Mosley Went to Mow Page 8

  When they had first looked into the plate-layer’s hut, she had readily agreed with him about keeping their mouths shut. But since then she had given what Nigel considered a demonstration of femininity. She had started saying that they ought to report what they had seen, and from there it had not taken her long to become obsessed with the idea. In vain did Nigel remind her that they had broken into the place, and that that would be the first thing to interest the authorities.

  ‘You broke into it,’ Sue said, dissociating herself with the facility of Eve.

  ‘And you were with me. You wanted to go in there. And you’ve not forgotten why.’

  ‘Well, thank God we didn’t,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know why you say that.’

  ‘Because,’ she said, with logical finality.

  But Nigel had not quite given up yet. He was a trier. He tramped solidly beside her, his shoulder bumping against hers. She actually tried to quicken her stride.

  It so happened, because of their place in the line, that their axis of advance took them along the edge of the cutting that overlooked the Old Railway. It was another group – a knot of villagers, including two women – who were advancing up the track itself. Sue and Nigel caught sight of them when they were about fifteen yards short of the old cabin.

  ‘Well – it’ll all be over bar the shouting in a minute,’ Nigel said. ‘Then you’ll be wondering what the hell you’ve been worrying about all this time.’

  They stopped to watch what would happen. The group was moving slowly, two of the men halfway up the banks of the cutting, beating at thick tussocks of grass with sticks. One of the women went up to the door of the gangers’hut and put her hand on the handle. The door opened easily for her.

  ‘Hey! It isn’t locked,’ Nigel said.

  The woman started to go into the hut and they waited for her to scream. But all she did was insert her torso, look casually round inside, then come out shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘Somebody must have taken that padlock away,’ Nigel said.

  Sue put her hands on the wall and shouted down into the cutting.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the woman shouted back. ‘Except two empty beer cans and about forty thousand spiders.’

  ‘Do keep up with the line, you two,’ said Grimshaw’s voice from behind them.

  No one who knew Sammy Bagshaw – no one even who loved him

  (if anyone did) – would have put his name forward for an exercise that demanded concentration, discipline, staying-power and at least some degree of knowledge of what was going on. At the age of eight, Sammy Bagshaw had not yet developed to the stage of thoroughly understanding all that was happening about him. There were even some forecasters who maintained that he never would. It took the sang-froid of the teacher with the Afro hairstyle and a ring in one ear to include Sammy in a field-studies expedition that was to live for a week away from home. Warned by his headmaster of what he was taking on, this teacher had simply remarked that just because a laddie had an IQ of sixty-five that was no reason why he should be socially deprived.

  It might be interesting to attempt a Sammy Bagshaw’s eye view of all that happened to him that day, but it would be difficult to say with any exactitude what was his impression of events at any given time. He must, for example, have known what his breakfast was, for he ate it. He must have known that it was raining, for social involvement was not his only area of deprivation, and he did not possess a coat.

  Presumably he thought that their movement in line up the rising flank of the moors was some sort of game, for he enquired who had the ball.

  It is not impossible, in normal circumstances, for a boy to get lost, but it is improbable that he will do so when moving across open country with a companion only a yard or two away from him on either side, a teacher a few paces behind, and a police constable keeping an eye on the sector. Nevertheless, Sammy did get lost, and he added to the magnitude of this feat by managing also to penetrate the line of keenly observant adults in front of him, without being observed by any of them. He was certainly himself unable to account for his being where he eventually was – but then, he could rarely do that at the best of times.

  What mattered was that Sammy Bagshaw, having got himself ahead of the main body, was the first to make a find. What he found was a woman’s coat, hanging on the branches of a budding hawthorn that was apparently able to draw enough sustenance to live in a crack in a patch of exposed rock face. It was, as Sammy was later heard to describe it, a funny coat. It had grey fur on its reversed collar and a yoke of grey fur round its middle. It was much longer than any coat that Sammy had ever seen on a woman.

  Sammy was not surprised by his find. If surprise had been a regular reaction in Sammy’s existence, he would surely have gone about with permanently raised eyebrows, since in a world governed by no analysable pattern of reason, practically everything must surely be to some extent astonishing. Nor was Sammy entirely the fool that some people took him for. It was raining hard, he was soaked to the skin, and he had just found a coat. Insouciant of the figure that he cut – Janie Goodwin was a significantly taller person than he was – he put it on.

  Not every member of Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw’s irregular army applied himself with equal diligence and self-sacrifice to the objectives of the day. Among those whose consciences could lightly be stilled in this respect was Anthony Brakeshaft, the lecturer in charge of the Technical College party. Having put his forces at the disposal of the state – with the additional bonus of having got them off his own hands for the day – he saw no reason to indulge in what looked as if it was going to be a twenty-mile tramp, to judge from the marked map that that bloody policeman was carrying. The rain was by now fair pissing down, and he saw no sense either in getting wetter than he already was. Time would be far better spent rising to the challenge of seduction – an art in which Tony Brakeshaft was more accomplished, because more eclectically experienced, than was Nigel Teesdale. Furthermore, his target was distinctly less uninformed on procedural matters than was Sue Grayson. In fact, the word ‘seduction’crossed his mind only out of courtesy to the lady.

  Brakeshaft had not really noticed Penny Evans until last night. He had noticed her while leaning over her to show his interest in a routine calculation that appeared to be puzzling her. He was leaning at such an angle, and she turned to look up at him through such an arc that her columns of figures were not all that he saw.

  ‘Your log tan angle of elevation can’t possibly be right,’ he said, maintaining the pressure on her shoulder that he had put there only tentatively in the first instance. She agreed with the most skilful of smiles and did nothing to suggest that she wanted the pressure removed.

  ‘I seem to have got into the habit recently of squinting down the wrong column.’

  She was dark-haired, looked after her hair more formally than most of her contemporaries did, was well made, tending to be stocky rather than chubby. She was highly practised in a smile that melted most men whom she wanted to melt, and she was quite clearly not indisposed to melt Anthony Brakeshaft at this juncture in a week in the country. She was also adept at conveying messages. The message now in transit was that she was well acquainted with her own equipment, that she knew what it was for and how to use it to advantage. And that if Mr Brakeshaft was interested, that suited her.

  But unfortunately she shared a bedroom at the Centre with a girl who was an unknown quantity to Brakeshaft, and whom he saw at the moment no tactical way of dislodging. He was disinclined, however, to let the encounter remain as brief as that.

  Now, this morning, Penny Evans was not looking her happiest in a light plastic raincoat, at the end of a line that had just started across yet another field. It had to be admitted, on the other hand, that the raincoat did something for her. It seemed to accentuate a very healthy mobility.

  It had also to be admitted that the line discipline was not very good on this sector of the front. There were oth
er members of the college besides their moral tutor whose hearts were not totally committed to what they had volunteered for. And one or two had already succeeded in slipping out of the line altogether, which accounted for gaps in it and its state of general raggedness.

  On the pretext of closing ranks, Brakeshaft went over to within earshot of Penny. ‘Not too good a morning, Miss Evans.’

  ‘I can think of places where I’d rather be.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Somewhere warm, dry and unfrequented.’

  A few minutes later they found what filled the bill, a group of sheds on a farm that seemed completely deserted. Maybe the inhabitants were all out in the line somewhere.

  Brakeshaft shouted over to the man nearest on his left that he was going to give these possible hidey-holes the once-over. The rest of them were to keep the line tight, and he would catch up with them.

  He passed behind Penny and beckoned her with a jerk of his head. They had to make their way round a slough where cattle had passed. She looked at him with a grin that anticipated something unsentimental, but of undoubted technical accomplishment. He pushed open one or two sheds, rejecting them as dirty or occupied by creatures unconducive to pure romance. Then he found one that was roomier than the others, and that had recently had space cleared in it.

  To some purpose: in one corner an executioner’s scaffold had been erected, on which stood a toothy-grinned effigy made from old sacks, strapped, noosed and waiting its hour on the drop. There was nothing scarey about it. Even at a distance and in that poorish light, one could see at once that it was only a scarecrow.

  Brakeshaft went up to the lever and pulled it hard over. The trap fell with a creak and a clatter, and the effigy, still grinning, fell swinging into the depths.

  Not all of Grimshaw’s mobile brigade were backsliders. The Hemp Valley had volunteered in some strength, and there were men and women who worked with dedication in spite of the weather, poking sticks into any vegetation that was at all dense, stirring up leaf-mould, examining dung-heaps for signs of recent turning, getting down on their hands and knees in wet grass to look into ditches and under hedgerows. The first find to go into the official log was discovered stuffed behind a loose stone beside a stile. It was a lady’s camisole in a kind of muslin trimmed with imitation lace, and was of a pattern much favoured during the reign of Edward VII.

  Halfway through the morning, Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw called a halt to take stock of general progress and to redeploy his troops in places where multiple desertions had left serious inadequacies in his striking power. A fair amount of woman’s underclothing had now been brought in, all of it dating from the first decade of the century, but all of it still in excellent condition. He reported to the Assistant Chief Constable over the radio network that there appeared to be an element of the ridiculous about the exercise.

  ‘The stuff is spread over such a wide area: a left elastic-sided boot a mile and a half from its neighbour, a pair of black ankle-length riding drawers some seven hundred yards from a high-necked, half-sleeved pure silk vest. Moreover, this is not a subject on which I would profess personal expertise, but I am a married man, and it does seem to me that none of this stuff has been recently worn. What I mean is, not to put too fine a point on it – it doesn’t seem to me to have just come off a lady’s back.’

  Then, short-breathed from a mixture of excitement and exertion, a man came running into the mobile headquarters to report the discovery of a gallows in good working order.

  And so the day came to an end at last. Grimshaw had had enough of it.

  There had been all that lingerie. Grimshaw had pinned flags all over his map, showing where vests, knickers, chemises and combinations had been found. He was beginning to suspect that this thing might possibly be a hoax; then the inspiration came to him that there might be some sort of significant pattern in the distribution of the garments. It might be somebody’s way of trying to tell him something. He plotted the finds accordingly, and the design he produced looked now like the left-hand profile of an eagle, now like the tail-feathers of a duck facing right. The thought kept coming to him – he told himself unjustly – that Mosley was behind this somewhere – and he, who had suffered deeply and consistently from Mosley in the past, wondered what he had done to deserve this new wave of venom. For although in the past Mosley had sometimes been obstinate, sometimes stupid, often devious and occasionally able to prove himself right in the end, he had never before shown himself as implacably bloody-minded as this.

  It was not only a matter of Janie Goodwin’s eccentric underwear. The day had also been overshadowed by those bloody gallows. The FOR SALE advertisement had been brought up in the first instance by the Assistant Chief Constable. Beamish had come back from Mosley with the tale of Billy Birkin. Then, towards the end of the morning, a man had come up panting to announce that he had found the contraption. Well and good. But within five minutes another Mercury had arrived, also panting, and declaring the whereabouts of a second engine of death. It was not more than an hour and a half before a third was placed on record. By the end of the working day – that is, by the first failure of daylight – Grimshaw had been to see with his own eyes six working sets of gallows: one in a shed behind a widow’s cottage; two on farm complexes, three on various smallholdings dotted up and down the Valley. He still had not got to hear about the one in the plate-layer’s hut that had disturbed the promising relationship between Nigel Teesdale and Sue Grayson; and that had appeared to be missing when the search-party passed that way this morning.

  So what was it about the Hemp Valley that made it the thing of the moment to possess the means of formal extermination? The initial statements of the owners had been somehow unconvincing.

  ‘Just curiosity, I suppose,’ one of them said.

  ‘I always have been interested in that sort of thing,’ came from another.

  ‘I thought that if we ever had a break-in and a burglar saw it on the premises, he might have second thoughts.’

  ‘We were going to give Sunday-morning shows. In aid of the Church of England Children’s Society.’

  Subject to the smaller print in manuals of police law that he had not yet had the chance to consult, Grimshaw did not think that the possession of a scaffold, however efficiently maintained, was in itself an offence. And when all was said and done, there were other things higher up in his mind than the fashion for gallows.

  There had been, for example, two more disappearances, one of which, he knew, was going to be attended by more denigratory publicity than anything else that had ever happened in his career. For he had just been on the point of dismissing his troops and driving back to Bradburn for a cup of sweet tea and a leisurely glance through anything else that had come in today, when it was reported to him in panic that one of the children from the Junior School was missing.

  Not that little moron Sammy Bagshaw. Sammy had not even been reported missing. He had returned to his unit before anyone had missed him, with the hem of Janie Goodwin’s coat trailing on the ground and the cuffs turned up nearly to his elbows. He had cried bitterly when they had taken the coat off him, but otherwise had been unable to give any account of himself. He could not state articulately where he had found the coat. Even the most subtle probing had not elicited where he had been. The information that he had succeeded in coaxing out of Sammy Bagshaw had to be counted among Grimshaw’s professional failures.

  There had been a letter in Janie Goodwin’s coat-pocket, a letter addressed to Janie Goodwin and folded back into the envelope in which it had originally been posted. It was a cryptic letter. Grimshaw had not so far managed to make head or tail of it. For just as he was making his third attempt to read it, six over-excited little girls had come running up ahead of their teacher to let it be known that Brenda Shuttleworth was not to be found.

  It took a good deal of piecing together, and Grimshaw was by no means convinced that he had succeeded in piecing it together correctly. It seemed that
the contingent of which Brenda was a popular member had stopped to eat their packed lunch in the grounds of a sawmill, when Brenda had said that she was going over into the next field to exchange reminiscences with some of the Second Year. When she did not return, it was taken for granted that she had tacked herself on to the Second Year for the remainder of the day’s sport. No one in the Second Year, however, had seen anything of Brenda Shuttleworth at all. Grimshaw sent two of his uniformed minions off to the sawmill in the failing light and said that he would follow in a few minutes’time.

  But this he was unable to do; he had just radioed this latest set-back to the Bradburn office when he saw that the retired schoolmistress, Miss Crane, was approaching. He had hitherto docketed her in his mind as a woman of some aplomb, but today something seemed to have shaken her. There was a greyness about her features and she was having difficulty in keeping her fingers still.

  Miss Elizabeth Stirrup, her young friend and former pupil, had, it seemed, vanished into the rain-swept air. Miss Crane had left her alone in the house while she went down into the village to organize haversack rations for the search-party, and when she got back, it looked as if Miss Stirrup had been making preparations for unexpected departure. Her suitcase was packed, but was still standing on a chair with the lid open. Her diary was also lying open on a table and her last sentence had been left unfinished.

  ‘She’s a young lady who’s capable of looking after herself, I would imagine,’ Grimshaw said hopefully.

  ‘I would not be so sure of that. I have taken the liberty of peeping into the pages of that diary, and I am greatly perturbed by the way she seems to have developed. Or should I say, not developed?’