The Glimpses of the Moon (17 page)

‘Yes, yes, of course.'

‘Something new might come out of it.'

‘Yes.'

‘And as I understand the matter, there were one or two people you didn't manage to catch up with. This boy Scorer, for instance. If what he let out to the Rector and, um, Fen means anything, his evidence may be crucial. You've got him safe now, I take it.'

‘Yes, quite safe. He's downstairs now with the others - and they're keeping a sharp eye on him; he won't have a chance to scarper again.'

‘What exactly happened to him?'

Widger explained. The youth Scorer, he said, was timorous, to put it mildly; to him, even the mildest perplexities.of life took on the appearance of deadly ambushes designed to maim or even to extinguish. His impulsive babblings to Fen and the Rector, on the subject of Mavis Trent, had consequently preyed on his mind; either he feared some form of retribution, or else -which was also possible - he hoped by secrecy to gain himself some paltry advantage of a monetary sort; or both. In any case, having at the Fete brought his bruised bottom to Dr Mason's attention, and been reassured (in so far, that was, as it was ever possible to reassure him about anything), he had sloped off home, collected a rug, some corned beef and some Coca-Cola, and proceeded to establish himself for the night in the ringing-chamber of Burraford church. By these actions he apparently expected to be able to avoid further interrogation; a relatively brief unavailability, he seemed to have imagined, against all likelihood, would cause the Rector to forget his rash bellowings as he lay in the lane after falling off his motor-cycle. He was not, evidently, at all a good contingency planner. His family - all of whom were given to prolonged nocturnal expeditions in pursuit, or even just on the off-chance, of one illegality or another - would, it was true, evince no surprise, let alone anxiety, at his absence; that part of it was all right. Scorer had omitted from his considerations, however, the fact that the following day was Sunday - and as a result of this, the ringers arriving to ring for Matins had found him, at half-past ten that morning, heavily asleep on the chamber's dusty floor. They had delivered him promptly to the Rector, who had locked him in the vestry for the duration of the service and subsequently driven him in, panic-stricken, to the Glazebridge police station, where he had
been kept pending Ling's arrival and the preliminary interviewing of all conceivable witnesses organized for that afternoon by Widger's two underlings (Detective-Constable Rankine and Detective-Sergeant Crumb, the latter a slothful middle-aged man good for nothing but paper-work) with the assistance of the uniform branch.

‘This Scorer sounds half-witted to me,' said Ling.

‘Half-witted
and
dishonest.'

‘A difficult witness.' Ling picked up his pipe and drew on it, grimacing in amazement when no combustion occurred. He reached again for the matches. ‘Well, well, we shall have to throw a bit of a scare into him.'

‘There'll be no difficulty about that.'

‘Another thing: I forget if you've got anyone with shorthand.'

‘There's Rankine.'

‘No,' said Ling hastily. He remembered Rankine distinctly from the Routh-Hagberd investigation. ‘No, I think we'll just -'

‘When he's taking things down he doesn't talk,' said Widger. ‘Or at any rate, he doesn't talk
so much.'

‘For the moment, I'll just jot down a few notes. Rankine can take proper statements, um, later. Where are we now?' Extending his crooked left arm at the maximum possible distance from his eyes, in the attitude of one hoping to ward off a blow, Ling peered at his wrist-watch. ‘Twenty-five past two,' he said. ‘We ought to be able to get going in a minute.' He applied flame to his tobacco and started pop-popping again. Widger, still testy from lack of sleep, reverted to looking out of the small office's one window.

It was a French window, giving on to an exiguous concrete balcony with a dangerously low wrought-iron railing. Beneath it lay the car-park, with the station's main door a little to the right. Widger's eye quartered the scene systematically, beginning with the ring-road's opposite pavement, where several girls of about eleven, coiffed and dressed like ageing tarts, were larking with a group of boys of the same age; they appeared to be, and in these enlightened days very probably were, making grabs at the boys' genitals. Frowning, Widger transferred his gaze to the nearer pavement, where the car-park's entrance was located, and where inquisitive Glazebridge townspeople
were drifting up, coagulating to gape, and being shooed on by a constable. Finally, the car-park itself - and this, thanks partly to the numerous witnesses waiting down belowand partly to a small army of pressmen, was fairly stuffed with waiting vehicles. At its centre stood a television van; linked to this was a camera with its generator buzzing; in front of the camera, a young man with womanish hair and a common accent was talking with unnatural rapidity into a hand-held microphone connected to the van by cables; agreatlylovedcharacter, nodoubt, in innumerable homes.:

The constable beckoned a car in from the ring-road: a gleaming white Saab from which, when it had succeeded in finding a space for itself, emerged the bulky, florid-faced form of P.C. Luckraft, in plain clothes. Widger frowned again. Luckraft, however, was presumably technically off duty, in so far as in present circumstances any of them could be said to be that; as to the car, Luckraft's wife had a bit of money of her own, Widger now vaguely remembered, and was not ungenerous with it … Nowthe constable was stopping, and after inquirywaving on in, a black Mercedes driven by a black man: Dermot McCartney, the science-fiction writer who had opened the previous day's Fete. He too, as one of the visitors to the Botticelli tent, might just conceivably have something pertinent to tell them…

Widger's eyes stung. His face, he found, was being subjected to a cloud of stale smoke. The pop-popping had ceased. ‘The head, Eddie,' Widger said for the second time, as he turned away from the spectacle outside.

Nodding like a man of decision, so that his pipe waggled up and down between his teeth, Ling put out his hand to the telephone.

As he did so, it rang.

‘Sir John Honeybourne? Yes, of course, put him on at once … Sir John? Superintendent Ling here.'

‘………'

‘Really, sir? Sorry about that. It - ‘

‘………'

‘Yes, sir. I quite understand. Now, about the unfortunate man's head. It's been recovered, as I expect you know, and
we have it here, and we can send it to you at once in a - '

‘…'

‘We can't, sir? But why not?'

‘………'

‘I see. But -'

‘……'

‘Oh.'

‘……'

‘At seven this evening. Certainly, sir, if you say so. But will it be all right? I mean, ought we perhaps to, um, refrigerate it or something?'

‘………'

‘Very good, sir. I'll be with you at seven. In the meantime, anything about the cause of death?'

‘.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘……'

‘Probably not poison.'

‘………'

‘Unless it's one of the volatile poisons like chloroform,' said Ling, hypnotized into repetition. ‘You'll need to look at the brain before you can be sure about that … And identity, sir. Any special marks?'

‘… '

'Nothing?'

‘…'

‘One small wart.'

‘………'

‘Below the left clavicle. No operation scars, no fractures?'

‘.'

‘The head's pretty badly damaged, sir, but do you think you might be able to, ah, reconstitute it to some extent, so as to give us some sort of a likeness?'

‘.'

‘Oh, good. Anything about age, height, things like that?'

‘…..,…..,…..,……'

Ling made jottings on a scratch-pad. ‘A well-nourished man,' he mumbled, ‘slightly obese, age about forty, height about six foot two … Sir?'

'.?'

‘How about his hands - hand, I mean?'

‘……………'

Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, ‘A manual worker in the past,' he hissed informatively at Widger, ‘but not recently. Not for the last few years.' Resuming contact with Sir John, 'Well, that's very helpful, sir,' he announced heartily,

‘..'

‘Till seven, then.'

‘…………'

‘Good-bye.'

Ling rang off, lay back in the desk chair as if exhausted, and said to Widger, ‘As a matter of fact, it isn't helpful at all. No cause of death, no pointers to identification, nothing. Ah well, perhaps when he sees the head, that'll give us something.'

‘What was it he
said
about the head?'

‘Said if we didn't sit on it, or play football with it, it wouldn't come to any harm between now and seven. He's a bit eccentric, I suppose.'

‘I dare say he is,' said Widger. ‘Seems to me, you're bound to get a bit eccentric, if you've spent your entire adult life cutting up corpses.'

‘What's he like?'

‘He's like a corpse himself.'

‘Somehow you don't expect that,' said Ling, ‘not with such a warm, cosy name.'

‘Why can't we take the head to him till seven?'

‘Because he's going to bed.'

'To bed?'

‘Yes. Apparently he was up all night working on the, um, trunk. So it's fair enough, really,' said Ling large-mindedly. He put on a pair of spectacles, partially horn-rimmed as if the money had run out half-way, and again consulted his wrist-watch. ‘So now we can - '

A noisy knock on the door interrupted him. Sergeant Connabeer, the Duty Officer from down below, came in. He was brandishing a typewritten list of names with pencil ticks against them.

‘They're all in now, sir,' he said. ‘That Negro was the last.'

Ling said, ‘Good lad,' clipping the ‘a' and mooing on the ‘oo'. It was one of his peculiarities that although he had spent his entire life in the South-West, he occasionally lapsed into a sort of generalized north-country accent, possibly from too much watching of
Softly, Softly,
or possibly in imitation of J. B. Priestley, whose works he was known to admire and whom, indeed, he to some extent physically resembled. ‘Everything under control then?' he asked in less fanciful phonemes.

‘Pretty well, sir - though it's a bit of a crush, of course and I've had to send out for more chairs … The reporters are a nuisance. We could do without them.'

‘Get rid of 'em, then.'

‘They're talking to the witnesses.'

‘So boot 'em out - politely, of course. They've got no divine right to be on the premises. Tell 'em I shan't have anything for them till evening.'

‘They say they've got deadlines.'

‘I can't help their deadlines,' Ling said. ‘For the moment, there just isn't any further information. I haven't,' he said untruthfully, 'got any further information myself.'

Connabeer reflected on the situation, and found a ray of light. ‘Actually, Mr Ticehurst's here now,' he said. 'So they've homed on him. Oh yes, and he says could you possibly see him for just five minutes, before you get started.'

And Ling sighed. ‘I suppose so,' he said. 'Yes, I suppose so. Send him up straight away.'

Ticehurst - who had retired two years previously from the uniform branch with the rank of Chief Inspector - was nowadays the County Force's P.R.O. Relishing the job, he also excelled at it. Policemen whose activities he glozed and expounded for the media liked him because he had been one of them, and understood their problems. The media liked him because he had a flair for investing even the most banal of misdemeanours, even the most turgid of inquiries, with an arresting aura of sensationalism and even of glamour. And down here, something of that sort was needful. The vast majority of crimes are committed by striking-class youths and young men living in conurbations - and in conurbations, unless you excepted self
important Plymouth, the county was almost completely lacking. Its malfeasances, therefore, were largely trivial; to make good copy, they required the intervention of a lurid mind; and this, to the immense gratification of reporters, Ticehurst was temperamentally well able to supply. Without ever going beyond the plain facts of the case, he could transform even so regular an occurrence as a farmer's hanging himself in a barn into something inapprehensibly monstrous; could convey the impression that a man who had neglected to buy his employees' National Insurance stamps constituted a gross danger to all peaceful citizens everywhere; could somehow manage to suggest, when hoodlums broke a shop window, that one more such episode was likely to topple six thousand years of civilization ineluctably; could, moreover - and it was this more than anything which made him so popular with the County Force -mysteriously bring about a sea-change in the image of even the most bumbling police officers going about their duties, so that they emerged as prodigies of intelligence, zeal and kindness. Ticehurst would gesture vigorously; his small eyes would gleam with excitement, his cheeks would redden, a light sweat would break out on his brow. And his listeners - who till then had been wondering how on earth to inject a bit of interest into anything so obviously tawdry and negligible - would scribble away in their notebooks with a will. True, the hectic pieces which resulted almost invariably had to be much toned down by drab and heartless sub-editors; but for the time being their recipients were grateful.

Bald, obese and beaming, Ticehurst waddled into Widger's office with a copy of the
Sunday Gazette
tucked under one arm. Thanks to Padmore, the
Gazette
had had a scoop. Whereas the other Sundays had become aware of the body in the Botticelli tent too late to do anything at all about it, the
Gazette
had been in time to remake most of its front page. On this, Padmore's story had appeared, much altered. It had been embellished with seven literals, a fuzzily reproduced photograph of Fen (taken, seemingly, at the age of about fifteen), and a tribute to its originator in the form of the by-line ‘J. E. Podmote'. Men had gone home late from the
Gazette
office, persuaded of having done a wonderful job.