Widger crossed the room and switched on a light. He looked at his watch. ‘Time we went down and talked to the reporters.’
Ling nodded, but made no immediate move. ‘Nothing from Forensic,’ he muttered.
Widger visualized the constables who had been, and presumably still were, collecting up every scrap of débris from the grass in and around the Botticelli tent, and placing their finds in little envelopes with locations carefully marked on them: fibres, sawdust, cigarette ends, toffee papers. ‘We’re giving Forensic a lot to do,’ he observed mildly. ‘And they did send an interim report on the hacksaw I found in the back of the tent. I asked them to give it priority.’
‘Yes, there’s that,’ said Ling, consulting the file. ‘Wiped. No fingerprints, and only the minutest traces of blood. Group A, rhesus negative. We’ll have to find out from Sir John if that corresponds with the dead man’s. Who did you say the hacksaw belonged to?’
‘Cobbledick.’
‘Cobbledick again. So he left it in the tent over Friday night, and then - let’s see, did he use it on Saturday morning?’
‘Yes. Just briefly. He was one of the earliest to arrive. He used the saw, and then put it back in the tent just before the picture arrived, at 10.30.’
‘Didn’t notice anything unusual about it, I suppose.’
‘No.’
‘So Chummy must have wiped it twice, once after cutting the head off, and then again after cutting the arm off.’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing from the C.R.O.’
‘Have a heart, Eddie. That tent was fairly smothered in prints.’
‘They could have let us know if they had a match for the prints on the arm that was left.’
‘They’ve done that. They rang me up about it just before you arrived this morning. Negative: the victim didn’t have form.’
‘Ground too dry to take footprints,’ Ling mumbled, unconsoled. ‘And then, of course, there’s the paint.’
They both thought about the paint. It had occurred to someone - specifically, to an officious little man called Wisdom -that the wooden parts of the Botticelli tent needed smartening up a bit, and he had accordingly spent most of Friday repainting them, scattering a good deal of the paint about him in the process. Unfortunately, the hue he had selected was that of dried blood, so that Forensic now had the headache of examining numerous pieces of dug-up grass and deciding whether their coloration was due to paint, or blood or both.
‘Plenty of gaps still,’ said Ling, ‘but also’ - and here he cheered up a bit - ‘plenty of lines to follow up.’ He stirred himself, putting three of his pipes into pockets and the fourth, and most impressive, into his mouth. He picked up Widger’s report and made for the door.
‘But you know what I really want to know most of all, Charles?’ he said, as they stood in the corridor while Widger locked up the office.
‘No, What?’
‘I want to know how the hell that bloody great arm could have been smuggled out of the tent without anyone seeing.’
9. The Short Arms of Coincidence and the Law
Quoth Hudibras, Friend Ralph, thou hast
Outrun the constable at last.
Samuel Butler: Hudibras
1
The press conference was not a success.
In part this was because the Glazebridge police station had no room large enough to contain it: reporters squeezed in elbow to elbow, and many of them were without seats. But given the sensational circumstances (which were worth a little discomfort), the paucity of space wouldn’t have mattered so much had it not been for Ling. He had made one enormous mistake already, in allowing pressmen and witnesses to mingle unimpeded while he conducted interviews in Widger’s office upstairs; now he compounded it by trying to pretend that this juxtaposition had never occurred. In practice, of course, the reporters - those of them who had the sense to continue hanging round the station instead of going out - had all the while been having a field day; and although Sergeant Connabeer, with a single constable to aid him, had attempted to keep the situation under control, his efforts, such was the excitement, had proved nugatory. The witnesses had found themselves hemmed in by a cloud of cameras, notebooks and cassette recorders, centres of a vast curiosity, targets for a never-ending stream of questions. And few of them had taken umbrage at this, or preserved a reasonable discretion; most had been delighted, and had talked freely. Moreover, they seemed to have felt no obligation to adhere calvinistically to the bare bones of truth, more particularly when they had nothing of great interest to recount: embellishment, often of the wildest sort, had been the order of the day. Scorer, much to his initial surprise, had found himself treated as a hero, and had responded with the assertion that he had not only seen the murderer but had chased him throughout the night, failing to tackle him and bring him down only by a hair’s breadth. The Major dilated on Sal’s unusual competence as a watchdog. Luckraft, omitting all references to rakes, mangles and the therapeutic ministrations of Oliver Meakins, described how he had seen someone lurking in the garden next to Mrs Clotworthy’s cottage; he also painted a lurid picture of his emotions on first seeing the body. Mrs Clotworthy specified to an interested audience the best way to cut up a pig, and gave it as her opinion that that Professor Fen wanted watching. All these people, and others, held opinions, mostly fanciful, not merely about this latest murder, but about Routh’s death and Mavis Trent’s death as well, and about the various links binding them together. Padmore came in for a good deal of cajoling, but kept what little extra he knew to himself, for the benefit of the Gazette; though he was certain to have to rewrite his book on Routh and Hagberd, he was consoling himself for this by a determination to do so well over this new murder that his stony-hearted superiors in Fleet Street would decide that it would be a waste ever to send him to Africa again. Fen too had his group of pursuivants, who were not only fascinated by his day-long custody of the head, but who knew him as having been a successful amateur detective and were anxious for his view on the present case. He fended them off, however, by stating, more or less truthfully, that he knew no more about the business than had been in the Gazette that morning. The Misses Bale were eloquent about the insult to their Botticelli, and Titty’s reactions to discovering the corpse - Elderly Spinster Finds Nude Male Body Behind Priceless Masterpiece - Were Widely canvassed. The Rector contented himself with saying that there were a lot of dubious characters about. Flashbulbs popped continually, the wildest rumours flew from tongue to tongue, and Scorer became such a nuisance that Sergeant Connabeer detached him by force from his inquisitors and locked him up in a cell. The reporters rejoiced, the more simple-minded among them assuming that far from having simply witnessed the murder, Scorer had now been found to have committed it, and had been summarily arrested.
Ling made his second mistake when the witnesses had at last been cleared out of the station and the press conference properly convened. At its outset it seemed to go well enough. Not unreasonably, in view of the fact that the investigation was still at such an early stage, Ling had intended, in his opening statement, to offer little more than had been in the Gazette that morning, together with a few harmless additional titbits such as that the murderer had probably used a car, and that in the absence of the County Pathologist the autopsy was being conducted by the celebrated Sir John Honeybourne; he could also, he thought, safely say that the body had not been positively identified yet, but that several promising lines of inquiry were being pursued. But beyond these banalities he was not prepared to go (in particular, he did not intend to say anything at all about Scorer), and it therefore came as a shock to him when the reporters started to ask questions based on their own interviews with the witnesses. If the questions had been anywhere near rational, Ling would very likely have kept his head. But they were not: most of the witnesses had interpreted the crime in terms of the wildest melodrama, and their exaggerations had been swallowed by the reporters hook, line and sinker. And now all this rubbish was being
regurgitated for the benefit of Ling, who was expected to confirm or deny it; and his attempts to reduce the questions to a more realistic level, and at the same time not answer them, made him increasingly unpopular. What he ought to have done was simply shake his head, and leave the reporters with the responsibility of putting into their stories whatever fatuities they chose. Instead, he tried to master the situation, floundering deeper and deeper in a quicksand of wordy incoherence. His great pipe went out, a light sheen of sweat sprang up on his forehead, and his interlocutors became momently more restive.
Ticehurst was sitting on Ling’s right, behind a small table on an improvised platform which creaked loudly whenever anyone moved. Widger, stiff with embarrassment and a determined non-contributor to the proceedings, was on Ling’s other side. As Ling blundered on, Ticehurst’s normally jovial features became a mask of dismay, and eventually, unable to bear it any longer, he plucked surreptitiously at Ling’s sleeve. Ling was in the middle of trying to deal with a group of reporters who wanted Scorer to be brought on to the scene, and it was some little time before he had attention to spare for his P.R.O.
‘Just say “No comment”!’ Ticehurst hissed in his ear. ‘Just keep saying “No comment”!’
‘As to Scorer,’ Ling told the assembled company, ‘he’s a -No Comment.’ It was like a speeding motor-cyclist braking abruptly to a halt.
A groan went up, and the reporters glared at Ticehurst, wet blanket at this stimulating jamboree. They went on trying for a few minutes longer, but Ling had belatedly learned: whatever they asked him, he sturdily came back with ‘No comment’. Widger and Ticehurst leaned back in their chairs, to an outbreak of stridulation from the platform, in heartfelt relief; in between saying ‘No comment’, Ling even managed to get his pipe going again. Finally, heartened by the success of his stonewalling, he was bold enough to look at his watch, get to his feet, and say, ‘Nothing more for now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid. Thank you for your attention.’ With which he creaked down off the platform, followed by Widger and Ticehurst, and elbowed his way through the clumps of grumbling reporters into the comparative quietude of the station’s entrance hall.
To Widger he said, ‘That went off quite well, didn’t it?’
Widger swallowed. ‘You think so?’
‘Yes, I do. Quite well.’
Ticehurst caught up with them. He was peering nervously over his shoulder at the vanguard of discontented reporters emerging from the conference room.
‘Well, I’ll be off now, Eddie, if you don’t mind,’ he said, and without waiting for a reply, waddled at a surprising speed to the entrance and so out into the night. Widger thought that he could hear him actually running to his car.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Sergeant Connabeer to Ling, ‘but what am I to do with Scorer?’
‘Don’t mention that name to me.’
‘Where is Scorer now?’ Widger asked.
‘I locked him up, sir.’
‘Good,’ said Ling.
‘Wait until the reporters have all gone,’ said Widger, ‘and then let him out and send him home.’
‘In a police car, sir?’
‘Certainly not. There’s a Sunday evening bus into Burraford. He can catch that.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘No comment,’ said Ling to a reporter who had approached him with a question about the identification of the body. ‘As soon as there’s anything solid, we’ll let you know.’
‘You’ve no idea who the victim is?’
‘Not yet, but we soon shall have… Charles, it’s time we were on our way. You’d better go up and fetch that … that thing from your office.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Widger, and made for the stairs. Ascending, he heard an increasing babble of voices from the entrance hall, and Ling saying ‘No comment’ several times. The reporters were clinging like limpets to the last.
As he unlocked the door of his office, Widger spared a thought for his two subordinates, who had failed to bring tea. Detective-Constable Rankine, now … But then Widger remembered. He had put Rankine in charge of the mobile H.Q. in the grounds of Aller House - not a very onerous task, since all the actual work was being done by photographers, and Forensic, and the fingerprint boys, and the group of Graveney’s constables who were maundering about picking things up off the ground; and there, presumably, Rankine was still. As to Detective-Sergeant Crumb, come hell or high water he always went home early. He was, indeed, so lazy and inefficient that Widger had excluded him from the murder investigation altogether (it seemed, in any case, not to have aroused much interest in him) and had left him to type up reports on such petty crime as the Department had been engaged on before the body turned up at the Fête,
Widger opened the door which led from his office to Crumb’s and Rankine’s office, and looked inside. As he had expected, the room was empty, its windows latched and its door to the corridor locked. For the thousandth time, he pondered the possibility of making a serious effort to get Crumb transferred to some other sphere of inaction. But it was really too late now: his appeal would certainly be dismissed, on the grounds that Crumb was nearly at retiring age.
Widger sighed, dismissed his useless subordinate from his mind, and turned back into his own office, where he picked up the Harris’s Bacon sack, hefted it, and on an impulse put it on the desk and opened it. He was to reflect, subsequently, that this impulse could have been a sub-cortical adumbration of the trouble yet to come; meanwhile, he rationalized it with the thought that since its discovery the head had been very cavalierly - very carelessly - treated, and that it was up to him to make every possible check.
But all was well. Hideous as ever, and still wrapped in Cobbledick’s copies of the Daily Mail, the head was there all right. Widger closed the sack and left the office with it dangling heavily by the neck from his right hand. Outside in the deserted corridor, he conscientiously locked up again.
In the entrance hall, the babble of voices continued unabated. Why on earth didn’t Eddie march out and hide himself somewhere, instead of standing there like a dead whiting put down to lure congers? And suddenly Widger swore. It had just occurred to him that owing to the parsimony with which it had been designed and constructed, the Glazebridge police station had no back stairs, or at any rate none that were accessible from where he was: he, and the sack, were going to have to run the gauntlet of the entrance hall. And if the reporters didn’t realize what the sack was, and what it must contain, after reading that bloody man Padmore in the Gazette that morning, they must all be quarter-wits. Good God, the moment they set eyes on him, they’d be down on him like a pack of wolves!
Widger counted up to five, slowly, meanwhile saying to himself, ‘You are an Inspector of Police. You will use your authority, and if necessary force, to brush these people aside and make your getaway.’ ‘Getaway’ somehow didn’t seem the right word: it carried overtones of the criminal, or anyway the craven. But it would have to do. The thing now was to make a move.
And in the event it looked to start with as if he were going to be lucky. For one thing, the ranks of the reporters had thinned, some of them having left to telephone their stories to their papers; for another, those who remained were concentrating on Ling, who was standing like a stuffed image at the centre of their circle, still saying ‘No comment’. Widger sidled down the stairway, shielding the sack with his body, and then, with difficulty resisting the temptation to go on tip-toe, made his way as rapidly and noiselessly as possible towards the entrance. He could put the sack in his car, he thought, and then come back for Eddie.
Unfortunately, however, one or two of the reporters were getting tired of Ling; their attention was wandering, and Widger had barely covered half the course before they noticed him. ‘The sack!’ one yodelled loudly, and another chimed in with ‘The head!’ In a moment Widger was surrounded, and babel broke loose, degenerating almost at once into a scuffle. Widger, tight-lipped, pushed and elbowed and thumped and inwardly cursed. Ling,
initially paralysed by incomprehension, suddenly realized what was happening and rushed to the aid of his colleague, with Connabeer and a constable at his heels. Fearful that the sack was about to be wrested from him, Widger hurled it at Ling, like a rugby player making a pass, and more by good luck than judgement, Ling succeeded in catching it. Pitching and heaving and shouting, the whole mêlée burst through the swing doors and out into the car-park.
Here the Press came to its senses. It had undoubtedly gone too far. Apprehensively, it withdrew. Marshalled by Connabeer, it submitted meekly to being led back inside and having its names and addresses written down. Connabeer told it severely that he couldn’t say what action would be taken, if any, but that its best plan would be to remain where it was for ten minutes or so, and then go quietly away. A left-wing reporter whom Widger had winded slightly muttered something about ‘police brutality’, but when told that it was a pity he hadn’t broken his neck fell silent; and from then on there was no more trouble.
2
Freed from pursuit but still breathing heavily, Ling and Widger hastened round to the back of the station where the police cars were kept, among them Widger’s prized grey Cortina. Widger unlocked the passenger door and Ling got in beside him, clutching the sack to his breast as if it contained the treasure of the Incas. The doors slammed, the engine purred into life, and they moved through the car-park into the ring-road, where they turned left.
Peace at last.
Since Ling was uncommunicative, Widger concentrated on driving; despite the intricacies of the case, there somehow seemed, for the moment, to be very little to say. Two miles out of Glazebridge, they turned left off the ring-road towards the south-west, more or less at right angles to the Burraford direction, and lost the traffic coming home from a day’s outing on the moor. It was by now almost completely dark, and Widger switched the headlights on.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 18