The Glimpses of the Moon (16 page)

Dismissed from their vigil, the Hulland twins lingered in the front part of the tent where the picture was, and were thus able to overhear part of Dr Mason's preliminary report. The corpse had been dead for some time, Dr Mason said, twelve hours at least, probably even more; the head (which like Routh's had been removed from the scene) had been cut off quite soon after death; the severed left arm, however, (and this, too, was apparently missing) had been cut off much more recently, perhaps within the last hour or two, and the abortive hackings of the right arm, and of the right leg, were equally recent. Excited by this information the Hullands broke into ejaculations of
gratification and surprise, as a result of which they were detected and driven away to join the crowd milling around outside. Their news - which they rapidly relayed, spreading fresh
frissons
far and wide - turned out, however, to be practically the last piece of solid information the afternoon was to produce. In due course Dr Mason left, phlegmatic as ever but amiably impervious to questioning; and the Major's telephone was again commandeered, this time by Widger, who, it was rumoured, had decided to apply for help to County Headquarters. But there was little else, and after an hour or so the customers, bored with waiting, began to drift away. Some hung on grimly, whiling away the time in the beer and tea tents, transactions were few, and the craving to display or look at dogs and female legs had so far abated that in the end both competitions had to be cancelled.

‘Pusillanimous lot,' said the Rector, still a bizarre figure of menace, though an unavailing one, in his grandmother's black bombazine dress. He brandished his cricket bag, evoking a small cry of dismay from Father Hattrick, who, along with Dermot McCartney, was currently acting as sounding-board for his indignation.
'Pounds,
we're losing
pounds?

Father Hattrick said, ‘Does anyone yet know who the unfortunate man is?'

‘Apparently not,' said the Rector. ‘The Hullands didn't see anything about him they could recognize, and nor did Titty Bale. Nor did Luckraft, come to that - I managed to get that much out of him. I dare say it isn't a local man at all: there've been plenty of strangers here this afternoon.'

Fen strolled up, with Padmore. ‘We're going,' he said.

‘Feeble,' said the Rector. ‘You haven't by any chance seen Scorer anywhere around, have you?'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘I expect he's gone to ground, then,' said the Rector gloomily.
'More
trouble. And where's my bank manager? He ought to have been here long ago.'

‘There doesn't seem much point in
my
hanging around, anyway,' said Padmore. ‘I had a word with Widger, and the police aren't going to issue any statement until after their people have arrived from County. Anyone want a lift anywhere?'

‘I wouldn't mind one,' said Fen, ‘with all this stuff to carry.'

‘All right, then. Let's go.'

‘Decapitation,' said Dermot McCartney. ‘The Itsekeri, of Nigeria, were at one time notable decapitators. Nowadays, however, they merely strangle people.'

‘Decapitation,' said Father Hattrick. ‘A barbarous business, certainly … “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown,”' he murmured, ‘“where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.”'

‘You and your King Charles's head,' said the Rector.

Back at the Dickinsons' cottage, lapped in peace after the brouhaha of the Fete, Fen contemplated without pleasure the next task which awaited him; though not normally liable to intuitive forebodings, he was certainly oppressed by them now.

He might as well, however, he thought, wait until Padmore had finished telephoning.

Fen was in the living-room. Padmore was in the big kitchen with his tin of peas on the telephone table in front of him, eating an Abernethy biscuit, sipping pink gin and dictating an account of the afternoon's events to a Gazette telephone reporter in London; through the open doorway his voice could be heard droning away, transforming the idiosyncratic Hulland twins into vapid stereotypes of popular journalism, each with an age in figures, an occupation in words and a talent for conversing in illiterate paragraphs of one short sentence apiece: a misprint to every sixth line, and a quarter of the quotation marks either misplaced or lacking altogether… Fen felt that he was becoming testy. He stared out of the living-room window at the lawn, where the tortoise Ellis was moving slowly round and round in a series of ever diminishing circles; near Ellis, the cat Stripey lay sprawled on his side, occasionally lashing out with his paw at some passing winged insect; beyond this precious pair were a hedge, the stony drive, an old barn used as a garage, a stand of mixed trees, a field, a glimpse of Thouless's bungalow, a glimpse of the Pisser and its adjacent criss-crossing echelons of other pylons, a glimpse of Aller House. In an upward-sloping meadow to the left, Friesians were grazing; urgent for insolation, they were drifting slowly upwards, eating
as they went, following the gold light of the westering sun up to the slope's crest while the band of shadow below them steadily widened.

A fly making its way laboriously up one of the small panes lost its foot-hold and fell on its back on the window-sill, dead.

Fen played a few notes quietly, at random, on the Dickinsons' upright piano. He picked up a volume of Angus Wilson, gazed fixedly for some moments at its sturdy brown covers, and put it down again.

‘Spark, Muriel,' he said. An idea began to fizz feebly at the bottom of his mind, like stale effervescing aspirin dropped into a glass of water. The use of ellipsis in Mrs Spark's earlier work,' he intoned, ‘imposes patterns on her narrative which in addition to their intrinsic shapeliness sometimes make the reader - sometimes make the reader - sometimes make the reader wonder if his wits are failing.' No, that would scarcely do.

Padmore's dictating drone modulated to easier, more conversational tones as he made his farewells. The telephone bell tinkled faerily as he rang off. Sighing, Fen collected his own pink gin from the pie-crust table, packed Muriel Spark off home with a promise to attend to her in the morning, and went through to the kitchen.

‘Well, that's that,' said Padmore. ‘But oh dear, isn't it all exasperating, isn't it all absolutely wretched? Because now it looks as if Hagberd didn't murder Routh after all.'

‘Oh, I don't know, you know,' said Fen. ‘It's too soon to jump to a conclusion like that.'

Padmore brightened a little. ‘You mean it might be an imitative crime? Yes, that's possible. Ah well, let's hope so, let's devoutly hope so … Incidentally, I reversed the charge on that call, but nowadays, even when you reverse the charge, you have to pay ten pence, so here's ten pence.'

‘Oh, thank you,' said Fen vaguely. ‘What I'm wondering, actually, is whether you may not have to ring your paper again almost immediately.'

‘Oh why? Is there something else you've thought of?'

And Fen sighed again. ‘There may be,' he said, putting his glass on the mantel-shelf above the Rayburn. ‘Yes there quite possibly may be. Just wait a moment, will you?'

Ducking into the scullery, he lifted his pig's-head sack off the top of the refrigerator, untied the coarse string which held it at the neck, and extracted from it a heavy spheroidal object wrapped in a good deal of
Daily Mail.

‘No snout,' he said resignedly.

‘What?' Padmore called from the kitchen.

‘I said, no snout.'

With more sighs, Fen unwrapped the newspapers, to discover that his intuition had been justified. The hair had mostly been torn out, the eyes were gone, and the other features were battered beyond recognition. But what he had - what, it seemed, he had toted round the neighbourhood for half the morning - was unquestionably a human head, not a pig's.

Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere
observes, are very stubborn things.

Matthew Tindal:
Will of Matthew Tindal

‘So we have three possibilities.'

‘Surely only two.'

‘I ought to have said, four.' With every sign of complacency, Detective-Superintendent Ling, from County, took his pipe out of his mouth, up-ended it, and set about thumping it noisily on a large electric-blue tin ash-tray, embossed in low relief about its perimeter with the name of an inexpensive proprietary cheroot. A minute amount of burned tobacco fell out, followed by a much greater quantity of unburned; Ling applied himself in silence to separating the two with his fingers. Looking on censoriously, Detective-Inspector Widger, himself a non-smoker, reflected not for the first time on the incivility of men with pipes, who commonly expect all social and business intercourse to be suspended while they tinker with their bits of hollowed briar.
Sexual
intercourse too? Widger somewhat wildly wondered. He must remember to ask Ling's wife Katherine about that, or rather, he mustn't.

‘However, it's early days for theorizing,' said Ling, as though it had been Widger, and not himself, who had been guilty of dialectical foolhardiness. ‘Facts first, theories after.
In
duction, not deduction.' He had read of this distinction years before in a Pelican Book, and never tired of repeating it.

Widger's rancour grew. ‘The head, Eddie,' he expostulated. ‘Now that you've had a look at it, oughtn't it to be sent off straight away to Sir John?'

‘Ah yes, the head,' said Ling weightily. ‘That's - it - it's a - ‘ But at this point, regardless of Widger's gelid stare, he petered out: his winnowing operation completed, he had begun thumbing the unburned tobacco back into his pipe-bowl, thereby once
again temporarily incapacitating himself for further speech. And now Widger frankly glowered. He glowered first at Ling; then, when that palled, as it very quickly did, he glowered at the Harris's Bacon sack, with its gruesome contents, which Ling had just deposited in the corner of the small office opposite the door; finally, he glowered out of the window, at the ring-road in which the police station was situated, and at the more distant prospect of Glazebridge itself, its spires and houses hazy in the autumnal Sunday-afternoon sunshine

‘A mess,' said Ling. He had finished filling his pipe, but had not yet begun to address himself to the lighting of it. ‘Let's hope that Sir John can - that Sir John - that he – ' He keeled over sideways in the desk chair, groping for matches in the jacket pocket thus exposed for use. ‘Let's hope that Sir John can do something to make it identifiable,' he managed to conclude.

‘Did you gather anything from it?' Widger asked. Ling's examination of the head had had to be deferred, owing to the lateness of his arrival, until after lunch; had, in fact, only just been completed.

‘Can't say I did, much.' Ling gave his Swan Vesta box an experimental shake, to discover if there was anything in it. ‘As to the sack, there must be tens of thousands of them knocking about. As to the string, it's just coarse, common stuff. As to the paper, that's two copies of the
Daily Mail,
Friday and Saturday the week before last, with “Cobbledick” pencilled on both the front pages. Who's Cobbledick?'

‘A market gardener. Lives a mile or two outside Burraford.'

Ling stared vacantly first at the match-box in his right hand, and then at the pipe in his left, as if attempting to set up, in his mind, some rational association between them. He said, ‘That pile of old papers, in among all the rest of that junk in the … the Botticelli tent: what were they
for?'

‘Cobbledick brought them along because he thought they might come in useful for wrapping up stuff on the Garden and Vegetable Stalls.'

‘I see. Well then, why weren't they used?'

‘I don't know. I imagine the stall-holders brought paper of their own.'

'Did you have a chance to find out
when
Cobbledick brought his lot along?'

‘Yes, I did. It was Friday afternoon.'

Ling sighed. ‘So they just happened to be there, and they just happened to come in handy. Not very revealing.'

‘You're assuming the murder was committed during Friday night?'

‘Well, it looks like it, doesn't it? And the head cut off immediately afterwards, and then … bashed about in that horrible way.' Ling struck a match and held it poised above the blotter -this time giving priority to utterance - until it burned itself down to his fingers and had to be shaken out. ‘It's a pity the body was moved before I could see it,' he remarked.

With difficulty quelling a fresh upsurge of umbrage, ‘C.C.'s instructions, Eddie,' Widger said. ‘I didn't have any choice.'

‘Oh, I'm not blaming you, old squire. As you say, no choice.'

‘I probably ought to have taken the head to Sir John, too, as soon as it was found. In fact, I was just on the point of leaving here with it when your phone call caught me.'

‘It's been difficult for you, I realize that,' said Ling placatorily. ‘I just felt I ought to take a look, that was all. As to this report of yours' - tapping the folder on the desk in front of him - ‘it's first-rate.' He lit a second match. ‘I don't think I've ever - ever - ' This time he had applied the match to his pipe's bowl, and was drawing smoke into his mouth with a popping noise, like small bladders successively punctured.

‘I had to hurry it rather,' said Widger. As a matter of fact it had taken him hours. ‘It's a bit sketchy.'

‘Oh, pop-pop,' Ling said, ‘Ah, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.'

‘But the essentials are there.'

‘… pop-pop-pop-pop.' Ling withdrew the pipe, smirked at it and put it down in the ash-tray, where it fumed briefly and then went out. Articulacy restored, ‘You managed to cover a tremendous lot of the ground,' he said. ‘Though of course, I have to go over it again.'