The Glimpses of the Moon (31 page)

Ling seemed slightly miffed. ‘Don't just stand there raising objections, Charles. We'll find out, never you fear. The case is closed. Now it's only a matter of tidying up a few loose ends.'

‘Listen, Eddie - '

But Ling wasn't prepared to listen. ‘As for me,' he said, ‘I'm going out to have a drink and celebrate. I feel I've earned it. Coming?'

‘If you don't mind, I've still got a few things I want to clear up here.'

‘Suit yourself.' Ling made for the door. ‘Oh, by the way, get in touch with Ticehurst, will you? Ask him to meet me in the
bar of The Seven Tuns, and we'll work out a statement about the Youingses which he can pass on to the press.'

‘All right.'

‘And one other thing. Youings is worried about his pigs. Ask Tully if he can send someone to look after them till Youings gets out of hospital.'

‘All right.'

‘Be seeing you, then, Charles.' And Ling went jauntily out, leaving Widger gazing after him sceptically.

Widger made satisfactory contact with Ticehurst and with Tully, and then, alone in the office, reverted patiently to his own chores.

But it was not until the following morning that his efforts bore their unexpected fruit.

Then came … the flyndermows and the wezel and ther came moo than xx whiche wolde not have comen yf the foxe had loste the feeld.

Anonymous, translated by William Caxton:
Reynard the Fox

Saturday morning came, a week after the Fête, and found Fen and the Major perched up in a large old apple tree, straining their eyes for signs of the Hunt. The apple tree had been the Major's suggestion, and Fen, though he rather doubted the wisdom of a man of the Major's age and disability clambering happily about in branches like a bird, had decided that it would be tactless and wounding to raise objections. The Major sat dangling his legs on a lower bough, and Fen was on the bough above him. Fen was smoking a cigarette, and the Major was eating a diminutive sour apple.

The apple tree was part of the hedge bordering the southern verge of the lane which led westward from Burraford past Aller and Hole Bridge to Glazebridge; technically, it belonged to Aller. Behind it and at the opposite side of the lane, on the far side of another hedge, were pasture fields, at present empty, belonging to Clarence Tully. To Fen's right could be seen the Rector's great ugly house, its Y Wurry board cloven, faded and dangling from a single nut and bolt, set in its disorderly gardens with their paddock at their back. Almost facing the house's front gate, a minor lane - tarmac-ed but barely wider than a footpath - led off northwards, and in this it was possible to make out the roof of a parked Mini; here, at the turn, a stone had been daubed with yellow paint to indicate part of the route of some imminent motor-cycle scramble. To Fen's left, and about a hundred yards away, the main lane which he was surveying from his eminence took a sharp turn leftwards and downhill, and by twisting round you could follow it for quite a
distance before it took another turn and disappeared from sight; in the corner of the nearer turn, a wooden field gate stood partially open. If you walked eastward past the Rector's house, you came after about half a mile to the wynd which led to Thouless's bungalow and Youings's pig-farm and the Dickinsons' cottage; further on, to your right, lay Aller House and its grounds; next, and again to your right, came the large field in which the Pisser (at present mute) eccentrically conducted its high-tension scaremongering; next came the Old Rectory, abandoned in panic by Mrs Leeper-Foxe, locked, shuttered and deserted; next, a couple of semi-detached cottages; next, The Stanbury Arms; next, the pathway to Chapel Lane, where Luckraft and Mrs Clotworthy lived; and finally, as protégé to these various outriders, the bulk of Burraford village itself.

The weather continued to hold, and the surroundings were altogether restful. In the time which had elapsed since Fen and the Major had lost the Hunt, and its followers on foot or in cars, they had seen nothing and no one except for a Central Electricity Generating Board lorry, three men aboard it, hastening in the direction of Burraford.

The meet had been at The Stanbury Arms - not a very good choice, since there was scarcely room for all the huntsmen, the Hunt followers, the hunt saboteurs, the cars, the horses, the horse-boxes, and the notoriously ill-disciplined bitch pack, all of whom were obliged to spread themselves a considerable distance in both directions along the lane. Even so, possibly owing to the sunshine, a general good humour prevailed. Isobel Jones, assisted by a blowsy girl from the village, did a busy trade in the overcrowded bar; Jack Jones looked down with keen approval from his bed at the upstairs window; and even the hunt saboteurs, some of whom had burdened themselves with scrawled, strangely-spelt objurgations on placards, seemed more or less at a loss, managing only a meagre jeer when the horses and hounds eventually moved off. The chief of the saboteurs, a small, dark-suited, bespectacled man whom Fen recognized as a dispensing chemist from Glazebridge, stood in the car-park in earnest but apparently amicable conversation with the Master, who was taking intermittent swigs from a gleaming silver hip flask; he seemed for the moment subdued, perhaps
because he had recently put an advertisement in the local paper offering a £5 reward to anyone who could give information about the smuggling in of foxes, in crates, by British Rail, and their subsequent release in the wilds to provide targets for the blood-lust of the huntsmen. This had provided a good deal of sour amusement to farmers who kept hens, and who were accustomed to waking up in the morning to find whole rows of the birds lying about the yard with their heads bitten off; the district was already infested with foxes, and Mr Dodd (which was the dispensing chemist's name) had hurriedly withdrawn his advertisement after only one issue.

The Glazebridge and District Harriers were an inefficient lot, and although they often found, deaths among the Canidae they put to flight were few and far between. Nor were they a very distinguished Hunt: the men mostly turned up in ratcatcher (Fen had that morning noted one, with waist-length hair, who was wearing a hoicked-up caftan and prayer beads above his shining riding boots); the women, though lending a little colour to the proceedings by putting on pink, were preponderantly ill-favoured and dull; the horses, with only a few exceptions, looked as if their sires and dams had been mated by some primitive flawed computer-dating system; and of the hounds, several were so fat and old and lenient, with rheumatism and sore pads, that they could scarcely be trusted not to abandon the chase after a mile or less. Still, what the Hunt lacked in usefulness it more than made up for in enthusiasm and optimism, emotions with which it was infected less by the Master, a neurotic figurehead who held his position chiefly by virtue of his money, than by the cheerfulness of Clarence Tully and his huge sons, all of them splendidly mounted, who moved chatting among the crowd like yeasty catalysts in an inert chemical mixture.

The Hunt eventually got under way, heading along the lane in the Glazebridge direction and pursued by pro and anti fanatics walking or in cars. The cars soon disappeared, and at various stages the pedestrians dropped out. Owing to the Major's arthritic hip, he and Fen made relatively slow progress, dropping further and further behind; and by the time they reached the apple tree, they had the lane to themselves. It was at this stage that the Major proposed that they cease walking and
climb instead. And so here they were, reasonably comfortable in their point of vantage, and with a grandstand view of the cumulative havoc which was shortly to develop down below.

The Major finished his apple and threw the core into the field behind the tree. ‘Widger visited you yesterday afternoon, my dear fellow,' he said. ‘Whatever did he want?'

‘He was telling me about progress in the investigation of the Botticelli murder,' said Fen from above. ‘Or rather, about the lack of it.'

‘They're not getting anywhere, then?'

‘Apparently not.'

‘Silly fellows, letting the wretched man's head be stolen from them like that,' said the Major severely. ‘No wonder they're stuck. Were you able to help them at all?'

‘Not very much, I'm afraid.'

‘And do you think that harpy killed Routh?'

‘Ortrud? Yes, probably. She seems to like hitting people on the head.'

‘Killing Routh is practically the only good thing you can say about her, don't you know. Question is, can they prove it?'

‘If she keeps her mouth shut, I dare say they can't.'

‘Ortrud can no more keep her mouth shut than she can get along without sex.'

‘Anyway, they can charge her with trying to kill her husband. What with one thing and another, it'll be an insanity plea, I imagine. That's if they can keep her quiet, and stop her boasting about it all.'

‘In any case,' said the Major, reaching for a second apple, ‘it seems as if Youings has seen through her at last. Whatever happens, he'll be able to get a divorce, won't he?'

‘Certainly he will.'

‘So all's well that ends well. What about the other two -Mavis and the man in the Botticelli tent? Did Ortrud murder them as well as Routh?'

‘I don't think so.'

The Major was shocked. ‘You don't
think
so? Are you telling me that there's
still
a murderer on the loose?'

‘Ortrud's half mad,' said Fen. ‘She wouldn't go to a lot of
trouble to cover up her tracks, as the Botticelli murderer has. Their mentalities are completely different.'

‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who
is
the Botticelli murderer?'

‘
I
don't know.'

‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,' said the Major plaintively. ‘We're practically at the end of the book.' All at once he straightened up on his bough. ‘I say, look, there's the Hunt coming this way. Or part of it. Drop-outs, I think. They've given up and are going home. Lost the hounds, perhaps, not that that's easy, with the lazy brutes averaging about five miles an hour on the straight. But they may have over-ridden them, however hard they reined in, and lost them that way.'

Following his gaze towards the field gate up the lane at the bend, Fen saw that in the pasture beyond it three huntsmen were riding slowly over the sky-line. Circumspectly this party descended towards the gate, and passing through it gained the lane, where two of them waited while the third conscientiously dismounted to close the gate and latch it. He then got astride his horse again, and still at a funereal pace the three of them, riding abreast, came on towards the apple tree where Fen and the Major were watching them. And by this time it was possible to make them out properly: they were two men flanking a girl with Bible-black hair peeking out from under her cap, and with the strained, wan face of one to whom the preliminaries of Armageddon have just been announced by some notorious practical joker. She, and the man riding on her left, wore pink; their companion was the man in the caftan and prayer beads whom Fen had noted at the meet. The near-side rider sported a long, thick, wiry, square-cut black beard - what Urquhart, in his translation of Rabelais, describes as a ‘great buggerly beard'; he seemed taciturn and straight-laced; the caftan man, who kept leaning from his saddle to pat the girl's arm consolingly, and to murmur to her, was patently less rigid and more humane. Both, however, looked as if they were in the act of honourably rescuing the girl from peril, and neither of them noticed Fen and the Major who in addition to being above eye-level, were in any case partially concealed by leaves.

‘My word!' said the Major. ‘They all look a bit glum, don't they?'

The horses' hooves kicked up little puffs of dust in the lane, like spurts of powder from an aerosol container. A vehicular noise was heard approaching, from somewhere along the lane beyond the Rector's house, and the huntsmen got themselves into single file to let whoever it was get past. Coming into sight at a good pace, and making a considerable racket about it, the noise revealed itself as an enormous estate wagon of indefinite make. It was ancient and damaged and painted all over in psychedelic swirls of hideous pastel colours. Sitting in the back of it, horn-rimmed-spectacled and dark-suited and revealed by his expression as being far from in comity with his much younger companions, was Mr Dodd the dispensing chemist, leader of the hunt saboteurs; next to him sprawled a girl with long, tangled hair; in front, and driving, was a completely bald youth (alopecia? Buddhism?) in a stained roll-neck sweater. Even above the engine's stuttering din, Fen and the Major were able to hear the girl's shriek of glee when she saw the three huntsmen, and to glimpse her leaning forward urgently to speak to the driver. He nodded; the estate wagon slowed, swerved in to the verge, and by a series of rapid manoeuvres managed to get itself sideways on across the lane just to the right of the apple tree. It was now blocking the way entirely, and the riders, after spreading out again, perforce came to a halt.

The bald youth switched off his engine and jumped out, facing the horses; he was revealed as wearing sneakers and old trousers as well as the roll-neck sweater, and appeared to be just as grim and laconic as the bearded huntsman. He was followed by Mr Dodd, who confronted the man in the caftan with a mien of intelligent reasonableness. Disentangling herself from a placard which said (in faded lettering) Free The Shrewsbury Pickets, the girl emerged last. She looked by far the most overtly bellicose of the party, in a T-shirt across whose bosom, and redolent with the charms of a long-lost Golden Age, were shakily stencilled the words I Love Che (‘Don't suppose she'd love him much if he turned up in his present condition,' observed the Major. ‘Remember
The Monkeys Paw?
'); she wore also shapeless slacks apparently tailored from jute, and highheeled
black patent-leather shoes whose chrome buckles were studded with paste to simulate diamonds. In this ill-considered get-up she stood glaring for a moment at the demoralized girl on the horse, who lost the first round by incontinently bursting into tears. While she dried her eyes with a lacy handkerchief about the size of a chequer-board square, the man in the caftan again patted her on the arm, consolingly. Then he addressed himself to Mr Dodd.