The Glimpses of the Moon

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘Just so, Miss Titania. And it’s my business to -’

  ‘No, no, Luckraft, you misunderstand me. The murder is evil, true. The mutilation is evil, certainly. But what is even worse is that they happened in the presence - or virtually the presence - of the Botticelli.’

  ‘And you think that that’s -’

  ‘I regard it as the worst evil of all. It is profanation, Luckraft - Profanation. It is the Unforgivable Sin.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind, of course, Miss Titania. And now -’

  ‘In fact,’ said Titty, ‘I think it may even be necessary to ask the dear Bishop to re-consecrate the picture.’

  Luckraft rolled his eyes. He was perhaps recalling that the Right Reverend had shown little stomach for his chrismal task when he had first performed it (the Rector had made an attempt - unusually, for him, an abortive one - to discourage and then evade the Bale sisters’ ultramontanist requirements altogether), and was unlikely to be pleased at being summoned to do the whole job all over again. He had even, in reference to the Misses Bale, muttered something about Aholah and Aholibah, a tantrum which had struck Luckraft, when at last he succeeded in locating these two mixes in the Old Testament, as erring on the side of exaggeration.

  From these not particularly timely reflections he awoke to the realization that Titty Bale had given over her brooding on Satanas, and was now eyeing him expectantly.

  ’Well, don’t just stand there like a dumpling, Luckraft,’ she said. ‘Go inside and get on with your detecting, or whatever it is you do.’

  The assembled crowd vibrated on a note in which Luckraft was now certain he could sense an element of censoriousness. Why doesn’t he do something, then? Ignorant Dogberry! Useless bumpkin! Calls himself a copper and doesn’t even know where to start!

  Jerkily, like some mechanical toy too cack-handedly activated, Luckraft flung himself at the tent flap and disappeared inside.

  3

  It was two hours later - past six o’clock - when Fen at last got back home to the Dickinsons’ cottage.

  Police activity, though competent as far as it went, had had a provisional air, as of an organization marking time tidily enough, but with no very clear notion as to the direction in which it would be most profitable to move. Following a brief personal inspection, Luckraft had left the Hulland twins in charge of the corpse, had sought out the Major and had asked permission to use the telephone in the Major’s flat, in whose doorway he had met Thouless emerging, flushed with triumph at having made contact with Dr Mason, and summoned him back. Luckraft had then, keeping the Major’s cocker bitch Sal at bay with well-judged kicks, rung up the police station in Glazebridge, given an account of the new enormity now brought to light in the Botticelli tent, and asked for instructions.

  These directed him to sentry duty at the gate, where he took up his stand, fending off questions and preventing people from leaving; the latter precaution struck everyone, Luckraft himself included, as pointless, since by simply ducking through a twin-strand wire fence you could leave the lawn, and beyond that the Aller House grounds as a whole, practically anywhere. In general, however, the Fête’s clientèle was showing more inclination to linger than to quit. Thanks to Titty Bale - who by now, to judge from her utterances, had come to regard what had happened as in some obscure fashion aimed at discrediting the Botticelli - news of the fresh murder, Burraford’s second in two months, was spreading through the crowd like flame on a blowy day through an expanse of dry bracken, and almost everybody was anxious to stay and find out more. The lack of solid information, a Barmecides’ banquet to curious appetites, was tantalizing. No one could be certain who the corpse was, or how it had come by its end, or by whose malice; Titty Bale notwithstanding, no one could be certain, even, if it was a man or a woman; and with Luckraft baffling all inquisition by the simple process of slowly and silently shaking his head, it was clearly necessary to remain on the scene until something substantial emerged. Meanwhile, and much to the Rector’s annoyance, the stalls and sideshows found themselves virtually deserted, and even the beer tent had emptied. As to Arthur, his mishap with the Try-Your-Strength machine was overshadowed wholly; attended by no more than a rag-end of his former numerous sympathizers, he continued, though now largely disregarded, to lie on the turf where he had fallen, exuding unrequited pathos, breathing plangently and holding a handkerchief to his head to staunch the bleeding.

  His injury was not - said Dr Mason, reappearing presently in response to Thouless’s telephone call - anything to worry about, so long as he went home as soon as possible and rested, and kept off the bottle for a bit; reassured by this intelligence, Arthur staggered to his feet and tottered over to a chair, where he sat blinking and grunting in residual confusion while he was swabbed and patched up. His act of mercy completed, Dr Mason closed his bag, exchanged a few words with Luckraft, and then strolled phlegmatically across the lawn to the Botticelli tent, to await the arrival of the police reinforcements from Glazebridge.

  These came on the scene ten minutes later; they consisted of Detective-Inspector Widger, two constables from the uniformed branch and Detective-Constable Rankine, who had beguiled the journey with a spoken catalogue of various hypotheses which he considered might apply to the situation confronting them.

  ‘Seventhly,’ he was saying as the police car jolted up to the gateway, ‘the crime was committed by Hagberd, who has escaped from Rampton. But to this theory we can see objections. They are threefold. In the first place, Hagberd has probably not escaped from Rampton, or we should have heard.’

  The car stopped. Widger got out of it and went to consult briefly with Luckraft. Delighted at being able to find Rankine something at once tedious and futile to do, he stationed him and one of the constables at the gate, with instructions to take people’s names and addresses as they left, detaining only those who were blood-boltered or in overt possession of offensive weapons. He then, with Luckraft and the remaining constable, made his way across the lawn to join Dr Mason in the Botticelli tent.

  Dismissed from their vigil, the Hulland twins lingered in the front part of the tent where the picture was, and were thus able to overhear part of Dr Mason’s preliminary report. The corpse had been dead for some time, Dr Mason said, twelve hours at least, probably even more; the head (which like Routh’s had been removed from the scene) had been cut off quite soon after death; the severed left arm, however, (and this, too, was apparently missing) had been cut off much more recently, perhaps within the last hour or two, and the abortive hackings of the right arm, and of the right leg, were equally recent. Excited by this information the Hullands broke into ejaculations of gratification and surprise, as a result of which they were detected and driven away to join the crowd milling around outside. Their news - which they rapidly relayed, spreading fresh frissons far and wide - turned out, however, to be practically the last piece of solid information the afternoon was to produce. In due course Dr Mason left, phlegmatic as ever but amiably impervious to questioning; and the Major’s telephone was again commandeered, this time by Widger, who, it was rumoured, had decided to apply for help to County Headquarters. But there was little else, and after an hour or so the customers, bored with waiting, began to drift away. Some hung on grimly, whiling away the time in the beer and tea tents, transactions were few, and the craving to display or look at dogs and female legs had so far abated that in the end both competitions had to be cancelled.

  ‘Pusillanimous lot,’ said the Rector, still a bizarre figure of menace, though an unavailing one, in his grandmother’s black bombazine dress. He brandished his cricket bag, evoking a small cry of dismay from Father Hattrick, who, along with Dermot McCartney, was currently acting as sounding-board for his indignation. ’Pounds, we’re losing pounds?

  Father Hattrick said, ‘Does anyone yet know who the unfortunate man is?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said the Rector. ‘The Hullands didn’t see anything about him they could recognize, and nor did Titty Bale. Nor did Luckr
aft, come to that - I managed to get that much out of him. I dare say it isn’t a local man at all: there’ve been plenty of strangers here this afternoon.’

  Fen strolled up, with Padmore. ‘We’re going,’ he said.

  ‘Feeble,’ said the Rector. ‘You haven’t by any chance seen Scorer anywhere around, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘I expect he’s gone to ground, then,’ said the Rector gloomily. ’More trouble. And where’s my bank manager? He ought to have been here long ago.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem much point in my hanging around, anyway,’ said Padmore. ‘I had a word with Widger, and the police aren’t going to issue any statement until after their people have arrived from County. Anyone want a lift anywhere?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind one,’ said Fen, ‘with all this stuff to carry.’

  ‘All right, then. Let’s go.’

  ‘Decapitation,’ said Dermot McCartney. ‘The Itsekeri, of Nigeria, were at one time notable decapitators. Nowadays, however, they merely strangle people.’

  ‘Decapitation,’ said Father Hattrick. ‘A barbarous business, certainly … “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown,”’ he murmured, ‘“where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.”’

  ‘You and your King Charles’s head,’ said the Rector.

  Back at the Dickinsons’ cottage, lapped in peace after the brouhaha of the Fete, Fen contemplated without pleasure the next task which awaited him; though not normally liable to intuitive forebodings, he was certainly oppressed by them now.

  He might as well, however, he thought, wait until Padmore had finished telephoning.

  Fen was in the living-room. Padmore was in the big kitchen with his tin of peas on the telephone table in front of him, eating an Abernethy biscuit, sipping pink gin and dictating an account of the afternoon’s events to a Gazette telephone reporter in London; through the open doorway his voice could be heard droning away, transforming the idiosyncratic Hulland twins into vapid stereotypes of popular journalism, each with an age in figures, an occupation in words and a talent for conversing in illiterate paragraphs of one short sentence apiece: a misprint to every sixth line, and a quarter of the quotation marks either misplaced or lacking altogether… Fen felt that he was becoming testy. He stared out of the living-room window at the lawn, where the tortoise Ellis was moving slowly round and round in a series of ever diminishing circles; near Ellis, the cat Stripey lay sprawled on his side, occasionally lashing out with his paw at some passing winged insect; beyond this precious pair were a hedge, the stony drive, an old barn used as a garage, a stand of mixed trees, a field, a glimpse of Thouless’s bungalow, a glimpse of the Pisser and its adjacent criss-crossing echelons of other pylons, a glimpse of Aller House. In an upward-sloping meadow to the left, Friesians were grazing; urgent for insolation, they were drifting slowly upwards, eating as they went, following the gold light of the westering sun up to the slope’s crest while the band of shadow below them steadily widened.

  A fly making its way laboriously up one of the small panes lost its foot-hold and fell on its back on the window-sill, dead.

  Fen played a few notes quietly, at random, on the Dickinsons’ upright piano. He picked up a volume of Angus Wilson, gazed fixedly for some moments at its sturdy brown covers, and put it down again.

  ‘Spark, Muriel,’ he said. An idea began to fizz feebly at the bottom of his mind, like stale effervescing aspirin dropped into a glass of water. The use of ellipsis in Mrs Spark’s earlier work,’ he intoned, ‘imposes patterns on her narrative which in addition to their intrinsic shapeliness sometimes make the reader - sometimes make the reader - sometimes make the reader wonder if his wits are failing.’ No, that would scarcely do.

  Padmore’s dictating drone modulated to easier, more conversational tones as he made his farewells. The telephone bell tinkled faerily as he rang off. Sighing, Fen collected his own pink gin from the pie-crust table, packed Muriel Spark off home with a promise to attend to her in the morning, and went through to the kitchen.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Padmore. ‘But oh dear, isn’t it all exasperating, isn’t it all absolutely wretched? Because now it looks as if Hagberd didn’t murder Routh after all.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, you know,’ said Fen. ‘It’s too soon to jump to a conclusion like that.’

  Padmore brightened a little. ‘You mean it might be an imitative crime? Yes, that’s possible. Ah well, let’s hope so, let’s devoutly hope so … Incidentally, I reversed the charge on that call, but nowadays, even when you reverse the charge, you have to pay ten pence, so here’s ten pence.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Fen vaguely. ‘What I’m wondering, actually, is whether you may not have to ring your paper again almost immediately.’

  ‘Oh why? Is there something else you’ve thought of?’

  And Fen sighed again. ‘There may be,’ he said, putting his glass on the mantel-shelf above the Rayburn. ‘Yes there quite possibly may be. Just wait a moment, will you?’

  Ducking into the scullery, he lifted his pig’s-head sack off the top of the refrigerator, untied the coarse string which held it at the neck, and extracted from it a heavy spheroidal object wrapped in a good deal of Daily Mail.

  ‘No snout,’ he said resignedly.

  ‘What?’ Padmore called from the kitchen.

  ‘I said, no snout.’

  With more sighs, Fen unwrapped the newspapers, to discover that his intuition had been justified. The hair had mostly been torn out, the eyes were gone, and the other features were battered beyond recognition. But what he had - what, it seemed, he had toted round the neighbourhood for half the morning - was unquestionably a human head, not a pig’s.

  7. Omnium-gatherum

  Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere

  observes, are very stubborn things.

  Matthew Tindal: Will of Matthew Tindal

  1

  ‘So we have three possibilities.’

  ‘Surely only two.’

  ‘I ought to have said, four.’ With every sign of complacency, Detective-Superintendent Ling, from County, took his pipe out of his mouth, up-ended it, and set about thumping it noisily on a large electric-blue tin ash-tray, embossed in low relief about its perimeter with the name of an inexpensive proprietary cheroot. A minute amount of burned tobacco fell out, followed by a much greater quantity of unburned; Ling applied himself in silence to separating the two with his fingers. Looking on censoriously, Detective-Inspector Widger, himself a non-smoker, reflected not for the first time on the incivility of men with pipes, who commonly expect all social and business intercourse to be suspended while they tinker with their bits of hollowed briar. Sexual intercourse too? Widger somewhat wildly wondered. He must remember to ask Ling’s wife Katherine about that, or rather, he mustn’t.

  ‘However, it’s early days for theorizing,’ said Ling, as though it had been Widger, and not himself, who had been guilty of dialectical foolhardiness. ‘Facts first, theories after. Induction, not deduction.’ He had read of this distinction years before in a Pelican Book, and never tired of repeating it.

  Widger’s rancour grew. ‘The head, Eddie,’ he expostulated. ‘Now that you’ve had a look at it, oughtn’t it to be sent off straight away to Sir John?’

  ‘Ah yes, the head,’ said Ling weightily. ‘That’s - it - it’s a - ‘ But at this point, regardless of Widger’s gelid stare, he petered out: his winnowing operation completed, he had begun thumbing the unburned tobacco back into his pipe-bowl, thereby once again temporarily incapacitating himself for further speech. And now Widger frankly glowered. He glowered first at Ling; then, when that palled, as it very quickly did, he glowered at the Harris’s Bacon sack, with its gruesome contents, which Ling had just deposited in the corner of the small office opposite the door; finally, he glowered out of the window, at the ring-road in which the police station was situated, and at the more distant prospect of Glazebridge itself, its spires an
d houses hazy in the autumnal Sunday-afternoon sunshine

  ‘A mess,’ said Ling. He had finished filling his pipe, but had not yet begun to address himself to the lighting of it. ‘Let’s hope that Sir John can - that Sir John - that he – ’ He keeled over sideways in the desk chair, groping for matches in the jacket pocket thus exposed for use. ‘Let’s hope that Sir John can do something to make it identifiable,’ he managed to conclude.

  ‘Did you gather anything from it?’ Widger asked. Ling’s examination of the head had had to be deferred, owing to the lateness of his arrival, until after lunch; had, in fact, only just been completed.

  ‘Can’t say I did, much.’ Ling gave his Swan Vesta box an experimental shake, to discover if there was anything in it. ‘As to the sack, there must be tens of thousands of them knocking about. As to the string, it’s just coarse, common stuff. As to the paper, that’s two copies of the Daily Mail, Friday and Saturday the week before last, with “Cobbledick” pencilled on both the front pages. Who’s Cobbledick?’

  ‘A market gardener. Lives a mile or two outside Burraford.’

  Ling stared vacantly first at the match-box in his right hand, and then at the pipe in his left, as if attempting to set up, in his mind, some rational association between them. He said, ‘That pile of old papers, in among all the rest of that junk in the … the Botticelli tent: what were they for?’

  ‘Cobbledick brought them along because he thought they might come in useful for wrapping up stuff on the Garden and Vegetable Stalls.’

  ‘I see. Well then, why weren’t they used?’

  ‘I don’t know. I imagine the stall-holders brought paper of their own.’

  ’Did you have a chance to find out when Cobbledick brought his lot along?’

  ‘Yes, I did. It was Friday afternoon.’