Edmund Crispin
The Glimpses of the Moon
Contents
1. Reminiscences of Old Gobbo
2. Alps on Alps Arise
3. Youings: A Rebuttal
4. Prompt Hand and Headpiece Sever
5. In an English Garden
6. Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change
7. Omnium-gatherum
8. Interviews
9. The Short Arms of Coincidence and the Law
10. Wasp Chewing
11. Galloping Major
12. Bliss was It in That Dawn to be Alive
13. The Chesterton Effect
1. Reminiscences of Old Gobbo
There’s humour, which for chearful Friends we got,
And for the thinking Party there’s a Plot.
Thomas Betterton, or Anne Brace-
Girdle, or William Congreve, or Anonymous:
from the Prologue to Congreve’s
Love for Love
1
‘That’s another of them, don’t you know,’ said the Major. As some people can sense the presence of a cat in the room, so the Major could sense a journalist, or at any rate claimed he could. ‘Really, it’s too bad. How long is it since Routh was murdered?’
‘Eight weeks, I suppose.’
‘Eight weeks at least. And yet here are reporters still rooting round the place like … like pigs in Périgord. What the devil do they expect to find, after all this time?’
‘I don’t believe that’s a journalist,’ said Fen. He ate the last of his veal-and-ham pie - conventionally insipid stuff with which, however, The Stanbury Arms served Bengal Club mango chutney in mitigation - and drank some beer. ‘Of course that’s not a journalist, Major. You’ve got journalists on the brain.’
The subject of their discussion, who had come into the bar only a minute previously, was a harmless-looking man in early middle age with scanty hair and a round, clean-shaven, yellowish face. His eyebrows were thick and smudged, as if laid on with a palette-knife, and he wore a dark townsman’s suit. As he paid for his drink he eyed Fen and the Major speculatively, and after a moment, glass in hand, came across to speak to them.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m a journalist.’ Fen gave a snort of exasperation. ‘Padmore’s my name,’ the newcomer went on, with diminished confidence. ‘J. G. Padmore. I wonder if I might join you?’ He peered anxiously at them out of moist brown eyes.
‘Sit down, my dear fellow, sit down, do,’ said the Major cordially. Whatever his other faults, he never let his prejudices debase his manners. ‘I’m the Major, and this is Professor Gervase Fen, from Oxford.’
‘How do you do?’ said Fen. ‘I’m sorry I made that noise. It was the Major I was irritated with, not you.’
‘Yes, I do irritate people, I’m afraid,’ said the Major, pleased at Fen’s tribute. ‘I talk too much, for one thing. Yes, well now, as I was saying, Fen is a Professor, and from Oxford. He’s staying down here for part of his sabbatical, to write a book. It’s to be about the modern novel. The post-war novel, that is. The post-war British novel.’ He seemed to feel that Padmore’s vocation necessitated filling him in on all this detail before anything further could be allowed to occur.
‘Burgess, Anthony,’ Fen instanced helpfully. ‘Amis, Kingsley. Lessing, Doris, Howard, E. J., Drabble, Margaret … Brooke-Rose, Christine.’
‘Hysteron proteron,’ said the Major.
‘I don’t know Hysteron’s work,’ said Padmore. ‘But the others, of course, are all very - are all very -’
‘Well and fine,’ the Major suggested.
‘But as you’ll have gathered, I’m still only at the card-indexing stage.’ And not mad-keen to be forging forward from it, either, Fen’s tone implied. He frowned. ‘Major,’ he said, ‘do tell that dog of yours to stop sniffing at my head.’
Padmore, who could see Fen’s head but no dog anywhere near it, looked round him a shade wildly. He relaxed, however, partially, on catching sight of a small black whippet, skeletal like an advertisement for some animal Oxfam, which was investigating a sack dumped in a corner by the bar counter.
‘He’s only sniffing,’ said the Major. ‘He won’t try and worry it out, don’t you know, not the way Sal would.’ Sal was the Major’s other pet, an inexhaustibly strident cocker bitch loved by no one but her owner.
‘It’s a pig’s head, for brawn,’ Fen explained to Padmore. ‘A present.’
‘From a Mrs Clotworthy,’ said the Major, the informative urge still fermenting in him. ‘A butcher’s widow, just turned seventy-five. She lives here in Burraford in a cottage.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Padmore vaguely. ‘How do you do?’ he said, Then, ‘Well, if you’re sure I’m not interrupting anything…’
By this time, regardless of whether they were sure or not, he had sat down on a narrow old black-painted bench fixed to the wall beside their table. There were several such benches in the bar-room - memorials to a centuries-extinct clientèle of pin-buttocks - but otherwise the furniture was all modern, from the oak counter with its mirror-backed shelves to the green glass-topped tables and the matching vinyl-covered chairs grouped round them. Isobel Jones, the landlord’s wife, hummed quietly to herself as she polished glasses. By the fireplace, an ancient man with no collar on sat motionless as a reptile, the breath moaning in his nose like wind up a chimney. Fred, the whippet, had abandoned Fen’s sack with a heavy sigh and lain down; he was now alternately licking his forepaws and gazing lachrymosely at the Major. For a pub at 11.30 on a sunny Saturday morning it was not a large complement, but there was good reason for this: nearly all the able-bodied local men who would normally have been present had been dragooned by the Rector into putting up stalls and marquees for the Autumn Church Fête to be held that afternoon in the grounds of Aller House.
Padmore, having inoffensively siphoned some of his ale-froth in under an extruded upper lip, put his glass on the table in a decisive manner, by way of indicating that he was now, so to speak, open for business. ‘It’s about Routh,’ he said. ‘And, of course, Hagberd.’
Since this news came as no surprise either to Fen or to the Major, they said nothing, but merely nodded at him slowly in unison, like a pair of china mandarins. ‘You see, I’m writing a book too,’ said Padmore. ‘I too am writing a book. About the case.’ They nodded again. Suddenly a new thought seemed to strike Padmore. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said.
Fen looked at him in perplexity. ‘You’re not writing a book?’
‘I mean, not now.’
‘Started it and then gave it up,’ the Major suggested. ‘Pity. Would have been just the job, if you’ll forgive my saying so.’
‘I mean, as a matter of fact it’s finished.’
‘Good gracious, my dear fellow, you have been quick,’ said the Major admiringly. ‘Only eight weeks since the thing happened, and you’ve done a book about it already.’
‘You’ve got to be quick nowadays, with murders,’ said Padmore. ‘Otherwise someone else who’s interested gets the jump on you and takes half your sales away. I’ve been worrying about that, I can tell you. “Is someone going to get the jump on me?” I ask myself. “Or have I been lucky – am I in fact leading the field?”’
‘Yes, yes, my dear chap, of course you’re leading it.’
‘And I can only answer, “I don’t know. I can’t know.”’
‘No, now you come to point it out, naturally you can’t.’
‘All I can do is to rush into print as fast as possible, and hope for the best. But it’s not right.’
‘Not right at all,’ said the Major. ‘Dreadful thing to be forced to do.’
‘I mean, the draft of my book isn’t right,’ said Padmore tes
tily. ‘That is, re-reading it, I don’t find that the two men, Hagberd and Routh, emerge vividly enough. They don’t start out at one from the page.’
‘I should hope not,’ said the Major. ‘A very nasty experience, that’d be. No, no, my dear fellow, I know what you mean. I was only trying to make a joke.’
‘Not properly rounded,’ said Padmore. He paused in momentary confusion as his eye lit on a photograph of a scrawny fashion model in a newspaper which lay on the bench beside him. Then, recovering, ‘So I thought I’d give myself a few days longer,’ he said, ‘and come down here again, talk to some of the people who knew them, and try to visualize them more distinctly.’ Put like that, the project sounded at once tedious and insubstantial, like ectoplasm at a séance. ‘And then do a certain amount of rewriting, I suppose,’ he concluded unenthusiastically.
‘No use looking at me, I’m afraid,’ said Fen. ‘I didn’t get here till a week after it happened. Try the Major. He knew them.’
But the Major regretfully shook his head. ‘Only to pass the time of the day with, don’t you know. And I should think you’ll find it’s the same with most people. Horrible man, Routh. And Hagberd, mad as a hatter, poor chap. So of course there was no one at all close to either of them - not that I’m aware of, anyway.’
‘Hagberd definitely struck you as insane, did he?’ said Pad-more earnestly. ‘Even beforehand?’
‘Lord, yes, he’d been like it for months,’ said the Major. ‘Ask anyone. It was all that work he did.’
‘But what I can’t understand is, why nobody took any action about it, if they realized he was dangerous.’
‘But, my dear fellow, that’s just what none of us did realize. He could be very fierce, of course, especially against Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe, but then, who wouldn’t be? Besides,’ said the Major with an air of reasonableness, ‘everyone who lives in the countryside’s a bit touched, one way or another. If we all started trying to have each other certified there’d be nobody left.’
‘So in fact, the murder came as a complete surprise?’
‘We-ll …’ The Major took an interval for consideration, passing the side of his right index finger along his narrow black moustache. ‘Yes and no. All that hacking and hewing afterwards, don’t you know - somehow that fitted in with Hagberd all right. What didn’t seem to fit in was the killing itself.’
Padmore reached for his glass. ‘To Hagberd, the dead flesh was dead flesh: nothing more,’ he intoned. Evidently he was now quoting from his book. ‘In the abusing of it,’ he went on, ‘the abusing of the dead flesh, that is, there could consequently be no true harm. Pain, not death, was the enemy.’ Fen and the Major made simultaneous mental notes, reducing the book’s potential sales by two. ‘Is that right, would you say?’ asked Padmore, relapsing into the language of everyday life. ‘Right more or less?’
‘Quite right, my dear fellow, absolutely right,’ the Major agreed. ‘And very… very forcefully put. Yes. The only thing is - if you don’t mind my mentioning it - that I don’t exactly see the point of putting it at all, forcefully or any other way. I mean, although it’s true that we all thought Hagberd was harmless, he wasn’t was he? He just ignored our ideas on the subject, and went ahead and murdered awful Routh anyway.’
And it was at this point that a new voice struck into the conversation: the voice of the ancient man by the fireplace.
‘Er never,’ it said.
*
2
The ancient man was called Gobbo.
That, at least, was how he was universally addressed; his real name, Gorley or Gorman or some such thing, had been in disuse for so long that by now he had probably forgotten it himself. As to ‘Gobbo’, that was a Gothicism (nothing to do with Shakespeare) bestowed round about the time of the relief of Ladysmith owing to the young Gorman’s (or Godwit’s) habit of hawking and spitting with an amplitude considered excessive even in those relatively coarse-grained days. Gobbo no longer hawked or spat, his third wife having with some effort cured him of these obnoxious practices; but the nickname was by that time ineluctable (the third wife’s reward, on sinking exhausted into the grave, had been to have ‘Agnes Lucy Gobbo’ carved on her tombstone by a monumental mason labouring under a misapprehension), and had remained. For the rest, like many native Devonians off the beaten tourist track, Gobbo gave the impression of having been left over unaltered from a very early novel by Eden Phillpotts. He cackled pruriently at references to love or courtship. He cadged drinks. He reminisced, racily if not particularly engrossingly, about a boyhood whose chief amusements had apparently been poaching and voyeurism. He proffered recipes for long life. In winter, The Stanbury Arms gave him a free pint of bitter each day, for looking after the fire. Sometimes he would remember to do this. Grunting feebly from the exertion, he would throw on to the fire a great log, which would dislodge another great log, which would tumble out and roll, burning fiercely, to the centre of the room.
‘Er never,’ Gobbo now repeated.
Padmore, who had opened his mouth to reply to the Major, slowly shut it again. He and the Major swivelled to face Gobbo, like gun-turrets on a man-of-war in a Look at Life at the pictures. Fen meditatively spooned a selected piece of Bengal Club out of the jar and ate it in his fingers on its own.
The Major said, ‘Who never what, Gobbo?’
‘Er never killed en.’
‘Hagberd never killed Routh? But, my dear fellow, that’s nonsense. We know he did.’
‘Giddout,’ said Gobbo.
This, if inexplicit, nevertheless had a punctuating effect, so that the Major felt obliged to pause for a moment or two before pursuing the argument. Then he said, ‘But why, Gobbo? The police were satisfied, more or less. What makes you think they were wrong?’
Gobbo moved his jaws silently. He was considering. Presently, ‘I’ll tell ’ee fer why,’ he said.
Gilded and warmed by the steady October sunlight, they waited as patiently as possible for Gobbo to go on. Isobel Jones had disappeared into a back room, from which clinkings and bumpings indicated that she was shifting crates of bottles about. The whippet Fred, tiring of the companionship of Fen’s sack, had rejoined the humans and was nudging, with his nose, the rubber tip of the propped-up walking-stick which the Major carried for his arthritis. Like most dogs, Fred detested pubs, and knocking the Major’s stick over was one of his regular methods of giving notice that in his opinion the time had come for departure.
The silence extended itself.
Fen wiped his fingers on his handkerchief and lit a cigarette.
At last, abruptly, Gobbo spoke.
‘I’ll tell ’ee fer why,’ he said.
The Major’s stick fell with a clatter to the floor. ‘Yes, well, my dear fellow, get on and tell us, then,’ said the Major, retrieving the stick with the dexterity of long practice.
Again Gobbo’s jaws moved, this time with a stridulating noise. He was summoning up saliva, presumably with a view to further speech. Again they waited. But when after a suspenseful interval no further speech had in fact occurred, it suddenly became evident to them all that Gobbo’s mind had unhitched itself from the topic, and was drifting rapidly out to sea. ‘Quick! Catch him!’ said Padmore agitatedly, and, ‘Gobbo!’ the Major rapped out in an army voice. ‘Answer the question, please!’
Luckily Gobbo had never been in the forces, so this worked. ‘Ur,’ he said. The current had reversed course, and he was coming back inshore again. ‘Ur. Ur, ur.’ All at once a spasm of energy seized him. ‘Er never,’ he began recapitulating, doppio movimento, accelerando. ‘ Er never killed en. And I’ll tell ’ee fer why. Cuz,’ he coda-ed triumphantly, allegro assai, ‘I wer’ talkin’ to en.’
Padmore stared at him. ‘Talking to Hagberd?’
‘Ehss.’
‘When?’
‘Ehss.’
‘Concentrate, Gobbo,’ said the Major severely. ‘You were talking to Hagberd when?’
‘Ehss.’
‘Concentrate. Y
ou’re trying to tell us that you were talking to Hagberd at the time when he was supposed to be killing Routh?’
‘Ehss.’
‘And you’re quite sure you know when that was? I mean, the date, and time of day?’
‘Mazed as a brish, er wer’.’
‘Yes, yes, my dear chap, we know all that. What I’m asking is, when was it?’
Gobbo once more fell silent; but this time, perceptibly, it was because he was giving the matter in hand his full attention. ‘Twenty-second,’ he presently announced, with decision.
‘August the twenty-second … well, that’s right enough,’ said the Major, whose voice was by now back in mufti. ‘That’s right enough!
‘Monday,’ Gobbo elaborated, flushed with his success.
‘Yes, that’s right too. It was a Monday. And the time?’
‘Ar pars seven, when I leaves.’
‘You’re not saying you were talking to Hagberd at half past seven here?’
‘Ehss.’
‘But my dear fellow, you can’t have been. People would have seen you both.’
‘Us wer’ out under tree.’
‘Oh … They shove him out of here at half past seven every evening,’ the Major muttered explanatorily to Padmore, whose eyes were already glazed with the effort to understand, ‘because otherwise the woman who gets him his supper won’t wait. But there’s a seat round the trunk of the old elm outside, and he sits down and has a rest there on the way home,.. So you talked to Hagberd that evening under the tree?’
‘Ehss.’
‘Do try and be a bit more garrulous, my dear fellow, can’t you?’ said the Major plaintively. ‘At this rate we shall be here till next week. You talked to Hagberd that evening - right. Now, what did you talk about?’
‘Ehss.’
‘“Yes” isn’t a proper answer, Gobbo.’
‘Ehss.’
‘No, it’s not. I’ll put the question another way. What did Hagberd talk about?’
Gobbo, clearly on the point of reiterating his monosyllable, at the last moment thought better of it and substituted something else instead. He said, ‘Said er wer’ crook wi’ a sheila.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 1