‘We’ll ask him.’
8. Interviews
Nay, who but infants question in such wise?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Fragment
1
The Major approached the office singing. ‘The savour, the flavour,’ he sang, ’of the great liddle cube. Oxo,’ he explained, entering. ‘I find the high notes in that one a bit difficult - though I suppose that if one started a bit lower down … The savour, the flavour,’ he rumbled.
Ling frowned. ‘Major,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to tell you what a serious matter this is.’
‘Paraleipsis,’ said the Major. ‘No, no, my dear fellow, of course you don’t. Dreadful business, dreadful - though not of course as dreadful as if one knew who the poor fellow was. And I suppose one doesn’t know that, not yet awhile,’ he added hopefully.
‘Please sit down, Major. We have a few questions to ask you.’
The Major settled alertly on the edge of the chair. ‘Ask away.’
‘We understand that you were out and about after midnight on Friday.’
‘Yes, well, not exactly.’
‘Whatever do you mean, Major?’
‘Well, I was in bed, you see, trying to read Adam Bede. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read Adam Bede?’
‘Please keep to the point.’
‘I was just coming to it. Let me see, where was I? Yes, Adam Bede. I was snug in bed, trying to read Adam Bede. And then, d’you see, I remembered.’
‘Remembered what?’
‘Remembered that I ought to have put Sal out. Sal has a sweet nature, but there’s no doubt she barks rather a lot. She barks when there’s someone about. Come to that, she barks when there’s no one about, except me. Come to that, she barks in her sleep.’
‘And you put her out every night?’
‘Good gracious, no, my dear fellow. What a cruel suggestion. No, it was the Fête, don’t you know. People leave things overnight - silly of them, really - and last year there was some pilfering. So I said that this year I’d tie Sal up outside the Botticelli tent, which is where most of the stuff gets dumped, and then if anyone came around snooping she’d bark and wake me up, and I’d go out and find out what was going on. It was a mild night, fortunately, and if it had come on to rain Sal could have gone into the tent, and of course I was going to put down food and water for her. Only then I went to bed and forgot. It was only when she started chewing at Adam Bede that I remembered.’
‘You didn’t hear any unusual noises from the grounds, at that time?’
‘Well, that’s a queer thing, because as a matter of fact I did. There was a sort of muffled sawing sound … I say: could that have been when the poor fellow was having his head cut off?’
‘We think it may have been.’
‘Pity I missed it,’ said the Major. ‘I mean, pity I missed the person who was doing it.’
‘If you ask me, Major,’ put in Widger, ’you were lucky not to blunder in on it.’
‘Yes, well, perhaps I am a bit old to go tackling ghouls in the middle of the night,’ the Major admitted. ‘Is Hagberd safe?’
‘Safe?’
‘Yes. I mean, he hasn’t escaped or anything.’
‘Hagberd’s perfectly safe,’ said Ling. ‘That was one of the first things we checked on.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded if it had been Hagberd, d’you see? Nice gentle man, except where Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe were concerned.’
‘Well, it wasn’t.’
‘That’s a good thing, then. I remember once saying to Hagberd, “Hagberd,” I said - ’
‘Major, will you please get on with your story.’
‘Well, yes, certainly I will. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? I managed to get Adam Bede away from Sal, and then I slipped on a dressing-gown, and then I got out the Supavite Doggy-woggy, and then I hunted about a bit for my torch, and by that time the sawing had stopped.’
‘You put on the light in your front room.’
‘Yes, naturally, my dear fellow. I wasn’t going to do all that in the pitch dark, was I now?’
‘Go on.’
‘There isn’t much more. I put Sal on the lead, and went out, and headed straight for the Botticelli tent. Sal barked a lot at first, which probably meant there was someone about, but when we got nearer she quietened down a bit, which probably meant they’d gone. Anyway, I tied Sal up at the entrance, and went in and took a look round, just in case, but there was nobody.’
‘You went into the back part of the tent?’
‘Oh yes, definitely, because that’s where everything’s put. The Misses Bale don’t like it a bit, but I say to them, “Titty,” I say -or as it may be, “Tatty” - their names are Titania and Tatiana -that awful mother of theirs - ’
‘And there was nobody there either?’
‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Nobody.’
‘Did you happen to notice a large piece of canvas spread out on the ground in a corner?’
‘Well, yes, now you come to mention it, I did. Don’t tell me that’s where the body was.’
‘We think so.’
‘Terrible thing, terrible. And you’d think that at any rate I’d have smelt the blood, wouldn’t you? A very distinctive smell, blood has. I remember once – ’
‘And it didn’t occur to you to look under the canvas, to see if there was a pilferer hiding there?’
‘No, it didn’t, I’m afraid. You see, by that time Sal had stopped barking altogether, and she wouldn’t have done that if there’d been anyone about for miles around, under a piece of canvas or not. So I just flashed my torch around and went out again. Then I did a little tour of the grounds, and then I went back to bed and Adam Bede again, with bits chewed out of it. That soon sent me to sleep, I can tell you.’
‘And you weren’t disturbed at all?’
’No, I wasn’t. As a matter of fact, I slept rather late, but then several local chaps turned up to finish off the stalls and marquees and so forth, and of course Sal started barking, and that was what eventually woke me.’
‘About when?’
‘About ten.’
‘One other thing, Major. Did you hear any unusual noises apart from the sawing?’
The Major looked doubtful. Well, there was a car,’ he said. Widger and Ling exchanged significant glances. ‘That,’ the Major went on, ’was when I’d just come out of the flat with Sal, and was heading for the Botticelli tent. A car started up and drove off, somewhere out in the lane. Might have been lovers, of course, but I very seldom hear traffic so late at night. Usually it’s dead quiet.’
Ling nodded. He rummaged in the folder containing Widger’s report until he found the page he wanted. ‘Now, Major, you were one of the people who visited the … the Botticelli tent during the Fête.’
‘Absolutely right, officer, I was. Mind you, it’s quite outrageous for Titty and Tatty to charge fifty pence for looking at that frightful daub, and I can’t really afford it, but I hate to disappoint the old girls. They’re not mad about anything else, don’t you know, just about the Botticelli. They think someone’s going to steal it from them, and it’s only because of the Church, or perhaps I should say the Rector, that they let it out of the house at all.’
‘And what did you do when you were inside?’
‘I sat down and had a nap.’
‘I see. You didn’t go into the rear section at all?’
‘Not unless I was walking in my sleep.’
‘And you didn’t hear anything from there? More sawing, for instance?’
‘My dear fellow, someone could have let off a bazooka, and I shouldn’t have heard it. It was that pop group, d’you see? They were wired up to loudspeakers all over the place, and there was one just outside. Luckily Titty and Tatty are a bit deaf - you should hear them saying the Nicene Creed, quite out of time with everyone else - or I’m sure they’d have protested.’
’Don’t they wear deaf-aids?’
‘They have one deaf-aid, whic
h they share between them, passing it back and forth … I’m afraid,’ said the Major, ‘that you’re going to find it a slow business, talking to them. What most of us do is just address the one who’s wearing the aid, and ignore the other one completely.’
‘I see,’ said Ling again. ‘Well, thank you, Major. You’ve been most helpful.’
‘Oh, have I, my dear fellow? I’m so glad.’ The Major reached for his stick and got briskly to his feet.
‘We’d like you to stay downstairs for a while, in case anything else crops up. And then later on - tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day - we’ll be asking you to sign a formal statement.’
The Major saluted smartly and hobbled to the door, where he paused for a moment.
‘There are a great many journalists on these premises,’ he said severely, and went.
2
’He confirms Scorer’s story, in some of its details,’ said Widger. ‘The sawing, the car …’ He petered out despondently: the conviction had for some time been growing in him that despite the abundance of evidence, this was going to prove an extremely difficult case.
Ling roused himself from what seemed to be a catatonic trance. ‘Oh ay,’ he said. ‘There’s that.’ While the Major had been talking he had been stuffing his second pipe (desisting regularly when he had to ask a question), and he now applied a lighted match to it. It at once emitted a shower of sparks, like a factory chimney in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and one of these fell on to the folder containing Widger’s report, where it started burning a small black hole. Without troubling to extinguish it, Ling brushed it off the desk on to the carpet. ‘Ay, the car,’ he muttered. ‘Choommy made his getaway in a car, by the sounds of it. We’ll have to check on that.’
Widger pulled a notebook from his pocket. He selected a blank page, and on it wrote the word car.
‘Put all the men you’ve got on to it.’ Men, Widger wrote, reflecting as he did so that Graveney’s people (Graveney was the Inspector in charge of Glazebridge’s uniform branch) weren’t going to stretch very far. Constables would have to be borrowed from the neighbouring manors, and even if that were done, Widger doubted if their chances of finding out anything about the car - of locating anyone who had actually seen it, for example - were much better than nil. What they really needed -and here Widger’s gloom touched its nadir - was the Regional Crime Squad, or even Scotland Yard. But the Chief wouldn’t have that, except in a really desperate emergency, which so far this wasn’t, or at any rate not quite. The Chief considered his own men capable of handling absolutely anything … Touching, of course, but alarming as well.
‘So what we have to do now is postulate,’ Ling was saying in his normal voice, through a cloud of smoke. ‘We postulate that Scorer and the Major were telling the truth, as far as they knew it. Our man was killed just outside the … the Botticelli tent. Then he was dragged inside, and stripped, and had his head sawn off … So if he wasn’t dead to start with,’ said Ling in a sudden access of cheerfulness, ‘he was dead then. But now, along comes the Major, with his dog. Our murderer panics. He picks up the clothes and the head. He takes to his heels. He leaves the grounds. He gets into his car. He drives off. He …’ His euphoria fading, Ling paused, unable to think of any evidence for what this ghastly figure did next. ‘He drives off,’ he repeated feebly.
‘And from then on,’ said Widger, ‘we lose track of him until the head turns up again.’
‘Being carted about all over the neighbourhood by this Professor Fen … Wait a minute, though.’
‘Yes?’
‘There are three things Chummy almost certainly did that night, after he left the grounds of Aller House.’
‘Yes?’
‘For starters, he mutilated the head, so as to make it unrecognizable. He wasn’t going to let it out of his hands, not till he’d done that.’
Widger saw several holes in this argument. He decided, however, that this was not the moment to specify them, and nodded instead.
Then he had to get rid of his victim’s clothes, or hide them somehow. Chances are he buried them. You’ll have to put men on to that, looking for freshly turned earth.’
Widger rolled his eyes but said nothing. In his notebook he wrote victim’s clothes.
‘And finally, he’d have to do something about his own clothes. He’s bound to have got blood on them.’
‘Yes.’
‘So there are three lines of inquiry for you,’ said Ling, with the complacency of a man who is going to be obliged to do none of the leg-work. ‘Four, if you include the car. No, five.’
‘Five?’
‘There’s tools. That mess’ - and here Ling swivelled round in the desk chair to indicate the sack in the corner of the office -’that mess wasn’t made without the help of tools. A hammer is what we want, with bits of blood and brains on it. Tell your men to look for a hammer.’
Without making any further entry, Widger put his notebook back in his pocket. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that you’ll be wanting to see Fen next.’
‘The professor? No, not quite yet. This Mrs Clotworthy first. Get her up here, will you?’
Widger picked up the house telephone and dialled the Duty Sergeant’s desk. He sneezed. Ling said, ‘Hello, old squire, getting a cold, are you?’
‘No, it’s the smoke from your pipe.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
The Major had made his entry singing; Mrs Clotworthy made hers talking. She was a dumpy little woman of seventy-five, with steel rimmed glasses and a bun; she swayed from side to side as she walked, and was wearing an ankle-length black dress in continuing memory of her late husband, the butcher. All in all, she looked like a Mrs Noah from a Victorian Noah’s Ark. As far as Widger could gather, she was complaining about something.
‘Oh my dear soul, ‘Ow you do get a body on the run!’ said Mrs Clotworthy. ‘An’ that dratted Freddy Smale couldn’t ’ardly wait ’alf a minute till I got on ’is bus an’ dapped me money in ’is little bowl avore ’e was off again like a blue-arsed vly! Lucky they sideways seats is up in front so ’ee can zit down quick I say, unless somebody’s set a push-chair on ’em, ’cus there id’n time to see if you’m facin’ vore nor back afore you’m in town an gettin’ down again. Tid’n like I was late neither, just stopped -’
‘Mrs Clotworthy.’
‘Just stopped to pull up a few bits of stroyle round the gate like, comes up easy now it’s dying off a bit not that it’s ever easy to get up the root so it don’t come back again avore you’ve had a chance to make a bonfire of the last lot as that what-’ sisname downstairs’ll find if ’e don’t get after ’is garden soon. Ought to a knowd ’e id’n a real gennulman ’cus any road -’
‘Mrs Cl -’
‘ - any road if the gentry can’t till their own ground they do know to get some’un as can avore it all goes to ruin an’ seedin’ over other volks’ plots.’
‘Mrs - ’
‘Still, I s’pose it takes all sorts an’ ’e makes ’is way out of books like that other chap makes is out of noting for the pictures so they do tell me though it seems a funny trade to me not like the gramophone or the wireless though they don’t call ’em that nowadays seems so.’
At this point, either Mrs Clotworthy’s jeremiad reached its natural term or else she simply ran out of breath. At any rate, it at last became possible for Widger and Ling to induce her to sit down and bend her mind to the matter in hand.
Yes, well, she’d been given this nice pig to cut up for her birthday; and then she’d met this gentleman who’d taken the Dickinsons’ cottage, and he was an M.A. the way her husband had always wanted to be, and when she’d heard that he didn’t get on with the shop brawn, she’d decided to give him the head so that he could make his own. So she’d told him she’d put it in her porch if she went out, and he could collect it from there; and that was what she’d meant to do. When was this? Why, yesterday, of course, yesterday as ever was. Yes, Saturday: didn’t they know when yesterday wa
s?
Mrs Clotworthy’s kindly intention had aborted, however, it transpired. What had happened was that quite early yesterday she had received a message that a gravid great-niece, living on the other side of Burraford, was in labour; and though this occurrence was by no means novel, Mrs Clotworthy was convinced, as she had been on numerous similar occasions previously, that family ties made it mandatory for her to be present - if not actually in the bedroom, at all events in the house -during the delivery. She had accordingly locked up her cottage and hastened off to her great-niece’s. And there she had remained all day (the great-niece’s pains being fairly prolonged) until Doctor Mason had arrived from the Church Fete just in time to relieve the great-niece of a burly son.
All this was clear enough - so clear, in fact, that Ling made the mistake of not questioning Mrs Clotworthy further. She evidently had more to say, but this, Ling patently feared, would be bound to have to do with the great-niece and the baby, neither of whom could be construed as figuring in any way in the death and decapitation of the man in the Botticelli tent. Accordingly, Mrs Clotworthy was conducted downstairs again, while Ling mopped his brow with a tobacco-coloured handkerchief such as snuff-takers use and Widger said:
‘It must have been Chummy, then, who put the sack in Mrs Clotworthy’s porch, presumably after she’d gone out.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘An imitative crime, then, up to a point.’
‘How do you mean? - Ah yes, I get it. Hagberd dumps Routh’s head through the window of Mrs Leeper-Foxe’s breakfast room at the Old Parsonage, to give her a fright - and Mrs Leeper-Foxe owns factory farms. Chummy dumps his victim’s head on Mrs Clotworthy, who’s a butcher’s widow and so more or less in the same line of business.’ Ling frowned and relit his pipe. ‘It isn’t really the same though. Why didn’t Chummy use Mrs Leeper-Foxe again?’
‘Because she isn’t here. She says that after what happened she’s never coming back. She’s selling the house.’
‘I see. So Mrs Clotworthy was a sort of rough equivalent. I shouldn’t have thought that a butcher’s widow would have got much of a fright from the head, though, not after a lifetime of cutting up dead meat.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 15
