‘No initials? No laundry-mark?’
‘No, neither. All the experts could say was that it had been washed a fair number of times. They didn’t find any significant stains on it, either, blood or oil or anything like that.’
‘Most unhelpful. Even so, I’m surprised that the inquest jury decided it was accident. I should have thought that an open verdict was what was called for.’
The Rector said, ‘So should I, but the Coroner thought differently. His idea was that there was never any man involved at all: Mavis simply decided to take a drive and a moonlit stroll over the bridge and along the river-bank; then at some stage she stood in the vee with her back to the parapet, gazing up at the moon or something, and lost her balance and went headlong. He implied, even if he didn’t actually say, that at the time of her squabble with Ella Hamilton, Mavis had a change of heart and decided to lay off men for a bit; that was confirmed, he thought, by the fact that the gossip about her had suddenly lost substance. Also, he pointed out that it had been pretty cold for a fortnight or more, and that in that sort of weather people didn’t normally make arrangements for canoodling al fresco, moon or no moon. As to the handkerchief, he said that almost certainly that had been Mavis’s. As to the handbag, he said Mavis herself must have wiped it. As to the traces in the bushes and on the bank, he said there was no evidence at all to connect them with the tragedy. And as to Mavis’s being able to call for help, he said that if no one was within earshot, at any time, that just didn’t come into it. He was very persuasive, I’m bound to say.’
‘And the jury went along with him.’
‘A majority of them did, yes. They weren’t unanimous, though. And I gathered afterwards that the ones who’d voted against accident were the ones who’d known Mavis quite well. Knowing her, they simply didn’t believe either that she’d given up men, or that she’d fallen off Hole Bridge unaided, or that she’d have gone out, even on her own, with a man’s cheap handkerchief on her.’
‘And how did the police react to the inquest verdict?’
‘I talked to Widger after it was over, and he said he was surprised: he’d expected an open verdict, perhaps even a murder verdict. However, the file would stay open, he said -and presumably it has stayed open, though if anything more’s been discovered, I haven’t heard of it.’
Fen considered for a moment, and then said, ‘Was she pregnant?’
‘No, she wasn’t.’
‘And another point: could it have been Routh she arranged to meet at the bridge?’
‘Psychologically, I’m afraid, yes.’ Uncharacteristically subdued after his long recital, the Rector was playing five-finger exercises on the top of the crystal ball. ‘As I think I mentioned, Mavis took up with some really appalling types. But Routh wasn’t a womanizer, you know. In fact, he made a point of sneering at women, and you felt it was genuine, not just a pose. No, if anything, I’d say Routh was hostile to women. As you’re probably aware, he was a pervert, a sadist, poor wretched unspeakable man. All his lust went into that ghastly business of tormenting animals.
‘But in any case,’ the Rector added, ‘we now have every reason to believe that it wasn’t Routh who killed Mavis, just as we have every reason to believe that Mavis didn’t have an accident, that she was murdered.’
‘Scorer.’
‘Precisely: Scorer, babbling about someone threatening someone with going to the police about Mavis Trent.’
‘Doesn’t Scorer realize the importance of whatever it was he overheard? Doesn’t he realize that he ought to tell the police?’
‘I’m quite sure he realizes,’ said the Rector, without hesitation. ‘But he’s a Scorer, you see - that’s to say, one of a shower of feeble, dishonest, catchpenny aments; in spite of plenty of competition, the Scorers manage to be quite the most undesirable family hereabouts. No Scorer would go to the police voluntarily, about anything. A Scorer would just sit on whatever it was he’d found out, trying to think up some way of turning it to his own advantage.’
‘Rather risky in this case, I’d imagine.’
‘Extremely risky. I shall have to drag Scorer into Glazebridge to see Widger as soon as possible - this evening, preferably. I hope I’m going to be able to lay hands on him,’ said the Rector. ‘After blurting all that stuff out to us, he may take it into his silly head to slope off and hide himself. I ought to have handed him over to Luckraft, really, but what with one thing and another, it - ’
Abruptly he broke off.
‘What the hell is that?’ he said.
From outside the tent, somewhere fairly close by, had come a sequence of sounds cutting across the expected turbulence of the Fete which had hitherto provided the unheeded background to their conversation: first the clang of a large bell, then a noise like a ship’s mast coming down, then a chorus of feminine screams, then an agitated male voice shouting indistinguishable instructions, then a crescendo of voices raised in perturbation, then the thud of rapidly trotting feet. The Whirlybirds, who had been hacking their way into the hull of Yellow Submarine, faltered, tried to recover themselves, failed to do so and finally stopped altogether; their speaking voices, not much different from their singing voices except in volume, could be heard inside the fortune-telling tent twittering frenetically but obscurely through the amplifiers.
Indignantly, the Rector started to his feet.
‘What the hell,’ he boomed, ‘is happening out there now?’
2
Padmore was one of those who saw it happen.
His interview with Clarence Tully had left something to be desired, the something consisting quite possibly of shortcomings in his interpellatory technique: prising facts from malign or unwilling black Press Relations Officers was one kettle of fish, substantiating Routh and Hagberd from the recollections of a Devon farmer quite another. Anyway, whatever the reason, nothing new or striking about either man had emerged. Like everyone else except Mrs Leeper-Foxe, Tully had found Routh repugnant and had avoided him. As to Hagberd, he, it appeared, had been always too busy working to have time to cultivate more than a nodding acquaintance with his employer.
‘Proper old Stakhanovite, that one,’ said Tully. His father, fetching up with the British expeditionary force at Murmansk in July of 1918, had developed a good deal of interest in Russian affairs during his eighteen months of waiting to come under fire, and some of this had leavened the agrarian preoccupations of the family at large.
‘I don’t see Hagberd, that’s the trouble,’ Padmore complained. ‘Or rather, I think I see him all right, but somehow I can’t seem to get him down on paper.’
‘There, then,’ said Clarence Tully, whether in commiseration or polite surprise it was impossible to tell.
Padmore parted from him and plunged once more into the fun of the fair. Presently he found himself side by side with the Fête’s Negro opener, Dermot McCartney, at the rifle range. They both banged away ineffectually for some time and then fell to discussing Africa, with particular reference to the Republic of Upper Volta. It was from the Republic of Upper Volta that Dermot McCartney had been brought to England at the age of three, and it was in the Republic of Upper Volta, in Ougadougou, that Padmore had once spent six painful weeks gathering material for his paper. During this period he had been pestered and pursued, he told Dermot McCartney, by a quadroon pea-nut planter who believed himself to be de Gaulle’s illegitimate son. Moreover, he had had difficulty, when his stint was over, in leaving. Since he was persona non grata in Ghana at the time, the river was closed to him, and he was forced to charter a ruinous two-seater aeroplane in which he was flown, hair-raisingly, into Dahomey, arriving at Cotonou just in time for the latest of the country’s biennial coups d’état. When the telegraph office re-opened, he had sent the Gazette a strictly factual cable about the recent days’ events, and had been at once expelled.
‘My people are mostly dolts, I’m afraid,’ said Dermot McCartney, consoling him. ‘Dolts or barbarians or both. They believe things which are either
nonsensical or else manifestly untrue, such as that they are collectively capable of managing their own affairs, and that black is beautiful, and that jazz is an art form.’
‘Are you one of the Mossi?’
‘Yes, I am, I’m sorry to have to say. A particularly rebarbative tribe, the Mossi, even for Africans.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Padmore, ‘but it certainly seems a very simple matter to get on the wrong side of them one way or another.’
Broderick Thouless strolled up, clutching his Mincer People scores in one hand, and in the other, various purchases bundled up in a Paisley shawl. He was accompanied by the Major, who now had the whippet Fred with him, on a lead.
‘I want to try the Try-Your-Strength machine,’ Thouless said.
‘Aren’t you on the small side for that, my dear fellow?’ said the Major, with less than his usual tact. ‘With these things, don’t you know, it’s brute size that counts.’
‘I may be small,’ said Thouless, affronted, ‘but I’m muscular … Mind you, they rig these contraptions somehow,’ he added, ‘so that the customer can scarcely ever win. So if I’m not successful, that’ll be the reason for it. If it’s rigged, I shan’t succeed.’
‘Pleonasm,’ said the Major.
‘I myself am certainly too small,’ said Dermot McCartney.
‘So am I,’ said the Major.
‘I’m big enough,’ said Padmore, ‘but the trouble is, I’m flabby. African food consists almost entirely of carbohydrates, so it’s not surprising, really.’
Exchanging further sorrows about their individual physiques, and about their individual states of health generally, the four of them wandered away from the rifle range and across the rough gravel driveway into the lawn’s eastern half, where they wound their way in procession among crowded stalls and marquees, passed the fortune-telling tent - in which the Rector was at that moment concluding his account of the death of Mavis Trent and so in due course came to a halt at the Try-Your-Strength machine near-by.
However, Padmore, Dermot McCartney and the Major were not, they saw, destined to watch Thouless excel himself immediately. (Or, as it turned out, ever.) The machine had just been pre-empted by Ortrud Youings.
It was a massive machine, traditional in design. With a long-handled mallet, you hit a metal plate set in the base-box, thus activating an arrangement of springs, cogs and levers which propelled a lead weight up a graduated slot in the tall central column; if you were lucky, the weight hit the bell at the top and you received a prize - a kewpie doll or a metal teapot or twenty Players or a psychedelic balloon, to judge from the adjacent display.
The machine was supervised, and indeed owned, by a fat barker called Arthur, well advanced in years, who stood beside it swaying benignly from side to side, the neck of a depleted whisky bottle projecting from a pocket of his raincoat.
‘Come and watch the little lady!’ he bawled hoarsely, ignoring the fact that Ortrud Youings was as tall, if not as obese, as he was himself. ‘Walk up! Walk up! Come on along and watch the little lady ring the bell!’
Ortrud Youings had taken off her jacket and given it to her husband, who was standing close to her with a love-sick smirk on his otherwise not unintelligent face; the onlookers saw the muscles ripple in her smooth white arms as she hefted the mallet. Grasping it firmly in both hands, she swung it slowly back over her right shoulder, then forward again, with lightning speed and colossal force, down on to the metal plate.
The entire machine seemed to totter at the impact. The plate crashed down on to the base-box, the cogs groaned and the lead weight shot up the slot like a bullet, hitting the bell with a clang which momentarily drowned even the Whirlybirds. But there was more. Though solidly built from mahogany, round about the turn of the century, the machine had since then been sapped by decades of hard use and weathering, and a transverse crack had gradually developed in its column just beneath the vertex of the bell. Strained to crisis point by Ortrud Youings’s tremendous blow, this crack now rapidly widened, and with a splintering of wood, to a hullabaloo of shrieks, gasps and shouted warnings, the top of the column sagged and broke away altogether. Bell and all, it plummeted earthward, catching its owner Arthur a glancing blow on the side of the head and collapsing him on to the turf, where he lay stunned, bleeding profusely from a wound in his scalp above his right ear.
The instantly ensuing commotion featured a single, rather ghastly, incongruity: wholly ignoring the unfortunate Arthur’s fate - for which, though unintentionally, she had after all been responsible - Ortrud Youings dropped the mallet, clasped her hands above her head, brandished them back and forth like a victorious prize-fighter, and shouting ‘ Juchhe! Juchhe!’, made for the prizes display, where she appropriated a teapot and proceeded to brandish that. His devotion temporarily quenched by her appalling behaviour, Youings seized his wife without gentleness and lugged her out of the way of the numerous people who were meanwhile milling round the recumbent Arthur, intent on administering help.
‘Doc Mason!’ a man shouted. ‘Someone find Doc Mason!’
‘ ’E’m gone,’ someone else bellowed. ‘Saw en drive off, not ten minutes since.’
‘Well then, fetch First Aid Box!’
Two youths, twin brothers called Hulland, volunteered to do this. Side by side, they left the scene at a measured trot. In the interim, Dermot McCartney - partly because he seemed calmer and more confident than anyone else, and partly, no doubt, as an illogical result of people’s frequent exposure to coloured doctors in hospitals - had been accepted as chief ministering angel. Down on one knee, he raised the injured man’s head an inch or two, probing gently with his fingers at the place where the wound was. Arthur stirred; he moaned; he made an attempt to sit up; he wasn’t, at any rate, dead.
‘He’ll do,’ Dermot McCartney told the circle of concerned onlookers, cheerfully.
‘Even so, we’d probably better get the doctor,’ said the Major. ‘If he’s gone straight home, he ought to be there by now. Thouless, my dear fellow, would you ring him up from my flat? You’ll be quicker than I shall. The door’s open, and the number’s on the pad beside the telephone. Mind and not let Sal out, or we shall have more casualties.’ Thouless nodded importantly and strode off towards the house. As he passed the fortune-telling tent, the Rector emerged from it carrying his cricket bag, with Fen at his heels.
The Hulland twins had by now arrived at their destination, the Botticelli tent; en route on the trot, they had thrown out brief explanations to the groups of people who were drifting, curious, towards the source of the disturbance. The sign on the Botticelli tent said Vacant. Titty Bale was still at the receipt of custom, and Luckraft with his crash helmet on was still sitting on guard opposite her.
‘First Aid Box,’ said one Hulland twin, panting.
‘Been an accident,’ said the other.
‘Chap hit on the head,’ said the first.
‘Bleeding all over the grass,’ said the second.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Titty Bale, frowning. Neither she nor her sister Tatty (who was presumably still faithfully on watch at the back of the tent) had ever really approved of the custom that had grown up over the years, of storing bits and pieces in the Botticelli tent, behind the black velvet against which the Assumption was suspended. ‘Well, fortunately there’s no one Meditating just at present. Even so, I shall have to speak to the dear Rector about it. It’s quite ridiculous to keep the First Aid Box here, and I shall tell him so … No, no, you two stay out here. I’ll fetch it.’ She got up and went into the tent, leaving the Hullands explaining matters to Luckraft.
Time passed - a matter of two minutes only, but to the Hullands this seemed (as indeed it was) needlessly long. Then Titty Bale reappeared through the tent flap. She had no First Aid Box with her. Moreover, she was moving slowly, and looked pale.
As they stared questioningly at her, ‘Luckraft,’ she said, speaking with some difficulty, ‘there’s a man in there.’
; ‘A man, Miss Bale?’
‘Yes. He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes, dead. And Luckraft, it’s happened again,’ Titty Bale said faintly. She went back to her chair and slumped down into it. ‘Hagberd has been put away, but it’s happened again?’
They continued to stare at her, wordlessly.
‘The man is not only dead,’ said Titty Bale, articulating with all possible care. ‘He has also been … been mutilated. That’s to say, he’s - that is to say, someone has cut off his head.’
Collapsed in her wood-and-canvas garden chair, she added, ‘Incidentally, he is completely naked. In searching for the First Aid Box, I lifted a sheet of tarpaulin, or some such material -and there he was, bare as the minute he was born.’
Alarmed, Luckraft surged to his feet. That must have been very distressing for you, Miss Titania,’ he said.
The nakedness? Pah!’ Luckraft’s concern for her spinsterly sensibilities re-aroused some of Miss Bale’s mettle. ‘Rubbish, Luckraft, rubbish! Let me tell you, I’ve seen a great many naked men in my time.’
‘Oh, have you, Miss Titania?’ said Luckraft feebly.
‘Yes, I have. I dare say I’ve seen more naked men than you’ve had hot dinners.’
Luckraft shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. ‘Gracious,’ was all he could find by way of response.
‘There is nothing - nothing, Luckraft - that I don’t know about naked men.’
‘No, I’m sure not, Miss Titania. All I was -’
‘Nursing, Luckraft, nursing. Nearly twenty years of it I had, when I was younger. And you don’t do a stretch like that without getting to know everything there is to know about naked men, do you now, Luckraft?’
‘Well, no, Miss Titania, I suppose not.’ Luckraft squared his shoulders. ‘Now, if you’ll just let me - ’
‘Yes, but be careful, Luckraft.’ Titty’s brief outbreak of animation was now apparently exhausted; she began to fidget nervously with her untidy grey hair. ‘There is evil in there.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 11
