The Glimpses of the Moon (20 page)

'Don't they wear deaf-aids?'

‘They have one deaf-aid, which they share between them, passing it back and forth … I'm afraid,' said the Major, ‘that you're going to find it a slow business, talking to
them
. What most of us do is just address the one who's wearing the aid, and ignore the other one completely.'

‘I see,' said Ling again. ‘Well, thank you, Major. You've been most helpful.'

‘Oh, have I, my dear fellow? I'm so glad.' The Major reached for his stick and got briskly to his feet.

‘We'd like you to stay downstairs for a while, in case anything else crops up. And then later on - tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day - we'll be asking you to sign a formal statement.'

The Major saluted smartly and hobbled to the door, where he paused for a moment.

‘There are a great many journalists on these premises,' he said severely, and went.

'He confirms Scorer's story, in some of its details,' said Widger. ‘The sawing, the car …' He petered out despondently: the conviction had for some time been growing in him that despite the abundance of evidence, this was going to prove an extremely difficult case.

Ling roused himself from what seemed to be a catatonic trance. ‘Oh ay,' he said. ‘There's that.' While the Major had been talking he had been stuffing his second pipe (desisting regularly when he had to ask a question), and he now applied a lighted match to it. It at once emitted a shower of sparks, like a factory chimney in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and one of these fell on to the folder containing Widger's report, where it started burning a small black hole. Without troubling to extinguish it, Ling brushed it off the desk on to the carpet. ‘Ay, the car,' he muttered. ‘Choommy made his getaway in a car, by the sounds of it. We'll have to check on that.'

Widger pulled a notebook from his pocket. He selected a blank page, and on it wrote the word
car
.

‘Put all the men you've got on to it.'
Men
, Widger wrote, reflecting as he did so that Graveney's people (Graveney was
the Inspector in charge of Glazebridge's uniform branch) weren't going to stretch very far. Constables would have to be borrowed from the neighbouring manors, and even if that were done, Widger doubted if their chances of finding out anything about the car - of locating anyone who had actually
seen
it, for example - were much better than nil. What they really needed -and here Widger's gloom touched its nadir - was the Regional Crime Squad, or even Scotland Yard. But the Chief wouldn't have that, except in a really desperate emergency, which so far this wasn't, or at any rate not quite. The Chief considered his own men capable of handling absolutely anything … Touching, of course, but alarming as well.

‘So what we have to do now is postulate,' Ling was saying in his normal voice, through a cloud of smoke. ‘We postulate that Scorer and the Major were telling the truth, as far as they knew it. Our man was killed just outside the … the Botticelli tent. Then he was dragged inside, and stripped, and had his head sawn off … So if he wasn't dead to start with,' said Ling in a sudden access of cheerfulness, ‘he was dead then. But now, along comes the Major, with his dog. Our murderer panics. He picks up the clothes and the head. He takes to his heels. He leaves the grounds. He gets into his car. He drives off. He …' His euphoria fading, Ling paused, unable to think of any evidence for what this ghastly figure did next. ‘He drives off,' he repeated feebly.

‘And from then on,' said Widger, ‘we lose track of him until the head turns up again.'

‘Being carted about all over the neighbourhood by this Professor Fen … Wait a minute, though.'

‘Yes?'

‘There are three things Chummy almost certainly did that night, after he left the grounds of Aller House.'

‘Yes?'

‘For starters, he mutilated the head, so as to make it unrecognizable. He wasn't going to let it out of his hands, not till he'd done that.'

Widger saw several holes in this argument. He decided, however, that this was not the moment to specify them, and nodded instead.

Then he had to get rid of his victim's clothes, or hide them somehow. Chances are he buried them. You'll have to put men on to that, looking for freshly turned earth.'

Widger rolled his eyes but said nothing. In his notebook he wrote
victim's clothes
.

‘And finally, he'd have to do something about his own clothes. He's bound to have got blood on them.'

‘Yes.'

‘So there are three lines of inquiry for you,' said Ling, with the complacency of a man who is going to be obliged to do none of the leg-work. ‘Four, if you include the car. No, five.'

‘Five?'

‘There's tools. That mess' - and here Ling swivelled round in the desk chair to indicate the sack in the corner of the office -'that mess wasn't made without the help of tools. A hammer is what we want, with bits of blood and brains on it. Tell your men to look for a hammer.'

Without making any further entry, Widger put his notebook back in his pocket. ‘I suppose,' he said, ‘that you'll be wanting to see Fen next.'

‘The professor? No, not quite yet. This Mrs Clotworthy first. Get her up here, will you?'

Widger picked up the house telephone and dialled the Duty Sergeant's desk. He sneezed. Ling said, ‘Hello, old squire, getting a cold, are you?'

‘No, it's the smoke from your pipe.'

‘Oh, sorry.'

The Major had made his entry singing; Mrs Clotworthy made hers talking. She was a dumpy little woman of seventy-five, with steel rimmed glasses and a bun; she swayed from side to side as she walked, and was wearing an ankle-length black dress in continuing memory of her late husband, the butcher. All in all, she looked like a Mrs Noah from a Victorian Noah's Ark. As far as Widger could gather, she was complaining about something.

‘Oh my dear soul, ‘Ow you do get a body on the run!' said Mrs Clotworthy. ‘An' that dratted Freddy Smale couldn't 'ardly wait 'alf a minute till I got on 'is bus an' dapped me money in 'is
little bowl avore 'e was off again like a blue-arsed vly! Lucky they sideways seats is up in front so 'ee can zit down quick I say, unless somebody's set a push-chair on 'em, 'cus there id'n time to see if you'm facin' vore nor back afore you'm in town an gettin' down again. Tid'n like I was late neither, just stopped -'

‘Mrs Clotworthy.'

‘Just stopped to pull up a few bits of stroyle round the gate like, comes up easy now it's dying off a bit not that it's ever easy to get up the root so it don't come back again avore you've had a chance to make a bonfire of the last lot as that what-' sisname downstairs'll find if 'e don't get after 'is garden soon. Ought to a knowd 'e id'n a real gennulman 'cus any road -'

‘Mrs Cl -
'

‘ - any road if the gentry can't till their own ground they do know to get some'un as
can
avore it all goes to ruin an' seedin' over other volks' plots.'

‘Mrs - '

‘Still, I s'pose it takes all sorts an' 'e makes 'is way out of books like that other chap makes is out of noting for the pictures so they do tell me though it seems a funny trade to me not like the gramophone or the wireless though they don't call 'em that nowadays seems so.'

At this point, either Mrs Clotworthy's jeremiad reached its natural term or else she simply ran out of breath. At any rate, it at last became possible for Widger and Ling to induce her to sit down and bend her mind to the matter in hand.

Yes, well, she'd been given this nice pig to cut up for her birthday; and then she'd met this gentleman who'd taken the Dickinsons' cottage, and he was an M.A. the way her husband had always wanted to be, and when she'd heard that he didn't get on with the shop brawn, she'd decided to give him the head so that he could make his own. So she'd told him she'd put it in her porch if she went out, and he could collect it from there; and that was what she'd meant to do. When was this? Why, yesterday, of course, yesterday as ever was. Yes,
Saturday:
didn't they know when yesterday was?

Mrs Clotworthy's kindly intention had aborted, however, it transpired. What had happened was that quite early yesterday she had received a message that a gravid great-niece, living on
the other side of Burraford, was in labour; and though this occurrence was by no means novel, Mrs Clotworthy was convinced, as she had been on numerous similar occasions previously, that family ties made it mandatory for her to be present - if not actually in the bedroom, at all events in the house -during the delivery. She had accordingly locked up her cottage and hastened off to her great-niece's. And there she had remained all day (the great-niece's pains being fairly prolonged) until Doctor Mason had arrived from the Church Fete just in time to relieve the great-niece of a burly son.

All this was clear enough - so clear, in fact, that Ling made the mistake of not questioning Mrs Clotworthy further. She evidently had more to say, but this, Ling patently feared, would be bound to have to do with the great-niece and the baby, neither of whom could be construed as figuring in any way in the death and decapitation of the man in the Botticelli tent. Accordingly, Mrs Clotworthy was conducted downstairs again, while Ling mopped his brow with a tobacco-coloured handkerchief such as snuff-takers use and Widger said:

‘It must have been Chummy, then, who put the sack in Mrs Clotworthy's porch, presumably after she'd gone out.'

‘Looks like it.'

‘An imitative crime, then, up to a point.'

‘How do you mean? - Ah yes, I get it. Hagberd dumps Routh's head through the window of Mrs Leeper-Foxe's breakfast room at the Old Parsonage, to give her a fright - and Mrs Leeper-Foxe owns factory farms. Chummy dumps
his
victim's head on Mrs Clotworthy, who's a butcher's widow and so more or less in the same line of business.' Ling frowned and relit his pipe. ‘It isn't
really
the same though. Why didn't Chummy use Mrs Leeper-Foxe again?'

‘Because she isn't here. She says that after what happened she's never coming back. She's selling the house.'

‘I see. So Mrs Clotworthy was a sort of rough equivalent. I shouldn't have thought that a
butcher's
widow would have got much of a fright from the head, though, not after a lifetime of cutting up dead meat.'

‘Humans are different from animals,' said Widger. ‘At any rate, they are as far as Mrs Clotworthy's concerned. I once had
to take her to the morgue to identify a nephew who'd been drowned. He wasn't messy at all - looked very peaceful, really -but she'd no sooner set eyes on him than she fainted dead away.'

‘Well, but that was a relative.'

‘Yes, but she's a tough old girl. I shouldn't have been surprised if she'd cried a bit - but
fainting …!
'

‘Ah well, it's a small matter. We'd better have a word with Fen now, I think.'

But Fen's evidence was brief and unenlivening. He had not particularly wanted to make brawn, he said, but had felt unable to reject Mrs Clotworthy's well-meant gesture, and consequently had gone along to her cottage about 10.30 yesterday, the Saturday. He had knocked on the one door, but there had been no reply. So then he had looked round the little wooden porch. It was very clean and tidy, with some potted plants on a shelf, and an empty milk bottle, and, of course, the Harris's Bacon sack, firmly tied at the neck with coarse string: this he had naturally assumed to be the pig's head, so he had taken it to The Stanbury Arms, where he had met the Major, who knew all the gossip and who had told him about Mrs Clotworthy's great-niece, thus accounting for her absence from home. He had talked to the Major, and to Padmore, and to Old Gobbo, and later, upstairs, to Jack Jones. Then he and Padmore and the Major had strolled along the lane to see the Rector, and after that he had gone home to the Dickinsons' cottage, where he had left his sack, still unopened, on top of the refrigerator. In the afternoon he had attended the Fete, and when everyone was at last allowed to leave, had taken Padmore home with him, to have a drink and telephone the gory news to his paper. Meanwhile, however, he had been thinking about the Routh-Hagberd case, and had decided that the sack, still on top of the refrigerator, had better be investigated. Opening it, he had found the mangled head of a man. He had telephoned the police, and they had come and collected the head, and Padmore, enraptured, had rung his paper a second time, and that was that.

Ling said, ‘And was there any time when the sack you picked up at Mrs Clotworthy's could have been switched for another?'

‘Certainly there was. There was the whole time when I was at
the Fête. I didn't lock up, and even if I had, the Dickinsons' cottage is very easy to get into.'

Widger said, ‘You say that when you were at The Stanbury Arms you went upstairs to talk to Jack Jones. Did you take the sack with you then?'

‘No, I didn't. I left it in the bar.'

‘So there could have been a switch then?'

‘I doubt it,' said Fen. ‘Isobel Jones was there, I think - and the bar was beginning to fill up. So it's possible, but not very likely. A second sack would certainly have been noticed.'

‘Seems as if you had the head in your possession all along, then.'

A faint gleam of amusement appeared in Fen's eyes. ‘It would seem so,' he said.

Ling squinted into the bowl of his pipe. Then he sucked at its stem. Then he sat forward in the desk chair, so abruptly that his stomach knocked the blotter, and Widger's report, on to the floor. Fen leaned forward and retrieved them for him.

‘Ah, thanks,' he said. ‘Now, Professor Fen, we have you down as one of the people who visited the… the Botticelli tent during the course of the Fête. Is that right?'