Free The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin

the icy slush, while the lamb watched him in timid fascination. By the time the Major hobbled back that way, ten minutes later, the lamb had caught on.
    â€˜Look at that, then!’ Hagberd called triumphantly. ‘Bucking like a brumby!’ And the Major, though he frowned momentarily at this distasteful mention of horses, had to admit that it was a pleasant sight.
    â€˜Heinz Spaghetti makes a meal taste great,’ he sang, getting a curt but friendly nod from Hagberd, who, prevented by his incessant labours from ever watching television, simply assumed that this familiar neighbour had all of a sudden gone harmlessly mad.
    Though Hagberd was very content with his job with Clarence Tully, his animus against Routh remained unabated. If anything, feeding on the fact that he was no longer in a good position to know what Routh was up to, and so he came to imagine more horrors than there actually were (Routh’s deviation being perfectly controllable - like most such things - he was taking care to control it for the time being, as a matter of self-preservation). There was also Mrs Leeper-Foxe. A widow, Mrs Leeper-Foxe had been endowed by her late husband with a fat income from factory farms, and though too fastidious to have anything directly to do with them herself, undeniably was battening on de-beaked chickens, calves with induced anaemia and pinioned necks, pigs tearing each others’ tails off in desperation at being unable to move, and other such martyrs to the Britishcraving for ever greater quantities of ever more and more tasteless, un-nutritious, hormone-adulterated meat. Compounding her heinousness, Mrs Leeper-Foxe associated with Routh. As a matter of fact they were thrown together willy-nilly because no one else would associate with either of them.
    â€˜I don’t approve of speaking ill of people,’ the Rector said. ‘On the other hand, if you didn’t speak ill of Routh, you’d never be able to mention him at all.’ He added that Mrs Leeper-Foxe probably had several good qualities, though none of them had so far claimed his own attention, either directly or by hearsay.
    Invited by Mrs Leeper-Foxe to take sherry with her, Routh put on his best blue suit and tugged his forelock, making it clear how honoured he was that she should deign to be gracious to a lowly creature like himself; his financial state was precarious, and he probably had vague hopes of persuading her to underwrite him in some way. As to her, she wallowed in Routh’s respectfulness like a hippopotamus in a mud-bank. The unspeakable fawning on the ineffable, they sat together in what Mrs Leeper-Foxe called the withdrawing-room of the Old Rectory - which she had bought three years previously, and had redecorated at considerable expense - sipping Oloroso from minute glasses and deploring antiphonally the decay of the class structure. Not that Mrs Leeper-Foxe was in Burraford often or for long. She had two other houses; and in any case, being lazy as well as a donkey, she was deterred from frequent visiting by the mysterious unavailability of adequate domestic help.
    â€˜Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe are soul-mates,’ said the Major.
    â€˜Hogwash.’
    â€˜Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe are
Wahlverwandtschaften.’
    â€˜You should spend less time reading Goethe, Major, and more reading the Bible.’
    â€˜I read the Vulgate,’ said the Major, who did nothing of the kind.
    â€˜Old Red Socks’ll get you in the end, you’ll see. And you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you, will you?’
    â€˜No,’ the Major agreed, ‘I certainly shan’t be able to say that, shall I?’
    Meanwhile, unfortunate Hagberd got madder and madder.
    2
    The grass grew and was cut (Hagberd previously grabbing up all discoverable hen-pheasants and transferring them with their broods, in Booth’s Gin cartons borrowed from Isobel Jones, to safer places). The corn ripened, the cows