The Glimpses of the Moon (43 page)

‘Just a couple of questions, my dear fellow, if you don't mind,' said the Major. And the Rector sighed histrionically. ‘First,' said the Major, ‘did you ever suspect that it was him?'

‘Not really, no,' said Fen. ‘This wasn't a case in which there was too little evidence; it was a case in which there was far too much. The only thing was that when I heard the details of the death of Mavis Trent, it did just occur to me that if she'd been murdered, the killer might be a policeman.'

‘Why was that?'

‘The fingerprints had been wiped off her bag before it was
thrown into the Burr after her. Now, most people think that water, and especially running water, will eliminate prints; and sometimes it will. But then again, sometimes it won't - and that's the sort of detail that would be likely to be known to a policeman rather than to anyone in any other profession, except perhaps detective-story writing.'

‘Did Luckraft murder Mavis, do you think?'

Fen shrugged. ‘Let's say that I think it wasn't an accident. She
could
have been wiping her bag, using a man's cheap handkerchief, immediately before she tumbled and fell; all one can say is that it makes a rather queer sequence of accidents … As to the fun she was going to have with Andrew before dismissing him, which she mentions in The Letter to George, I'm afraid it was that same old silly thing; I'm pregnant by you, darling, and what are you going to do about it? Then, after a bit of teasing, no, of course I'm not really, I was just having you on. But I'm afraid she was never allowed to get to the stage of issuing her
d
é
menti.
One shove, and over she goes, dropping her bag on the way. The murderer picks it up, wipes it, and throws it after her. Then he waits until he's sure she's really dead. Then he goes home.'

Despite the warmth of the Rayburn, the Major shivered a little. ‘Ghastly,' he said. ‘Poor, poor silly child … What does Luckraft himself have to say about it all, in his confession?'

‘Doesn't deny the
affaire.
Doesn't deny The Letter. Doesn't deny the assignation. Doesn't deny that he went to Hole Bridge that night. But Mavis, he says, never turned up. So he waited half an hour or so, then left.
É finito.'

‘Well, so
do
you think he did it?'

‘Oh yes, obviously he did. For one thing, eliminate The Letter and the blackmail over it, and there's no strong ascertainable reason left for Andrew's murdering his brother. Incidentally, regardless of the fact that it's what used to be called a capital charge, he's going to insist on pleading Guilty, and nothing the lawyers say will budge him. He'll just make a short statement saying that George was sponging on him, and that he suddenly lost his temper and killed impulsively. So there won't be any testimony that isn't purely formal - nothing about Mavis, nothing about The Letter, nothing about anything. He'll simply
go to prison and be kept there a good long time. And the Press will be furious, but there'll be nothing whatever they can do about it.'

‘Reporters,' said the Major. ‘Never could stand the fellers. Padmore quite a decent sort, but the rest of them …'

‘Mrs Clotworthy.' At their current rate of progress, Fen was beginning to feel, his dissertation would last all night. ‘Mrs Clotworthy in her cottage, Luckraft in the old toolshed (where he'd carefully hidden the bust of Gladstone, in readiness for its metamorphic function), the boy Oliver Meakins on the lookout for healing herbs, me passing The Stanbury Arms on my way to the footpath which leads from Holloway Lane to Chapel Lane.

‘And then it all dissolves into farce. A puffing female messenger hammers on Mrs Clotworthy's door, which is at once opened to her. She delivers her tidings: Sandra is about to become a mother again. Enthralled, Mrs Clotworthy locks up and dashes away. So Luckraft's bit of misdirection has for the moment failed. Not quite certain of what to do next, he moves forwards, treads on the rake, whose handle clouts him on the brow, loses his balance and falls backwards, hitting his head so hard on the old mangle as to render him unconscious for ten minutes or so. Meanwhile, enter me. I see the sack with George Luckraft's head in it, assume it to be the promised pig's head, and pick it up and take it away without thinking to examine it more closely. It is either my constant companion, or sitting on top of my refrigerator, till early evening, when at last, following the discovery of a headless corpse in the Botticelli tent, it occurs to me to take a proper look at it - and if there was ever a detective in fiction more ridiculously circumstanced, I have yet to hear of him.

‘So the head gets back not to Luckraft - who for hours hasn't the remotest idea what can have happened to it - but to the police.

‘Widger and Ling interview Luckraft, as they interview everyone who entered the Botticelli tent during the time when the medical evidence says that the corpse's arm was cut off. And during that interview, Widger has told me, they inadvertently let a couple of cats out of the bag. In the first place, Luckraft
learns that Sir John Honeybourne has said that the head, no matter how badly damaged, can be “reconstituted”, and a reasonably accurate simulacrum of it produced. In the second place, he learns that Widger and Ling are themselves going to take the head to Sir John as soon as their press conference at six o'clock is over.

‘So Luckraft is once again in deadly peril - in peril that the head will be identified before he has a chance to get away to Africa. (He daren't, of course, try to get away before he has the excuse of the leave due to him: the hounds would be in full cry almost before he was across the Channel.) And that chance he simply must have. All leave will probably, in the circumstances, be suspended. But Luckraft has had his leave cancelled once. If he takes it now, in spite of its being cancelled again, his action will be put down, for a few days anyway, to simple bloody-mindedness. And by the time anyone gets to know anything different, he will have disappeared: no summons to Interpol will do the smallest good, if he can only have a little breathing-space in which to vanish.

‘The thing for him to do, then, is to muddy the waters. The police are no fools, but even sages are confusable up to a point. And Luckraft's next step in this direction almost makes me feel an affection for him, ghoul though he undoubtedly was. Lingering with the other witnesses until the press conference began and they were free to leave, he happened to find in a pocket of the civilian suit he was wearing a relic of a small nephew's birthday party which he had attended some weeks previously. There had been crackers - good crackers, crackers as they used to be before the manufacturers decided they could get away with fillings of the cheapest possible rubbish. Luckraft had won a Dying Pig; and there, in his pocket, it had remained ever since its charms, at the party, had given place to rival attractions.

‘You know the thing I mean, of course: it's a sort of small balloon which you blow up with a view to letting the air out and producing, by means of an ingenious device in the neck, one of the most hideous and realistic bubbling screams you ever heard.

‘And Luckraft thought that he could use this. He
had
to get
that head back before Sir John Honeybourne could work on it. So, he would set a trap. He would so horribly distract Widger and Ling, before they had a chance to make contact with Sir John, that with any luck at all they would plunge into the fray leaving Widger's car unlocked, with the head in it for the taking.

‘And so it happened: the dreadful shriek from the back garden, Widger and Ling rushing round one side of Sir John's house, Luckraft slipping round the other - and the substitution of sacks.

‘That substitution was, of course, strictly a bravura touch. Luckraft had the sack with Tabitha's head in it, which he had taken that morning from Mrs Clotworthy's porch (more misdirection!). Before driving to Sir John's isolated house, and concealing himself in the twilight, in the wilderness at the front, he waited for Widger and Ling to come. They came. Luckraft crept round to the back and operated his Dying Pig. Then, while his superiors vainly beat the bushes in their search for the cause of the scream, it was back to the front, exchange Tabitha for George, gumshoe back to his car and drive quietly away.

‘And this time, he was taking no more risks with George's head. He weighted it with stones and sank it in the Glaze -where the frogmen, I understand, at last found it yesterday morning. No, Luckraft was taking no more risks with George's head - or with anything else. He was wise there, I think; what with one thing and another, Widger and Ling were completely bemused already, and by the Friday afternoon, nearly a week after the murder, they still hadn't the ghost of an idea who the victim was, let alone who had murdered him. But then Widger suddenly realized something very simple that he ought to have realized long before.'

‘He was visiting you that Friday afternoon,' said the Major dreamily. ‘There wouldn't be any connection, I suppose?'

‘Certainly not. No connection whatever. He needed a rest, so we just talked about life in general.'

‘H'm,' said the Major.

‘Yes, Widger had this idea, and he made a lot of telephone calls, and one of them was successful. Hence the police cavalcade - somewhat obstructed, you'll remember, by a variety of
factors - which we saw heading from Glazebridge into Burraford on Saturday morning. They were on their way to pick up Luckraft, and not actually arrest him, at any rate take him back for some pretty strict and prolonged questioning. Well, they got there just in time: Luckraft and his wife were packed and on the point of leaving. And the questioning proved not to be necessary - any more than the small army they had with them proved necessary to overcome Luckraft's resistance. He came quietly. In Glazebridge, after all the due warnings had been given, he offered his confession, regarding which the only doubtful thing was his refusal to admit that he had killed Mavis Trent. I think he did it, but I also think that he was deeply ashamed of having done it. Ah well, I suppose now we shall never know. Not for sure.'

‘Ah,' said the Major. ‘No wonder Widger and Ling didn't want to take de Brisay with them, and have him watch them arrest one of their own people.'

Fen yawned and stretched. ‘And that, gentlemen, I think, is that. I don't know if anyone would care for a hand of bézique, or a -'

‘Oh, no, you don't,' said the Major. ‘You don't get away without answering the one really fascinating question.'

‘And that is?'

‘How was almost all of a big man's arm smuggled out of the Botticelli tent? The Bale sisters were watching everyone like hawks, and I'll take my dying oath their evidence is reliable. The only thing the arm could possibly have been in was the Rector's cricket bag - which it wasn't, as Father Hattrick and I can both tell you.'

‘Ta ever so,' said the Rector.

‘So how was it spirited away?
How?'

Fen seemed amused. ‘By the Chesterton Effect,' he said.

‘The
what?'

‘There are two Chesterton effects, actually, which are used in the Father Brown stories. The first you've just exemplified. It consists in asking the wrong question.'

‘In what way was my question wrong?'

‘You should have asked,
“Why
was the dead man's arm spirited away?”'

‘Well, because it identified him in some fashion, that's obvious.'

‘Y-yes. Fair enough.'

‘If you ask me,' the Rector interposed, ‘the whole puzzle arises simply because the medicos foozled their job. The arm wasn't cut off during the Fete at all, but at some much earlier time.'

‘No, the medical evidence was all right,' said Fen. ‘And that brings us to the second and more important Chesterton effect: even when you've picked the right question, the answer to it is a paradox. So: “Why was the dead man's arm cut off?” Answer: “Because he hadn't got an arm.”'

For a second or two the Major simply gaped. Then, with a moan, he collapsed in his chair like a pricked bladder. ‘Amputation,' he mumbled.

‘Exactly. And a fairly recent one, too, or the evidence of it would have spread upwards into the shoulder, and could hardly have been missed. But a recent amputation - George had got his arm crushed in a winch, by the way, and had to have it taken off, almost in its entirety, at Freedom Fields - would be much easier to disguise. There would be clip marks in the skin, and suture material in the wound; the main blood vessels would still fairly evidently have been recently tied. But there would still not be much shaping of the stump - it'd still be rounded rather than pointed; the main nerves would still be cut straight across; the sawn edge of bone would still be obviously fresh. To make it seem as if the
whole arm
had just recently been hacked off, you'd only have to remove a segment about half the length of your index finger. And the Bale sisters certainly wouldn't be on the watch for as small a bulge as that would make; if they noticed it at all, they'd simply assume that Luckraft had overstuffed one of his pockets.

‘There was Widger's problem; and once he'd thought of the simple and only answer to it, all he had to do was ring hospitals and ask them what arm amputations had taken place recently, and what the name of the patient was. It took him a bit of time to get round to Freedom Fields and the (unusual) name Luckraft. But he did it in the end.'

There was a long silence when Fen finished speaking. The wind had dropped but the rain had increased, and there were already bubblings and gurglings in the gutter which ran along the front of the cottage. With its two picked partridge carcases, the table had a slightly mortuary air; but the wine was completely gone, and no trace remained, either, of the brandied peaches and cheese. Two thin slices of peeled cucumber clung to the sides of the salad bowl, in whose bottom a baby radish sat steeped in a little pool of french dressing. From the stove came the pleasant sound and scent of coffee percolating.