At about this point, it occurred to Ling that there was no need for him to keep the sack on his lap for the entire journey. He twisted round awkwardly and deposited his burden on the back seat, bumping Widger’s head with it in the process. Then he settled back, lit one of his pipes with a relay of six matches, coughed painfully and croaked out the single ejaculation ’Ah’. Widger supposed that this was intended to express contentment.
They plunged deeper and deeper into a nexus of ever narrower and narrower lanes. Wild flowers glimmered in the hedgerows, and the trees - even the sycamores, the limes and the horse chestnuts - were still leafy: it was certainly a freak autumn. As they went on, other traffic diminished to vanishing point, and the houses - almost all of them farmhouses hereabouts - became increasingly widely spaced. A Dutch barn loomed up on their right, and was gone. A rabbit appeared in the lane ahead, and bobbed along frantically in front of them, mesmerised by the glare of the headlights (Widger patiently reduced speed, so as to avoid running it down) until after about a quarter of a mile it found a gateway, veered into it, and was lost from sight. It was a lonely, unpeopled part of the countryside - and also, if you were going somewhere specific, a confusing one: Widger was glad that when he had ferried the body to Sir John, twenty-four hours ago, he had sat in front with the ambulance driver and taken careful note of the route.
He had not, on that occasion, seen very much of the great man. The door had been opened to him by a big-boned, silent, blond servant of some sort, who had switched on the porch light, nodded significantly and then gone out to the ambulance to help its driver, and the constable Widger had brought with him, to get the polythene-wrapped remains into the house. Widger had waited, and presently Sir John had appeared, pushing, with one extended forefinger, a large, rubber-wheeled trolley. He was tall, thin, gaunt, bald and cadaverous, with huge splayed, brownish front teeth which he revealed to Widger, in what was more a leer than a smile, as he bade him good evening. He had then stood aside and watched while Chummy’s victim was manhandled on to his trolley; had asked for, and listened to in silence, a brief account of how and where and when the body had been discovered; had promised a report as soon as possible; had slapped the body in a friendly way on its stomach; had said goodnight; and had shut the door in Widger’s face. Widger had at first been slightly taken aback by this inhospitable treatment; but then, remembering that he still had an immense amount to do before Ling’s arrival in the morning, he had dismissed it from his mind, had returned to the ambulance and had requested the driver to take him and the constable back to Glazebridge police station.
In these circumstances, he had had little opportunity to look about him. He already knew, however, the eccentric way in which the famous morbid pathologist, for so many years a star witness at the Old Bailey, had elected to dispose of his retirement; knew it by grace of detailed information supplied by Sir John’s nearest neighbour, an astute, amiable farmer named Boddy whom Widger liked very much, and with whom he occasionally, on Market Days, had a pint at The Seven Tuns. Briefly, Sir John was independently quite wealthy, so that on leaving London he had been able to do more or less what he pleased; and what for some arcane reason had pleased him was to buy an enormous abandoned limestone quarry in the remotest spot he could find, and to build on its floor a massive bespoke ranch-style cedarwood house. This comprised three parts: on the left was a three-car garage; connected to it, by a short covered arcade, was the central mass of the lavish, roomy living quarters; and connected to them, again by an arcade, was a separate block containing three laboratories and an office. Sir John was apparently not a gardener, Boddy said: he had solved the garden problem by surrounding the entire complex of buildings with a wide apron of concrete beyond which the original wild growth was allowed to flourish unchecked, except on rare occasions when men with sickles and bill-hooks came along to lop off its encroachments on the concrete. The concrete included an elaborate system of gutters and drains to dispose of the rain-water which came pouring down the three sides of the quarry. There were servants living in, Boddy said, but he didn’t know how many, and thought they were probably foreign.
And what - Widger reflected, as he twisted the wheel of the Cortina to take the last turn which led to their destination - did this wealthy hermit do with his time? Ah, but Widger knew that. Sir John researched. In his laboratories, he conducted experiments - experiments, moreover, which all bore on his lifelong preoccupation with crime, and more particularly with murder. Widger had always regarded forensic medicine as one of the most interesting aspects of C.I.D. work, and he really did know a good deal more than the average detective about it. The last he had heard, Sir John was currently engaged in mapping on a time chart the degenerative changes in dried blood, with allowance for temperature and other extraneous influences. True, as far as Widger knew he had not yet published anything on the subject, but even so, he seemed the ideal man to deal with the forensic-pathological aspects of the Botticelli murder. Much better, really, than Easton, the County Pathologist: Easton was a good man, but he was kept too busy to do much more than apply the established routines.
And now, here they were.
Sir John had no driveway - simply a gateless finger of the concrete apron which pointed down to the lane. Widger turned into it and ran the car up close to the front door. The place looked deserted; no light showed - but perhaps there were thick curtains on the windows, and they had been carefully drawn.
With the cessation of movement, with the switching off of engine and headlights, Ling roused himself. Widger suspected that he had been asleep. He peered out into the surrounding blackness.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘Where are we?’
’We’ve arrived.’
‘What’s the name of this place?’
‘It hasn’t got a name. It’s just a house in a quarry.’
‘But isn’t there a village or anything?’
‘No.’
‘My God,’ Ling said again. ‘Talk about the back of beyond … Listen, Charles.’
‘Yes?’
‘I have a hunch that Sir John’s evidence is going to be important. It may even be the clincher.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we know that Chummy’s pretty unscrupulous. He might benefit from killing again.’
‘Eddie, surely you don’t mean that Sir John -’
‘Yes, I do, though. If I’d known that Sir John lived miles from anywhere, in a place like this, I’d have put a guard on him.’
‘Oh, but you’re being ridiculous,’ said Widger. ‘No one would - ’
But that was where he stopped, because that was when it happened.
From somewhere behind the house came a long, high-pitched, bubbling, hideous scream.
3
Ling moved swiftly. He had grabbed Widger’s torch from the cubby-hole in the dashboard, and was half-way out of the passenger door, before Widger had sufficiently recovered from the unexpectedness of that ghastly cry to be able to make a single move. And once out, Ling switched on the torch and ran, at a pace astonishing in a man of his bulk and years. He pounded over the concrete towards the garage - this being the quickest way to get round to the back - and Widger, at last recovering the use of his limbs, flung himself out of the car and followed. He made the best speed he could; but Ling had a good start, and when he and the torch disappeared round the garage end, Widger was left in almost total darkness, and was forced to slow down. When eventually he groped his way round, he found that Ling, too, had dropped to a walk. He was flashing the torch around him as he went - expecting, presumptively, that it would presently illuminate some ominous dark huddled mass, moribund or dead, lying on the concrete. But there was no such thing. Catching up, Widger saw that the apron lay blank and untenanted all the way along to the laboratories and beyond.
‘The bushes,’ said Ling.
With the escarpment of the quarry looming high above them, they plunged manfully into the tangle of undergrowth: elders, maples, red-leaved spindleberries
; hogweed, willowherb, cow parsley, knapweed, stinging nettles, and everywhere the creamy fluffy, feathery fruits of Old Man’s Beard; blackthorn which tore shreds from their clothes and lacerated their hands. They got separated and Widger, torchless, found himself reduced to a mere palpating. At intervals they called out to one another, barely intelligibly, so that Widger was reminded of Horatio and Bernardo and Marcellus trying to pin down the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the battlements of Elsinore: ‘ ’Tis here!’; ‘ ’Tis here!’; ‘ ’Tis gone.’ His first panic abating, Widger, as he stumbled on, realized how useless all this wild thrashing about was. There could have been half a dozen corpses lying in this fecund mish-mash on the quarry floor, and it would still have taken them hours, the way they were going about it, to find even one of them. More or less simultaneously, the same idea seemed to occur to Ling.
‘Arc-lamps!’ he shouted. ‘We shall have to get arc-lamps!’ But even as he made this recommendation, he lost his footing and pitched head first into a five-foot-high clump of thistles. The torch flew from his hand, and Widger heard the tinkle as it smashed on a stone. They were in darkness again.
Suddenly a door at the back of the house opened, emitting a brilliant oblong of light. Two figures stood framed in the doorway, one of them, Widger was relieved to see, undoubtedly Sir John Honeybourne. Next to him was a much younger, much shorter man, a goblin with a shock of wiry hair and thick pebble glasses. They gazed out into the night; and:
‘May I ask,’ said Sir John equably, ‘what is going on here?’
Ling scrambled to his feet, and for a moment he and Widger stood there waist-high in the undergrowth like a brace of startled pheasant put up by a game-dog. Then they pulled themselves together and struggled back on to the concrete. They hurried up to the door.
‘Sir John?’ said Ling. ‘Thank God you’re safe, sir.’
‘Safe? Safe?’ said Sir John. ‘Of course I’m safe. Why shouldn’t I be safe?’
‘But didn’t you hear that scream, sir?’
‘Oh, the scream. Yes, certainly I heard it. One could hardly not hear it, could one? Blood-curdling. And you thought that that was I, did you, in the grip of some ruffian or other? Well, it wasn’t. I expect,’ Sir John added, ‘that it was an owl.’
‘An owl, sir?’ Ling said blankly. Although he was a townee, the suggestion of an owl stretched his credulity to the utmost.
‘An owl, yes.’ Sir John was firm. ‘Or possibly some other creature ferae naturae. At night-times the countryside is full of strange noises, I’ve found. It doesn’t do to worry about them.’
‘But, sir - ’
‘Let’s see, now, you will be Superintendent Ling.’
‘Yes, sir. At your service. But - ’
‘And this other gentleman, whom I’ve already met, is Inspector Widger.’
‘Sir,’ said Widger. He was uncomfortably aware that both he and Ling must look as though they’d just been dragged through a hedge backwards.
‘Sir, about this scream - ’
‘Dear me, Superintendent, you’re very persistent, aren’t you? But haven’t we more important things to do than go chasing after an elusive scream? Tomorrow morning, when there’s some light, you may if you wish send a whole squad of men here to turn the place upside down. If they discover a cadaver, it will have come conveniently to the right customer. But they won’t. They’ll get badly scratched - incidentally, you must let me put some antiseptic on your own scratches - but they won’t find anything, except perhaps a cat mangled by a fox. Meanwhile - ’
‘You’re safe, sir,’ said Ling obstinately, ‘and this gentleman with you is safe. But how about the rest of your household?’
‘I’m a lonely man, Superintendent,’ said Sir John, exposing his unlovely teeth in a leer, ‘and there are only two more of us -a married couple who live in and minister to my simple needs. They’re Swedes, of course,’ he added, as though Swedishness were somehow mandatory in domestic servants. ‘And I’ve only just this moment been talking to them, so it was neither of them who screamed. But now, we really must get down to business. Where is this head you were supposed to be bringing me? I’ve been looking forward to sawing the top off that - and let us hope, of course, that it’s a fit for the body I have.’
Ling gave up. To Widger he said: ‘Get the sack from the car, Charles, will you, please?’
Widger hastened off, made his way round the side of the garage by brushing his fingers against the cedarwood wall, came in sight of the Cortina’s sidelights, reached the car, retrieved the sack from the back seat, turned the sidelights off to save the battery, and with considerable caution - since for the first part of the trip he now had no illumination at all - retraced his steps to the rear of the house. The back door still stood open, but Ling and Sir John and the unidentified goblin had by now got themselves inside, and were waiting for him in a small unfurnished lobby. He joined them.
‘Aha!’ said Sir John, eyeing the sack. ‘We’d better go to the laboratories, I think.’
He led the way through a bewildering complex of rooms and into the arcade, talking all the time.
‘I have been remiss,’ he said. ‘Remiss in not introducing you sooner to Mr Morehen here. Superintendent Ling, Inspector Widger, Mr Morehen. I call Mr Morehen my little water fowl.’
Mr Morehen spoke for the first time. ‘Drop dead,’ he said.
‘Mr Morehen,’ Sir John continued, unperturbed, ‘is my assistant. My trainee-assistant, I ought to have said. For some reason best known to himself, Mr Morehen wishes to become a morbid pathologist, though he has really no talent for it, none at all.’
‘Belt up,’ said Mr Morehen.
‘Mr Morehen, you see, is by temperament not a pathologist, morbid or otherwise. He is a quantitative analyst. Above all, he loves to measure things. Give Mr Morehen anything - absolutely anything - and he will at once measure it for you. Take alcohol.’
Since at this point they were passing a sideboard laden with bottles, Widger imagined for one wild moment that they were being offered a drink. But this was apparently not so.
‘A good thing you’ve got me, if you ask me,’ said Mr Morehen.
‘Take alcohol,’ said Sir John again. ‘We wish to test blood for its alcohol, so what do we do? We supply ourselves with a millilitre of blood and a millilitre of saturated potassium carbonate solution and we place them in one compartment of a diffusion vessel without allowing them to mix. Then we take a solution of potassium dichromate in sulphuric acid and place it in the other compartment. Seizing the sealed vessel, we proceed to mix the two solutions by tilting - and if alcohol is present, the dichromate will turn a charming green. What could be more satisfying? What could be more delightful? But for Mr Morehen, this isn’t enough.’
‘I should think not,’ said Mr Morehen.
‘Mr Morehen wants to know how much alcohol. While you are admiring the green, Superintendent, Mr Morehen is indifferent.
He is thinking milligrams of alcohol per 100 grams of blood”.’
‘I never knew you knew,’ said Mr Morehen.
‘Well, these things have to be done, unfortunately,’ said Sir John. ‘So in that sense, you could argue that Mr Morehen is really quite useful to have about the place: a sort of purblind human computer. Nor, luckily, does his usefulness end there. For Mr Morehen, Superintendent, is an International Socialist, whatever that may be, and believes in the dignity of manual labour. With him, even more luckily, the manual labour takes the form of disagreeable housework, and his efforts save the poor Hetmans all manner of unpleasant chores, as well as enabling me to economise on wages. I don’t say that Mr Morehen isn’t rather limited. But within his limits, he’s quite a paragon.’
‘When the Revolution comes,’ said Mr Morehen, ‘you’ll be one of the first for the lamp-post,’ and on this affable note they reached the end of the arcade, and Sir John led them into the largest of the three laboratories, where dazzling fluorescent strip lights were burning.
Widger looke
d about him with interest; but his knowledge of forensic medicine was almost entirely theoretical, and he could make little of what he saw. There were flasks, retorts, blenders, Bunsen burners, rubber hoses, jars with specimens in pickle, microscopes, a fluoroscope, test tubes, surgical instruments -scalpels, scissors, forceps — and an electrically-driven circular saw. At one end of the big room he recognized X-ray equipment - and the utility of that was obvious. So was the utility of the surgical instruments. But as to the rest, Widger could only stare and wonder.
At the centre of it all, on a sort of operating table with guttering and pipes, lay the sheeted figure of the murdered man.
Sir John went up to it and whipped the sheet away.
‘Well, here he is,’ he said cheerfully. ‘A bit mottled by now, of course, but apart from his paunch, a fine figure of a man. I don’t know if you’d like to see his organs? They’re in that row of jars over there.’
‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Ling. He approached the body gingerly, made a pretence of studying it, choked slightly, backed off and slumped down heavily on a small stool.
Mr Morehen was closely examining the abdominal incision; he almost had his nose in it. ‘This stitching’s a bit of a cock-up,’ he said.
‘You did it yourself,’ Sir John said.
‘I never said I didn’t, did I? Ah well, it doesn’t matter now.’ And with this, Mr Morehen appeared to lose interest in the proceedings; he began wandering about the laboratory, picking things up, sniffing at them and putting them down again, not always where he’d got them from.
Sir John went to a bench and swept a lot of chemical glassware to one side with a large hand, in order to clear a space. ‘Come along, Inspector,’ he said to Widger. ‘You can put it here.’ Widger went across with the sack, deposited it, and retreated again to join Ling. ‘Well now, gentlemen,’ said Sir John, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get on with this straight away. I dare say you can find your own way out, or if not, Mr Morehen will take you.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 19
