The Glimpses of the Moon (37 page)

‘Superintendent, arrest that man.'

‘I - I - ' said Ling, in what was apparently a nautical affirmative.

‘He stole a Victorian jewel-safe from me.'

‘Oh, in that case, sir - '

‘Get him back here and make him … make him' - here the Rector's normal vibrant tones acquired a marked and significant tremor - ‘make him open the safe in your presence.'

‘Very good, sir, I'll …' Ling called to the two constables in the Panda. ‘Crosse! Tavener!' he called. ‘Go after that man'
pointing - ‘and bring him back.' The two constables leapt from their car and trotted off into the Pisser's field in the wake of the man from Sweb, who turned and saw them coming but who, burdened as he was, could do nothing to put on speed other than abandon his spoils. Still scraping vaguely at himself with the handcuffs, Rankine left the Cortina and joined the continually enlarging group by the gate.

‘Not that I didn't
mean
him to, mind,' said the Rector.

Ling felt that the primary purpose of their mission was becoming diluted by trivia. To the workmen he shouted, ‘Eh, coom on, lads, git tha' bluidy thing out o' t'way, can't 'ee?'

‘We're police,' Widger bawled over the ever-increasing stridor of the descending helicopter.

‘You're police, you better stick us in the cells,' bawled back the workman who had terrorized Goodey, wiping sweat off his brow with a hairy forearm. ‘Be a sight cooler there than it is here, I reckon … Here, Bert,' he added, addressing his colleague, ‘get on over the other side and see if that roller's got stuck again, will you?'

Pushing his way unceremoniously through the assembly at the gate, Bert crossed the lane, somehow forced his way through a hole in the hedge, and disappeared from view. The cradle began to twitch and shudder again.

Rankine had produced a notebook. ‘Shall I take some details, sir?' he asked Widger.

‘No.'

Now two horses became members of the static troupe. The first carried Miss Mimms, not at the immediate moment weeping, but with all the look of a storm-cloud sucking up moisture in readiness for a fresh deluge. The second carried the bearded huntsman, ready no doubt with his single expletive, and on its crupper the man in the caftan, peering anxiously about him in all directions for a sight of his missing mare. This was the situation when with the exception of Leggings (‘Please, please, Uncle Stanislas, make me well again') everyone had his or her mouth open in preparation for speech.

And this was when, virtually simultaneously, three separate climaxes occurred.

In the first place, the Pisser exploded, as everybody but the
experts had always said it one day would. First giving brief warning with a hiss like a thousand pitsful of Fu Manchu's death-dealing snakes, its one remaining connected terminal first discharged a corona of brilliant blue and orange sparks and then produced a detonation so ear-splitting and colossal as to make people even as far distant as Hole Bridge leap to the conclusion that nuclear warfare had become a reality at last. Of those gathered together to witness this
dénoûment
(apart from the horses, which plunged and whinnied as if suddenly assaulted on all sides by Gargantuan gadflies), for many seconds only one was able to move: swearing terribly and still clutching his mill-board, Leggings raced up to the cradle, somehow manoeuvred himself underneath it, grabbed up the radiotelephone on board the C.E.G.B. lorry and began gabbling frantic warnings. The Pisser's single cable had left at least a small part of the neighbourhood able to use electrical appliances; now all lunch-time ovens cooled, electric irons ceased to make proper creases, spin driers ground to a halt and television assumed a stupefying blankness for many miles around. One music-lover, his stereo tape-deck only a second away from the enormous climax of
Also Sprach Zarathustra,
genuinely supposed, for a few frantic seconds, that Jahweh, on account of his sins, had determined to strike him instantaneously deaf, with the result that, instead of a thunderous chord, dead abrupt silence met his ears.

The second explosion came hard on the heels of the first, and although not nearly so loud, was shocking enough in all conscience. Looking round and seeing Crosse and Tavener closing in on him, the man from Sweb had done what he ought to have done long before: he had paused, dumped the Rector's box on the grass, fished its key from his pocket, unlocked it and opened its lid: unencumbered, he might - just
might
- succeed in reaching the woods, and taking cover there, before the fuzz caught up with him. If he had had any sense, he wouldn't even have worried about the box's contents - but the acquisitive instinct in thieves is naturally very strong, and the man from Sweb was psychologically incapable of not taking just a quick look, the more so as the helicopter was just touching down and so temporarily concealing him from the two pursuing uniforms. He
opened the box, and suffered a humiliation which almost made him decide to spend the remainder of his life in some blameless occupation, such as politics or hawking encyclopaedias from door to door.

The helicopter's rotors were slowing to a standstill as the Pisser began its hissing noise. From the pilot's cabin jumped the pilot. He wrenched open the passenger door and let down a short flight of steps, down which, barely credibly in those surroundings, there started to descend two men in bowler hats, each with brief-case and neatly furled umbrella, both in pinstriped black trousers and black coats. These, presumably, were an arm of the C.E.G.B.'s top brass, come to give their personal attention to the technical problem confronting their subordinates.

The first of them, however, had not yet reached
terra firma
when the Pisser let fly; and the second bang, following so rapidly afterwards, broke their nerve completely. Shouting something at the pilot (Take off! Take off!' it might have been), they turned and rushed back up into the shelter of their aircraft. Of sterner stuff, the pilot shrugged, whipped the little flight of steps back into its concealment, slammed the door, clambered back into his cockpit, and obeyed. The machine lifted higher and higher. Then it veered away and clickety-clacked rapidly southward over the top of Worthington's Steep, where it vanished, being, indeed, never seen in those parts again.

The second bang, meanwhile, had been the product of the man from Sweb's opening the Rector's box, and was shattering enough in itself. But there was more. Accompanying the bang, a thick black cloud jetted from the box's interior, totally smothering the man from Sweb's frontal aspect from the tip of his hat to half-way down his trousers, so that it appeared as if the make-up artist from
The Black and White Minstrel Show
had gone berserk or was protesting against racism, or (since the two things are not dissimilar) both. Nor was even this quite all -though for the time being only the man from Sweb and the pursuant Law were suitably placed to appreciate the Rector's delicate final touch. And the pursuant Law, coming up to where the man from Sweb, all notions of escape banished from his mind by his dreadful condition, stood acquiescently awaiting it,
could be seen from the gate not merely to hesitate, but even to recoil slightly. But then Duty, stern daughter of the Voice of God, took over again. The pursuant Law, possibly mindful of the Force's unofficial motto (
‘You Just Come Along O' Me, Me Buck-O'
) trod forward again. Crosse took the man from Sweb by the arm, and set off with him towards the gate; Tavener gingerly picked up the box, following on with that.

They arrived, and at their approach it soon became evident what this third element in the booby-trap had been.

It had been hydrogen sulphide.

The man from Sweb smelled like a cargo of broken addled eggs.

A faint whimpering came from the edge of the group. This was the Rector, trying to suppress his laughter.

The man from Sweb, who when desperately hard pressed could show an irascible side, glared. ‘Call yourself a man of God,' he squeaked. ‘Call yourself a man of God, and look what you - look what you - look what you've -' Words failed him.

‘The Hulland twins made that for me,' said the Rector. ‘Very clever with their hands, the Hulland twins. Don't know how they managed to make the hydrogen sulphide into a spray, though, I always thought it was just a gas.'

‘It's a gas, all right,' said Crosse, who was prone to Americanisms. ‘Phew! I never smelled anything like it.'

‘He pongs, he pongs, he's black and he pongs,' the Rector intoned, to the first part of the chant generally used for the Psalm
Justus es Domine.
'And the soot, too. Lovely. It was all damp and caked when I gave it to the Hulland twins from the chimneys of my house. They must have dried it out very carefully and then sieved it over and over again. But it's the pong that's the best. Haw-haw,' chortled the Rector, bending forwards in his mirth and clutching with both hands at his stomach as if it contained a great rent from which, if unstemmed, his puddings would come bursting out. ‘Ah, haw-haw-haw-haw-
haw!'

‘What's happening?' This was Fen, who had at last caught up with them all. ‘What's happening, and where's the Major?'

‘The Major,' said Widger, pointing, ‘is
there.'

For this was the third of the three things whose simultaneity, and whose immediate consequences, make them so difficult to describe, intelligibly, in any sort of chronological order.

While the Pisser was preparing to detonate, and the man from Sweb was fumbling in his pocket for the key to the Victorian jewel-safe, there was heard, though amid all the other agitations not attended to, the ker-a-lop, ker-a-lop, in the next field towards Glazebridge, of a galloping horse. This approached with great rapidity, ceasing to be sound and becoming vision at precisely the instant when Xantippe, the Major still up, jumped the hedge into the Pisser's field. Unfortunately it was also the instant when the double squib went off.

Now, it is not physically possible for any horse totally unconnected with the ground to stop dead in mid-air; yet this was what, to Goodey's dazed and deafened senses, Xantippe appeared fractionally to do. Then, like a cinema projector resuming normal working after a frame has jammed, all was movement again. Xantippe came on over. She touched down. And now she really did stop dead, all four hooves thrust forward while her head and body hinged backwards from her forearms, stifle joints and quarters.

So abrupt and violent an arrest of impetus can, for the rider, have only one result.

The Major flew over Xantippe's head.

He had had his first fall.

He was not dead, however, or even, it seemed, seriously incapacitated. First he moved; then he lifted his head; then he got somewhat groggily to his feet, and, leaving his mount in an unhorsemanlike manner to its own devices, began hobbling towards the group at the gate. Fen went to meet him.

‘Major, are you all right?'

‘Yes, perfectly, my dear fellow, perfectly. And didn't you
see?'

‘Yes, I arrived just in time to
see.
But the thing is -'

‘I had a
fall,
my dear fellow, I had a
fall.
I had my first
fall
… Mind you - nasty treacherous brute, that. She refused three times, and each time I had to take her back and put her at the fence all over again. Still, we got here eventually.'

On catching sight of his horse, the man in the caftan had uttered a single shriek of ‘Xantippe', had practically fallen off from behind Beaver, and had rushed to the rescue of his kidnapped love, Miss Mimms, though a horsy girl herself, gazing after him in considerable resentment at being so absolutely forgotten in favour of an animal of so little apparent breeding. She threw a pleading look back over her shoulder at Beaver, who said ‘Scybalum!', apparently on general principles rather than for any particular cause. Passing Fen and the Major, the man in the caftan paused for long enough to hiss ‘Horse-thief!' at the Major, and then raced on to administer consolation to his maltreated darling, who, though sweating fairly freely, seemed not much the worse for her adventure. She had already recovered from her terror, and was browsing, and would quite soon - it was possible to surmise - be falling asleep again. The man in the caftan patted her nose and gave her sugar and wiped her with the hem of his garment. He mouthed comforting phrases at her, but these were unfathomable to those who heard them, since they were couched in some unidentifiable language - stable-boys' argot, perhaps, or even, in view of the horse's name, demotic Greek.

‘What happened to the man from Sweb?' the Major asked Fen.

‘They caught him. He's here now.'

‘Super,' said the Major, who had been watching too Many David Frost programmes recently. ‘Can't have characters like that ballsing up the Rector's property. Ah, and there he is.'

‘Who?'

‘The Rector. In at the death, as usual. It's the human deaths I mean,' the Major explained kindly. ‘The Rector isn't a hunting man.'

‘You're sure you haven't broken any bones?'

‘No, no, my dear chap, nothing awkward like that. Just bruises. Witch-hazel, now have I got any witch-hazel at the flat? Yes, I believe I have. I tried to use it on Sal once, only she bit me. Postman kicked her, the wretched brute.'

‘Well then, what about your head? Are you concussed?'

‘Certainly not. Do
I sound
concussed …? Though come to think of it' - they were now nearing the gate - ‘there does seem
to be something a bit odd about my sense of smell. For example -'

‘Oh, that's all right,' said Fen. ‘That's just the man from Sweb.'

‘Is it really? I don't remember his smelling like that before. But perhaps it's one of these men's toiletries they're always advertising.'

‘It's sulphuretted hydrogen,' said Fen. ‘Seriously, Major, I'd be easier in my mind if you let Dr Mason take a quick look at you.'