The Glimpses of the Moon (23 page)

‘Ah!' On Ling, light was dawning at last. ‘And Father Hat-trick - F. X. Christopher - '

‘Exactly. He wanted to see them before I gave them away. So I said I'd bring them along to the Fête and he could look at them in the Major's flat.'

‘I see. But surely, sir, if you'll forgive my saying so, a cricket bag - for four little things like that -'

‘Oh, there were other things too,' said the Rector airily. ‘Intrinsically valuable stuff, what's more. The bag was full - no room for any human arms. That was why I'd arranged to meet my bank manager at the Fête as well as Father H. What with some of the characters you see about the place nowadays, you can't be too careful.'

‘Your bank manager.'

‘Yes. When Father H. had seen the relics, my bank manager was going to collect the bag from me and take it straight to his bank and lock it up safely,
pro tern
. Only the miserable man never turned up, so eventually I had to cart the whole boiling back home with me again. Oh, one more thing: if you're thinking I could have done some sort of a switch at some stage, you put the idea out of your mind straight away. Because when I came out of the Botticelli tent, the good Father was waiting for me, and he
ran
across to the Major's flat - he always runs; seems to prefer it to walking - and I ran after him without stopping anywhere - there must be dozens of witnesses to that -and when we arrived the Major was waiting, and I opened the bag in front of both of them, and there was no human arm in it. And now I'm going back to Burraford.'

In the small office the shadows were lengthening, and down below, the car-park was filling up again as the media men returned in good time for the press conference. Widger suddenly realized that they had had no tea. Where was Rankine, where was Crumb? Their room adjoined this one, so why hadn't one or the other of them brought tea? What would Eddie think? Did it matter what Eddie thought? If he'd wanted tea, he could presumably have asked for it. What Widger wanted was a drink and then bed, but he realized that the day still had a long way to go.

When the Bale sisters were ushered into the office, Widger, slightly light-headed, perceived for the first time that their
names were the wrong way round: Tatty (who had mounted guard at the back of the Botticelli tent) was large-bosomed but quite smartly dressed; Titty (who had been at the receipt of custom) was flat-chested but untidy, her upper half wrapped in a variety of long, diaphanous scarves. Facially, however, they were very similar - greying women of sixty or thereabouts. And although both were a bit deaf, Widger knew that they had all their wits about them, particularly where the Botticelli was concerned.

It was Titty who was wearing the hearing-aid, so Ling, mindful of the Major's warning, addressed himself first to her, while she fiddled with volume control in order to get him satisfactorily tuned in. Her evidence, however, was disappointing. She was adamant that her list of people who had entered the tent was complete and correçt; she was adamant that no one could have smuggled even a baby's arm out, no matter how cunningly concealed; apart from the Rector's cricket bag, she had neither seen nor heard anything out of the way; and finding the body when she was looking for a medicine chest had of course been a shock, but at her age one got used to such things. (How on earth, Widger wondered, had she managed to come by this particular form of induration? Was she finding naked headless bodies all the time?)

Ling now indicated a wish to speak to Tatty, and there ensued a longish pause while Titty unscrewed the speaker of the hearing-aid from her ear, disentangled its cord from her scarves, unhooked the black microphone from the front of her blouse, and passed the whole contraption to her sister, who spent an almost equal amount of time putting it on. But Tatty, when the whole thing was adjusted to her satisfaction, proved to have even less to say than Titty. She had enjoyed the soft music (it was Titty who during the Fête had had custody of the hearing-aid), and could positively assert that no one had entered or left the tent by crawling under the back or sides, which had in any case been firmly guyed. Beyond that, nothing.

In a last desperate bid for useful information, Ling got the aid transferred back to Titty. How was it, he asked, that Titty was so completely unable to describe the two strangers who had gone in to see the Botticelli? Titty replied that she had only
really looked at them when they came out again, and then solely with a view to detecting tell-tale bulges. Both were middle-aged, she thought. Ling went on questioning her for a while about clothes, hair, height, accent and so forth, but absolutely without result. Neither of the men had stolen the Botticelli, and that was enough for Titty.

Eventually, on both ladies' expressing a wish to go to church, Ling gave up and sent them away, warning Titty that she would have to give evidence (about the finding of the body) at the inquest on Tuesday.

He mopped his brow as the door closed behind them. ‘The funny thing is,' he said, ‘that I
believe
them.'

Widger crossed the room and switched on a light. He looked at his watch. ‘Time we went down and talked to the reporters.'

Ling nodded, but made no immediate move. ‘Nothing from Forensic,' he muttered.

Widger visualized the constables who had been, and presumably still were, collecting up every scrap of débris from the grass in and around the Botticelli tent, and placing their finds in little envelopes with locations carefully marked on them: fibres, sawdust, cigarette ends, toffee papers. ‘We're giving Forensic a lot to do,' he observed mildly. ‘And they did send an interim report on the hacksaw I found in the back of the tent. I asked them to give it priority.'

‘Yes, there's that,' said Ling, consulting the file. ‘Wiped. No fingerprints, and only the minutest traces of blood. Group A, rhesus negative. We'll have to find out from Sir John if that corresponds with the dead man's. Who did you say the hacksaw belonged to?'

‘Cobbledick.'

‘Cobbledick again. So he left it in the tent over Friday night, and then - let's see, did he use it on Saturday morning?'

‘Yes. Just briefly. He was one of the earliest to arrive. He used the saw, and then put it back in the tent just before the picture arrived, at 10.30.'

‘Didn't notice anything unusual about it, I suppose.'

‘No.'

‘So Chummy must have wiped it twice, once after cutting the head off, and then again after cutting the arm off.'

‘Yes.'

‘Nothing from the C.R.O.'

‘Have a heart, Eddie. That tent was fairly smothered in prints.'

‘They could have let us know if they had a match for the prints on the arm that was left.'

‘They've done that. They rang me up about it just before you arrived this morning. Negative: the victim didn't have form.'

‘Ground too dry to take footprints,' Ling mumbled, unconsoled. ‘And then, of course, there's the paint.'

They both thought about the paint. It had occurred to someone - specifically, to an officious little man called Wisdom -that the wooden parts of the Botticelli tent needed smartening up a bit, and he had accordingly spent most of Friday repainting them, scattering a good deal of the paint about him in the process. Unfortunately, the hue he had selected was that of dried blood, so that Forensic now had the headache of examining numerous pieces of dug-up grass and deciding whether their coloration was due to paint, or blood or both.

‘Plenty of gaps still,' said Ling, ‘but also' - and here he cheered up a bit - ‘plenty of lines to follow up.' He stirred himself, putting three of his pipes into pockets and the fourth, and most impressive, into his mouth. He picked up Widger's report and made for the door.

‘But you know what I really want to know most of all, Charles?' he said, as they stood in the corridor while Widger locked up the office.

‘No, What?'

‘I want to know how the
hell
that bloody great arm could have been smuggled out of the tent without anyone seeing.'

Quoth Hudibras, Friend Ralph, thou hast
Outrun the constable at last.

Samuel Butler:
Hudibras

The press conference was not a success.

In part this was because the Glazebridge police station had no room large enough to contain it: reporters squeezed in elbow to elbow, and many of them were without seats. But given the sensational circumstances (which were worth a little discomfort), the paucity of space wouldn't have mattered so much had it not been for Ling. He had made one enormous mistake already, in allowing pressmen and witnesses to mingle unimpeded while he conducted interviews in Widger's office upstairs; now he compounded it by trying to pretend that this juxtaposition had never occurred. In practice, of course, the reporters - those of them who had the sense to continue hanging round the station instead of going out - had all the while been having a field day; and although Sergeant Connabeer, with a single constable to aid him, had attempted to keep the situation under control, his efforts, such was the excitement, had proved nugatory. The witnesses had found themselves hemmed in by a cloud of cameras, notebooks and cassette recorders, centres of a vast curiosity, targets for a never-ending stream of questions. And few of them had taken umbrage at this, or preserved a reasonable discretion; most had been delighted, and had talked freely. Moreover, they seemed to have felt no obligation to adhere calvinistically to the bare bones of truth, more particularly when they had nothing of great interest to recount: embellishment, often of the wildest sort, had been the order of the day. Scorer, much to his initial surprise, had found himself treated as a hero, and had responded with the assertion that he had not only seen the murderer but had chased him throughout the night, failing to tackle him and bring him
down only by a hair's breadth. The Major dilated on Sal's unusual competence as a watchdog. Luckraft, omitting all references to rakes, mangles and the therapeutic ministrations of Oliver Meakins, described how he had seen someone lurking in the garden next to Mrs Clotworthy's cottage; he also painted a lurid picture of his emotions on first seeing the body. Mrs Clotworthy specified to an interested audience the best way to cut up a pig, and gave it as her opinion that that Professor Fen wanted watching. All these people, and others, held opinions, mostly fanciful, not merely about this latest murder, but about Routh's death and Mavis Trent's death as well, and about the various links binding them together. Padmore came in for a good deal of cajoling, but kept what little extra he knew to himself, for the benefit of the
Gazette;
though he was certain to have to rewrite his book on Routh and Hagberd, he was consoling himself for this by a determination to do so well over this new murder that his stony-hearted superiors in Fleet Street would decide that it would be a waste ever to send him to Africa again. Fen too had his group of pursuivants, who were not only fascinated by his day-long custody of the head, but who knew him as having been a successful amateur detective and were anxious for his view on the present case. He fended them off, however, by stating, more or less truthfully, that he knew no more about the business than had been in the
Gazette
that morning. The Misses Bale were eloquent about the insult to their Botticelli, and Titty's reactions to discovering the corpse - Elderly Spinster Finds Nude Male Body Behind Priceless Masterpiece - Were Widely canvassed. The Rector contented himself with saying that there were a lot of dubious characters about. Flashbulbs popped continually, the wildest rumours flew from tongue to tongue, and Scorer became such a nuisance that Sergeant Connabeer detached him by force from his inquisitors and locked him up in a cell. The reporters rejoiced, the more simple-minded among them assuming that far from having simply witnessed the murder, Scorer had now been found to have committed it, and had been summarily arrested.

Ling made his second mistake when the witnesses had at last
been cleared out of the station and the press conference properly convened. At its outset it seemed to go well enough. Not unreasonably, in view of the fact that the investigation was still at such an early stage, Ling had intended, in his opening statement, to offer little more than had been in the
Gazette
that morning, together with a few harmless additional titbits such as that the murderer had probably used a car, and that in the absence of the County Pathologist the autopsy was being conducted by the celebrated Sir John Honeybourne; he could also, he thought, safely say that the body had not been positively identified yet, but that several promising lines of inquiry were being pursued. But beyond these banalities he was not prepared to go (in particular, he did not intend to say anything at all about Scorer), and it therefore came as a shock to him when the reporters started to ask questions based on their own interviews with the witnesses. If the questions had been anywhere near rational, Ling would very likely have kept his head. But they were not: most of the witnesses had interpreted the crime in terms of the wildest melodrama, and their exaggerations had been swallowed by the reporters hook, line and sinker. And now all this rubbish was being regurgitated for the benefit of Ling, who was expected to confirm or deny it; and his attempts to reduce the questions to a more realistic level, and at the same time not answer them, made him increasingly unpopular. What he ought to have done was simply shake his head, and leave the reporters with the responsibility of putting into their stories whatever fatuities they chose. Instead, he tried to master the situation, floundering deeper and deeper in a quicksand of wordy incoherence. His great pipe went out, a light sheen of sweat sprang up on his forehead, and his interlocutors became momently more restive.

Ticehurst was sitting on Ling's right, behind a small table on an improvised platform which creaked loudly whenever anyone moved. Widger, stiff with embarrassment and a determined non-contributor to the proceedings, was on Ling's other side. As Ling blundered on, Ticehurst's normally jovial features became a mask of dismay, and eventually, unable to bear it any longer, he plucked surreptitiously at Ling's sleeve. Ling was in the
middle of trying to deal with a group of reporters who wanted Scorer to be brought on to the scene, and it was some little time before he had attention to spare for his P.R.O.