self-consciously blew it.

  According to all the studies of the sexual drive that Nigel had read, this trauma ought to have had her clinging to him for orgiastic relief. Was not procreation the natural human response to death and destruction? Were not the slopes of volcanoes classically strewn with copulating couples who ought more rationally to have been fleeing for their lives? But there seemed to be something about Sue that was not according to the book. Far from tearing off her clothes and snatching at the zip of his flies, she seemed to have been sapped of all her urges. There seemed scarcely anything feminine about her any more. Her hair could have been a man’s. Nigel looked at the barely disturbed contours under the jacket-pockets of her denim jacket and wondered whether she actually had breasts or not.