The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin Read Free Book Online

is it,’ he asked, ‘that may or may not have gone in?’
    â€˜The Compulsory Service Order.’ The man from Sweb sighed, with every evidence of genuine regret. ‘We
ask
people to cooperate, of course, but if they won’t, then there’s nothing else for it.’
    â€˜But couldn’t you save time and trouble by compelling everyone to cooperate straight away?’
    â€˜Oh, no,’ said the man from Sweb, shocked. ‘That’d be dictatorship, wouldn’t it? Sweb wouldn’t do anything like that. Dear me, no… The only thing was, I didn’t feel the Rector was in quite the right mood for me to give him the order personally, so now I’ve put it in The Letter-box.’
    â€˜Let’s hope so.’
    â€˜Of course I have.’ The man from Sweb re-buttoned his grey overcoat efficiently across his middle. ‘Well, I must be away, away, away. Anyone for a lift?’
    But there was no one for a lift, since Fen lived close by, and Padmore was heading back to Burraford to have another go at Gobbo, whereas the man from Sweb’s headquarters were in Glazebridge, in the opposite direction.
    Though lunch was still pending, the man from Sweb puristically said ‘Good afternoon,’ and trotted off to his Mini.
    â€˜Ought to have remembered to tell him to get his people to do something about that pylon,’ said Padmore, on whom the Pisser had made its usual abiding first impression. ‘You’ll have a word with this Youings, then?’
    Fen said that if possible he would. He still, however, lacked any real interest in the Routh-Hagberd horrors, and off-hand, considered it unlikely that Gobbo’s reminiscences, even if correct, were going to make any serious difference to anyone so long as they remained so feebly supported.
    â€˜That tyre,’ said Padmore sadly. ‘I’m going to have to change that wheel,’
    Fen walked with him for fifty yards, back towards Burraford, and parted from him at the entrance to the Thouless-Youings-Dickinson lane. They had arranged to meet again later on, at the Church Fete.
    â€˜Watneys brings us all together,’ Fen heard the Major singing in the distance. ‘What we want is Watneys.’

3. Youings: A Rebuttal
    Various the roads of life; in one
All terminate, one lonely way
We go; and ‘Is he gone?’
Is all our best friends say.
    Walter Savage Landor:
Wisdom of Life and Death
1
    As he walked up the lane, towards Youing’s pig farm and his own cottage, Fen heard more music.
    To be accurate, what he heard was not so much music as sounds. The sounds were being produced by Broderick Thouless, on the piano in the hut in his garden where he worked.
    Film-music composers are just as liable to type-casting as actors and actresses. Chance pitchforks them into working on a picture which turns out specially successful, and subsequently, regardless of whether they have contributed anything ponderable to the picture’s success or not, producers go on for years and years mechanically re-hiring them for further pictures of the same kind, with the result that one spends his working life in a perpetual seascape, another writing wah-wahs on trumpet parts for people surfacing in mud-baths into which they have comically fallen, a third assembling electronic bees for nude love scenes, and so on.
    For more than a decade now, Broderick Thouless had resentfully specialized in monsters.
    For him, type-casting had set in with a highbrow horror film called
Bone Orchard,
a Shepperton prestige production which against all probability had made a profit of over a quarter of a million pounds. By nature and inclination a gentle romantic composer whose idiom would have been judged moderately progressive by Saint-Saëns or Chaminade, Thouless had launched himself at the task of manufacturing the
Bone Orchard
score like a berserker rabbit trying to topple a tiger, and by overcompensating for his instinctive