‘No.’
‘It was something that had actually happened to him.’
‘Yes… Tell me, why do you call yourself Madame Sosostris, Famous Clairvoyante?’
‘It was the Major. He suggested it.’
‘I see.’
‘I used to be Gypsy Rose Lee, but then I decided it was time for a change. Why?’ said the Rector suspiciously. ‘What’s wrong with Madame Sosostris, Famous Clairvoyant?’
‘Nothing wrong with it. It’s from a poem, that’s all.’
‘A poem!’ The Rector registered acutest disgust. ‘Poem! Just the other day,’ he confided, ‘the Major made me read some poem or other, about someone going into a church and donating an Irish sixpence. As if there weren’t enough foreign coins in the offertory-boxes already. Let me just get my hands round that poet’s neck,’ he said, brooding, ‘and I’ll Irish-sixpence him.’
‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ Fen said.
‘Unacknowledged legislators grinding out unacknowledged legislation,’ said the Rector. ‘Do you want to know some more about your future?’
‘No, I don’t. I want to know about Mavis Trent.’
‘No reason why you shouldn’t. But you’ll have to cross my palm with paper again.’
‘I could get it from the newspaper files for nothing.’
‘Come on, come on, you’re not a miser, are you?’ With some reluctance Fen handed over another fifty-pence. ‘You mustn’t take up too much of my time, though,’ the Rector warned. ‘Go and see how many there are in the queue, will you?’
Obediently, Fen got up, went to the tent flap and looked out. ‘There’s no one,’ he reported, returning.
‘My parishioners are a parcel of old muckworms,’ said the Rector resentfully.
‘Well now, Mavis Trent,’ he said. ‘A widow. Fortyish, but looked younger. Very blonde hair - dyed - and one of those attractive mischievous faces, not really pretty, let alone beautiful, but somehow very appealing; it cheered you up just to look at her. Nice figure, and dressed well - plain well-cut clothes, nothing gaudy. Her husband died quite young of leukaemia, but luckily he was one of those people with a mania for insurance, and Mavis came into so much money that she didn’t have to take a job, though as a matter of fact she did do quite a few jobs - casual or part-time - partly because she enjoyed the social side and partly because she wasn’t the sort to sit about the house all day with folded hands. She did a lot of unpaid work too, cooking meals for pensioners and helping with kids and so forth.’
‘Sounds a paragon,’ Fen commented.
‘She was a thoroughly nice woman, Mavis,’ said the Rector. ‘Everyone liked her. And most people went on liking her, even after her husband died.’
‘What did she get up to, then?’
‘Men,’ said the Rector. ‘She suddenly started chasing after men. There’d been nothing like that while her husband was alive, or not as far as anyone knew, but then a few months after his death, whoosh, the balloon went up with a vengeance.’
‘All changed, changed utterly,’ Fen suggested. ‘A terrible cutie is born.’
‘That’s more poetry, I take it. Mavis was a nympho, I suppose, but calling her that gives a wrong impression. She never seemed to flirt or ogle or any of that stuff. But then, she didn’t have to, or anyway, not obviously: she was just naturally cheerfully sexy, with a sort of built-in spontaneous come-hither which gave you the idea, very powerfully, that making love to her would be all fun and no complications. It was, too - or so I gather. Damn it, I was quite taken with the girl myself. Not that I’d have married her, of course (she didn’t seem interested in making a second marriage, come to that), and of course, me being a cleric and not approving of all this promiscuity anyway, there was no question of an affaire (besides, you can’t stay properly fit if you keep fornicating all the time). Even so, I still got the impression that she wouldn’t have minded nabbing me, on a temporary basis,’ said the Rector, with evident gratification. ‘So you can see, she wasn’t exactly what you’d call choosy.
‘And that was the chief trouble, really. Of course, there were rows about husbands, but not as many as you’d have expected, and not as bad as you’d have expected, either. Where Mavis was concerned, the injured wives somehow seemed to get half paralysed; they’d kick up a shindig, naturally, but it was always their husbands they were furious with, not, for some mysterious reason, Mavis; she was so bright and open about everything that it seemed to positively hypnotize people. Another thing was that with Mavis, absolutely nobody lasted more than a week or two; and another thing was that Mavis’s men never seemed to mind getting the brush-off: they simply accepted it the way you accept the fact that when you’ve just had a meal, you don’t want to eat any more.’
The Rector rubbed his nose, ruminatively. ‘Mavis looked sexy, all right,’ he added. ‘But I’ve sometimes wondered if perhaps the poor girl wasn’t very good in bed. That’d account for her men not bothering too much when she dropped them, and it’d also account for her gallivanting from one man to another to another to another.’
Fen said, ‘Trying to find one who could rouse her, you mean.’
‘That’s it. On the surface she seemed perfectly normal and … and fulfilled - easy and happy and comfortable in spite of being so active. Nothing neurotic, in fact. But that could have been misleading.
‘Anyway, that’s all academic now. What I started to say was that it wasn’t the occasional hoo-ha over other women’s husbands that made some people uneasy about Mavis, so much as the fact that she was so hopelessly undiscriminating. Some of her men were all right, but there were others who were really dreadful types, louts you Wouldn’t have imagined Mavis would have wanted to be seen dead with. And as I say, there were hordes of them; it was as if Mavis was trying to qualify for The Guinness Book of Records; and not just local men, either - men for miles around, even as far away as Plymouth and Exeter and London.
‘The reason I know about all this is that Mavis wasn’t in the least secretive about her goings-on. In particular, there was a friend called Ella Hamilton - gone to live in Walsall now; tiresome creature, actually, but Mavis seemed to like her. Anyway, Mavis used to tell Ella pretty well everything, not always naming names, but not keeping much else back. The two of them were as thick as thieves - but then Mavis made a pass at Ella’s boy-friend, and Ella took umbrage, and among other things came to me and poured out a bucketful of murky gossip about Mavis - I tried to stop the silly chit, but she was half hysterical and I couldn’t. The general idea was that I should do something about Mavis, preach her a sermon, I suppose, and show her the error of her ways.’
‘Which you didn’t,’ Fen said.
‘Which I didn’t. Wouldn’t have done the slightest good. No one takes any notice of the clergy nowadays, except for Humanists waiting to welcome South-Bank bishops into the fold … I say,’ said the Rector, ‘do you find it a bit close in here?’
‘Not close, exactly. Smoggy.’
‘It’s the thurible,’ said the Rector. ‘It’s stepped up its output. I’d better do something about it, or we’ll both suffocate.’ He produced a large earthenware teapot from under his chair, crossed to the thurible and emptied the teapot’s contents into it. There was a hissing noise; the smoke first increased, then diminished, then vanished altogether.
‘Interesting thing, that thurible,’ said the Rector, disposing of the teapot and sitting down again. ‘Belonged to that ass Dash-wood. A relation of mine bought it when the Monks of Medmenham packed it in. I imagine they used it for their Black Masses and so forth, burning goat’s dung in it, or some such twaddle … Incidentally, I’ll take my hat and wig off, if you don’t mind, they’re making me too hot. Where was I?’
‘Ella Hamilton.’
‘Oh yes. Well, Ella doesn’t come into it any more - parted brass rags with Mavis after the kafuffle over the boy friend. Result: after the quarrel, for a month or two before she died, or was killed, nobody quite knew what our Mavis
was up to. Ella had used to chatter a lot about Mavis, you see, and with that source of information cut off by the quarrel, the local tattlers found they no longer had anything much to get their teeth into; Mavis herself was quite open about things, as I told you, but on the other hand she wasn’t deliberately indiscreet, so no one had any idea what man or men she was going with in the last few weeks of her life. There were the usual rumours, of course, but all very vague, very contradictory. The police questioned literally dozens of people when they were preparing for the inquest, but all they got for their trouble was wind and vapour. For all they could find out, Mavis might have given up men altogether.
‘Well now, it was about the middle of March that it happened - can’t remember the exact date, but it doesn’t matter. You know Hole Bridge?’
Fen did. It was by way of Hole Bridge that the road from Burraford and Aller to Glazebridge crossed the Burr. Built in 1572 in grey granite from the Moor, it had a single-lane carriageway lined on either side with V-shaped bays in which pedestrians could take refuge when wheeled traffic came along. The Burr was wide here: wide, shallow and fast-moving, with a jumble of big rocks beneath the surface.
‘Yes, I know it,’ Fen said.
‘Well, so it was there she was found,’ said the Rector, ‘by an old loon called Meiklejohn, a retired accountant, lives in Hole in the pink cottage with the bus-stop outside the gate. He was out for an early-morning walk. First thing he saw was Mavis’s little white Sprite, parked in the old railway siding. He didn’t take any notice of that, but then he went on, on to the bridge, and looked over the edge, and there she was, poor soul, stretched out on her back on a slab of rock directly under the vee nearest the bank on the Glazebridge side, like a tumbled old bolt of dark cloth with the water bubbling over it. Meiklejohn’s a coward or a half-wit or both - didn’t try to make his way down to Mavis and see if there was anything he could do for her, just tottered off in a funk and phoned the police. However, there was nothing he could have done for her, as it turned out. She’d been dead for hours.
‘A neighbour had heard the Sprite drive away from Mavis’s house round about eleven the previous evening, so it was a reasonable guess that she’d had an assignation at the bridge; that was why the police were so anxious to find out who her current boy-friend was. But after she got to the bridge, what happened then? Was it an accident? You know how low the parapet is, scarcely comes up to one’s crotch; if you were standing with your back to it, and lost your balance for some reason, you could topple over as easy as winking; and it’s a long fall, and the water’s too shallow over that rock slab to break your fall, you’d hit the rock full tilt.
‘The most innocent possibility, then, was that Mavis arrived at the bridge ahead of the boy-friend and somehow tumbled over. Then along comes the boy-friend, fails to see her lying there under the bridge - there was a full moon that night, but on the other hand, there was also a lot of cloud - eventually decides she’s stood him up, and tools off without the least idea that anything’s seriously wrong.’
‘Wouldn’t he have seen Mavis Trent’s parked car?’ Fen asked.
‘Not if he’d come from the Glazebridge direction, and had just stayed on the bridge, without following the road on towards Hole and Aller and Burraford. The railway siding isn’t visible from the bridge. Meiklejohn saw the car because he was approaching the bridge from the other direction, from Hole.’
‘I see.’
‘So that’s one thing that might have happened,’ said the Rector. ‘Mavis wasn’t at all the sort of person to get careless or giddy and fall off a bridge, but it just might have happened. However, there were four things - clues, if you like - which pointed to the possibility of violence.
‘First off, after she fell, or was pushed, Mavis didn’t die immediately, according to the medicos. She probably stayed alive for half an hour or more. She could have drowned - there’s a good two feet of water over the slab she fell on - or she could have cracked her skull and gone out that way; but what she actually did die of, according to the post mortem, was internal bleeding, and that took a bit of time. Her right arm was all right, and they thought she must have used that to hoist herself up and keep her head clear of the water. She couldn’t have done much else to help herself, poor soul - too badly smashed up; she suffered from osteoporosis, it turned out, soft bones, and there were a hell of a lot of fractures, too many to have allowed her to drag herself to the bank. But, she could have called out; weakly, perhaps, on account of her injuries, but loud enough to be heard by anyone on the bridge.’
‘Are there any houses close to the bridge?’ Fen asked. ‘I can’t off-hand remember.’
‘No, nothing very near - and of course, the river makes a good deal of noise. As far as houses are concerned, the poor thing could have yelled her head off, and still no one would have heard. Anyone on the bridge could have heard, though; which rather disposes of the idea of an innocent boy-friend hanging about there waiting, with no idea that there’d been an accident.
‘The second thing was that the police found traces - freshly snapped twigs and so forth - suggesting that someone had pushed down through the bushes from the bridge to the water’s edge, on the side where Mavis was lying. Also, they found a flattened patch in the grass on the bank, as if someone had squatted or sat there in the shadow of the bridge. They thought someone might have done just that, waiting for Mavis to die -perhaps talking to her, even.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Fen, appalled.
‘Yes, very nasty. However, the traces weren’t very definite and in any case they could have been nothing to do with Mavis’s death at all - could have been made the previous day. It was dry weather, like now, so there was nothing so decisive as a footprint; and there were no cigarette ends or shreds of cloth or what not.
‘Thirdly, Mavis’s handbag,’ the Rector went on. ‘The current isn’t strong near the banks, so they found the bag in the water only a few feet away from her. So far, so good - but there was one odd thing. Did you know that fingerprints can survive under water?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well, so there ought in reason to have been a few prints on the bag. But there were none. The handle was a sort of fancy coloured cord - glorified string, really - and that wouldn’t have taken prints anyway; but there ought to have been a few prints on the bag itself, because that was smooth pigskin.’
‘She could have given the thing a rub over before leaving home, to smarten it up,’ Fen suggested, ‘and then never touched it except for the handle.’
‘Oh, quite. On the other hand, she could have dropped it just before she toppled over, and then someone could have picked it up, and opened it and rummaged in it, and closed it again, and wiped it off, and finally chucked it into the water after her.’
‘Yes … She didn’t have gloves with her, then.’
‘None were found. And no one could think of any reason why a murderer should have taken them from her, and taken them away from the scene.’
‘Yes,’ Fen said again. He was thinking that if Mavis Trent in fact had been murdered, the evidence of the handbag was particularly interesting, not so much because the murderer had examined it, or because he had then remembered to eliminate his fingerprints, but for another reason, a fairly obvious one, all things considered. It was at this moment that he had his first vague inkling of what eventually proved to be the truth. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘Equivocal, though: if Mavis Trent was a smartly dressed woman, as I think you said, she certainly could have polished the bag before setting out.’
‘It’s all equivocal, unfortunately,’ said the Rector. ‘Grounds for suspicion, yes, but never anything conclusive.’
‘You said there were four clues. What was the fourth?’
‘A handkerchief. Found clutched tightly in Mavis’s hand. Don’t know what the technical term for dead people clutching things is, but I dare say you do.’
‘Cadaveric spasm.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, there
was this handkerchief, balled up in Mavis’s hand. And it was a man’s handkerchief, not Mavis’s at all.’
Fen said, ‘Even if it was a man’s handkerchief, can you be sure it wasn’t hers? Women do sometimes own men’s handkerchiefs.’
‘I’m quite sure it wasn’t hers.’
‘Was her own handkerchief in her handbag or her pocket?’
‘No,’ the Rector admitted. ‘She didn’t seem to have one.’
‘Well, then.’
‘What I imagine happened was that the murderer, if any, knew that his handkerchief had gone into the river in Mavis’s hand, and took her handkerchief out of the handbag, and carried it away with him, to make it seem as if his handkerchief was hers.’
‘It’s all wildly hypothetical,’ Fen pointed out.
‘Yes, I know it is. All I’m trying to say is that Mavis was too well turned out to go out on a date carrying a ropy old cheap cotton man’s handkerchief with her. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it. And if that’s so, then the handkerchief was handed to her, for some reason, by whatever man she was meeting.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Fen. ‘Women sometimes borrow handkerchiefs from men, and afterwards get them laundered and give them back. Mavis Trent may have done just that -brought the handkerchief along with a view to returning it; and she may have fallen into the river, accidentally, before the owner came along.’
‘Well, but in that case, where was her own handkerchief? Besides, this handkerchief in Mavis’s hand was all crumpled, all balled up, not neatly folded as it would have been if it had just been laundered,’
Fen sighed. ‘Yes, that’s a point,’ he agreed. ‘Not exactly hanging evidence, but certainly it doesn’t quite fit with the accident theory, particularly taken in conjunction with the other three indications you mentioned. The police tried to trace the handkerchief, I take it?’
‘They did, but no soap. Couldn’t even find the manufacturer, let alone the retailer; as I told you, it was a cheap, common thing. Widger, for the police, said at the inquest that either it was foreign or else the manufacturer had gone out of business, perhaps years ago.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 10