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Authors: Edmund Crispin
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early acquaintance, had talked about the murder often and at length, giving many minutiae which even as good a paper as the
Western Morning News
obviously hadnât the space to take cognizance of. But although the Majorâs extensive local colour had registered in Fenâs retentive mind, he hadnât, up to now, felt any urge to disinter it and pick it over. Up to now, Routhâs murder simply hadnât seemed to him mysterious enough to be genuinely interesting.
Was it, in fact, mysterious even after Gobbo?
Necessary to find out.
While Stripey twitched in his sleep and Ellis crept on towards the dry-stone edge of the world, Fen settled down to read what the
Western Morning News
had to tell him, supplementing its facts with the details supplied by the Major.
4. Prompt Hand and Headpiece Sever
I believe the right question to ask ⦠is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment - was the carver happy while he was about it?
John Ruskin:
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
1
His parents dying when he was three, Hagberd was brought up in a Kalgoorlie orphanage which also acted as trustee for the small amount of money his father had left him. This money he spent, as soon as he was twenty-one, on four hundred acres inland from Esperance, on a herd of Herefords to graze them, and, as more or less of an afterthought, on a pre-fabricated shack for himself to live in. He had always got on well with animals, and the beef production thereabouts was at the time inconsiderable.
Other factors were not. With the Western Australia irrigation scheme still several years in the future, Hagberd found it desperately hard to water his cattle, even, let alone the pastures which kept them fed. Again, Australia lacks coprophages. Enormous expanses of it have none at all. The industrious beetles which elsewhere gobble up cow-pats as if they were coffee meringues have to be imported, and even then are liable to pine. Consequently, the cow-pats poison not only the grass they lie on, but also a quite extensive area round them.
With more money Hagberd might have survived - money for wells and ditches and an ingenious but expensive mechanical stand-in for the dung-beetles called McGlashanâs Chemical Foraging Facility. With more money he could also have hired an assistant or two, instead of trying to do everything himself. But there was no more money to be had. After three years he abandoned the unequal struggle, sold the land and the herd for what they would fetch, and worked his passage to England.
It was reasonable that he should be temporarily disenchanted with farming. What was not so reasonable was that a mandeeply in love with hard work should take employment in a Midlands boiler factory. Flabbergasted to find that his fellow-workers knocked off every day at an hour when the edge of his own appetite for toil was still completely undulled, Hagberd had at first expostulated and then, when that had no effect, taken to staying on after hours in order to sweep up cigarette butts in the yards, mend the wire of the car-park fence, disinfect lavatories, whiten doorsteps and clean windows. Once, at 10.30 p.m., he was discovered polishing the floor of the Personnel Directorâs office, which by some mischance had been left unlocked. Five weeks and six strikes after his arrival, he was sacked. As far as the shop stewards were concerned, he might have lasted longer than that: his passion for work being clearly pathological, they bore him no resentment, and in any case he supplied a valuable pretext, Union-approved, for downing tools. The management, however, saw matters otherwise: there were enough pretexts for strikes already, without adding Hagberd to the list. From his office window the Managing Director watched the final departure, recoiling when Hagberd spat on the windscreen of the directorial Rolls Royce (but this, it turned out, was only in order to wash a bird-dropping off it), ringing frantically for his secretary when
Western Morning News
obviously hadnât the space to take cognizance of. But although the Majorâs extensive local colour had registered in Fenâs retentive mind, he hadnât, up to now, felt any urge to disinter it and pick it over. Up to now, Routhâs murder simply hadnât seemed to him mysterious enough to be genuinely interesting.
Was it, in fact, mysterious even after Gobbo?
Necessary to find out.
While Stripey twitched in his sleep and Ellis crept on towards the dry-stone edge of the world, Fen settled down to read what the
Western Morning News
had to tell him, supplementing its facts with the details supplied by the Major.
4. Prompt Hand and Headpiece Sever
I believe the right question to ask ⦠is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment - was the carver happy while he was about it?
John Ruskin:
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
1
His parents dying when he was three, Hagberd was brought up in a Kalgoorlie orphanage which also acted as trustee for the small amount of money his father had left him. This money he spent, as soon as he was twenty-one, on four hundred acres inland from Esperance, on a herd of Herefords to graze them, and, as more or less of an afterthought, on a pre-fabricated shack for himself to live in. He had always got on well with animals, and the beef production thereabouts was at the time inconsiderable.
Other factors were not. With the Western Australia irrigation scheme still several years in the future, Hagberd found it desperately hard to water his cattle, even, let alone the pastures which kept them fed. Again, Australia lacks coprophages. Enormous expanses of it have none at all. The industrious beetles which elsewhere gobble up cow-pats as if they were coffee meringues have to be imported, and even then are liable to pine. Consequently, the cow-pats poison not only the grass they lie on, but also a quite extensive area round them.
With more money Hagberd might have survived - money for wells and ditches and an ingenious but expensive mechanical stand-in for the dung-beetles called McGlashanâs Chemical Foraging Facility. With more money he could also have hired an assistant or two, instead of trying to do everything himself. But there was no more money to be had. After three years he abandoned the unequal struggle, sold the land and the herd for what they would fetch, and worked his passage to England.
It was reasonable that he should be temporarily disenchanted with farming. What was not so reasonable was that a mandeeply in love with hard work should take employment in a Midlands boiler factory. Flabbergasted to find that his fellow-workers knocked off every day at an hour when the edge of his own appetite for toil was still completely undulled, Hagberd had at first expostulated and then, when that had no effect, taken to staying on after hours in order to sweep up cigarette butts in the yards, mend the wire of the car-park fence, disinfect lavatories, whiten doorsteps and clean windows. Once, at 10.30 p.m., he was discovered polishing the floor of the Personnel Directorâs office, which by some mischance had been left unlocked. Five weeks and six strikes after his arrival, he was sacked. As far as the shop stewards were concerned, he might have lasted longer than that: his passion for work being clearly pathological, they bore him no resentment, and in any case he supplied a valuable pretext, Union-approved, for downing tools. The management, however, saw matters otherwise: there were enough pretexts for strikes already, without adding Hagberd to the list. From his office window the Managing Director watched the final departure, recoiling when Hagberd spat on the windscreen of the directorial Rolls Royce (but this, it turned out, was only in order to wash a bird-dropping off it), ringing frantically for his secretary when
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