The Glimpses of the Moon

by Edmund Crispin

  Stalking about Routh’s farm from before dawn to beyond dusk, doing the work of three men, Hagberd was at first unaware of this; and when his suspicions did eventually stir, he found it practically impossible to credit them. How could anyone want to give pain to an animal? No sentimentalist, Hagberd knew that rearing animals once in a while inflicts pain unavoidably. No vegetarian, he knew that the terminal few minutes in the slaughter-house often inflict fear. But so long as animals were alive, surely nothing within reason could be too good for them, could it?

  The turning-point came when Hagberd discovered not only that Routh’s visits to Longhempston, twenty miles away, were for the purpose of watching hare-coursing, but also that Routh had been a prime mover in getting this baneful recreation locally revived. There had been other things - among them, a Leghorn with both legs broken, a ewe in milk with a long strip of her wool and hide torn away, a starving mongrel stray with its ribs trodden in - but these might, after all, have been due to accidents or to predators. The hare-coursing was something else. Learning of it, Hagberd started keeping an eye on his soft-spoken employer, and so one day came on him enjoying himself privately with a two-month-old kitten.

  Hagberd dealt with him thoroughly, left him lying in the muck of the yard, and went off to notify the R.S.P.C.A., taking the dying kitten along for evidence. But Routh had snipped and ripped with precaution. A fox, he said: undoubtedly the kitten had been mauled by a fox. The vet had reluctantly agreed that it just conceivably could have been, and the Society had equally reluctantly decided not to attempt to prosecute. Routh said that he should hope not. Here was he examining the poor little thing to see if anything could be done for it, and all of a sudden here had been Hagberd, snarling and lashing out with his fists like a maniac. He, Routh, wouldn’t take any action over the assault, he selflessly said, since Hagberd clearly wasn’t right in the head. Not taking any action, he added (but only to himself), would also help to quash the likelihood of there being any really thorough-going investigation of the stimulating ways in which he chose to spend some of his spare time.

  Hagberd left Routh, and went to work for Clarence Tully.

  On a bleak morning of early February, the Major, out for a walk, watched Hagberd teaching a baby lamb to skip. Uttering strange antipodean yelps of encouragement, Hagberd was repeatedly jumping into the air, his great Wellingtons crashing down again into the icy slush, while the lamb watched him in timid fascination. By the time the Major hobbled back that way, ten minutes later, the lamb had caught on.

  ‘Look at that, then!’ Hagberd called triumphantly. ‘Bucking like a brumby!’ And the Major, though he frowned momentarily at this distasteful mention of horses, had to admit that it was a pleasant sight.

  ‘Heinz Spaghetti makes a meal taste great,’ he sang, getting a curt but friendly nod from Hagberd, who, prevented by his incessant labours from ever watching television, simply assumed that this familiar neighbour had all of a sudden gone harmlessly mad.

  Though Hagberd was very content with his job with Clarence Tully, his animus against Routh remained unabated. If anything, feeding on the fact that he was no longer in a good position to know what Routh was up to, and so he came to imagine more horrors than there actually were (Routh’s deviation being perfectly controllable - like most such things - he was taking care to control it for the time being, as a matter of self-preservation). There was also Mrs Leeper-Foxe. A widow, Mrs Leeper-Foxe had been endowed by her late husband with a fat income from factory farms, and though too fastidious to have anything directly to do with them herself, undeniably was battening on de-beaked chickens, calves with induced anaemia and pinioned necks, pigs tearing each others’ tails off in desperation at being unable to move, and other such martyrs to the British craving for ever greater quantities of ever more and more tasteless, un-nutritious, hormone-adulterated meat. Compounding her heinousness, Mrs Leeper-Foxe associated with Routh. As a matter of fact they were thrown together willy-nilly because no one else would associate with either of them.

  ‘I don’t approve of speaking ill of people,’ the Rector said. ‘On the other hand, if you didn’t speak ill of Routh, you’d never be able to mention him at all.’ He added that Mrs Leeper-Foxe probably had several good qualities, though none of them had so far claimed his own attention, either directly or by hearsay.

  Invited by Mrs Leeper-Foxe to take sherry with her, Routh put on his best blue suit and tugged his forelock, making it clear how honoured he was that she should deign to be gracious to a lowly creature like himself; his financial state was precarious, and he probably had vague hopes of persuading her to underwrite him in some way. As to her, she wallowed in Routh’s respectfulness like a hippopotamus in a mud-bank. The unspeakable fawning on the ineffable, they sat together in what Mrs Leeper-Foxe called the withdrawing-room of the Old Rectory - which she had bought three years previously, and had redecorated at considerable expense - sipping Oloroso from minute glasses and deploring antiphonally the decay of the class structure. Not that Mrs Leeper-Foxe was in Burraford often or for long. She had two other houses; and in any case, being lazy as well as a donkey, she was deterred from frequent visiting by the mysterious unavailability of adequate domestic help.

  ‘Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe are soul-mates,’ said the Major.

  ‘Hogwash.’

  ‘Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe are Wahlverwandtschaften.’

  ‘You should spend less time reading Goethe, Major, and more reading the Bible.’

  ‘I read the Vulgate,’ said the Major, who did nothing of the kind.

  ‘Old Red Socks’ll get you in the end, you’ll see. And you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you, will you?’

  ‘No,’ the Major agreed, ‘I certainly shan’t be able to say that, shall I?’

  Meanwhile, unfortunate Hagberd got madder and madder.

  2

  The grass grew and was cut (Hagberd previously grabbing up all discoverable hen-pheasants and transferring them with their broods, in Booth’s Gin cartons borrowed from Isobel Jones, to safer places). The corn ripened, the cows mooed, a fresh line of pylons sprouted in the only combe hitherto unaffected, the Dickinsons started packing for Canada, and three miles from Routh’s farm a puppy was found suffocated to death, after long and interesting struggles, in a sealed polythene bag. On Monday 22 August, the Bust girl went to a school-friend’s home for tea, and overstayed her time.

  This was bad, being certain to result in much energetic slapping of wrists, calves and bottom.

  The Bust girl’s parents offered the rare spectacle of a married couple neither complementary nor opposite, but identical -identical, that is, in everything except sex and appearance. In conversation they quite often actually chorused, without any sort of pre-arrangement, and in matters of discipline they were equally unanimous. The Bust children were pitied, however, less because of their parents’ simultaneous walloping fits, which though frequent were short-lived, than because of their parents’ joint sense of humour, which was almost unbelievably imbecile in character. In the Michael Innes phrase, the Busts were not people with whom a joke readily loses its first freshness. Fourteen years after the birth of their daughter Anna May, they could still reduce each other to tears of helpless laughter merely by mentioning her by her full name; and they thought it a masterstroke to have followed up their initial inanity by calling their son John Will.

  ‘Lucky for them they didn’t come to me for the christenings,’ said the Rector, ‘or I’d have held their silly heads down in the font till they drowned.’

  But it was, of course, the punitive rather than the humorous aspect of Anna May’s parents which chiefly occupied her mind as she hurried, towards 7.30 p.m. that Monday, along the little-used lane which flanked Bawdeys Meadow to the north. As she explained later to the police, she was quite sure about the time because her watch was a good one and she had had plenty of reason (she dolefully added) to keep looking at it.

  Most of Bawdeys Meadow is open pasture; at one corner
of it, however, there survives an ancient, ugly copse, relic of one of the insanely finicking property deals which have been the recreation of farmers from time immemorial. The trees grow thickly there; though not in fact dead, they are dead-seeming. Litter strews the spongy ground - not picnickers’ litter, but the litter of people who, with disagreeable things to get rid of, have found a conformably disagreeable spot in which to dispose of them - and light filters only sparsely through the tangle of crooked, mossy boughs. A high, neglected hedge hides the copse from the lane, except at one point where a sagging gate gives access.

  That particular Monday evening was chilly and overcast: the weather had made a false dusk two hours in advance of the true one. Hurrying along towards home and retribution, the backs of her plump legs tingling in anticipation, Anna May was only very vaguely aware of the two voices muttering together somewhere on the other side of the hedge. She had other, more pressing things to think about.

  But then, with terrifying suddenness, one of the voices skirled upwards to a mindless squawk of pure dread.

  The sound of the blow was followed by a crashing in the underbrush, approaching rapidly. Still moving forward automatically, Anna May arrived at the copse gate just as Routh staggered into view out of the trees.

  His caved-in right temple, as yet scarcely masked by bleeding, showed like a hollow punched in a ball of white plasticine. Groping mindlessly for support, he reeled and fell; Anna May heard the small detonation of his arm snapping under him. Abruptly the blood gushed, first from his mouth and then from his ruined brain. He twitched three times, very violently, before finally lying still.

  Afterwards, Anna May remembered that there had been a sound of someone else moving, and that the sound ceased when she happened to scuff her shoe in the grit at the lane’s edge. But at the time she was thinking in terms of accident, not of assault, and in any case the spectacle of Routh had shocked her into temporary unawareness of everything else. With considerable courage she walked forward and stood over him. She had done well in school at First Aid, and after all, this sort of thing was what First Aid was for, so perhaps -

  She bent to feel for his pulse: nothing. Watched for his breathing: and nothing. Wild thoughts of attempting the Kiss of Life flitted through her mind. But if there was bad brain damage, the Kiss of Life wouldn’t do any good, would it? Besides, she didn’t believe she could possibly force herself to try it. Not possibly. It would mean letting her hair fall on to that congealing horror, and pinching the squat white nose shut, and feeling inside the mouth to make sure the tongue didn’t fall back and block the air passages. No, not possibly. Besides—

  From behind the screen of crippled trees, someone who was looking on suddenly uncontrollably giggled.

  As the new pattern slipped clear and complete into her understanding, like a replacement transparency in an epidiascope, Anna May turned and ran, heart racing, throat dry, rubber soles throwing up little spurts of white dust as they flip-flopped frantically on tarmac worn smooth and slippery with age. Nearest, as it happened, was her own home, and when it came in sight she slowed a little, looking back.

  No one.

  Puffing up the path and through the front door, Anna May found herself instantly in the middle of a whirlwind of flailing palms; her parents were particularly incensed with her that evening - her being so late having delayed the start of an outing of their own - and the few disjointed words she managed to blurt into the hubbub were interpreted by them as an ill-judged attempt to tell them about something she had been watching on television. Bawling in unison, they condemned her supperless to bed. And for the time being Anna May didn’t persist. In her present confused state she obscurely felt that it might be safer to keep quiet. Mr Routh was dead all right - nothing anyone could do for him now. Also, he was good riddance to bad rubbish. Let him lie, while she latched her bedroom window and locked her bedroom door and sat down to think things out calmly.

  By the following morning she had done this - and more importantly, by then her parents had become relatively approachable again. Expecting more slapping when she repeated her story, Anna May instead found herself fallen on with loud protestations of affectionate anxiety. She must see a doctor, see the police, eat another piece of toast and marmalade, be given a bicycle. The senior Busts then rushed off together to Bawdeys Meadow.

  But the body had been found earlier on.

  When they saw what had been done to it, both the Busts fainted.

  3

  The body had been found round about 6.30 a.m., eleven hours after death, by a farm labourer called Prance who was passing Bawdeys Meadow on his way to work. It had been moved from the copse to the meadow proper, and Prance, glimpsing it through a hole in the hedge, had climbed up on to the bank to get a better view of it.

  Fortunately Prance was an extremely phlegmatic man.

  The meadow here sloped down to the hedge quite steeply, so that the effect of what Prance saw was that of a five-piece infant’s jigsaw puzzle assembled with the usual infant incompetence on a tilted green-baize table. In death, Routh was divided. Moreover, although in death, as in life, his trunk remained central to his anatomy, other parts of him had been re-dealt. Briefly, both his legs and both his arms had been first cut off, and then, in relation to the rest of him, swapped: his thighs now sprouted from his shoulders (the toes of his shoes pointing uphill), while his arms - neatly disposed in parallel, with the palms of the hands flat on the grass - appeared to be attached to either side of his groin.

  Having examined this composition impassively for some seconds, Prance made a provisional identification from the clothes, and then went off to the nearest telephone box to ring Constable Luckraft’s cottage in Burraford. The identification had to be provisional, since the head, though like the limbs it had been severed from the trunk, was nowhere visible.

  Luckraft got out his motor-cycle and came at once. He stood guard while Prance trudged once again to the telephone box, this time to notify the police station in Glazebridge. Luckraft dealt with the Busts, listened to their story, promised them that Anna May’s evidence should be heard at an early opportunity, and shooed them off home. He wandered about a bit, and presently, a few yards inside the copse, came on what appeared to be - and indeed was - the weapon with which the murder had been done.

  Detective-Inspector Widger and Detective-Constable Rankine arrived by car. They hadn’t hurried themselves: Prance, in a fit of bucolic mischief-making, had given the Duty Sergeant at Glazebridge full details of the discovery, thereby ensuring that his call would be treated as an egregiously puerile hoax. Now Widger stared at the remains dazedly while questioning Luckraft, who in due course conducted the party into the copse to look at the heavy wrench which lay there, its business end slightly stained with what was presumably Routh’s blood.

  ‘That’s not been lying there for weeks on end,’ said Detective-Constable Rankine. ‘You can tell it hasn’t, simply by looking at it.’ No fact or inference, however obvious, really existed for Rankine until he had put it into words.

  Widger said, ‘Let’s hope we can trace the owner.’

  ‘And it’s heavy enough to have done the job. One good whack with that, just one, and pfft, you’re dead.’

  Luckraft said that he thought the owner of the wrench was probably him, Luckraft.

  ‘Yours, Luckraft?’ said Widger, flustered. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

  ‘It’s missing, sir, from the tool-kit on my bike. I just looked.’

  ‘Good heavens, man, don’t you keep your tool-kit locked?’

  Luckraft pointed out that the tool-kits on police motor-cycles were not equipped with locks.

  ‘Well, but how long has it been missing?’

  Luckraft said that the wrench could have been missing for as long as eight days; it was eight days, anyway, since he had had occasion to open the kit. He added that of course he was round and about the district quite a lot, and often had to leave the bike temporarily unattended, for instance wh
en visiting people in their houses.

  ‘So that what we have here looks very much like a case of premeditation,’ said Rankine. ‘Someone sees this bike - unattended, as has been remarked. He says to himself, “Now, this bike has a tool-kit, and in the tool-kit will be a stout wrench.” He glances around him to find out if he is observed.’

  ‘If it is mine, sir,’ said Luckraft, ‘there’ll be my initials scratched on the other side.’

  ‘I see. May I ask if you always scratch your initials on police property?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Always. Because otherwise it gets nicked. By my fellow-officers, I mean.’

  ‘I see. Well, we’re not going to touch the wrench yet awhile. You yourself haven’t touched it, I hope?’

  ‘Certainly not, sir.’

  ‘Bringing us back full circle,’ said Rankine, ‘to the central puzzle in this affair: where is the deceased’s head? Several possibilities suggest themselves. The head may be buried somewhere quite close by. Or it may have been taken away. Or it -’

  ‘Be quiet, Rankine,’ said Widger. ‘Get to a telephone and ring County - urgent. And ring Dr Mason - urgent.’ With obvious reluctance Rankine took himself off, on foot, while Widger climbed into the police car and drove away in the opposite direction, for a preliminary talk with Anna May. Luckraft remained on guard, keeping at bay the sightseers who now began to trickle along in response to the Bust parents’ agitated gossiping. One enterprising middle-aged lady, a Mrs Jewell, climbed a near-by tree in order to get a proper look, but almost at once was taken dizzy and fell to the ground, fortunately suffering nothing worse than a few scratches and bruises in the process. After that, by bawling angrily from his post at the copse gateway, Luckraft managed to prevent all further tree-climbing, bank-clambering and hedge-peering, and since in default of these there was practically nothing to be seen other than the familiar blue-clad bulk of Luckraft himself, most people responded reasonably promptly to the demand that they keep moving.