The Glimpses of the Moon (24 page)

‘Just say “No comment”!' Ticehurst hissed in his ear. ‘Just keep saying “No comment”!'

‘As to Scorer,' Ling told the assembled company, ‘he's a -No Comment.' It was like a speeding motor-cyclist braking abruptly to a halt.

A groan went up, and the reporters glared at Ticehurst, wet blanket at this stimulating jamboree. They went on trying for a few minutes longer, but Ling had belatedly learned: whatever they asked him, he sturdily came back with ‘No comment'. Widger and Ticehurst leaned back in their chairs, to an outbreak of stridulation from the platform, in heartfelt relief; in between saying ‘No comment', Ling even managed to get his pipe going again. Finally, heartened by the success of his stonewalling, he was bold enough to look at his watch, get to his feet, and say, ‘Nothing more for now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid. Thank you for your attention.' With which he creaked down off the platform, followed by Widger and Ticehurst, and elbowed his way through the clumps of grumbling reporters into the comparative quietude of the station's entrance hall.

To Widger he said, ‘That went off quite well, didn't it?'

Widger swallowed. ‘You think so?'

‘Yes, I do.
Quite
well.'

Ticehurst caught up with them. He was peering nervously over his shoulder at the vanguard of discontented reporters emerging from the conference room.

‘Well, I'll be off now, Eddie, if you don't mind,' he said, and without waiting for a reply, waddled at a surprising speed to the entrance and so out into the night. Widger thought that he could hear him actually running to his car.

‘Excuse me, sir,' said Sergeant Connabeer to Ling, ‘but what am I to do with Scorer?'

‘Don't mention that name to me.'

‘Where is Scorer now?' Widger asked.

‘I locked him up, sir.'

‘Good,' said Ling.

‘Wait until the reporters have all gone,' said Widger, ‘and then let him out and send him home.'

‘In a police car, sir?'

‘Certainly not. There's a Sunday evening bus into Burraford. He can catch that.'

‘Very good, sir.'

‘No comment,' said Ling to a reporter who had approached him with a question about the identification of the body. ‘As soon as there's anything solid, we'll let you know.'

‘You've no idea who the victim is?'

‘Not yet, but we soon shall have… Charles, it's time we were on our way. You'd better go up and fetch that … that thing from your office.'

‘Yes, all right,' said Widger, and made for the stairs. Ascending, he heard an increasing babble of voices from the entrance hall, and Ling saying ‘No comment' several times. The reporters were clinging like limpets to the last.

As he unlocked the door of his office, Widger spared a thought for his two subordinates, who had failed to bring tea. Detective-Constable Rankine, now … But then Widger remembered. He had put Rankine in charge of the mobile H.Q. in the grounds of Aller House - not a very onerous task, since all the actual work was being done by photographers, and Forensic, and the fingerprint boys, and the group of Graveney's constables who were maundering about picking things up off the ground; and there, presumably, Rankine was still. As to Detective-Sergeant Crumb, come hell or high water he always went home early. He was, indeed, so lazy and inefficient that Widger had excluded him from the murder investigation altogether (it seemed, in any case, not to have aroused much interest in him) and had left him to type up reports on such petty crime as the Department had been engaged on before the body turned up at the Fête,

Widger opened the door which led from his office to Crumb's and Rankine's office, and looked inside. As he had expected, the room was empty, its windows latched and its door to the corridor locked. For the thousandth time, he pondered the possibility of making a serious effort to get Crumb transferred to some other sphere of inaction. But it was really too late now:
his appeal would certainly be dismissed, on the grounds that Crumb was nearly at retiring age.

Widger sighed, dismissed his useless subordinate from his mind, and turned back into his own office, where he picked up the Harris's Bacon sack, hefted it, and on an impulse put it on the desk and opened it. He was to reflect, subsequently, that this impulse could have been a sub-cortical adumbration of the trouble yet to come; meanwhile, he rationalized it with the thought that since its discovery the head had been very cavalierly - very
carelessly
- treated, and that it was up to him to make every possible check.

But all was well. Hideous as ever, and still wrapped in Cobbledick's copies of the
Daily Mail,
the head was there all right. Widger closed the sack and left the office with it dangling heavily by the neck from his right hand. Outside in the deserted corridor, he conscientiously locked up again.

In the entrance hall, the babble of voices continued unabated. Why on earth didn't Eddie march out and hide himself somewhere, instead of standing there like a dead whiting put down to lure congers? And suddenly Widger swore. It had just occurred to him that owing to the parsimony with which it had been designed and constructed, the Glazebridge police station had no back stairs, or at any rate none that were accessible from where he was: he, and the sack, were going to have to run the gauntlet of the entrance hall. And if the reporters didn't realize what the sack was, and what it must contain, after reading that
bloody
man Padmore in the
Gazette
that morning, they must all be quarter-wits. Good God, the moment they set eyes on him, they'd be down on him like a pack of wolves!

Widger counted up to five, slowly, meanwhile saying to himself, ‘You are an Inspector of Police. You will use your authority, and if necessary force, to brush these people aside and make your getaway.' ‘Getaway' somehow didn't seem the right word: it carried overtones of the criminal, or anyway the craven. But it would have to do. The thing now was to make a move.

And in the event it looked to start with as if he were going to be lucky. For one thing, the ranks of the reporters had thinned, some of them having left to telephone their stories to their papers; for another, those who remained were concentrating on
Ling, who was standing like a stuffed image at the centre of their circle, still saying ‘No comment'. Widger sidled down the stairway, shielding the sack with his body, and then, with difficulty resisting the temptation to go on tip-toe, made his way as rapidly and noiselessly as possible towards the entrance. He could put the sack in his car, he thought, and then come back for Eddie.

Unfortunately, however, one or two of the reporters were getting tired of Ling; their attention was wandering, and Widger had barely covered half the course before they noticed him. ‘The sack!' one yodelled loudly, and another chimed in with ‘The head!' In a moment Widger was surrounded, and babel broke loose, degenerating almost at once into a scuffle. Widger, tight-lipped, pushed and elbowed and thumped and inwardly cursed. Ling, initially paralysed by incomprehension, suddenly realized what was happening and rushed to the aid of his colleague, with Connabeer and a constable at his heels. Fearful that the sack was about to be wrested from him, Widger hurled it at Ling, like a rugby player making a pass, and more by good luck than judgement, Ling succeeded in catching it. Pitching and heaving and shouting, the whole mêlée burst through the swing doors and out into the car-park.

Here the Press came to its senses. It had undoubtedly gone too far. Apprehensively, it withdrew. Marshalled by Connabeer, it submitted meekly to being led back inside and having its names and addresses written down. Connabeer told it severely that he couldn't say what action would be taken, if any, but that its best plan would be to remain where it was for ten minutes or so, and then go quietly away. A left-wing reporter whom Widger had winded slightly muttered something about ‘police brutality', but when told that it was a pity he hadn't broken his neck fell silent; and from then on there was no more trouble.

Freed from pursuit but still breathing heavily, Ling and Widger hastened round to the back of the station where the police cars were kept, among them Widger's prized grey Cortina. Widger unlocked the passenger door and Ling got in beside him, clutching
the sack to his breast as if it contained the treasure of the Incas. The doors slammed, the engine purred into life, and they moved through the car-park into the ring-road, where they turned left.

Peace at last.

Since Ling was uncommunicative, Widger concentrated on driving; despite the intricacies of the case, there somehow seemed, for the moment, to be very little to say. Two miles out of Glazebridge, they turned left off the ring-road towards the south-west, more or less at right angles to the Burraford direction, and lost the traffic coming home from a day's outing on the moor. It was by now almost completely dark, and Widger switched the headlights on.

At about this point, it occurred to Ling that there was no need for him to keep the sack on his lap for the entire journey. He twisted round awkwardly and deposited his burden on the back seat, bumping Widger's head with it in the process. Then he settled back, lit one of his pipes with a relay of six matches, coughed painfully and croaked out the single ejaculation 'Ah'. Widger supposed that this was intended to express contentment.

They plunged deeper and deeper into a nexus of ever narrower and narrower lanes. Wild flowers glimmered in the hedgerows, and the trees - even the sycamores, the limes and the horse chestnuts - were still leafy: it was certainly a freak autumn. As they went on, other traffic diminished to vanishing point, and the houses - almost all of them farmhouses hereabouts - became increasingly widely spaced. A Dutch barn loomed up on their right, and was gone. A rabbit appeared in the lane ahead, and bobbed along frantically in front of them, mesmerised by the glare of the headlights (Widger patiently reduced speed, so as to avoid running it down) until after about a quarter of a mile it found a gateway, veered into it, and was lost from sight. It was a lonely, unpeopled part of the countryside - and also, if you were going somewhere specific, a confusing one: Widger was glad that when he had ferried the body to Sir John, twenty-four hours ago, he had sat in front with the ambulance driver and taken careful note of the route.

He had not, on that occasion, seen very much of the great man. The door had been opened to him by a big-boned, silent,
blond servant of some sort, who had switched on the porch light, nodded significantly and then gone out to the ambulance to help its driver, and the constable Widger had brought with him, to get the polythene-wrapped remains into the house. Widger had waited, and presently Sir John had appeared, pushing, with one extended forefinger, a large, rubber-wheeled trolley. He was tall, thin, gaunt, bald and cadaverous, with huge splayed, brownish front teeth which he revealed to Widger, in what was more a leer than a smile, as he bade him good evening. He had then stood aside and watched while Chummy's victim was manhandled on to his trolley; had asked for, and listened to in silence, a brief account of how and where and when the body had been discovered; had promised a report as soon as possible; had slapped the body in a friendly way on its stomach; had said goodnight; and had shut the door in Widger's face. Widger had at first been slightly taken aback by this inhospitable treatment; but then, remembering that he still had an immense amount to do before Ling's arrival in the morning, he had dismissed it from his mind, had returned to the ambulance and had requested the driver to take him and the constable back to Glazebridge police station.

In these circumstances, he had had little opportunity to look about him. He already knew, however, the eccentric way in which the famous morbid pathologist, for so many years a star witness at the Old Bailey, had elected to dispose of his retirement; knew it by grace of detailed information supplied by Sir John's nearest neighbour, an astute, amiable farmer named Boddy whom Widger liked very much, and with whom he occasionally, on Market Days, had a pint at The Seven Tuns. Briefly, Sir John was independently quite wealthy, so that on leaving London he had been able to do more or less what he pleased; and what for some arcane reason had pleased him was to buy an enormous abandoned limestone quarry in the remotest spot he could find, and to build on its floor a massive bespoke ranch-style cedarwood house. This comprised three parts: on the left was a three-car garage; connected to it, by a short covered arcade, was the central mass of the lavish, roomy living quarters; and connected to them, again by an arcade, was a separate block containing three laboratories and an office. Sir
John was apparently not a gardener, Boddy said: he had solved the garden problem by surrounding the entire complex of buildings with a wide apron of concrete beyond which the original wild growth was allowed to flourish unchecked, except on rare occasions when men with sickles and bill-hooks came along to lop off its encroachments on the concrete. The concrete included an elaborate system of gutters and drains to dispose of the rain-water which came pouring down the three sides of the quarry. There were servants living in, Boddy said, but he didn't know how many, and thought they were probably foreign.

And what - Widger reflected, as he twisted the wheel of the Cortina to take the last turn which led to their destination - did this wealthy hermit do with his time? Ah, but Widger knew that. Sir John researched. In his laboratories, he conducted experiments - experiments, moreover, which all bore on his lifelong preoccupation with crime, and more particularly with murder. Widger had always regarded forensic medicine as one of the most interesting aspects of C.I.D. work, and he really did know a good deal more than the average detective about it. The last he had heard, Sir John was currently engaged in mapping on a time chart the degenerative changes in dried blood, with allowance for temperature and other extraneous influences. True, as far as Widger knew he had not yet published anything on the subject, but even so, he seemed the ideal man to deal with the forensic-pathological aspects of the Botticelli murder. Much better, really, than Easton, the County Pathologist: Easton was a good man, but he was kept too busy to do much more than apply the established routines.