‘Never mind,’ Fen consoled him. ‘I expect you’ll have been expelled by Gadafi long before anyone has a chance to bomb you. Besides, just think. It might have been Uganda.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Or Angola.’
‘Oh God, God … Gervase, you know what I’m going to do?’
‘No. What?’
‘I’m going to buy myself a little cottage here in Devon and just write books about murders.’
‘There aren’t many murders down here, you know. These last few months have been quite exceptional.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean just Devon murders. Murders everywhere, and particularly the old ones, which have never been properly solved. There was an extraordinary business in Victorian times in Balham, for instance -’
‘I’m afraid you’ll find that about six thousand books have been written about the Bravo Case already.’
‘Well, something.’ Padmore fixed his eyes on one of the innumerable B.R. symbols dotted about the station - simplified representations, they seemed, of a particularly nasty derailment. ‘There must be something. Your own cases, now - ’
‘Crispin writes those up,’ said Fen, ‘in his own grotesque way.1 And there’s not much money in it, John. In writing about any murders, I mean.’
‘I don’t need much,’ said Padmore lachrymosely. ‘A roof over my head, a warm fire in winter, beans on toast, clothes, whisky, wine, a car, a stereogram, records, books, just a few decent sticks of furniture - that’d have to be Georgian, I certainly couldn’t afford Queen Anne - a daily, a gardener, - a -’
‘A crooked Tax Accountant,’ Fen suggested.
A whistle blew and the train began to move. Padmore grasped Fen’s hand through the open window, and bade fair to drag him at increasing speed right along the platform and off the end of it unless he literally wrenched himself free. The newspaperman - whose vocation, Fen judged, though misguided, was unlikely ever to be replaced by anything else -continued despite this forcible parting to wave from the window until the train rounded a curve and his atebrin-yel-lowed face was lost from sight.
So now, in the cosy warmth of the Dickinsons’ cottage’s kitchen, it was just Fen, and the Rector, and the Major. Stripey, judging the weather too inclement for venery, was asleep in the adjoining room.
‘Good soup, this,’ said the Rector. ‘I’il have some more,’ he added, never backward in making his requirements known.
‘That’s the way,’ said Fen, ladling the fluid on to the Rector’s plate from a saucepan on the stove.
‘And what’s for afters?’
‘Cold roast partridge, salad, mashed potatoes. Peaches in brandy and Brie.’
‘Sounds all right.’
‘Mostly from Fortnum’s, I’m afraid. But the soup,’ said Fen,
‘I made myself.’
‘Delish.’
‘You, Major?’ Fen asked. ‘Basis is shin of beef.’
‘Excellent, my dear fellow, excellent.’
‘It ought to be excellent, because I’ve been boiling it up every day for more than a week now.’
‘So I can imagine,’ said the Major, paling slightly. ‘Yes, really quite excellent. Very… very strong.’
‘The wine’s good, too.’ The Rector picked up one of the two bottles and stared incredulously at the label. ‘La Tache, 1953?’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know there was any left in the world. However did you get hold of it?’
‘There are still a few dozen in the College cellars.’
‘Bibulous dons,’ said the Rector, holding his glass to the light. ‘Lovely orangey colour. I’ll have some more of that, too.’
‘Join me in a Sweet Martini,’ the Major chanted, to the tune of Frère Jacques. ‘It has taste! It has taste!’
‘You’ve had quite enough to drink already, Major,’ said the Rector severely. ‘And besides, it’s very ill-bred to sing at table.’
‘It’s gotta be Tide — Noo Tide!’
‘Kindly be quiet. Fen, did Ortrud Youings kill Routh?’
‘Oh, I should think so, yes. In fact, she boasted of it when they arrested her. But then she changed her mind, when they got a lawyer in to look after her. And after that, she wouldn’t speak anything but German - she’s one of those women who can never stop talking, but she had the sense to wrap it up until they could get an interpreter, and that took quite a long time. After that, it was German for days on end, and Not Guilty all along the line. Of course, they’ll have her for bashing her husband, but as to Routh - well, there’s some independent evidence against her, from X, but that may not be quite enough. What obviously happened was that she went out for a walk on the evening before the Bust girl found the body, met Routh, and tried to seduce him, as she did anything in trousers. And Routh, I think, must have simply jeered at her (he wasn’t a one for the women anyway, let alone a tigress like that), so that she got enraged and knocked him on the head.’
‘Was she the woman Hagberd was referring to when he said he was “crook with a sheila”?’
‘I imagine so, don’t you? She’d have tried her little games on him, all right. But Hagberd was - is - a bit of a puritan. He’d have been shocked to the core at the idea of having an affaire with the wife of another man - especially if the other man were someone he liked, such as Youings. So Hagberd turned our Ortrud down, and she was fresh from that humiliation when miserable little Routh had the nerve to turn her down, too. It was too much, and she simply brained him - and went on her way singing, I’ve no doubt, as happily as a lark. And then Hagberd chanced on the body, and although he wouldn’t himself have killed Routh (almost everyone in the neighbourhood agreed about that), he was quite dotty enough to do the dismembering and play all the foolish tricks with the head.’
‘Will the Court find Ortrud guilty but insane, or whatever the phrase is nowadays?’
‘I expect so. And then after she’s been put away for a few years, some lunatic Parole Board will decide that she’s now fit to be a member of society again, in which case’ - Fen shrugged - ’the whole thing will probably happen all over again, somewhere else.’
‘Which brings us,’ said the Rector, ‘to X.’
‘Ah yes, X.’ Fen nodded. ‘Psychologically, I think the most interesting murderer I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Great cunning combined with crass stupidity. Great unscrupulousness and great sense of duty. Great bravado - with a humorous touch to it, even - and ridiculous timidity. Great good luck, and great bad…’
The Rector drank wine. ‘Luckraft,’ he said. ‘Police Constable Andrew Aloysius Luckraft. Seen him about the place for donkey’s years, and until the papers printed them, for the life of me I couldn’t have told you either of his Christian names.’
2
‘Brothers,’ said Fen, rather as if addressing a trade union of two. ‘Andrew Luckraft had a brother, George. They didn’t greatly resemble one another either in looks or in temperament. As regards temperament, although it was Andrew who committed the fratricide, George was in character by far the more criminal of the two. If he hadn’t decided to blackmail Andrew for every penny Andrew could produce, he wouldn’t have been killed - and probably, when the money ran out, Andrew would have gone to the authorities and told them the whole dismal story, including the virtually certain murder of Routh by Ortrud Youings. As it was, he got the wherewithal to pay his exigent brother from a second blackmail. Youings, as we know, doted on Ortrud - though he’s got over that now, thank heavens; and Youings had a bit of money in addition to owning the pig farm. So when Andrew found out that it was Ortrud, almost incontrovertibly, who had broken Routh’s pate for him, he knew where to turn in order to meet his brother’s demands. Youings would believe him, all right, when told what Ortrud had done - for all his uxoriousness, he had no illusions at all about his wife’s occasional shocking malignancy and violence -and Youings would pay. In his turn, Andrew would pay George out of the proceeds. And that was really the only link between the two cases. It’s unique, though, as far as I’m
aware - A blackmailing B for the cash to silence C, who in a sort of circlet is blackmailing A.’
‘Yes, I see that much, my dear fellow, and as far as it goes it’s very clearly put, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it. But there must have been a lot of factors which haven’t appeared in the papers, as far as I know. F’rinstance, I don’t understand how -’
‘And you never will,’ said the Rector testily, ‘if you don’t keep your mouth shut and let Fen get on with it in his own way. As to the papers, the police, since it concerns one of their own number, aren’t giving out a scrap more information than they absolutely have to. What I don’t understand is how Fen comes to know so much more about the business than anyone else. What I can’t see -’
‘And never will,’ said the Major, ‘if you don’t belt up for a minute or two, while our host puts us in the picture -’
‘Stop it, you two,’ Fen reproved them mildly. ‘I know what I know simply because a few days ago I read Andrew Luckraft’s confession.’
‘So he did confess!’
‘To killing his brother, yes. Not to killing Mavis Trent. He says it’s true he was having an affaire with her, but he doesn’t know anything at all about her death.’
‘Wise of him,’ said the Major dryly. ‘He might confess to killing his brother, and the jury might be a little bit sympathetic, particularly since the brother was a blackmailer and in general, as far as I can gather, pretty much of a bad hat. But Mavis Trent a jury certainly wouldn’t forgive him for… I say, what a lot of nymphos there are in this case. Now if only Mavis and Ortrud could have got together and organized a sort of joint lesbonympho, probably none of this would have happened. Just goes to show what a powerful force sex still is.’
‘ “Still”?’ said the Rector. ‘I can’t think what you mean by “still”. Anyway, Major, you brood far too much over sex. It’ll ruin your health, just see if it doesn’t’
‘My dear fellow, I hardly ever think about it at all. Not voluntarily.’ The Major sounded quite put out at this presbyteral slur on the purity of his imaginings. ‘Much too old. The only time I think about it is when I wish I lived in a country where somebody or other wasn’t bedevilling you with sex, in one form or another, every five minutes. It’s like being infested with gnats. Do you think they’d take kindly to me in Eire?’
‘No.’
‘There was a girl on the telly doing the washing up in just high heels and panty-hose. Whatever would you think if I were to do that?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised in the least. Fen, how did you come to read this confession of Luckraft’s?’
‘Widger showed it me.’
‘Oh, he did, did he? Why?’
‘He seemed to feel,’ said Fen evasively, ‘that he owed me some sort of a favour.’
‘And did he?’
‘Nothing to speak of.’
‘You didn’t mention it yesterday or the day before.’
‘No. I was asked not to. But now that Luckraft’s safely surrounded by lawyers, they feel they can release most of what he said. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow, so there’s no reason why you two shouldn’t know about it now. Sir Robert Mark has been informed. So has the Queen. Though what they’re expected to do about it, except waggle their heads,’ said Fen with some candour, ‘I really can’t imagine.’
‘I’ve watched the Queen closely,’ said the Rector, who as a matter of fact couldn’t remember ever setting eyes on her, ‘and she never waggles her head.’
‘Well, anyway, it’s all public knowledge by now,’ said Fen. ‘So if there are any questions -’
An instant and simultaneous babble erupted from the Rector and the Major. Fen waited for it to minify, and then fastened on the last (indeed, first) inquiry that was more or less wholly intelligible.
‘Begin at the beginning? Well, there’s good precedent for that - as well as for stopping when you reach the end. The beginning, of course, is Mavis Trent and her men. It was inevitable that sooner or later she would set her cap at Andrew Luckraft and sure enough, she did. And he fell. His wife isn’t a marvellously agreeable person, I understand, and probably the only reason he stuck with her so long was that she had this bit of money of her own, and wasn’t too ungenerous with it; so he needed sympathy as well as sex, and Mavis Trent was good at supplying these in a single attractively wrapped package. But the wife, though open-handed enough, had from the point of view of Luckraft’s affaire one serious disadvantage: she was a maniacally jealous woman; one hint of the Mavis Trent business and Luckraft would have whizzed through the Divorce Court like a naked man running the gauntlet through two rows of sadists with spiked whips, and been back in no time to living on a humble copper’s pay. Not so impossible to do that, you may say; but like most criminals, Luckraft failed to see that you can hardly ever, on this turning globe, rob Peter without paying Paul; and he knew that Mavis, though she had money too, was altogether too fond of variety in her men to be likely to want to keep him indefinitely in the rather better-than-average style to which he’d become accustomed.
‘So - it all had to be a dead secret. And a dead secret it actually was until one fateful day when Luckraft agreed to meet Mavis in a pub in Plymouth, and take her out to dinner.
‘Because, you see, there just happened to be someone else in that particular pub on that particular evening: Andrew’s brother George.
‘Their lives had taken different courses, and they’d never even attempted to keep in touch. Andrew, always the more law-abiding of the two, had become a policeman; George had gone into the Merchant Navy, and despite a few dubious incidents en route, had eventually got his Mate’s ticket. He never ranged far afield, I gather - none of that xenophile curiosity to see the world - but stuck to the British ports and the closer Continental ones; so there was nothing intrinsically surprising about his turning up in Plymouth.
‘It took half an hour’s surreptitious staring for the brothers to recognize one another; and when they finally did, their meeting wasn’t exactly a joyous one. But booze works marvels, and one of the marvels it worked this time was to make a gift to Mavis of a brand-new and, she thought, infinitely superior man -infinitely superior to Andrew, I mean. Andrew was stolid and socially unenlivening; George could draw the long bow, in an endless stream of amusing nautical anecdotes which always, as well as being mildly scabrous, made himself out the duffer until the final touch of self-aggrandizement which represented him as being by a hair’s breadth the victor in the end.
‘Mavis was enchanted by all this. When Andrew went off to the Gents, she responded eagerly to George’s suggestion that they should meet again. He would probably be in Plymouth for several weeks, he said; so if she didn’t mind being seen about the place with a poor old crock of a shellback like him -
‘Mavis didn’t mind: it was as if Andrew had never existed. She arranged her first date with George there and then …’
‘And never lived to keep it.’
Fen sighed. ‘And here, I’m afraid, is where it all becomes very vague and conjectural. We do know, though - because Luckraft has told us so - that Mavis wrote George a long letter at his Plymouth address, in which she expressed her undying affection for him and poked fun at his brother, whom, she mentioned in passing, she was due to meet late the following evening at Hole Bridge. She was going to give Andrew a bit of a fright, she said, just because he was such an old stick-in-the-mud. But then she’d tell him it was all only a joke - and she’d tell him, too, that it was George she wanted now, someone who’d seen a bit of life, and not someone whose highlight of the year was keeping an eye on things at a perfectly well-behaved and completely boring old Church Fête.’
‘Yes, I suppose we are a bit boring,’ said the Rector meditatively. ‘But what are we expected to do? Hire the cast of Raymond’s Revuebar?’
‘Goodness gracious, my dear fellow,’ said the Major, ‘I never realized you knew about such things.’
‘Oh, I know about them, all right,’ said the Rector darkly.
‘Beast is beast and pest is pest, and ever the twain shall meet. The Bishop of Southwark was telling me all about the Raymond’s Revuebar girls only the other day. But then somehow we got on to Bangla Desh (where I’ve been, by the way, and he probably hasn’t), so I never got round to asking him how we could brighten our Church Fetes up, short of breaking all the Ten Commandments simultaneously to a fanfare of slide-trombones.’ Plumbing the depths of gloom, ‘I dare say he’s never come across the Ten Commandments, anyway, not to remember them,’ the Rector said. ‘And, you know, it’s all very well and fine’ (’hendiadys’, the Major muttered) ‘but what is one to do? What is one Actually To Do?’
‘Talk less, for one thing,’ said the Major. ‘Fen here has scarcely got started, and here are you babbling about the Bishop of Southwark. You just leave the Bishop of Southwark alone.’
‘I wish he’d leave God alone,’ said the Rector. ‘God has managed for centuries without the Bishop of Southwark, so why -now - ’
‘The Letter!’ the Major shouted. ‘I want to hear more about The Letter!’
This contrived to silence even the Rector. Pouring them all some more La Tache, by way of vinous irenicon, Fen obligingly resumed his tale.
3
‘George got this letter from Mavis, then,’ he said, ‘and to start with it simply amused him: his brother as a settled adulterer -and with an obvious flighty wanton like Mavis - struck him as one of the funniest things he’d ever come across. But his amusement altered - not to regret, but sharp self-interest - when he read in the Western Morning News of the “sad fatality” at Hole Bridge. Details were at this stage scanty: but the date was right, and the time of night was right, and above all, the place couldn’t have been righter. On Mavis he wasted no emotional capital: plenty of girls around, and most of them as easy to lay as one brick on top of another. Nor did he worry, to speak of, about whether the thing had been accident, suicide or murder. In fact, if it had been murder, then bully for dull Andrew: who would have thought the old man had so much blood - or at any rate, spunk - in him?
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 31