The Glimpses of the Moon

by Edmund Crispin

  Worth a try, perhaps.

  ‘Wait,’ said Fen.

  But the doors of the Rector’s house proved, when he got there, to be either locked or bolted, and no ground-floor window stood open. He went back, accordingly, to where Enoch reclined, alternately clutching his ankle, trying to straighten the distorted steering-gear of his bicycle, and moaning, and reported failure, with the result that Enoch yammered more loudly than ever. Eventually rallying his powers of speech:

  ‘So be ’ee ’a’bb’n got water,’ he said, coming at last to the nub of the matter, ‘ ’ee’ve got summat a mite stronger, mebbe?’

  At this, Fen’s heart hardened a little. Ordinarily a clement man, he now found himself somewhat out of sympathy with Enoch’s predicament, which he was inclined to feel was being much exaggerated by its victim. No, the person Fen was really anxious about was the Major, whose elderly, brittle bones, in his headlong career across fields and hedges, must certainly bring him to grief sooner or later, if they had not done so already. Fen understood the Major’s motives, all right: his dislike of horses was genuine, and he couldn’t possibly have imagined that he had any chance of catching up with the man from Sweb in his Mini. What had happened was that quite simply, a spirit of boyish mischief had entered into him at the sight of Xantippe browsing almost immediately below him, and he had been wholly incapable of resisting it; then, once mounted, he had decided that for appearance’s sake he must do something putatively purposeful in order to justify his action, and so had set heels to flank and taken off in pretended pursuit with a gusto worthy of the cavalry charge at Lewes (whose leader, Fen now uneasily remembered, had nearly lost the day owing to too prolonged a pursuit).

  Which didn’t mean that the Major wasn’t at this moment pinned with a broken leg beneath a capsized hulk of squirming equine flesh, his cries for help unheard; for Xantippe had clearly not at all relished being descended upon, not, as Zeus descended upon Danae, by a shower of delicate manageable guineas but by a single vast bifurcated ingot; and there had been the devil in her eye.

  Fen decided to give Enoch one last chance.

  ‘You must try to stand,’ he said. ‘You must put your weight on it.’ And when Enoch’s mouth opened to protest against the anguish this would entail, he added hastily: ‘Not all of your weight. Some of it. Otherwise we shall never be able to find out whether that ankle of yours is broken or not.’

  ‘There’s them X-rays.’

  ‘So there is. Are. But we haven’t got them here, don’t you see?’

  ‘Didn’t ’ee ever know what tes to ‘ave a parched throat, squire? Tes a’most worse’n the pain, and that be - ’

  Turrible. Yes, quite … I’ll tell you what,’ said Fen, brightly and also rather abruptly, as if some entirely new-fleshed the ophany had just presented itself to him. ‘Yes, I’ll tell you what we ought to do. We ought to get you to a doctor.’

  ‘Can’t move.’

  ‘We’ll get a doctor to come to you here, then. I’ll go and find a telephone and arrange for it.’

  ‘Doan leave me!’

  ‘But, Mr Powell, how on earth can I fetch a doctor if -’

  ‘Everyone leaves me!’

  Fen lost patience at last; he was visualizing the Major, steadily breaking up under Xantippe’s hairy form like coal under the blows of a sledge-hammer; by now he might even be unable to call for help, whereas this - this preposterous chawbacon -

  ‘Me too,’ he said, and pursued, diminishingly, by Enoch’s heartrending pleas, set off rapidly along the lane in the direction of Burraford, well to the rearward of the rest of the cortège. Passing the estate wagon, whose occupants seemed still locked in contumely, he considered briefly, and not for the first time, asking Mr Dodd to exercise his pharmaceutical skills on the ailing cowman. But once again he rejected the idea: Mr Dodd was patently at the moment in no frame of mind to relinquish his vituperations, even if the patient needing his attentions were in the final throes of a bout with the King of Terrors.

  Fen left them behind, their offside wing still puncturing the bank, and lost them from earshot as he rounded the first bend of the lane.

  He broke into a trot.

  12. Bliss was It in That Dawn to be Alive

  There is … a current of strong, leaking electricity.

  Anthony Carson: A Train to Tarragona

  1

  The scene now changes dramatically to a point about three-quarters further along the lane towards Burraford, where Jack Jones is reclining against his pillows recuperating from the excitements of the meet, Isobel Jones is hammering a spigot into a kilderkin of one of the few potable ales left in the country and Mrs Clotworthy is making a steak-and-kidney pudding with a thick suet crust - to a point, in fact, at which the Pisser, its high-tension current like a loaded automatic rifle in the hands of some senile bedlamite, stands in rusty, antique ambush behind the hedge, terrorizing with its noises not merely the passing natives but even strangers who know nothing of its habits but who sense instinctively that all is not well with the thing. For the moment, however, the Pisser is mute, and, with the exception of a single cable, literally unstrung; all is placidity and peace; the uproar from the Glazebridge quarter is inaudible here, and even if it were not, would evoke little remark, for the countryside is full of unaccountable phenomena, acoustic and otherwise, and to puzzle over each and every one of these would necessarily preoccupy the mind to the exclusion of all else. And certainly, none of the four persons present has attention to spare for anything but the anxieties and problems of his immediate vicinity; one of them, indeed, appears to be paying no attention whatever even to these.

  The two engineers from the Central Electricity Generating Board are hard at work. Caps crammed down unhealthily to the very tops of their ears, they are labouring to make sense of the Pisser and its doings, and if possible to cure, or at least to modify, its present bogieman repute. Between the Pisser and the hedge they have erected, and somehow fixed firmly in the ground, a very much smaller pylon - as if the Pisser’s noises had been a product of labour pains, and it had at last managed to pup - and an exact equivalent of this object stands on the other side of the lane (twins, then, one of them thrown further than the other in the process of parturition). Slung between these miniatures, and so crossing the lane, is a sort of mesh cradle constructed of heavy, many-plied wire. In this there repose the massive cables which (all but one) have been disconnected from the Pisser’s terminals, and whose ends now lie coiled at random, large basking blindworms, on the grass near the Pisser’s splayed, Lynn Chadwick feet.

  On the Burraford side of all this obstruction is parked the C.E.G.B. lorry glimpsed earlier by Fen and the Major. It can be seen to be elaborately equipped, even to a radiotelephone.

  But things are not going well, and the radio-telephone is unable to help. So, at least, diagnoses Don Goodey, third of the quartet. Goodey, it will be remembered, is the angler who, on the bank of the Burr, suffered the traumatic experience of being nudged on the toes, while dozing, by farmer Routh’s severed head, or to be more accurate, by the improvised raft to which that horrific memento mori was nailed. He has, however, by now had plenty of time in which to recover from his dismal arousal - plenty of time, too, for his dining out on ever more and more gaudy accounts of his experience to have at length palled. Accordingly he has reverted to his normal chief recreation, which, angling apart, is watching other people at work. And in this, clearly, it is the two workmen who are the star turns: the fourth person present, though admittedly in some sense working - working, moreover, with hardly a moment’s pause for reflection or rest - lacks, for Goodey, the pleasing charisma of intense muscular effort; moreover, the nature of his association with the workmen, though patently such an association does exist, is hard to define. He is a tall man in leggings; his dress and general demeanour suggests that he is socially a cut above the other two; he holds a large mill-board, its spring clip fairly bursting with paper. Much of the paper has been written on, and is hanging
over the edge of the board, but a considerable wad remains virgin, and on this, Leggings is busy writing with a silver ball-point pen. He is some sort of supervisor, then, some sort of foreman, and his occupation is to keep a record of the work being done on the Pisser, the assiduity or otherwise of its doers, the triumphs they may achieve from time to time, and so on and so forth. Yes; but here Goodey’s interest turns to perplexity. Surely Leggings is writing far too much for these simple explanations to be adequate? Glittering in the autumn sunlight, his Biro is travelling from left to right of the page with the rapidity of a shuttle operating a loom. It reaches the end of the line; in a flash it whisks back, a notch lower, to the beginning of the next line - and with undiminished rapidity the whole process is repeated. Now Leggings has come to the end of his page; he flips it over the edge of the mill-board and instantly commences work on another. Scarcely an official report, then, even though such things are apt to be wordy to a degree. Goodey, though unemployable through idleness, is by no means uneducated. Possibly, he conjectures, Leggings is whiling away his time with the C.E.G.B. with the composition of a large panoramic novel, something of the order of Little Dorrit, say, or War and Peace. He is not, in any case, very exhilarating to study for long, and Goodey’s gaze reverts to the two workmen.

  These are now both on the Pisser’s side of the lane, struggling in unison, and still vainly, with some sort of winding mechanism attached by a hawser from the mini-pylon to the nearer end of the wire cradle. The cradle jolts and jerks under their combined assault, but remains obstinately blocking the throughway. Goodey feels very sorry for this pair. On such a hot morning, it must be aggravating to strive so hard and meet with such poor success. Goodey decides - mistakenly, as it turns out, but he is one of those people who are chronically error-prone - that perhaps a little encouragement from an outsider will be consoling, and may even weight the scales in the workmen’s favour.

  ‘Having a bit of trouble?’ he calls.

  Unheeding, Leggings scribbles on. But the two workmen are far from being unheeding. For a moment, they seem as if turned to bronze. Then, with one accord abandoning the mini-pylon and its winch, they make for the gate against which Goodey has been leaning. Something in their demeanour disquiets Goodey, who retreats a few steps into the lane. The workmen come out through the gate, and so forward to confront their Job’s Comforter. The older man leads, but the other is close behind him. The older man looks at Goodey and then speaks.

  ‘You bugger off,’ he says, confidingly.

  Goodey is six foot tall, but his interlocutor tops him by at least three inches. Moreover, he is brawny, brown and very muscular from long hours of work in the open air. No thought but the conciliatory crosses Goodey’s mind. ‘No offence meant,’ he mumbles.

  ‘But some taken,’ says the workman. He stares at Goodey fixedly for a further few seconds, as though engraving his features in some personal Rogues’ Gallery prominently on display somewhere behind his central sulcus. Then he turns to his companion, nods briefly, and leads the way back to their scene of joint arduousness at the mini-pylon, carefully closing the gate behind them.

  Leggings stops writing for long enough to raise his eyes briefly to the heavens, presumably in search of inspiration. He finds it, and the ball-point at once goes into action again.

  Goodey wonders whether he had better take himself off altogether, and look for diversion elsewhere. But there are elements in this present situation which are irresistible: Goodey absolutely must, he feels, wait and see how it is eventually resolved. Cautiously - indeed, almost on tiptoe - he re-approaches the gate.

  Leggings pauses for long enough to take out a handkerchief and wipe his eyes: he has perhaps just embarked on an extended and pathetic death-bed scene.

  Rattling like a rabid mongrel with dozens of empty tin cans tied to its tail, a helicopter comes into sight over Worthington’s Steep, apparently steering by the line of pylons to which the Pisser belongs. Reaching the Pisser itself, it begins deafeningly to circle, conceivably - thinks Goodey, transferring his attention from workmen to chopper - with a view to taking aerial photographs.

  But helicopters are not really very absorbing, the way frustrated workmen are.

  The wire cradle across the lane squeaks and gibbers like the sheeted dead, at the same time shivering like those Romans unfortunate enough to be abroad and observe them.

  The older workman keeps shouting, ‘One, two, Three! One, two, Again!’, and at each climax a groan goes up, accompanied by the sound of sinews cracking.

  The cradle remains earth-bound.

  Having propped the infant Grand Duchess up against her frilly damask pillows (bed-side toys by courtesy of Fabergé), Leggings resumes writing. The infant Grand Duchess smiles bravely and lisps a request for a glass of eau de vie. No, better make that lemonade or passion-fruit juice.

  The cradle seems to be lifting now. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is.

  No, it isn’t.

  It has fallen back on to the lane again. Sexual, scatological and religious oaths are uttered in quick succession by the two workmen.

  Even above these, and the rumpus of the helicopter, sharp-eared Goodey picks up a new sound. So now, he reflects, there really will be trouble.

  Up along the lane from the direction of Glazebridge, a cloud of dust has appeared, moving rapidly.

  Presently this resolves itself into a grey Mini, driven by a small, pink-faced person in a grey trilby hat.

  It is the man from Sweb.

  2

  By temperament, the man from Sweb was an evader, not an escaper. He had been put away three times - the first time for half a stretch, the second time for one and a bit, the third for a pontoon; but since he was a stair dancer, a walk-in thief, judges had been inclined to be lenient until the last occasion, when his offence had been said by prosecuting counsel to have been aggravated by his having broken a window to ‘effect an entrance’ (the man from Sweb had denied this, squeaking out from the box some long, rambling fantasy about people who didn’t keep their houses in proper repair; but unluckily the judge hadn’t believed any of this). Still, on the whole he had had it off all right, thanks to working alone, to making careful reccys, to a considerable knowledge of works of art and to lying low in between jobs; and his previous arrests had all been peaceable, unexpected affairs, the work probably of some anonymous snout, and had left him with no time in which to get seriously nervous. But this business was different: now the hounds were on his scent with a vengeance, and he was running for cover instead of being relatively amicably, as it were, unveiled; now he had to get to his bolt-hole in a hurry, against expert competition - and his bolt-hole was a long way away. No wonder he was scared, and driving somewhat erratically as a consequence. Instead of watching the road ahead, he kept peering into his driving mirror, and even twisting round to look back through the rear window. The rozzers were after him, not a doubt about that…

  He looked for all the world, Goodey thought wonderingly as the little car raced nearer and nearer, like a fugitive from justice.

  Emerging from Y Wurry with his, or rather the Rector’s, ponderous iron coffer, and intending to slip away with it as quietly as possible, the man from Sweb had been dismayed to hear voices raised in wrath, together with motor engines and various animal noises, only a short distance away; and an unobtrusive survey of the situation, through a small hole in the outermost of one of the Rector’s many hedges, had increased his alarm almost to a point at which he had considered returning the coffer to the Rector’s attic, and its obviously matching key to the hall table on which it had carelessly been left; he could then, if discovered on the premises, easily have fabricated some innocent reason for his presence there. But now - police! And in force! True, for the moment they seemed much preoccupied by the mellêe still gathering impetus in the lane. True, if he had been thinking clearly the man from Sweb could easily have unlocked the coffer, seen if there was anything of value inside it, and if not, have thrown it away and made off. But hi
s emotions at the prospect - the possible prospect - of yet another dose of porridge were such that he was as incapable of thinking clearly as he would have been of throwing a grenade at Princess Anne. No blagger he. On the contrary, he was, for an experienced criminal, a markedly timorous man, and the forefront of his mind was wholly preoccupied with the notion that the anonymous snout had struck again, and that Old Bill consequently knew not only that he was here, but also that he had chosen this particular afternoon, when the Rector had publicly announced that he would be away at a Diocesan Synod, to turn that clergyman’s drum over and make off with the best and most disposable of the many objets d’art et de virtu its top floor was said to contain. Had he known that Old Bill, in the shape of the Rector, was gleefully watching his every move from the inside of the house, he would probably have fainted from fear. As it was, he simply panicked and decided to take a chance, rushing out of the gate, and into the Mini, and away, before the police had any opportunity to disentangle themselves, or even to become seriously aware that he was present. He did, however, as he drove off, hear the Rector’s cry of ‘Stop thief!’, and knew with a heart-sick prosternation that he was discovered. The only thing to do now seemed to be to drive as fast as possible and hope that some wildly improbable contingency would rescue him at the last.

  Accordingly, he was so busy looking at the road behind that he was almost on top of the Pisser’s cradle, stretched across his route, before a chorus of warning cries, including even that of Leggings, awoke him to his peril. Stamping on the foot-brake, he skidded violently and somehow managed to bring the Mini to a halt, nearly sending himself head first through the windscreen, mere millimetres short of the obstruction. With the dust settling round him, but with the lane towards Glazebridge still void of pursuit, he scrambled out and stared pitifully at the two workmen, who in turn stared blankly back at him. Leggings had returned to his writing, trying to decide whether the infant Grand Duchess was exhibiting a deathly pallor or a hectic flush.