Free The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin Page A

mooed, a fresh line of pylons sprouted in the only combe hitherto unaffected, the Dickinsons started packing for Canada, and three miles from Routh’s farm a puppy was found suffocated to death, after long and interesting struggles, in a sealed polythene bag. On Monday 22 August, the Bust girl went to a school-friend’s home for tea, and overstayed her time.
    This was bad, being certain to result in much energetic slapping of wrists, calves and bottom.
    The Bust girl’s parents offered the rare spectacle of a married couple neither complementary nor opposite, but identical -identical, that is, in everything except sex and appearance. In conversation they quite often actually chorused, without any sort of pre-arrangement, and in matters of discipline they were equally unanimous. The Bust children were pitied, however, less because of their parents’ simultaneous walloping fits, which though frequent were short-lived, than because of their parents’ joint sense of humour, which was almost unbelievably imbecile in character. In the Michael Innes phrase, the Busts were not people with whom a joke readily loses its first freshness. Fourteen years after the birth of their daughter Anna May, they could still reduce each other to tears of helpless laughter merely by mentioning her by her full name; and they thought it a masterstroke to have followed up their initial inanity by calling their son John Will.
    â€˜Lucky for them they didn’t come to me for the christenings,’ said the Rector, ‘or I’d have held their silly heads down in the font till they drowned.’
    But it was, of course, the punitive rather than the humorous aspect of Anna May’s parents which chiefly occupied her mind as she hurried, towards 7.30 p.m. that Monday, along the little-used lane which flanked Bawdeys Meadow to the north. As she explained later to the police, she was quite sure about the timebecause her watch was a good one and she had had plenty of reason (she dolefully added) to keep looking at it.
    Most of Bawdeys Meadow is open pasture; at one corner of it, however, there survives an ancient, ugly copse, relic of one of the insanely finicking property deals which have been the recreation of farmers from time immemorial. The trees grow thickly there; though not in fact dead, they are dead-seeming. Litter strews the spongy ground - not picnickers’ litter, but the litter of people who, with disagreeable things to get rid of, have found a conformably disagreeable spot in which to dispose of them - and light filters only sparsely through the tangle of crooked, mossy boughs. A high, neglected hedge hides the copse from the lane, except at one point where a sagging gate gives access.
    That particular Monday evening was chilly and overcast: the weather had made a false dusk two hours in advance of the true one. Hurrying along towards home and retribution, the backs of her plump legs tingling in anticipation, Anna May was only very vaguely aware of the two voices muttering together somewhere on the other side of the hedge. She had other, more pressing things to think about.
    But then, with terrifying suddenness, one of the voices skirled upwards to a mindless squawk of pure dread.
    The sound of the blow was followed by a crashing in the underbrush, approaching rapidly. Still moving forward automatically, Anna May arrived at the copse gate just as Routh staggered into view out of the trees.
    His caved-in right temple, as yet scarcely masked by bleeding, showed like a hollow punched in a ball of white plasticine. Groping mindlessly for support, he reeled and fell; Anna May heard the small detonation of his arm snapping under him. Abruptly the blood gushed, first from his mouth and then from his ruined brain. He twitched three times, very violently, before finally lying still.
    Afterwards, Anna May remembered that there had been a sound of someone else moving, and that the sound ceased when she happened to scuff