The Glimpses of the Moon (14 page)

‘She could have given the thing a rub over before leaving home, to smarten it up,' Fen suggested, ‘and then never touched it except for the handle.'

‘Oh, quite. On the other hand, she could have dropped it just before she toppled over, and then someone could have picked it up, and opened it and rummaged in it, and closed it again, and wiped it off, and finally chucked it into the water after her.'

‘Yes … She didn't have gloves with her, then.'

‘None were found. And no one could think of any reason why a murderer should have taken them from her, and taken them away from the scene.'

‘Yes,' Fen said again. He was thinking that if Mavis Trent in fact had been murdered, the evidence of the handbag was particularly interesting, not so much because the murderer had examined it, or because he had then remembered to eliminate his fingerprints, but for another reason, a fairly obvious one, all things considered. It was at this moment that he had his first vague inkling of what eventually proved to be the truth. ‘Yes, I see,' he said. ‘Equivocal, though: if Mavis Trent was a smartly dressed woman, as I think you said, she certainly could have polished the bag before setting out.'

‘It's
all
equivocal, unfortunately,' said the Rector. ‘Grounds for suspicion, yes, but never anything conclusive.'

‘You said there were four clues. What was the fourth?'

‘A handkerchief. Found clutched tightly in Mavis's hand. Don't know what the technical term for dead people clutching things is, but I dare say you do.'

‘Cadaveric spasm.'

‘I'll take your word for it. Anyway, there was this handkerchief, balled up in Mavis's hand. And it was a man's handkerchief, not Mavis's at all.'

Fen said, ‘Even if it was a man's handkerchief, can you be sure it wasn't hers? Women do sometimes own men's handkerchiefs.'

‘I'm quite sure it wasn't hers.'

‘Was her own handkerchief in her handbag or her pocket?'

‘No,' the Rector admitted. ‘She didn't seem to have one.'

‘Well, then.'

‘What I imagine happened was that the murderer, if any, knew that his handkerchief had gone into the river in Mavis's hand, and took
her
handkerchief out of the handbag, and carried it away with him, to make it seem as if
his
handkerchief was hers.'

‘It's all wildly hypothetical,' Fen pointed out.

‘Yes, I know it is. All I'm trying to say is that Mavis was too well turned out to go out on a date carrying a ropy old cheap cotton man's handkerchief with her. She wouldn't have dreamed of it. And if that's so, then the handkerchief was handed to her, for some reason, by whatever man she was meeting.'

‘Not necessarily,' said Fen. ‘Women sometimes borrow handkerchiefs from men, and afterwards get them laundered and give them back. Mavis Trent may have done just that -brought the handkerchief along with a view to returning it; and she may have fallen into the river, accidentally, before the owner came along.'

‘Well, but in that case, where was her own handkerchief? Besides, this handkerchief in Mavis's hand was all crumpled, all balled up, not neatly folded as it would have been if it had just been laundered,'

Fen sighed. ‘Yes, that's a point,' he agreed. ‘Not exactly hanging evidence, but certainly it doesn't quite fit with the accident theory, particularly taken in conjunction with the other three indications you mentioned. The police tried to trace the handkerchief, I take it?'

‘They did, but no soap. Couldn't even find the manufacturer, let alone the retailer; as I told you, it was a cheap, common thing. Widger, for the police, said at the inquest that either it was foreign or else the manufacturer had gone out of business, perhaps years ago.'

‘No initials? No laundry-mark?'

‘No, neither. All the experts could say was that it had been washed a fair number of times. They didn't find any significant stains on it, either, blood or oil or anything like that.'

‘Most unhelpful. Even so, I'm surprised that the inquest jury decided it was accident. I should have thought that an open verdict was what was called for.'

The Rector said, ‘So should I, but the Coroner thought differently.
His
idea was that there was never any man involved at all: Mavis simply decided to take a drive and a moonlit stroll over the bridge and along the river-bank; then at some stage she stood in the vee with her back to the parapet, gazing up at the moon or something, and lost her balance and went headlong. He implied, even if he didn't actually say, that at the time of her squabble with Ella Hamilton, Mavis had a change of heart and decided to lay off men for a bit; that was confirmed, he thought, by the fact that the gossip about her had suddenly lost substance. Also, he pointed out that it had been pretty cold for a fortnight or more, and that in that sort of weather people didn't normally make arrangements for canoodling
al fresco,
moon or no moon. As to the handkerchief, he said that almost certainly that had been Mavis's. As to the handbag, he said Mavis herself must have wiped it. As to the traces in the bushes and on the bank, he said there was no evidence at all to connect them with the tragedy. And as to Mavis's being able to call for help, he said that if no one was within earshot, at any time, that just didn't come into it. He was very persuasive, I'm bound to say.'

‘And the jury went along with him.'

‘A majority of them did, yes. They weren't unanimous, though. And I gathered afterwards that the ones who'd voted against accident were the ones who'd known Mavis quite well. Knowing her, they simply didn't believe either that she'd given up men, or that she'd fallen off Hole Bridge unaided, or that she'd have gone out, even on her own, with a man's cheap handkerchief on her.'

‘And how did the police react to the inquest verdict?'

‘I talked to Widger after it was over, and he said he was surprised: he'd expected an open verdict, perhaps even a murder verdict. However, the file would stay open, he said -and presumably it has stayed open, though if anything more's been discovered, I haven't heard of it.'

Fen considered for a moment, and then said, ‘Was she pregnant?'

‘No, she wasn't.'

‘And another point: could it have been Routh she arranged to meet at the bridge?'

‘Psychologically, I'm afraid, yes.' Uncharacteristically subdued after his long recital, the Rector was playing five-finger exercises on the top of the crystal ball. ‘As I think I mentioned, Mavis took up with some really appalling types. But Routh wasn't a womanizer, you know. In fact, he made a point of sneering at women, and you felt it was genuine, not just a pose. No, if anything, I'd say Routh was hostile to women. As you're probably aware, he was a pervert, a sadist, poor wretched unspeakable man. All his lust went into that ghastly business of tormenting animals.

‘But in any case,' the Rector added, ‘we now have every reason to believe that it wasn't Routh who killed Mavis, just as we have every reason to believe that Mavis didn't have an accident, that she was murdered.'

‘Scorer.'

‘Precisely: Scorer, babbling about someone threatening someone with going to the police about Mavis Trent.'

‘Doesn't Scorer realize the importance of whatever it was he overheard? Doesn't he realize that he ought to tell the police?'

‘I'm quite sure he realizes,' said the Rector, without hesitation. ‘But he's a
Scorer,
you see - that's to say, one of a
shower of feeble, dishonest, catchpenny aments; in spite of plenty of competition, the Scorers manage to be quite the most undesirable family hereabouts. No Scorer would go to the police voluntarily, about anything. A Scorer would just sit on whatever it was he'd found out, trying to think up some way of turning it to his own advantage.'

‘Rather risky in this case, I'd imagine.'

‘Extremely risky. I shall have to drag Scorer into Glazebridge to see Widger as soon as possible - this evening, preferably. I hope I'm going to be able to lay hands on him,' said the Rector. ‘After blurting all that stuff out to us, he may take it into his silly head to slope off and hide himself. I ought to have handed him over to Luckraft, really, but what with one thing and another, it - '

Abruptly he broke off.

‘What the hell is that?' he said.

From outside the tent, somewhere fairly close by, had come a sequence of sounds cutting across the expected turbulence of the Fete which had hitherto provided the unheeded background to their conversation: first the clang of a large bell, then a noise like a ship's mast coming down, then a chorus of feminine screams, then an agitated male voice shouting indistinguishable instructions, then a crescendo of voices raised in perturbation, then the thud of rapidly trotting feet. The Whirlybirds, who had been hacking their way into the hull of
Yellow Submarine,
faltered, tried to recover themselves, failed to do so and finally stopped altogether; their speaking voices, not much different from their singing voices except in volume, could be heard inside the fortune-telling tent twittering frenetically but obscurely through the amplifiers.

Indignantly, the Rector started to his feet.

‘What the
hell,'
he boomed, ‘is happening out there
now?'

Padmore was one of those who saw it happen.

His interview with Clarence Tully had left something to be desired, the something consisting quite possibly of shortcomings in his interpellatory technique: prising facts from malign or unwilling black Press Relations Officers was one kettle of fish,
substantiating Routh and Hagberd from the recollections of a Devon farmer quite another. Anyway, whatever the reason, nothing new or striking about either man had emerged. Like everyone else except Mrs Leeper-Foxe, Tully had found Routh repugnant and had avoided him. As to Hagberd, he, it appeared, had been always too busy working to have time to cultivate more than a nodding acquaintance with his employer.

‘Proper old Stakhanovite, that one,' said Tully. His father, fetching up with the British expeditionary force at Murmansk in July of 1918, had developed a good deal of interest in Russian affairs during his eighteen months of waiting to come under fire, and some of this had leavened the agrarian preoccupations of the family at large.

‘I don't
see
Hagberd, that's the trouble,' Padmore complained. ‘Or rather, I think I see him all right, but somehow I can't seem to get him down on paper.'

‘There, then,' said Clarence Tully, whether in commiseration or polite surprise it was impossible to tell.

Padmore parted from him and plunged once more into the fun of the fair. Presently he found himself side by side with the Fête's Negro opener, Dermot McCartney, at the rifle range. They both banged away ineffectually for some time and then fell to discussing Africa, with particular reference to the Republic of Upper Volta. It was from the Republic of Upper Volta that Dermot McCartney had been brought to England at the age of three, and it was in the Republic of Upper Volta, in Ougadougou, that Padmore had once spent six painful weeks gathering material for his paper. During this period he had been pestered and pursued, he told Dermot McCartney, by a quadroon pea-nut planter who believed himself to be de Gaulle's illegitimate son. Moreover, he had had difficulty, when his stint was over, in leaving. Since he was
persona non grata
in Ghana at the time, the river was closed to him, and he was forced to charter a ruinous two-seater aeroplane in which he was flown, hair-raisingly, into Dahomey, arriving at Cotonou just in time for the latest of the country's biennial
coups d'état.
When the telegraph office re-opened, he had sent the
Gazette
a strictly factual cable about the recent days' events, and had been at once expelled.

‘My people are mostly dolts, I'm afraid,' said Dermot McCartney, consoling him. ‘Dolts or barbarians or both. They believe things which are either nonsensical or else manifestly untrue, such as that they are collectively capable of managing their own affairs, and that black is beautiful, and that jazz is an art form.'

‘Are you one of the Mossi?'

‘Yes, I am, I'm sorry to have to say. A particularly rebarbative tribe, the Mossi, even for Africans.'

‘Well, I don't know about that,' said Padmore, ‘but it certainly seems a very simple matter to get on the wrong side of them one way or another.'

Broderick Thouless strolled up, clutching his
Mincer People
scores in one hand, and in the other, various purchases bundled up in a Paisley shawl. He was accompanied by the Major, who now had the whippet Fred with him, on a lead.

‘I want to try the Try-Your-Strength machine,' Thouless said.

‘Aren't you on the small side for that, my dear fellow?' said the Major, with less than his usual tact. ‘With these things, don't you know, it's brute size that counts.'

‘I may be small,' said Thouless, affronted, ‘but I'm muscular … Mind you, they rig these contraptions somehow,' he added, ‘so that the customer can scarcely ever win. So if I'm not successful, that'll be the reason for it. If it's rigged, I shan't succeed.'

‘Pleonasm,' said the Major.

‘I myself am certainly too small,' said Dermot McCartney.

‘So am I,' said the Major.

‘I'm
big
enough,' said Padmore, ‘but the trouble is, I'm flabby. African food consists almost entirely of carbohydrates, so it's not surprising, really.'

Exchanging further sorrows about their individual physiques, and about their individual states of health generally, the four of them wandered away from the rifle range and across the rough gravel driveway into the lawn's eastern half, where they wound their way in procession among crowded stalls and marquees, passed the fortune-telling tent - in which the Rector was at that moment concluding his account of the death of Mavis Trent
and so in due course came to a halt at the Try-Your-Strength machine near-by.