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

Hagberd paused to weed a large geranium bed near the main gate, and at length heaving a groan of relief as the lean, gangling figure disappeared into the traffic and the industrial murk.
    Temporarily at a loss, Hagberd now decided to make a pious pilgrimage to Plymouth, where in 1809 an ancestor of his, a naval rating, had been hanged on Devonport dock for trying to push his Captain overboard instead of getting on with manning his gun against the French. So he came to Devon. And so, his thoughts turning again to farms and all the delightful beasts they supported, he in due course came to be employed in Burraford by Routh, with consequences which were to prove disastrous for them both.
    Hagberd not only was an Australian cattleman, he looked like one. He was sinewy, lanky, long-armed, easy-striding. He wore broad-brimmed hats. His weather-beaten face was a yard of muddy pump-water, his nose a beak. He had small, intensely blue eyes, set very close together. His ears stood out like jughandles.Routh was physically his antithesis - short, pulpy and white-skinned, with a compressed sort of face, the little ears and nose seeming as if tight-laced by invisible Sellotape.
    And Routh was Hagberd’s antithesis not only in the physical sense.
    Routh was a very bad farmer. And when he thought it safe, he was deliberately cruel to animals. Routh liked hearing an animal scream.
    Stalking about Routh’s farm from before dawn to beyond dusk, doing the work of three men, Hagberd was at first unaware of this; and when his suspicions did eventually stir, he found it practically impossible to credit them. How
could
anyone want to give pain to an animal? No sentimentalist, Hagberd knew that rearing animals once in a while inflicts pain unavoidably. No vegetarian, he knew that the terminal few minutes in the slaughter-house often inflict fear. But so long as animals were alive, surely nothing within reason could be too good for them, could it?
    The turning-point came when Hagberd discovered not only that Routh’s visits to Longhempston, twenty miles away, were for the purpose of watching hare-coursing, but also that Routh had been a prime mover in getting this baneful recreation locally revived. There had been other things - among them, a Leghorn with both legs broken, a ewe in milk with a long strip of her wool and hide torn away, a starving mongrel stray with its ribs trodden in - but these might, after all, have been due to accidents or to predators. The hare-coursing was something else. Learning of it, Hagberd started keeping an eye on his soft-spoken employer, and so one day came on him enjoying himself privately with a two-month-old kitten.
    Hagberd dealt with him thoroughly, left him lying in the muck of the yard, and went off to notify the R.S.P.C.A., taking the dying kitten along for evidence. But Routh had snipped and ripped with precaution. A fox, he said: undoubtedly the kitten had been mauled by a fox. The vet had reluctantly agreed that it just conceivably could have been, and the Society had equally reluctantly decided not to attempt to prosecute. Routh said that he should hope not. Here was he examining the poor little thing to see if anything could be done for it, and all of a sudden herehad been Hagberd, snarling and lashing out with his fists like a maniac. He, Routh, wouldn’t take any action over the assault, he selflessly said, since Hagberd clearly wasn’t right in the head. Not taking any action, he added (but only to himself), would also help to quash the likelihood of there being any really thorough-going investigation of the stimulating ways in which he chose to spend some of his spare time.
    Hagberd left Routh, and went to work for Clarence Tully.
    On a bleak morning of early February, the Major, out for a walk, watched Hagberd teaching a baby lamb to skip. Uttering strange antipodean yelps of encouragement, Hagberd was repeatedly jumping into the air, his great Wellingtons crashing down again into