Moonspender (10 page)

"Bill. It's me. Lovejoy."

"
Mmmmh
?" He came awake slowly,
chomping and swallowing and rubbing his face. He peered, pulled himself up,
cast about and found a cobwebby bottle. Sighing and burping, he shared the
wine. Last year's elderberry, too sweet by a mile. Idly I gazed around while
his hooch blasted his brain back into its customary orbit. The place was a
mess. Gruesome farm instruments rusted. Planks flaked. Disintegrating sacks,
boxes
unrectangled
, plant pots in bent columns.
Jubilant spiders festooned comers, spinning webs almost audibly. A few bulbs
had hopefully shot green from a dissolving wheelbarrow. I let Toffee out. She
started to roam, putting her feet down gingerly, with her nose going like a
slumming rabbit.

"God, Bill. This is truly rural." I hate countryside.
All these emblems of uncontrollable nature really depressed me, but there was a
lovely old Suffolk scythe rusting on the wall. I'd try to talk him out of that,
soon as I got a minute.

"You wouldn't think so, Lovejoy. Not with the goings-on round
here in the black hours."

Ramparts is a few acres wedged in by Mrs. Ryan's estate, the dense
ancient Pittsbury Wood, Dogpits Farm, and our village.

"Owls and foxes, eh?" I sympathized.

"People. If I'd been a crime writer I'd have gone out to
watch."

"Still turning out bodice-rippers, eh?" Bill writes six
romance novels a year, under six pseudonyms. He has it down to a fine art, his
basic plots on wall charts.

"Why not?" Mention of his trade always makes him
barbary
. He gets a lot of hassle from posh writers.
"What's wrong with simply entertaining people? Folk like romance. Soap
beats eternal in the human breast. So literary nuts call my stuff
breast-sellers? I outsell them by two million copies a year."

"Don't ballock me," I said, narked. "I'm swigging
your rotten
plonk
, remember."

He mumbled a sorry, and with true writer's skill uncorked another
dusty bottle with his teeth. I wish I could do that. "It was all right
sending Ben Cox to you, wasn't it, Lovejoy? He was asking for somebody who knew
the local antiquities game."

"Aye. That's what I came about." The fresh bottle was
better, thank heavens. "Is he okay?"

"Ben? Straight as a die. Known him since school days, same
class in St. Edmundsbury." He smiled, a bit shyly. "I ask him a few
historical details for my romances. The authentic touch."

That settled, I now wanted my pen'orth. "So he wasn't
anything to do with the night noises? I mean, Ledger's already had me in."

"Typical bobby. Doesn't he know you're a born townie?"
He chuckled reminiscently. "No, Lovejoy. That was some blokes over
Pittsbury Wood, playing silly sods. Probably badger-baiters. They were talking
about them last night at the Treble Tile. Good wine, Eh?"

"Great," I said.

"Here, Lovejoy." He watched me persuade Toffee into her
basket. "What do you think of Tanzie Heartsease for my new
pseudonym?"

"Great," I said thinking, God.

"Lying sod." He went narked, really showed a flash of
threat, gone as quickly as it arrived. "Still, Lovejoy. Your new
ladyfriend likes my books, if you don't."

"My who?" I was smiling at his merry banter, ready to
leave with Toffee reclining like a princess on a palanquin.

"Mrs. Prentiss." He came with me, grinning. "I
heard you were chatting her auntie up in her new restaurant."

Smiling at my most sincere, but now with difficulty, I cracked
back that my acquaintances would rather read a train ticket than his gunge, but
was so shaken I reeled in to the White Hart as soon as I was round the bend in
the road. Billiam had left me the equation: Darling Candice equals newly
widowed Mrs. George Prentiss. Couldn't be true . . . could it?

The antique that Mrs. York wanted suddenly deserved priority.
Things were cobbling together to form a sinister picture, with me in the
foreground, too near poor dead George.

"Hellfire, Toffee. Look at its size."

The bull heard and raised its gigantic head, giving me a stare. The
field was huge, stuck to the north end of Pittsbury Wood. A thick hawthorn
hedge rimmed the footpath that runs from the river path to the road half a mile
off. A herd of cows noshed grass in the next field. I leaned on the gate,
examining possibilities.

Toffee raised her head, yawned, settled back. She'd grown heavier
as I'd walked from the White Hart—it's about a mile—so I stuck the basket on
the ground. And saw Tom Booth. He grinned at my squawk of alarm.

"You stupid burke, Boothie." I was already nervy, out
here a million leagues from civilization.

"I made enough din, Lovejoy."

The old devil had slunk up to scare me, his joke. He's a stocky
man, pale and deep, not at all the wiry poacher of legend. I eyed him uneasily
in case he was carrying dead. He's all bulging brown tweeds. This very moment
he might be a walking gibbet, slain creatures dangling under that jacket. He's
our village billiards champion. Of course not as good as Mary Queen of
Scots—between love affairs she was actually the greatest billiards champ in
history—but able on the table. "It's all right, Lovejoy. I'm clean."

I'm not really squeamish. No, honestly. But life's important to a
pheasant, isn't it? Bound to be. He takes orders at the Queen's Head. 

"Admiring Charleston, are you?" Boothie spat expertly,
lit a foul clay pipe. "Yon big bugger
killt
George Prentiss."

"Aye. What was George doing strolling across Charleston's
field at night?"

"Dunno. I was seeing to the river, down Seven Arches."
"Which way was George going, Boothie?"

"Gawd, Lovejoy. I'd not thought of that." We looked at
the terrain, thinking. The footpath crosses the field, then forks right through
Pitts-bury Wood; left brings you out at Dogpits. Well, so what? Round here,
footpaths are free and literally thousands of years old.

"Was George coming or going?" I wondered aloud, keeping
my voice even. "Message in a bottle if you can find out, Boothie,
eh?" For all I know these old country
wallahs
might be able to tell from looking at the floor, like Red Indians.

"Right. I'll listen out. O'course," he added, ever so
casually, "this isn't Charleston's usual run. He's normally in Little
Tom."

Farmers give fields names. The biggest field on a farm is called
Big Tom, the field we were looking at. So Little Tom was the one with the herd.

Odderer and odderer. "Did Charleston jump that far
gate?" The five-barred gate between the two fields.

Boothie guffawed. "Him? Jump a gate? Yon bugger'd go through
it, open or shut. Only thing he jumps is cows. Evil bastard." The gate
looked undamaged.

Boothie's gaze was serene. He nodded when he saw I'd got the
point. The gate had been opened when George was halfway across, and Charleston
had flattened him like a night express. God. I turned to see

Boothie moving silently off at a languid lope, his trousers
horribly baggy.

I called after him, "Does Ledger know somebody opened
it?"

"Who'd tell him?" he said over his shoulder.

"Boothie." My tone must have done it. He paused while I
asked, "Was it you making that racket in Pittsbury Wood last week?"

He laughed, knocked out his pipe and like a good countryman spat
to fizz out the glowing ashes. "Ever heard a noisy poacher, Lovejoy?"
He shook his head at the mystifying incomprehension of townsfolk.

"Campers, then?" I yelled after.

"None hereabouts since the major fetched hounds."

The sky was flooding darkness on a chiller wind. The woods began
to make that near-whistling when the breeze stiffens off the sea estuary. The
great bull was suddenly still, his massive head raised toward the trees. Had he
heard something? The forest seemed to loom as the rain clouds lowered in an
unpleasantly stealthy collision, a gathering of ominous strength.

"Here, Boothie," I said, intending a joke, but the track
was empty. Gone. There was only me and the bull, standing in the path of
something primeval and horrid. Meteorologists might describe it as a simple
thunderstorm, but it was me standing alone out here, not them. I began
whistling loudly and walked off at increasing pace.

"You're no bloody help," I muttered crossly at Toffee.
She didn't even wake, idle little sod. Typical female, leaving me out here
hurrying to get us both safe home from that
eery
shrilling darkening wood, and her safe under the blanket.

A tractor bloke pulling a cart laden with sugar beet gave me a
lift to Bures. I know Don vaguely, a demon fast bowler who cracks the
bravest—read daftest—skulls on our cricket team. He joked about doing it again
next summer. They'd dropped me from the team after a fight with an umpire,
honestly not my fault. I mean, umpires blind as a bat shouldn't be allowed,
right? Don put me down at the old church by Bures crossroads to catch the bus
to St. Edmundsbury. He thinks I'm odd. I think he's barmy.

"See you next Lammas, Lovejoy." Our cricket championship
cup matches begin on Lammas Day, the old name for August First. He passed
Toffee down. "If you've still got your cricket pitch, that is," he
quipped. "Manor Farm's reclaiming your field. Mrs. Ryan, isn't it?"

"Reclaiming?"

"It's on lease, a peppercorn rent." He was sad-faced at
the calamitous news.

"So what? There's that Long Tom field near Pittsbury Woods,
big enough."

His face changed. "
You'm
orff
yor
'
eed
,
booy
," he said, his dialect showing sudden
stress. "Lammas Day's bad enough."

No pausing, no matter how I yelled what the hell was he on about.
I watched him go. None of that made real sense. I crossed to wait for the bus,
twenty minutes.

Nothing important of course—I ask you, village cricket—but odd. In
East Anglia the cricket season's not long: April to October if the year's a record-breaker
for fine weather. I waited, restless.

What had I just thought, that was so disturbing? The months of the
year. What's worrisome about April? April? How innocent can you get? And
October? October means soggy wet autumn,
Michaelmas
,
All Saints, Harvest Festival at church with that bloody awful visiting organist
from
Wivenhoe
making a right pig's ear of Purcell.
But her breasts are lovely, and her smile sideways for us wavering warblers to
start "Pilgrim," my favorite, would melt a sinner's heart. . . .

"Are you coming or not?"

"Eh?" I said, startled. The bus was here and the driver
bawling down. "Don't yell your head off, Dick. You've woken my frigging
cat."

Toffee grumbled all the way to St. Edmundsbury. Old dears gave her
their undivided attention. She loved it. I got unanimous blame for feeding her
wrong; she didn't say a word in my defense. Is that typical, or is that
typical?

The Suffolk Independent Archeology Trust was not the massive
building I'd led myself to expect. Think more of a broom cupboard. It was pure
luck I found it (a notice by an old cobbler's announced a Grand Lecture by Ben
Cox, M.A. The office address was given). Twenty minutes later I was clumping up
the bare boards of a condemned terrace building to the third floor garret where
Ben Cox sat working. His desk was half. I mean that literally; he'd sawn an old
Victorian desk to get half of it in. The crude wall shelving was of
suspiciously similar wood.

My expression must have given me away as usual. He nodded, smiling
shyly. "Can we take for granted that I'm ashamed of practically everything
in sight?" he suggested. A joyful welcome nonetheless. We dithered about
whether to shake hands, decided it would be too forward.

"I admire your office," I said. "Well, you liked my
cottage."

He laughed, nodding. "Tit for tat, eh?" I sidled in, no
mean feat. A stool, as in bar, was the only other resting place. I looked
round, hung Toffee's basket behind the door.

"Ben," I said as he made coffee
cackhanded
in a
roadmender's
billy
-can.
"You have no funds, a handful of burning-heart volunteers, and an eviction
notice with the ink still wet. Right or no?"

"Right."

"To continue: Your repeated petitions to councillors have
failed. You're broke.
Mmmmh
or
nnnh
?"

"
Mmmmh
."

"Furthermore you saw me on telly, and somebody told you I was
maybe daft enough to help on spec. Another
mmmh
?"

He stirred the coffee agitatedly, red-faced. "Lovejoy. I
don't think you're off your trolley. But if anybody needs a
divvie
it's us."

He sat, coffee-making forgotten. "We're losing the battle.
The pillagers, the treasure-hunters. They hear of an ancient burial mound and
go marauding in gangs, digging anywhere. It's these . . ."he hesitated,
grasped the nettle, . . . "these antique dealers who've done it. They pay
the earth . . ."