Goodey, who was closest, spoke.
‘Well, you nearly copped it that time, chum,’ he said, friend-lily.
The man from Sweb’s mild and diffident manner was genuine, not a pose: he knew that if he were a professional actor, he would be permanently ‘resting’. ‘Shall you be long?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, but - ’
‘At this rate, looks as if we’re going to be all day,’ said Goodey cheerily, associating himself gratuitously with the electricity men. ‘I’d back up and go round by Hole Bridge, if I was you.’
‘But I’ve got to get through. I’ve got to!’
‘Well, if you was to hang on for a bit, I dare say -’
‘No, no! You don’t understand!’
Goodey, who had a fine conceit of himself, was unprepared to admit this. He said: ‘You’ve got to get through. Right? But you can’t get through till that cradle’s shifted. Right? So you’ll have to ask’ - here Goodey looked doubtfully at Leggings, who had again momentarily paused in his writing, perhaps meditating the literary advisability, or otherwise, of petechiae -‘you’ll have to ask those two chaps there how they’re getting along. Right?’
The man from Sweb cleared his throat. ‘Shall you be long?’ he called. But his tone as well as being squeaky was humble and muted, and the two workmen, though conscious of being addressed, failed to catch his drift. ‘What?’ they bellowed. ‘What was that you said?’
More loudly, ‘I said, shall you be long?’ the man from Sweb repeated. ‘I - I’m in rather a hurry, you see.’
The two workmen looked at one another, and evidently decided this was not a foeman worthy of their steel. ‘We’ll be as long as a donkey’s,’ the older one said - at which witticism he and his colleague clutched one another in a joint paroxysm of mirth. ‘Tell you what, matey, you want to get through, you just come in here and lend us a hand.’ Leggings frowned fractionally at them, but the Muse was too strong for him, and he resumed composition without speaking. ‘They don’t understand,’ squeaked the man from Sweb desperately. ‘No one understands.’
‘Yes, yes, they do,’ Goodey soothed him. ‘I understand. Your problem, as I see it - ’
But the man from Sweb was no longer attending to him. Instead, he was staring back in horror along the lane, where a second, smaller cloud of dust had appeared. This solidified shortly into a bandy-legged ape wearing clerical black, moving towards them at quite a considerable pace.
‘It’s him!’ shrieked the man from Sweb. ‘It’s him! They’re after me! They’ll catch me!’
Though beginning to wonder if he was dealing with a lunatic, Goodey made another attempt at consolation. ‘Now, that’s only the Rector,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why he’s running like that -shouting something too, by the sound of it - but unless you’ve been visiting him, and have left something important behind… Come to think of it, I heard he was at some conference or other this afternoon, but I suppose - ’
He got no further, for at this point the man from Sweb gave vent to a cry like a live mouse being torn asunder by contesting tabbies. For now two further clouds of dust had appeared, approaching rapidly in file and emitting engine noises. These passed the Rector at speed, and were quickly seen to be a Cortina followed by a police Panda car. The man from Sweb threw up his hands in dismay - a gesture Goodey had hitherto imagined to be confined to the stage, and even there to have died the death about the time of the production of The Second Mrs Tanqueray - and looked round him wildly. Then he lunged back into the Mini, emerged from it clutching a large heavy iron chest, and with this upborne in his arms thrust through the gate, setting off at a tottering run towards the patch of scrubby woodland which signalled the nearest available shelter. Goodey had been right the first time: the man was a fugitive from justice. Should he, Goodey, therefore now give chase? He was still inwardly debating this problem when it was solved for him by the Cortina and the Panda screeching to a sudden stop immediately behind the man from Sweb’s abandoned Mini.
Widger and Ling were as a matter of fact still unaware of the man from Sweb and of his nefarious activities back at Y Wurry: they had bigger fish to fry. All they knew was that here was yet another impediment to their real momentous mission; and by thrusting their heads out of the car windows they were able to glimpse the heavy wire cradle, strung across the lane, which had brought the Mini to its present chrysalid, sloughed condition.
‘That car yours?’ Widger bellowed at Leggings.
His pen momentarily halted, Leggings shook his head.
‘Well, is it yours, then?’ Widger demanded of Goodey.
Goodey said that No, it wasn’t.
‘Is it theirs?’ said Widger, indicating the two workmen but addressing himself to Leggings.
Leggings frowned at this renewed interruption and again shook his head.
Widger got out of the Cortina.
‘Whose is it, then?’ he inquired angrily of the world at large.
‘It’s his,’ said Goodey.
‘His? Whose?’
‘His.’ And Goodey pointed to the man from Sweb, who by now was several hundred yards away and in some slight danger from the helicopter; this had been circling lower and lower over the Pisser and was now evidently intending to touch down near by. Its ratchet clatterings were making conversation increasingly difficult on the ground.
‘Who is he?’ Widger shouted. ‘What’s he running away for?’
Goodey shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he shouted back. ‘I think he may be trying to escape from the police.’
‘Why should he be doing that?’
‘What?’
‘I said, why should he be doing that?’
The Rector joined them. For a man of his years, his long run had left him remarkably unpuffed. ‘After him, Widger!’ he said, his normal tones amply the equal in decibel power to everyone else’s special efforts. ‘After him, I say! Tally-ho! Thar she blows! Yoicks! Never say you let him get away from you now!’
‘There, there, sir.’
‘What?’
‘I said There, there.’
‘Could have told you from the first he wasn’t from Sweb,’ said the Rector. ‘Not nasty enough, for one thing. You know why he came to see me, Widger? He was casing my joint.’
‘You mean to tell me, sir, that he was a - is a -’
‘I was ready for him, though,’ said the Rector. ‘First time he came to see me, I said to myself, he’s not from Sweb. So I rang them up, and sure enough, he wasn’t. Good disguise, mind. Nowadays we’re all such a parcel of tegs that we’ll believe anyone who says he’s anything to do with any part of the Government or the County Council or any of that drivel. There were ninety and nine who safely lay,’ said the Rector, ‘in the shelter of the fold. Only I was the hundredth, you see.’ He paused, possibly because the context of his quotation struck him, coming from a Christian cleric, as not wholly apposite. ‘Anyway, he didn’t take me in, not for a single second. Here’s a bad egg, I said to myself. And sure enough, he was. Mistake he made, though, was in casing my joint too soon. Because during the last week, I’ve sold practically everything valuable off, and it’s all been taken away, by Spink’s and people. So then, when I gave it out that I wasn’t going to be home this afternoon -’
‘Wait, sir, wait,’ bawled Widger. ‘Are you trying to tell me that that man’ - he gestured towards the by now fairly distant little grey figure still stumbling in laborious haste across the tussocky grass towards the woods - ’that that man is a burglar?’
‘Course he’s a burglar. Got criminality written all over him, like some outsize graffito. It says, “I am a criminal,” that’s what it says.’
The near-side door of the Cortina opened to emit a thick nimbus of tobacco smoke through which, as the breeze wafted it away, the irate figure of the officer in charge of the investigation presently became discernible. ‘What in hell is going on now?’ it wanted to know, as it circled the car to join Widger, Goodey and the Rector in the shadow of the
Pisser. ‘It’s the Rector, Eddie. As far as I can make out, he think’s he’s been burgled.’
‘What?’
‘I said, As far as I can make out, the Rector thinks he’s been burgled.’
‘Inspector, arrest that man,’ said the Rector.
‘Superintendent, sir. I smoke a pipe.’
‘Superintendent, arrest that man.’
‘I - I - ’ said Ling, in what was apparently a nautical affirmative.
‘He stole a Victorian jewel-safe from me.’
‘Oh, in that case, sir - ’
‘Get him back here and make him … make him’ - here the Rector’s normal vibrant tones acquired a marked and significant tremor - ‘make him open the safe in your presence.’
‘Very good, sir, I’ll …’ Ling called to the two constables in the Panda. ‘Crosse! Tavener!’ he called. ‘Go after that man’ pointing - ‘and bring him back.’ The two constables leapt from their car and trotted off into the Pisser’s field in the wake of the man from Sweb, who turned and saw them coming but who, burdened as he was, could do nothing to put on speed other than abandon his spoils. Still scraping vaguely at himself with the handcuffs, Rankine left the Cortina and joined the continually enlarging group by the gate.
‘Not that I didn’t mean him to, mind,’ said the Rector.
Ling felt that the primary purpose of their mission was becoming diluted by trivia. To the workmen he shouted, ‘Eh, coom on, lads, git tha’ bluidy thing out o’ t’way, can’t ’ee?’
‘We’re police,’ Widger bawled over the ever-increasing stridor of the descending helicopter.
‘You’re police, you better stick us in the cells,’ bawled back the workman who had terrorized Goodey, wiping sweat off his brow with a hairy forearm. ‘Be a sight cooler there than it is here, I reckon … Here, Bert,’ he added, addressing his colleague, ‘get on over the other side and see if that roller’s got stuck again, will you?’
Pushing his way unceremoniously through the assembly at the gate, Bert crossed the lane, somehow forced his way through a hole in the hedge, and disappeared from view. The cradle began to twitch and shudder again.
Rankine had produced a notebook. ‘Shall I take some details, sir?’ he asked Widger.
‘No.’
Now two horses became members of the static troupe. The first carried Miss Mimms, not at the immediate moment weeping, but with all the look of a storm-cloud sucking up moisture in readiness for a fresh deluge. The second carried the bearded huntsman, ready no doubt with his single expletive, and on its crupper the man in the caftan, peering anxiously about him in all directions for a sight of his missing mare. This was the situation when with the exception of Leggings (‘Please, please, Uncle Stanislas, make me well again’) everyone had his or her mouth open in preparation for speech.
And this was when, virtually simultaneously, three separate climaxes occurred.
In the first place, the Pisser exploded, as everybody but the experts had always said it one day would. First giving brief warning with a hiss like a thousand pitsful of Fu Manchu’s death-dealing snakes, its one remaining connected terminal first discharged a corona of brilliant blue and orange sparks and then produced a detonation so ear-splitting and colossal as to make people even as far distant as Hole Bridge leap to the conclusion that nuclear warfare had become a reality at last. Of those gathered together to witness this dénoûment (apart from the horses, which plunged and whinnied as if suddenly assaulted on all sides by Gargantuan gadflies), for many seconds only one was able to move: swearing terribly and still clutching his mill-board, Leggings raced up to the cradle, somehow manoeuvred himself underneath it, grabbed up the radiotelephone on board the C.E.G.B. lorry and began gabbling frantic warnings. The Pisser’s single cable had left at least a small part of the neighbourhood able to use electrical appliances; now all lunch-time ovens cooled, electric irons ceased to make proper creases, spin driers ground to a halt and television assumed a stupefying blankness for many miles around. One music-lover, his stereo tape-deck only a second away from the enormous climax of Also Sprach Zarathustra, genuinely supposed, for a few frantic seconds, that Jahweh, on account of his sins, had determined to strike him instantaneously deaf, with the result that, instead of a thunderous chord, dead abrupt silence met his ears.
The second explosion came hard on the heels of the first, and although not nearly so loud, was shocking enough in all conscience. Looking round and seeing Crosse and Tavener closing in on him, the man from Sweb had done what he ought to have done long before: he had paused, dumped the Rector’s box on the grass, fished its key from his pocket, unlocked it and opened its lid: unencumbered, he might - just might- succeed in reaching the woods, and taking cover there, before the fuzz caught up with him. If he had had any sense, he wouldn’t even have worried about the box’s contents - but the acquisitive instinct in thieves is naturally very strong, and the man from Sweb was psychologically incapable of not taking just a quick look, the more so as the helicopter was just touching down and so temporarily concealing him from the two pursuing uniforms. He opened the box, and suffered a humiliation which almost made him decide to spend the remainder of his life in some blameless occupation, such as politics or hawking encyclopaedias from door to door.
The helicopter’s rotors were slowing to a standstill as the Pisser began its hissing noise. From the pilot’s cabin jumped the pilot. He wrenched open the passenger door and let down a short flight of steps, down which, barely credibly in those surroundings, there started to descend two men in bowler hats, each with brief-case and neatly furled umbrella, both in pinstriped black trousers and black coats. These, presumably, were an arm of the C.E.G.B.’s top brass, come to give their personal attention to the technical problem confronting their subordinates.
The first of them, however, had not yet reached terra firma when the Pisser let fly; and the second bang, following so rapidly afterwards, broke their nerve completely. Shouting something at the pilot (Take off! Take off!’ it might have been), they turned and rushed back up into the shelter of their aircraft. Of sterner stuff, the pilot shrugged, whipped the little flight of steps back into its concealment, slammed the door, clambered back into his cockpit, and obeyed. The machine lifted higher and higher. Then it veered away and clickety-clacked rapidly southward over the top of Worthington’s Steep, where it vanished, being, indeed, never seen in those parts again.
The second bang, meanwhile, had been the product of the man from Sweb’s opening the Rector’s box, and was shattering enough in itself. But there was more. Accompanying the bang, a thick black cloud jetted from the box’s interior, totally smothering the man from Sweb’s frontal aspect from the tip of his hat to half-way down his trousers, so that it appeared as if the make-up artist from The Black and White Minstrel Show had gone berserk or was protesting against racism, or (since the two things are not dissimilar) both. Nor was even this quite all -though for the time being only the man from Sweb and the pursuant Law were suitably placed to appreciate the Rector’s delicate final touch. And the pursuant Law, coming up to where the man from Sweb, all notions of escape banished from his mind by his dreadful condition, stood acquiescently awaiting it, could be seen from the gate not merely to hesitate, but even to recoil slightly. But then Duty, stern daughter of the Voice of God, took over again. The pursuant Law, possibly mindful of the Force’s unofficial motto (‘You Just Come Along O’ Me, Me Buck-O’) trod forward again. Crosse took the man from Sweb by the arm, and set off with him towards the gate; Tavener gingerly picked up the box, following on with that.
They arrived, and at their approach it soon became evident what this third element in the booby-trap had been.
It had been hydrogen sulphide.
The man from Sweb smelled like a cargo of broken addled eggs.
A faint whimpering came from the edge of the group. This was the Rector, trying to suppress his laughter.
The man from Sweb, who when desperately hard pressed could show an irascible
side, glared. ‘Call yourself a man of God,’ he squeaked. ‘Call yourself a man of God, and look what you - look what you - look what you’ve -’ Words failed him.
‘The Hulland twins made that for me,’ said the Rector. ‘Very clever with their hands, the Hulland twins. Don’t know how they managed to make the hydrogen sulphide into a spray, though, I always thought it was just a gas.’
‘It’s a gas, all right,’ said Crosse, who was prone to Americanisms. ‘Phew! I never smelled anything like it.’
‘He pongs, he pongs, he’s black and he pongs,’ the Rector intoned, to the first part of the chant generally used for the Psalm Justus es Domine.’And the soot, too. Lovely. It was all damp and caked when I gave it to the Hulland twins from the chimneys of my house. They must have dried it out very carefully and then sieved it over and over again. But it’s the pong that’s the best. Haw-haw,’ chortled the Rector, bending forwards in his mirth and clutching with both hands at his stomach as if it contained a great rent from which, if unstemmed, his puddings would come bursting out. ‘Ah, haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!’
‘What’s happening?’ This was Fen, who had at last caught up with them all. ‘What’s happening, and where’s the Major?’
‘The Major,’ said Widger, pointing, ‘is there.’
For this was the third of the three things whose simultaneity, and whose immediate consequences, make them so difficult to describe, intelligibly, in any sort of chronological order.
While the Pisser was preparing to detonate, and the man from Sweb was fumbling in his pocket for the key to the Victorian jewel-safe, there was heard, though amid all the other agitations not attended to, the ker-a-lop, ker-a-lop, in the next field towards Glazebridge, of a galloping horse. This approached with great rapidity, ceasing to be sound and becoming vision at precisely the instant when Xantippe, the Major still up, jumped the hedge into the Pisser’s field. Unfortunately it was also the instant when the double squib went off.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 28