The Glimpses of the Moon Read Online Free Page B

and countermarched, criss-crossing one another at all angles, like files of army motor-cyclists giving a display at a tattoo; it was to Burraford, for preference, that the Board brought distinguished foreign visitors when it wanted to exhibit its method of never using one pylon where three would do as well. Underneath the Board’s jumble of ironmongery there were, however, fields, hedges, trees, brooks, footpaths and farm animals. To your right, on a reasonably clear day, you could see part of the south-eastern escarpment of the Moor. To your left you could see the eighteenth-century façade of Aller House. Ahead - about a mile ahead where the lane sloped upwards to a series of narrow bends and the hedges changed to high stone walls and embankments - you could see Aller hamlet. Here the Rector lived, and here Fen had rented a cottage for the three months of his stay. If you carried on beyond Aller, for five miles or so, you arrived eventually at Glazebridge, the small but affluent market town which was the centre of the district.
    Owing to the Major’s hip, progress was slow; but Fen’s sack weighed heavy enough to make him glad to amble, and Pad-more was clearly not athletic at the best of times. They met, and were greeted by, a steady trickle of people coming away from the preparations for the Church Fete. Pattering along a yard or two ahead of them, Fred frequently turned his head to make sure they were still there. He seemed to be afraid that if he relaxed his vigilance at all, a pub would spring up magically by the roadside, and suck the Major in.
    Padmore gave an account of himself.
    He was not, it appeared, properly speaking a crime reporter at all. In reality he was an expert on African affairs, and had returned from the dark continent three months previously with the cheerless distinction of having been expelled from more emergent black nations, more expeditiously, than any otherjournalist of any nationality whatever. Even Ould Daddah and Dr Hastings Banda had expelled him, he said - the latter inadvertently, under the impression that he was a Chinese.
    â€˜Underdeveloped countries with overdeveloped susceptibilities,’ said Padmore sourly.
    There had been no question, he went on, of his trying to knock African aspirations; on the contrary, he sympathized with them. Simply, he had had a run of exceptionally bad luck. He would send off a cable censuring some dissident General at the exact moment when the General’s minions were successfully gunning down the palace guards, the Deputy Postmaster and the doorman at the television studios. Or he would praise the enlightened policies of a Minister already on his way to be sequestrated or hanged. Or he would commend the up-to-date safety precautions at an oil refinery which the next day would go up in flames, with fearsome loss of life. As a result of all this, eventually his paper, the
Gazette,
tiring of running indignant news items about their special correspondent’s various expulsions, had called him back to London, a call he had answered as soon as he could get out of the Zambian prison where he had been put because of an article drawing the world’s attention to how well President Kaunda was always dressed (this had been interpreted as imputing conspicuous waste in high places). The
Gazette
people had been very nice about it, Padmore said. They hadn’t at all blamed him. There had been no question of not keeping him on the strength. Nevertheless, no one had been able to find anything much for him to do until the night when Chief Detective Superintendent Mashman had given a party to celebrate his retirement after thirty years in the Force. All four of the
Gazette’s
senior crime staff had gone to this, and on their way back from it had driven rapidly into the back of a Bird’s Eye Frozen Foods lorry and been removed to hospital. So when the sensational news of Routh’s murder had come in, the following morning, Padmore had