The Glimpses of the Moon (36 page)

The cradle seems to be lifting now. No, it isn't. Yes, it is.

No, it isn't.

It has fallen back on to the lane again. Sexual, scatological and religious oaths are uttered in quick succession by the two workmen.

Even above these, and the rumpus of the helicopter, sharp-eared Goodey picks up a new sound. So now, he reflects, there really
will
be trouble.

Up along the lane from the direction of Glazebridge, a cloud of dust has appeared, moving rapidly.

Presently this resolves itself into a grey Mini, driven by a small, pink-faced person in a grey trilby hat.

It is the man from Sweb.

By temperament, the man from Sweb was an evader, not an escaper. He had been put away three times - the first time for half a stretch, the second time for one and a bit, the third for a pontoon; but since he was a stair dancer, a walk-in thief, judges had been inclined to be lenient until the last occasion, when his offence had been said by prosecuting counsel to have been aggravated by his having broken a window to ‘effect an entrance' (the man from Sweb had denied this, squeaking out from the box some long, rambling fantasy about people who didn't keep their houses in proper repair; but unluckily the judge hadn't believed any of this). Still, on the whole he had had it off all right, thanks to working alone, to making careful
reccys, to a considerable knowledge of works of art and to lying low in between jobs; and his previous arrests had all been peaceable, unexpected affairs, the work probably of some anonymous snout, and had left him with no time in which to get seriously nervous. But this business was different: now the hounds were on his scent with a vengeance, and he was running for cover instead of being relatively amicably, as it were, unveiled; now he had to get to his bolt-hole in a hurry, against expert competition - and his bolt-hole was a long way away. No wonder he was scared, and driving somewhat erratically as a consequence. Instead of watching the road ahead, he kept peering into his driving mirror, and even twisting round to look back through the rear window. The rozzers were after him, not a doubt about that…

He looked for all the world, Goodey thought wonderingly as the little car raced nearer and nearer, like a fugitive from justice.

Emerging from Y Wurry with his, or rather the Rector's, ponderous iron coffer, and intending to slip away with it as quietly as possible, the man from Sweb had been dismayed to hear voices raised in wrath, together with motor engines and various animal noises, only a short distance away; and an unobtrusive survey of the situation, through a small hole in the outermost of one of the Rector's many hedges, had increased his alarm almost to a point at which he had considered returning the coffer to the Rector's attic, and its obviously matching key to the hall table on which it had carelessly been left; he could then, if discovered on the premises, easily have fabricated some innocent reason for his presence there. But now - police! And in force! True, for the moment they seemed much preoccupied by the mellêe still gathering impetus in the lane. True, if he had been thinking clearly the man from Sweb could easily have unlocked the coffer, seen if there was anything of value inside it, and if not, have thrown it away and made off. But his emotions at the prospect - the
possible
prospect - of yet another dose of porridge were such that he was as incapable of thinking clearly as he would have been of throwing a grenade at Princess Anne. No blagger he. On the contrary, he was, for an experienced criminal, a markedly timorous man, and the forefront of his mind
was wholly preoccupied with the notion that the anonymous snout had struck again, and that Old Bill consequently knew not only that he was here, but also that he had chosen this particular afternoon, when the Rector had publicly announced that he would be away at a Diocesan Synod, to turn that clergyman's drum over and make off with the best and most disposable of the many
objets d'art et de virtu
its top floor was said to contain. Had he known that Old Bill, in the shape of the Rector, was gleefully watching his every move from the inside of the house, he would probably have fainted from fear. As it was, he simply panicked and decided to take a chance, rushing out of the gate, and into the Mini, and away, before the police had any opportunity to disentangle themselves, or even to become seriously aware that he was present. He did, however, as he drove off, hear the Rector's cry of ‘Stop thief!', and knew with a heart-sick prosternation that he was discovered. The only thing to do now seemed to be to drive as fast as possible and hope that some wildly improbable contingency would rescue him at the last.

Accordingly, he was so busy looking at the road behind that he was almost on top of the Pisser's cradle, stretched across his route, before a chorus of warning cries, including even that of Leggings, awoke him to his peril. Stamping on the foot-brake, he skidded violently and somehow managed to bring the Mini to a halt, nearly sending himself head first through the windscreen, mere millimetres short of the obstruction. With the dust settling round him, but with the lane towards Glazebridge still void of pursuit, he scrambled out and stared pitifully at the two workmen, who in turn stared blankly back at him. Leggings had returned to his writing, trying to decide whether the infant Grand Duchess was exhibiting a deathly pallor or a hectic flush.

Goodey, who was closest, spoke.

‘Well, you nearly copped it that time, chum,' he said, friend-lily.

The man from Sweb's mild and diffident manner was genuine, not a pose: he knew that if he were a professional actor, he would be permanently ‘resting'. ‘Shall you be long?' he asked. ‘I don't want to be a nuisance, but - '

‘At this rate, looks as if we're going to be all day,' said Goodey cheerily, associating himself gratuitously with the electricity
men. ‘I'd back up and go round by Hole Bridge, if I was you.'

‘But I've
got
to get through. I've
got
to!'

‘Well, if you was to hang on for a bit, I dare say -'

‘No, no! You don't
understand!'

Goodey, who had a fine conceit of himself, was unprepared to admit this. He said: ‘You've got to get through. Right? But you can't get through till that cradle's shifted. Right? So you'll have to ask' - here Goodey looked doubtfully at Leggings, who had again momentarily paused in his writing, perhaps meditating the literary advisability, or otherwise, of petechiae -‘you'll have to ask those two chaps there how they're getting along. Right?'

The man from Sweb cleared his throat. ‘Shall you be long?' he called. But his tone as well as being squeaky was humble and muted, and the two workmen, though conscious of being addressed, failed to catch his drift. ‘What?' they bellowed. ‘What was that you said?'

More loudly, ‘I said, shall you be long?' the man from Sweb repeated. ‘I - I'm in rather a hurry, you see.'

The two workmen looked at one another, and evidently decided this was not a foeman worthy of their steel. ‘We'll be as long as a donkey's,' the older one said - at which witticism he and his colleague clutched one another in a joint paroxysm of mirth. ‘Tell you what, matey, you want to get through, you just come in here and lend us a hand.' Leggings frowned fractionally at them, but the Muse was too strong for him, and he resumed composition without speaking. ‘They don't
understand,'
squeaked the man from Sweb desperately. ‘
No one
understands.'

‘Yes, yes, they do,' Goodey soothed him. ‘I understand. Your problem, as I see it - '

But the man from Sweb was no longer attending to him. Instead, he was staring back in horror along the lane, where a second, smaller cloud of dust had appeared. This solidified shortly into a bandy-legged ape wearing clerical black, moving towards them at quite a considerable pace.

‘It's him!' shrieked the man from Sweb. ‘It's him! They're after me! They'll catch me!'

Though beginning to wonder if he was dealing with a lunatic, Goodey made another attempt at consolation. ‘Now, that's only the Rector,' he said. ‘I don't know why he's running like that -shouting something too, by the sound of it - but unless you've been visiting him, and have left something important behind… Come to think of it, I heard he was at some conference or other this afternoon, but I suppose - '

He got no further, for at this point the man from Sweb gave vent to a cry like a live mouse being torn asunder by contesting tabbies. For now two further clouds of dust had appeared, approaching rapidly in file and emitting engine noises. These passed the Rector at speed, and were quickly seen to be a Cortina followed by a police Panda car. The man from Sweb threw up his hands in dismay - a gesture Goodey had hitherto imagined to be confined to the stage, and even there to have died the death about the time of the production of
The Second Mrs Tanqueray -
and looked round him wildly. Then he lunged back into the Mini, emerged from it clutching a large heavy iron chest, and with this upborne in his arms thrust through the gate, setting off at a tottering run towards the patch of scrubby woodland which signalled the nearest available shelter. Goodey had been right the first time: the man
was
a fugitive from justice. Should he, Goodey, therefore now give chase? He was still inwardly debating this problem when it was solved for him by the Cortina and the Panda screeching to a sudden stop immediately behind the man from Sweb's abandoned Mini.

Widger and Ling were as a matter of fact still unaware of the man from Sweb and of his nefarious activities back at Y Wurry: they had bigger fish to fry. All they knew was that here was yet
another
impediment to their real momentous mission; and by thrusting their heads out of the car windows they were able to glimpse the heavy wire cradle, strung across the lane, which had brought the Mini to its present chrysalid, sloughed condition.

‘That car yours?' Widger bellowed at Leggings.

His pen momentarily halted, Leggings shook his head.

‘Well, is it yours, then?' Widger demanded of Goodey.

Goodey said that No, it wasn't.

‘Is it theirs?' said Widger, indicating the two workmen but addressing himself to Leggings.

Leggings frowned at this renewed interruption and again shook his head.

Widger got out of the Cortina.

‘Whose is it, then?' he inquired angrily of the world at large.

‘It's his,' said Goodey.

‘His? Whose?'

‘His.' And Goodey pointed to the man from Sweb, who by now was several hundred yards away and in some slight danger from the helicopter; this had been circling lower and lower over the Pisser and was now evidently intending to touch down near by. Its ratchet clatterings were making conversation increasingly difficult on the ground.

‘Who is he?' Widger shouted. ‘What's he running away for?'

Goodey shrugged. ‘Don't ask
me,'
he shouted back. ‘I think he may be trying to escape from the police.'

‘Why should he be doing that?'

‘What?'

‘
I said, why should he be doing that?'

The Rector joined them. For a man of his years, his long run had left him remarkably unpuffed. ‘After him, Widger!' he said, his normal tones amply the equal in decibel power to everyone else's special efforts. ‘After him, I say! Tally-ho! Thar she blows! Yoicks! Never say you let him get away from you now!'

‘There, there, sir.'

‘What?'

‘
I said There, there.'

‘Could have told you from the first he wasn't from Sweb,' said the Rector. ‘Not nasty enough, for one thing. You know why he came to see me, Widger? He was casing my joint.'

‘You mean to tell me, sir, that he was a - is a -'

‘I was ready for him, though,' said the Rector. ‘First time he came to see me, I said to myself,
he's
not from Sweb. So I rang them up, and sure enough, he wasn't. Good disguise, mind. Nowadays we're all such a parcel of tegs that we'll believe anyone who says he's anything to do with any part of the Government or the County Council or any of that drivel. There were ninety and nine who safely lay,' said the Rector, ‘in the
shelter of the fold. Only I was the hundredth, you see.' He paused, possibly because the context of his quotation struck him, coming from a Christian cleric, as not wholly apposite. ‘Anyway, he didn't take
me
in, not for a single second. Here's a bad egg, I said to myself. And sure enough, he was. Mistake
he
made, though, was in casing my joint too soon. Because during the last week, I've sold practically everything valuable off, and it's all been taken away, by Spink's and people. So then, when I gave it out that I wasn't going to be home this afternoon -'

‘Wait, sir, wait,' bawled Widger. ‘Are you trying to tell me that that man' - he gestured towards the by now fairly distant little grey figure still stumbling in laborious haste across the tussocky grass towards the woods - 'that that man is a
burglar?'

‘Course he's a burglar. Got criminality written all over him, like some outsize
graffito.
It says, “I am a criminal,” that's what it says.'

The near-side door of the Cortina opened to emit a thick nimbus of tobacco smoke through which, as the breeze wafted it away, the irate figure of the officer in charge of the investigation presently became discernible. ‘What in hell is going on
now?'
it wanted to know, as it circled the car to join Widger, Goodey and the Rector in the shadow of the Pisser. ‘It's the Rector, Eddie. As far as I can make out, he think's he's been burgled.'

‘What?'

‘
I said, As far as I can make out, the Rector thinks he's been burgled.'

‘Inspector, arrest that man,' said the Rector.

‘Superintendent, sir. I smoke a pipe.'