The Glimpses of the Moon (42 page)

‘And there he saw his opportunity.

‘His brother was still pressing him, and pressing him hard. He was frantic for money to keep Mavis Trent's letter out of the hands of the police.

‘And here now was virtually incontrovertible evidence that Ortrud had murdered Routh.

‘And here was a husband who doted on her.

‘And the husband had money.

‘There was never the smallest difficulty about it, Andrew says in his confession. For all his infatuation, Youings knew his Ortrud, and he paid up without complaining, without proof, on nothing but an anonymous letter-writer's say-so (it enclosed a gory Polaroid colour photograph of the truncheon; but Youings had already noted its absence, and when Routh was killed, had wondered). He had no thought of going to the police. He simply left the money, each week, where he had been told to leave it, and went away again. Next week, when he returned, it was gone, and he obediently left more. This couldn't have gone on for ever, of course: Youings's resources were by no means unlimited.

‘But then George Luckraft precipitated matters.

‘A hundred pounds a week doesn't buy all that much, these days. He could scarcely be said to be living in luxury. Moreover, he was the type of man who craves not just luxury, but unlimited idleness as well. Moreover - again - even if he had wanted work, he would in his present condition find it none too easy to get. He visualized quiet comfort, good food, decent clothes, a Jag at the very least, a blonde or two to go with the
Jag, and plenty of doubles, morning and evening, at the local, where he would be one of the most welcome and popular customers they'd ever had. Most of this his brother Andrew could manage -
if
he went to live, to settle down permanently, in his brother's house. Some of it he might have to wait for, but he'd get it in the end …

‘And so: that was the situation when Andrew drove in the Saab to Plymouth to plead with George - only to find that George, bag and baggage, was waiting to move in on him in the bungalow at Burraford.

‘In Plymouth they ate and they drank together, that Friday evening just before the Church Fete. And to Andrew, one thing became abundantly clear: that though his wife would no doubt put up with an in-law for a week or two, the notion of his staying on indefinitely, as a subsidized lodger, would have no appeal to her whatever. One of the two had to go, wife or brother; and since with his wife dead he would still have George on his back, literally an old man of the sea, the one who went would have to be George. In any case, Andrew was heart-sick over the whole business, and not just for his own sake: he pitied Youings, and he liked Youings, and every time he milked Youings of more cash, he felt himself utterly contemptible.

‘Yes, George would most certainly have to go.'

In the momentary pause which followed this, the Major's diffident voice was heard. ‘Forgive me if I back-track just for a moment, my dear fellow,' he said. ‘I'm being stupid, I know. But Luckraft “came on what appeared to be - and indeed was -the weapon with which the murder was done.” Well, what he came on, you say, was this truncheon of Ortrud's, this cosh. But what he gave Widger and Co. was a wrench, a wrench from his - his own - ' The Major gave way to what he would certainly have recognized as aposiopesis. ‘Oh,' he said blankly. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I see. I
am
being stupid.'

‘Glad to know you realize the fact,' said the Rector rather acerbly. ‘It's all this drink you've been taking, you're not used to having so much. Obviously, what Luckraft did was (a) find the cosh, (b) recognize its blackmail potentialities, (c) hide it in his tool-kit, taking out a heavy wrench to make room for it, (d) smear the wrench with Routh's blood (he couldn't manage
brains or hair, because Hagberd had made off with the head, and was using it to scare the wits out of that snobby hell-hag Leeper-Foxe, by dumping it through her breakfast-room window, and then, when she and the other woman rushed out to raise the alarm, taking it away again and substituting the bust of Butcher Cumberland which he'd snitched from Thouless's bungalow, probably with the idea of doing a war-dance round it and then pulverizing it somehow, though what he actually did, one doesn't know, because one hears nothing more about it till it nudged Goodey on the foot) where had I got to?'

‘ “Lastly,” ' the Major suggested. ‘I counted three “lastlys” in your sermon at Matins last Sunday, Rector, not to mention an “in conclusion”, a “finally” and a “to sum up”. There were intervals of about five minutes in between. As Pepys tells us -'

‘Never you mind Pepys,' said the Rector darkly. ‘Yes, (d) continued: no brains or hair for Luckraft to smear on the wrench, but plenty of blood. So Luckraft uses that, and then (e) he wipes the wrench clean of fingerprints, and puts it exactly where he found the cosh, and (f) displays it to Widger and the others when
they
turn up … Very clever of him, really,' said the Rector in grudging admiration. ‘I mean, using his
own
wrench, and pretending it might have been stolen from him at any time, anywhere, in the previous few weeks. Diverted suspicion from him completely - because if he
had
killed Routh with the wrench, Widger would imagine that he would clean it up afterwards and put it back in his tool-bag, not display it publicly.'

‘Conditional clause syntactically a bit groggy there,' said the Major. ‘Or to be more accurate, the main clause following. “Would have cleaned”, not “would clean”.'

‘If there's anything in this world I hate,' said the Rector, ‘it's a purist. And now, perhaps, if Dr Dryasdust can keep a still tongue in his head for just a few more minutes, we can get on. Fen?'

Fen absently nibbled at his Brie, which had just the right degree of runniness. ‘We left George and Andrew in Plymouth,' he said. ‘And in that unhappy little discussion, George was - or at any rate seemed to be - the victor: Andrew agreed to drive him home to Burraford, and put him up in the bungalow there,
at least for a few days, until, as he said, “something more sensible could be worked out”. They ate fish and chips, and off they went. I don't think that at the time Andrew planned to kill George immediately; but then Fate, in the unexpected form of Andrew's conscientious police training, took a hand. Passing Aller House on their way into the village, Andrew suddenly remembered that he had promised to take a look round the site of the Fete once or twice during the night, to see if there were any pilferers on the prowl, as there had been occasionally in previous years. He told George this. George simply laughed, not dreaming that Andrew was actually going to
do
what he'd promised. However, Andrew
did
mean it: it's one of the strange contradictions in his character that although he was already in intention a murderer, and a fratricide at that, he still took it as morally essential that he should perform this trivial duty. He stopped the car; George, who never trusted anyone an inch -and in this case, how right he was! - said that although he considered the whole thing a lot of rubbish, he would come too; and while they were getting out of the car, Andrew, who trusted George no more than George trusted him, managed to smuggle his police truncheon on to his person without George's noticing.

‘Outside the Botticelli tent, their quarrel flared up again, George speaking in whispers and Andrew (‘lah-di-dah voice') in more normal tones. And from the youth Scorer we've heard,
ad nauseam,
what happened then. Andrew lost his temper, killed his brother with the truncheon, and dragged him into the Botticelli tent. There were essential things he had to do in the attempt to cover his tracks, and in the rear part of the Botticelli tent he would probably find the tools he needed…

‘He did: a strange hacksaw, a heavy axe and a sharp knife had all been left there overnight. You see, the moment the corpse was identified as a Luckraft, Andrew would be lost: whatever the other evidence, he would be under observation continuously until he confessed, or was arrested, or killed himself; his chances of escape would be practically nil. But delay the identification of the corpse, and there was still hope. Remember, eight days from the inevitable discovery of the remains he was due for leave, when he had arranged to go on a package holiday to North Africa with his wife. And in Africa, it
oughtn't to be too difficult to disappear. There's a constant demand for mercenaries in Africa, and so long as they're tough and can shoot, no one asks many questions about where they've come from, and why. Well, our Andrew was tough all right -and Widger tells me that he was also considered a very good marksman. Wifey would languish in Tangier or somewhere until rescued by the British Consulate, and Hubby, meanwhile, would be growing a harvest of facial hair and working out plausible answers to any queries there might be about his experience and background and papers. From that time on, reliable old P.C. Luckraft of Burraford would be eliminated, for ever, from the face of the earth.'

‘Interpol?' the Major queried.

‘Oh, no doubt in the end a telex would be sent to them at that hideous cuboid they inhabit at St Cloud. But Interpol's writ doesn't run - or at any rate, doesn't function - the whole world over, by any manner of means. Besides, the message would arrive too late: Andrew would already be deep in the Dark Continent by the time some bored Arab official received the telex and took action.'

‘So Andrew cut off his brother's head,' said the Major.

‘Yes.'

‘That's all very well, but surely he'd have been physically capable of dragging or carrying the complete body back to the Saab, and taking it away to some remote spot and burying it.'

‘Certainly. And that was what he originally intended to do -except that he was going to bury the head in one place and the rest in another, as a sort of double indemnity. Oh yes, and the clothes: George might conceivably have been identified by them, so they were to be parcelled up into lots and buried in yet more places. Quite a busy night, our Merry Andrew was proposing for himself - all the more so when you consider that his
own
blood-spattered clothes had to be got rid of too, and all traces of blood washed from his hands and fingernails and so forth. Luckily, his wife was quite used to his being in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night (he'd persuaded her that this was an unavoidable part of his police duties). At all events, he'd got as far as stripping the corpse, and cutting off the head, when there was an interruption.'

‘An interruption, my dear fellow?'

‘Yes. You.'

‘Oh Lor.'

‘You and your, um, conversible cocker bitch, Sal.'

‘ “Conversible”!' The Major for a few moments was ecstatic. ‘The very word I've always wanted for Sal. “Conversible”, yes. Not a yapper, as unkind dog-haters are always saying, just con -'

‘We take your point, Major,' said the Rector. ‘And on the day Sal dies there'll no doubt be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, all of it audible, for a change. Anyway, I think you had a very lucky escape.'

‘An escape, Rector? Escape from what?'

‘From Luckraft, of course, you numskull. Here was a murderer standing over his victim, and here were you, within an ace of finding him. If Luckraft hadn't had scruples, we should have been walking along slowly behind you a week ago, wearing black and carrying our hats in our hands, and there'd also have been a freshly dug little grave in the Doggies' Cemetery.'

‘Phew!' the Major produced a gaudy silk handkerchief and swabbed his forehead with it. ‘Damme, I never once thought of it that way. Thank God Luckraft
did
have scruples.'

‘Yes, he's an odd bundle of inconsequences,' said Fen. ‘Killing you, as a means of saving his own skin, is something which would simply never have occurred to him. Anyway, he heard you and Sal coming towards the Botticelli tent, and abruptly changed his plan. Pausing only to make preliminary slashes in the corpse's thighs, and to drag a big piece of tarpaulin over it in case you took it into your head to look inside and flash your torch around (he was still very much playing for time, remember), he grabbed up the clothes and the head and made himself scarce, with Scorer following as soon as it seemed safe to do so. So - when you got there, the cupboard was bare. Did you look inside the Botticelli tent, by the way?'

‘Yes, I did, but it was just a quick glance around, don't you know. If anyone had actually been there, Sal'd have been yelling her h -I mean, she would have told me.'

‘Quite. So although Luckraft still had a pretty busy night, it wasn't as hectic as it could have been. Apart from anything
else, although it took him a long time to smash the head up, he decided to keep it.'

‘His change of plan,' said the Rector, ‘being to make the authorities believe either that they'd made a mistake, and the killer and mutilator of Routh wasn't Hagberd at all, but someone still at large; or else this was an imitative crime. Hence using Mrs Clotworthy as a sort of rough substitute for the Leeper-Foxe. George's mangled head in its bacon sack was deposited in Mrs Clotworthy's porch surreptitiously next morning; at the same time, the pig's head - which Mrs Clotworthy
had
remembered to put out - was taken away; and Luckraft (supposed by his wife to have gone off on duty) kept watch from the toolshed of the abandoned cottage next door. He knew Mrs Clotworthy's terror of human remains. He knew that when she saw the head, she'd simply drop it and run shrieking for help. And when she did that, he'd nip around, retrieve the head, and leave something equivalent to the bust of Cumberland in its place. What I wonder?'

‘It was a bust of Gladstone, as a matter of fact,' said Fen. ‘It had lain underneath a pile of rubbish in Luckraft's garage for years now, and as Widger found out,
Mrs
Luckraft not only didn't know it was there, she'd never even set eyes on it or heard of it. Luckraft himself was very ashamed of it, because he'd paid through the nose for it at a junk shop in Exeter, only to find, when he took it to a genuine antique dealer for valuation, that it was worth about five shillings. He'd brought it home, but he'd never mentioned the shaming business to anyone, and only remembered about it when he was casting about in his mind for something to use in imitation of Thouless's bit of marble.'