Moonspender

by Jonathan Gash

  "Ten hooks and worked bars," Sandy was cooing, spinning Ro, "were quite enough for Queen Vicky's back fastening. It's nearly enough for dear Rowena."

  Ryan accosted me boldly enough, saying he admired the brickwork, and being charming to Lize. The swine could really turn it on. Well, let's see how much charm he'd muster when he came sneaking after me in that dark forest waiting out there. . . .

  "No wonder you weren't at work today, Lovejoy," Mrs. Ryan murmured to me, circling conversationally. She looked good enough to eat in a light calf-length dinger with the central split hem she knows I go for. "Busy."

  "It was hell," I concurred. "Mostly night work, though."

  "Was it indeed." She eyed Lize, and asked what now.

  "Now?" I said, puzzled. "You mean the telly show?"

  "With you, Lovejoy. And me." Her head tilted, checking we were safe to talk. "Has my estate outlived its usefulness?"

  Her stare makes honesty difficult. "I have greater need of your estate than ever." How true, I thought. Luckily she misunderstood.

  "Shhh." She smiled and pressed my fingers.

  Ledger spoke, too. Mrs. Ledger, all pearly homeliness, was surprisingly a musician, cello and keyboard. She argued quite well how reputations were chancy—like. Bach was more famed as a player than a composer in his own day, and better known for being a jailbird than for fathering twenty children. I countered by asking if she had any antique musical instruments. She hadn't, but her husband Ledger played the Boehm flute, another shaker. You never really know people, do you.

  At nine the place was rearranged for the telly show under Sandy's direction, with Goldie's assistants arguing and Suzanne going anxious. They did it with models, attired from Beryl's museum, for each alleged period. I was made referee, and sworn to good behavior. Ro captained the bride's team and Big Frank the bridegroom's. Helen, Liz Sandwell, and Margaret—lovely in a limp-concealing long dress—opposed Harry Bateman, who can only recognize antiques by their lack of a digital clock. Brad, and Mannie (who'd conformed by displaying a carnation on his caftan). Sandy paraded each antique on, which was galling to the cameras, but on the whole it went well.

  Goldie really seemed to come alive during the filming. Of course she was all excited from having done a full commentary on an antique real-life Victorian wedding ("The very priest is genuine, viewers!") but even so I was astonished. She had a battery of signals to direct the cameras, for example to focus on Mannie's bare feet; I saw it come on the monitor. And she was witty enough when folk applauded in the wrong places or dropped a glass, making jokes to gain a covering laugh.

  She introduced me at halftime, and I bumbled about a Norwich school painting, giving tips to the unwary purchaser, like at least measure the damned thing and all that.

  By the second half most of the antique dealers were tipsy and laying heavy bets, and every bad guess was greeted with a storm of clapping or boos. They had extra blokes to flag everybody quiet so Goldie could speak. What with the cheering I began to think. Oh, hell, another rollicking for Lovejoy, but oddly enough the day kept giving out surprises, for when Ro's team won and Goldie finally closed the transmission, calling "Good-bye, viewers!" over a storm of yelling and stamping, she came running over to me and hugged me. I pulled away because she looked rotten in that makeup but no, she dangled on me patting my face.

  "Lovejoy! Superb! We've never had ... oh, God! It was real real real!" As bad as Lize.

  And the T-shirt brigade were all round saying Oh darling, things had nearly gone wrong. I'd assumed Veronica would be wild because some of the panel were still attired in the early nineteenth century and some not, but even that was somehow a plus. They're a loony lot.

  It was some time before I could get away and sit out on the balcony in the cool. The day had long since burned out. Ledger came by after a second, as I knew he would. Once a peeler, always a peeler.

  "Something out of Sherlock Holmes, Lovejoy." He chuckled, gesturing. Him in his dinner jacket, me like a caped Dracula, music, light, and chatter from the tall windows.

  "What're you doing with an antique flute. Ledger?"

  He laughed, wagging. "I knew that would irritate you, Lovejoy. But question is, what're you going to do with a valuable Roman bronze in Long Tom Field, isn't it?" I snickered a mental snicker. Only me and the killer knew it was in the New Black.

  "Lize's speculative reporting? Give over, Ledger."

  "Oh, aye. She gave me a written statement. No grammatical errors, Lovejoy, but a pack of lies all the same." He glanced over the balcony. "See that glowing cigarette? That's a constable." He gave his a sardonic grin, half lit from the ballroom. "Truth is, Lovejoy, a worm couldn't get into the field where George was killed. Let alone you. Or your opponent."

  "Opponent? Don't talk daft." The silly old coot left then. I wrapped myself in my cloak and sat on a balcony seat for a doze.

  28

  It was ten before I missed Ryan in the crush. My heart gave a nasty lurch. Naturally I'd checked every so often through the blue haze to see nobody had slipped off to wait in the woods—that was my ploy, not anybody else's. Quickly I reentered the mob and mingled cheerily, watching. Candice was missing, too. Grinning and caUing greetings, I made my way to the men's loos. No sign. I talked a bit with Ro and Big Frank—enthroned in state before their going away—and managed to escape after Veronica Gold laughingly demanded my autograph. Sandy was holding court, waspish jokes about practically everybody. Pierre advised me about a private room to have a lie-down for my sudden headache, off the corridor lounge.

  Minutes later I was through the double doors and prowling Suzanne's house. I'm too clumsy to be a really good prowler, but with common sense you stand half a chance. My mind reasoned: Ryan's a friend of the major; is he also close to Candice?

  The house was quite small, nothing like I'd expected. Lights had been left on. A television was going somewhere. I made the upstairs without a tremor. Only one room had voices, Candice going on at Ryan with the occasional riposte from him. I was so relieved he was still here I hardly bothered to listen at first.

  ". . . not a question of getting the stuff out of the ground, Candie," he was giving back. "It's doing it so we keep the takings."

  She: "You're Like dearest Christopher." The name was an expletive. "Caution's for old men."

  "It's for successful men, silly cow."

  "Oh. Forceful, is it?" She went little-girl voluptuous. "Want to pick a page, sailor? A drawing? One of the figurines. . . ?"

  "I've a lot on tonight." Same words I'd used.

  "Switch the bed on? Start the mirrors? Or are you getting Like groveling George?"

  Ryan's voice sounded suddenly uneasy. "George was none of my doing. You know that." Oh, aye, I thought sardonically. Keep up the innocence, lad. See how much good it does you.

  "Do I?" Candice's voice had thickened.

  She gasped, laughed. There was a sudden stirring inside, so I eeled away. It looked Like I'd found where George was taking the book; Candice was the collector of erotica. It only dawned on me as I scurried along the corridor that if I'd had half the sense I was born with I could have asked Big Frank when meeting him on the London train that day. He'd been collecting erotica for a "local lady," wouldn't say who. He'd even asked me to find him a fertility pendant. I'm thick.

  George had probably been caught—by Clipper's men, hard at their electronic wizardry? He must have been trying to approach this house unseen, hoping, poor fool, to contact his former wife and please her by a gift right up her own street. No mistake there, from what she'd so enticingly revealed. Candice and her bedroom gadgetry would occupy Ryan long enough to give me a head start.

  For the sake of appearances I nipped back into the restroom, from which I planned to emerge, whistling noisily. Bentham looked up drunkenly from the couch.

  "Lovejoy. You've been with Candice."

  "Not me." I kept cool. A rumpus now would spoil things.

  "Don't he, you bastard." He tried to rise, fell back. "Sh
e fancied you from the outset. A tramp." His head wagged in drunken mystification. "I can't handle her, Lovejoy. She frightens me."

  "Take what you can get and scarper. A bird like her."

  "You're an animal. I'm an officer and a gentleman."

  Aye, he looked like one, with puke stains down his red mess jacket, and drunk paralytic.

  Ledger too had gone from the reception throng. About time.

  Pittsbury Wood was silent. I'm sure there are different sorts of silence. This particular night's silence was heavy, oppressive, though usually all that means is that the weather's turning sultry. Tonight was cold. No breeze. No rain. A moon was having a hard time of it, lifting its chin over cloud rims, then down again. That highwayman poem came to me from school as I stood waiting: "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas . . ." Romantic twaddle. Anyway, Boothie was around, with Decibel. I'd saved his life that day, so he'd not let me down. The old poacher's invisible presence warmed the chill from my spine.

  From where I stood near the edge of the wood I knew that beautiful New Black Field lay on my left. Six furlongs distant, round Charleston's Lx)ng Tom Field, Ledger's police would be waiting for me and for the murderer—in the wrong place, happily, thinking poor George had been killed there. Only the true boss murderer, Ryan, would come to the New Black here on the edge of the wood, for only he'd given orders that had done George in. And where. And he'd dig the leopard up to prove it. Of course I didn't know what to expect, but there were some certainties. One was that Ryan would come. He had to, to protect the knowledge of where George Prentiss had died that night. And since I'd announced to the whole wide world of the Advertiser's readership that I shared that knowledge, he had to come for me. There'd be no witnesses. He'd arrange a mock-up road accident, something elsewhere. I watched the big field glow in sudden moonlight, fade as swiftly into blackness.

  A good idea of mine, I approved inwardly, to choose Halloween. Local people don't wander abroad, especially in the last hour. They're not superstitious, of course—all that spooky rubbish is for kids' toffee papers and Hollywood matinees.

  These witching hours are a godsend to a poacher. And he'd got Decibel, loyal and silent hunter. Can you honestly think of two better allies? I mean, anywhere? The police surrounding Long Tom Field would be chilled to the marrow. Serve them right.

  Nothing out there yet. Another quick moon rinse, then blackness settled. I tried to think my way through the tenor part of Rincke's Mass, the Introibo, but found myself dangerously near to humming aloud and shut up.

  Ledger's police were getting paid overtime for squatting in a ditch doing nowt. I was out in the same cold, cold night free of charge. I smiled. Ledger's lads probably had their ears out for the sewing-machine chatter of my old Ruby. Tough luck. Here in the forest sounds carried oddly. They become distorted, every susurrus a threat.

  Leaving the party at Dogpits and cutting up through the northeast pasture had been easy. So easy, in fact, that I'd wondered if Ledger had deliberately made it so. Unprofitable line of thought, that. No. I'd simply been Hereward the Nightwalker, silently slow round the winter wheat field. I'll bet even Boothie would have had a hard time finding me, if I hadn't told him my exact waiting spot. "Don't move," he'd cautioned, "once you're in position."

  Well, I wasn't moving. Movement makes noise. It makes stealthy crackles.

  I wasn't moving. So why had I just heard a crackle? I listened to nothing. I relistened, very closely, to nothing. To utterly absolutely nothing?

  To a cra-ckle . . . then nothing.

  Relax, Lovejoy. Tom Booth and good old fang-toting Decibel were around. Allies. I'd already proved that, hadn't I? Relax, because no noise is nothing is absolute zero.

  Leaf rasp. And cra . . . ckle. Now, noise is noise, no?

  No snuffle of night creatures, no comforting hoots, no badgers shuffling. Why not? I'd been standing still for yonks, so long that the fauna had begun to disregard me. But now they'd gone silent. But don't they only do that when somebody is moving in a wood?

  Not a wood. This wood.

  Going crackle? A pace a minute? Slower? My throat dried. Sweat dampened my hands. I didn't move. I felt like praying, swearing I hadn't moved, honestly God I haven't, as if that proved I'd not misbehaved.

  "I can hear you, Ryan." I spoke before I could think.

  The crackling stopped. Silence. A terrible wave of hate wafted at me from the dark.

  "Ryan?" I gulped. "The wood's surrounded." Something clicked, to my right.

  "Now, Councillor." A pathetic whimper. "Don't . . ."

  It wasn't Ryan. He'd never carry a gun. His wife had told me only last week he even turned westerns off television. And he only rented out the land for duck shoots, never went himself

  "Boothie?" I said, sweating down my back. My legs began trembling. But you'd never hear Tom Booth click a gun hammer, not unless he wanted you to. "Decibel?" A croak. "Here, boy."

  Crackle. Oh God. Moving around. Crackle.

  "Clipper?" I said louder. "Clipper?" But Clipper and his men wouldn't come, not with the police skulking within earshot.

  "Major?" Too drunk to stand. "Ollie?" I croaked, "Candice? Harold Ayliffe? Enid? Sir John? Winstanley?"

  Another click, close and deliberate. The second hammer. And a rustle, as in arms raised when somebody—

  I screeched and ran nightblind, arms ahead, the killer plunging after. No doubts now. I was whimpering, rushing hunched, my eyes screwed up against malicious whipping undergrowth. Direction didn't matter. Distance was everything.

  But I swear that bloody foliage had it in for me. It snatched my top hat off. It had a high old time lashing my face, scratching my hands, neck, head. My thatch of hair was drag-combed over my face, thorns stabbing my skin.

  The killer's breath was stertorous. I could hear him. I fled through a sharp groove where water suddenly sucked my feet under. Then the forest floor slammed up, jarring me so my teeth rattled. The ridge? A thinning, suddenly easier passage. I thrashed on in a straight line. I must be on the Celtic ridge, higher than the rest of the wood.

  And I saw the fire, only a glimpse, but a definite bonfire among the trees. A bole thumped my chest as I changed direction, ploughing along the arc of raised ground. Thinner meant faster. My chest was searing so I hadn't strength to bawl for help. Wavering, I battered yelping along the ridge until I was about opposite the fire, then slithered down among brambles and shoved through a small brook making a hell of a noise, no silent Trapper Jim.

  But stupidly I'd made an angle for him to cut across. He too'd seen the fire. His crashing pursuit was to my right, encroaching, trying to cut me off from the fire and nearly succeeding. I flopped wetly into water, some small pond, floundered through and ran low, blindly, arms out and careering into everything in my panic. Twenty steps, just enough to make him change direction, then a ducking spring right, directly toward the flickering.

  Chanting. Scouts? Guides? Anyway, a trillion witnesses.

  "Boothie," I gasped, shaky from exertion. God, I wished I'd kept up circuit training, but I'd only done it once, half an hour to please Magdelene.

  I forced through, smashing foliage. A bonfire was there in a small clearing, but no people. Jesus. I moaned, ran as the man butted through the tangle behind me, his breath an audible fast sough.

  Fastest way across. I ran at the fire, leapt through with my lunatic cloak flying out behind me—and tumbled on Enid.

  They are there in my mind yet: Enid, eyes opening as I hurtled onto her, three other kneeling women, mouths opening to scream. I fetched them all down in mid-chant, their white gowns flashing legs and arms as we rolled over in sparks, smoke, and their frightened screeches. With my yowling plea, gibberish, it must have seemed like Doomsday.

  They scrabbled up and ran, screaming. All except poor batty Enid, who, with the silent calm of madness, got herself together and knelt, eyes on me. I was spent, utterly done for.

  "Lovejoy."

  Billiam was there, step
ping sideways round the fire. He looked in as bad a state as me, gasping, matted, disheveled. He held a double-barreled shotgun. It went up and down with his rasping respiration.

  "No," I pleaded. I tried to crawl, put my hands together in supplication. I'm pathetic.

  He tilted his head for me to move away from Enid. I hauled myself up beside her. She rose, solemn and docile. I stepped behind her, almost retching. Billiam moved, aimed.

  "Protect me, Enid," I panted, keeping her between me and the gun.

  "Magister?" She looked at me, eyes blank.

  "The gun won't harm you," I bleated. "Honest."

  Billiam sidestepped, looked along the barrels at me. And Enid, bless her, said, "Yes, Magister." She walked one pace between me and mad frigging Billiam. Her arms were outstretched protectively. I swear she was smiling. I cringed and hunched over, whimpering, arms wrapped round my head, eyes closed. The explosion made me whine one long loud whine.

  Silence. The only rasping breathing left was mine. A footfall, soft. I was untouched. What. . . ?

  A dog's cold snout touched my hand. I screeched, leapt away on my bum, and saw Decibel standing over me, coming to lick my face. Then he went to Enid and nuzzled industriously at her cheek, sneezing when a hair strayed.

  Boothie was standing over Billiam's darkstained prostrate form in the firelight. He held his shotgun the way countrymen do, lock across his left wrist and the gun pointing down.

  "Enid," I said. She was so still. Decibel had lost interest and was wanting more night games, the psychopath.

  "She's not hurt, Lovejoy." Boothie's remark was so full of criticism I'd have clouted him if I'd had the strength. "It was my gun, not Billiam's."

  "You've killed him?" I got up, trembling.

  Tom's leathery old face was carefully void of expression. "He was chasing you, with intent to kill, when he stuck his foot in an ancient mantrap. His gun went off accidentally and he blew his own face open."