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

across the hedge. ‘I wonder if you’d mind buying something for me. At the Fête, I mean.’
    â€˜Aren’t you going yourself?’
    â€˜Yes, but I can’t possibly buy
this.
It’s my scores for
The Mincer People.
I gave them with a lot of other junk to be sold on the Rectory Stall.’
    â€˜And now you want them back?’
    â€˜Good God, no. It’s just that no one in his senses is going to offer a penny for them, so if they’re left over they’ll be a sort of embarrassment, or at least, so I suppose.’
    â€˜Not to the Rector, surely.’
    â€˜Not, admittedly, to the Rector, but it won’t
be
him, it’ll be poor old Miss Endacott, who’s so shy of people, she practicallyfaints away whenever she catches sight of anybody. I’m sure she’d rather hang herself than face bringing the scores back to me, so you see, they’ve got to be disposed of somehow.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t mind buying them myself,’ Fen said.
    â€˜You would, you know,’ said Thouless, all at once speaking quite cheerfully. Consideration of
The Mincer People
had improved his emotional tone, so that he was now veering towards one of his unpredictable fits of euphoria. ‘Terrible stuff, you’ve never
heard
such a noise. There was one bit of kiss music, for a marvel, but by the time I got to it I’d done so many murders that it sounded exactly like another one.
Derngh!’
he exclaimed in his nose, imitating sforzato stopped horns. ‘And then
erk, skerk,’
he added, possibly attempting to convey ponticello strings. ‘And then there was one part where I got Jimmy to put the xylophone down on its side and play tremolandos on the resonators - unspeakable, that was. I can’t remember anything nastier I’ve done except for those sickening wailing violin harmonics in
Thing of Things.’
    â€˜All right, I’ll buy the scores for you, then,’ said Fen compliantly.
    â€˜Thanks. And now I think I’d better go indoors and turn out a spot of relief music before I eat,’ Thouless said. Relief music was his anodyne for the X-pictures, the example in hand at the moment being settings of poems from
A Child’s Garden of Verses. ‘
How’s your health these days?’ he added, as if Fen had applied to him for life insurance. ‘Good?’
    â€˜Yes, very good, thanks. Yours?’
    â€˜Indifferent,’ said Thouless. ‘Still, I suppose I’ve been worse, even if I can’t remember when. See you this afternoon, then.’
    â€˜See you this afternoon,’ Fen agreed, and went on up the lane until he came to Youings’s well-kept pig farm.
2
    In the yard beside the house, Youings was hobnobbing with a gigantic brood sow. A massive, fresh-faced, blond man of about forty, he was bent over double, addressing the sow practically nose to nose.
    â€˜ ’Ullo, my dear,’ he was saying to it tenderly in his mild Devon accent. ‘ ’Ow
are
you, then -
W1lf1
You funny littlething, you.’ The great creature grunted and swayed in satisfaction, its dugs wobbling like mottled blancmanges.
    â€˜Wilfreda, is it?’ said Fen. He had become accustomed, by now, to the fact that west-country sows often bore the same sort of names as the higher-born women in Thomas Hardy; for example, there was another of Youings’s which was called Eusalie. ‘Nice animal,’ Fen added with fake judiciousness.
    â€˜Ah, morning, Professor,’ said Youings, undoubling himself. ‘Yes, proper little wildego, this one.’ He meant harum-scarum, a description which seemed inapposite unless, as the reiterated ‘little’ suggested, he still thought of Wilfreda as a piglet.
    â€˜Cobby,’ Fen remarked, using a Devon word for well-knit, compact. This too was on the face of it inapposite, but since animal breeders have different standards of animal beauty from those of mere lookers-on,