The Glimpses of the Moon (41 page)

‘And never will,' said the Major, ‘if you don't belt up for a minute or two, while our host puts us in the picture -'

‘Stop it, you two,' Fen reproved them mildly. ‘I know what I know simply because a few days ago I read Andrew Luckraft's confession.'

‘So he
did
confess!'

‘To killing his brother, yes. Not to killing Mavis Trent. He says it's true he was having an
affaire
with her, but he doesn't know anything at all about her death.'

‘Wise of him,' said the Major dryly. ‘He might confess to killing his brother, and the jury might be a little bit sympathetic, particularly since the brother was a blackmailer and in general, as far as I can gather, pretty much of a bad hat. But Mavis Trent a jury certainly
wouldn't
forgive him for… I say, what a lot of nymphos there are in this case. Now if only Mavis and Ortrud could have got together and organized a sort of joint lesbonympho, probably none of this would have happened. Just goes to show what a powerful force sex still is.'

‘ “Still”?' said the Rector. ‘I can't think what you mean by “still”. Anyway, Major, you brood far too much over sex. It'll ruin your health, just see if it doesn't'

‘My dear fellow, I hardly ever think about it at all. Not voluntarily.' The Major sounded quite put out at this presbyteral slur on the purity of his imaginings. ‘Much too old. The only time I think about it is when I wish I lived in a country where somebody or other wasn't bedevilling you with sex, in one form or another, every five minutes. It's like being infested with gnats. Do you think they'd take kindly to me in Eire?'

‘No.'

‘There was a girl on the telly doing the washing up in just high heels and panty-hose. Whatever would you think if I were to do that?'

‘I shouldn't be surprised in the least. Fen, how did you
come
to read this confession of Luckraft's?'

‘Widger showed it me.'

‘Oh, he did, did he? Why?'

‘He seemed to feel,' said Fen evasively, ‘that he owed me some sort of a favour.'

‘And did he?'

‘Nothing to speak of.'

‘You didn't mention it yesterday or the day before.'

‘No. I was asked not to. But now that Luckraft's safely surrounded by lawyers, they feel they can release most of what he said. It'll be in all the papers tomorrow, so there's no reason why you two shouldn't know about it now. Sir Robert Mark
has been informed. So has the Queen. Though what
they're
expected to do about it, except waggle their heads,' said Fen with some candour, ‘I really can't imagine.'

‘I've watched the Queen closely,' said the Rector, who as a matter of fact couldn't remember ever setting eyes on her, ‘and she never waggles her head.'

‘Well, anyway, it's all public knowledge by now,' said Fen. ‘So if there are any questions -'

An instant and simultaneous babble erupted from the Rector and the Major. Fen waited for it to minify, and then fastened on the last (indeed, first) inquiry that was more or less wholly intelligible.

‘Begin at the beginning? Well, there's good precedent for that - as well as for stopping when you reach the end. The beginning, of course, is Mavis Trent and her men. It was inevitable that sooner or later she would set her cap at Andrew Luckraft and sure enough, she did. And he fell. His wife isn't a marvellously agreeable person, I understand, and probably the only reason he stuck with her so long was that she had this bit of money of her own, and wasn't too ungenerous with it; so he needed sympathy as well as sex, and Mavis Trent was good at supplying these in a single attractively wrapped package. But the wife, though open-handed enough, had from the point of view of Luckraft's
affaire
one serious disadvantage: she was a maniacally jealous woman; one hint of the Mavis Trent business and Luckraft would have whizzed through the Divorce Court like a naked man running the gauntlet through two rows of sadists with spiked whips, and been back in no time to living on a humble copper's pay. Not so impossible to do that, you may say; but like most criminals, Luckraft failed to see that you can hardly ever, on this turning globe, rob Peter without paying Paul; and he knew that Mavis, though she had money too, was altogether too fond of variety in her men to be likely to want to keep him indefinitely in the rather better-than-average style to which he'd become accustomed.

‘So - it all had to be a dead secret. And a dead secret it actually was until one fateful day when Luckraft agreed to meet Mavis in a pub in Plymouth, and take her out to dinner.

‘Because, you see, there just happened to be someone else in
that particular pub on that particular evening: Andrew's brother George.

‘Their lives had taken different courses, and they'd never even attempted to keep in touch. Andrew, always the more law-abiding of the two, had become a policeman; George had gone into the Merchant Navy, and despite a few dubious incidents
en route,
had eventually got his Mate's ticket. He never ranged far afield, I gather - none of that xenophile curiosity to see the world - but stuck to the British ports and the closer Continental ones; so there was nothing intrinsically surprising about his turning up in Plymouth.

‘It took half an hour's surreptitious staring for the brothers to recognize one another; and when they finally did, their meeting wasn't exactly a joyous one. But booze works marvels, and one of the marvels it worked this time was to make a gift to Mavis of a brand-new and, she thought, infinitely superior man -infinitely superior to Andrew, I mean. Andrew was stolid and socially unenlivening; George could draw the long bow, in an endless stream of amusing nautical anecdotes which always, as well as being mildly scabrous, made himself out the duffer until the final touch of self-aggrandizement which represented him as being by a hair's breadth the victor in the end.

‘Mavis was enchanted by all this. When Andrew went off to the Gents, she responded eagerly to George's suggestion that they should meet again. He would probably be in Plymouth for several weeks, he said; so if she didn't mind being seen about the place with a poor old crock of a shellback like him -

‘Mavis didn't mind: it was as if Andrew had never existed. She arranged her first date with George there and then …'

‘And never lived to keep it.'

Fen sighed. ‘And here, I'm afraid, is where it all becomes very vague and conjectural. We do know, though - because Luckraft has told us so - that Mavis wrote George a long letter at his Plymouth address, in which she expressed her undying affection for him and poked fun at his brother, whom, she mentioned in passing, she was due to meet late the following evening at Hole Bridge. She was going to give Andrew a bit of a fright, she said, just because he was such an old stick-in-the-mud. But then she'd tell him it was all only a joke - and she'd
tell him, too, that it was George she wanted now, someone who'd seen a bit of life, and not someone whose highlight of the year was keeping an eye on things at a perfectly well-behaved and completely boring old Church Fête.'

‘Yes, I suppose we are a bit boring,' said the Rector meditatively. ‘But what are we expected to do? Hire the cast of Raymond's Revuebar?'

‘Goodness gracious, my dear fellow,' said the Major, ‘I never realized you knew about such things.'

‘Oh, I know about them, all right,' said the Rector darkly. ‘Beast is beast and pest is pest, and ever the twain shall meet. The Bishop of Southwark was telling me all about the Raymond's Revuebar girls only the other day. But then somehow we got on to Bangla Desh (where I've been, by the way, and he probably hasn't), so I never got round to asking him how we could brighten our Church Fetes up, short of breaking all the Ten Commandments simultaneously to a fanfare of slide-trombones.' Plumbing the depths of gloom, ‘I dare say he's never come across the Ten Commandments, anyway, not to remember them,' the Rector said. ‘And, you know, it's all very well and fine' ('hendiadys', the Major muttered) ‘but what is one to
do?
What is one Actually To Do?'

‘Talk less, for one thing,' said the Major. ‘Fen here has scarcely got started, and here are you babbling about the Bishop of Southwark. You just leave the Bishop of Southwark alone.'

‘I wish he'd leave God alone,' said the Rector. ‘God has managed for centuries without the Bishop of Southwark, so why -now - '

‘The Letter!' the Major shouted. ‘I want to hear more about The Letter!'

This contrived to silence even the Rector. Pouring them all some more La Tache, by way of vinous irenicon, Fen obligingly resumed his tale.

‘George got this letter from Mavis, then,' he said, ‘and to start with it simply amused him: his brother as a settled adulterer -and with an obvious flighty wanton like Mavis - struck him as
one of the funniest things he'd ever come across. But his amusement altered - not to regret, but sharp self-interest - when he read in the
Western Morning News
of the “sad fatality” at Hole Bridge. Details were at this stage scanty: but the date was right, and the time of night was right, and above all, the place couldn't have been righter. On Mavis he wasted no emotional capital: plenty of girls around, and most of them as easy to lay as one brick on top of another. Nor did he worry, to speak of, about whether the thing had been accident, suicide or murder. In fact, if it
had
been murder, then bully for dull Andrew: who would have thought the old man had so much blood - or at any rate, spunk - in him?

‘No, the question was, what was in it for George? And what was the best way to play his cards? (He had at that stage not the faintest fear that what bridge players call a Yarborough, a hand with no honour cards in it, was what was eventually, in the shadow of Aller House, to be dealt to him by the “quiet” one of the family.)

‘Yes, what was in it for George? Circumstances hadn't been kind to him recently (I'll explain that presently), and his first temptation was to milk Andrew for every penny he was worth, and then do a flit. But he soon saw the folly of that: Andrew wouldn't be able to raise very much of a sum, all at once, and meanwhile there were debts (many of them due to an opinion which he was inclined to share with the Major, of the unreliability of horses) pressing on him urgently. He was in this frame of mind when a conversation in a bar with a man who owned a large electrical store decided him on his future course.

‘ “No, you don't make any profit to speak of just by selling things,” the man had said. “You make it by persuading the mugs how lovely it would be if they could have some rubbishy gadget straight away, and then pay for it bit by bit. After that, it's only a matter of dickering with some finance company over who gets what proportion of the profits, and you can go straight out and order your first Rolls. The cash customers - well, half of 'em don't even
ask
for a discount; the rest you tell it's a one-off order, so they can only have five per cent. When you've done that a few times, you own a Merc as well. Or better still, become a finance company yourself.”

‘George had listened, and he had learned: Andrew, or little by little. Because he had no doubt that The Letter, if given to the police, would sink Andrew good and proper.'

‘Another
hendiadys. I say, we are having a -'

‘Silence, Major! Silence, I say!'

‘With that letter to guide them, Andrew's colleagues would start investigating his private life; and from that it was only a step to Mavis's death at Hole Bridge. Besides, Andrew's wife would go up in smoke; no hope of help or support from
that
quarter. All in all, Andrew had better pay - or else.

‘Well, he paid. The first demand was for £100, and he managed that out of his own small savings. The same with the second. But with the third, he had to start asking his wife for money. He got it, on one specious excuse or another. But the demands continued to come in, regularly once a week, and Wifey soon became suspicious. The situation was desperate, until -'

‘Until Ortrud Youings snuffed Routh,' the Major interposed.

‘Exactly. It was Prance who discovered Routh's dismembered corpse; but then Andrew Luckraft was left alone on the scene for quite some time. He wandered about Bawdeys Meadow looking for clues. And he found a clue, all right. He found the weapon.'

‘But, my dear fellow, I always understood that it was a wrench from his own -'

‘No, of course it wasn't. It was Ortrud Youings's cosh, simply chucked away - that woman really is quite mad - somewhere among the trees.'

The Rector stirred. ‘Her
cosh?'
he said. ‘Do you mean that thing she used to go about with, with the -'

‘Yes. I gather almost anyone in the neighbourhood would have recognized it. During the Hitler war, her father was a concentration camp guard, you know - Auschwitz - and at the Nuremberg trials he was condemned to death for torture and for murder among the wretched inmates. Not before he'd engendered Ortrud, though. She was born subsequent to his execution, but his effects came to her through her mother, and among them this loathsome object which ought by rights to have been burned, if only because of the swastika decorating, in
plaited leather, the handle. Anyway, she has it - had it - and used to carry it about with her most of the time. She was savagely resentful of her father's death, and the cosh became a sort of horrible cult-object to her, a sort of memorial to him. I'm surprised that she threw it away after killing Routh with it, but perhaps she had enough remnants of common sense left to imagine that she'd hidden it successfully, and could more safely come back to collect it after all the turmoil had died down. In any event, she didn't hide it very effectively, because Luckraft discovered it inside ten minutes, with Routh's hair and blood and brains still sticking to it.