The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin Page A

car and drove away in the opposite direction, for a preliminary talk with Anna May. Luckraft remained on guard, keeping at bay the sightseers who now began to trickle along in response to the Bust parents’ agitated gossiping. One enterprising middle-aged lady, a Mrs Jewell, climbed a near-by tree in order to get a proper look, but almost at once was taken dizzy and fell to the ground, fortunately suffering nothing worse than a few scratches and bruises in the process. After that, by bawling angrily from his post at the copse gateway, Luckraft managed to prevent all further tree-climbing, bank-clambering and hedge-peering, and since in default of these there was practically nothing to be seen other than the familiar blue-clad bulk of Luckraft himself, most people responded reasonably promptly to the demand that they keep moving.
    Meanwhile, in Burraford, Routh’s head was making the first of its three posthumous appearances.
    *
    A Routh-type female, so greedy for money and so lost to self-respect that she was prepared to work even for Mrs Leeper-Foxe, had agreed to cook the breakfasts at the Old Rectory, and was firm that on this particular morning there had been nothing amiss in the dining-room when she had put the food on the table. Two minutes later there was. Intent on bacon, sausages, kidneys, tomato and egg, Mrs Leeper-Foxe in her mauve housecoat at first failed to notice the last respects that were being paid her from the armchair in the corner by the open window. She had, indeed, actually sat down and served herself, and was lifting the first loaded forkful to her mouth, before she became aware of being stared at by a football-shaped object with no iris or pupil to its eyes, and with a nasty dent on one side. And even then, her reaction was not immediate. Her hand continued to move upwards, her mouth opened, and in went the food. She even started to chew.
    Then realization dawned.
    The food exploded all over the table, making way for a screaming fit like a steam engine with its whistle stuck. In a few seconds more there were two steam engines, the Routh-type breakfast cook soaring high in hysterical descant, Mrs Leeper-Foxe becoming intermittent from lack of breath, as if an engineer had climbed up on top of her and was wrestling with her valve. Their combined uproar rushed headlong from the house and up the lane past The Stanbury Arms - where Jack Jones was so taken aback by it that he half got out of bed - and eventually came to rest against a buffer of alarmed people who had emerged from the various cottages along its route. Some sort of coherence being at last established, two men were dispatched to the Old Rectory to investigate, neither of them, as it happened, having so far heard the news of the discovery in Bawdeys Meadow. They were consequently gratified, but not surprised, to find that Mrs Leeper-Foxe and the breakfast cook had apparently succumbed to a joint morbid hallucination: what the armchair contained was not Routh’s severed head, or anybody else’s, but a life-size eighteenth-century bust in white marble.
    This object eventually turned out to be the property of Broderick Thouless, the composer. Through a tortuous sequence ofbastardies Thouless was descended, or imagined he was, from William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden; and it was Cumberland the bust purported to represent, It stood normally on a mahogany pedestal in a corner of honour in Thouless’s parlour, but since he was currently engrossed all day and every day in working on a film called
Unalive,
he did not, as it happened, enter this room for a full forty-eight hours previous to discovering his loss and telephoning an indignant complaint to Glazebridge police station, which he did practically simultaneously with the bust’s re-appearing in the Old Rectory. In the commotions consequent on Routh’s murder it took the police some time to make the necessary connection, and it was not, therefore,