Buried for Pleasure (7 page)

Sanford Morvel looked as if it were trying to be a gracious, peaceful country town and failing very badly. Its main street was wide but vacant-seeming; its Town Hall was old but ugly; its shops and pubs and houses had uniformly succeeded in missing the great periods of English domestic architecture; its church was squat and sullen. Fen and Captain Watkyn lunched on ill-cooked meat and tepid vegetables at the ‘White Lion', a pretentious but comfortless hotel in the Market Square. Afterwards they went to the Town Hall, where the deposit and nomination papers were given with due form to the Sheriff, and where Fen shook hands with Strode and Wither, neither of whom (since the occasion was not a public one) evinced much cordiality to him or to each other.

Following this ceremony, Fen was introduced by Captain Watkyn to the car he was to use, a lumbering old Morris no longer capable of doing more than twenty miles an hour. In it, having received a promise that Captain Watkyn would collect him in time for the meeting tomorrow night, he drove languidly back to Sanford Angelorum.

On the way he stopped the car in order to look at Sanford Hall. It was a large building, of the eighteenth century apparently, set well back from the road in extensive grounds and partly screened by trees. The sun shone brilliantly; the vista was quiet and unpeopled. Fen left the car, found an entrance to the grounds of the Hall and, undeterred by considerations of trespass, went through it.

Crossing a small coppice of beeches, he came on a curious scene.

By the side of a small stream, about thirty yards off, Diana stood talking to the young man in shabby tweeds with whom Fen had seen her earlier in the day, and whom in default of other evidence he identified as Lord Sanford. It was impossible to tell what the conversation was about, but it did not seem to be a particularly amicable one. Diana was gesticulating vehemently; her eyes flashed, and her mouth, when she spoke, was twisted at the corners with indignation. The young man seemed less angry than harassed; evidently he was on the defensive. Their voices came to Fen's ears, through the hot summer air, in weak spasms of uninflected sound.

But it was not the apparent quarrel which chiefly interested him. It was the presence among the beech trees of a watcher other than himself.

The fair-haired girl who called herself Jane Persimmons was partly hidden by one of the tree trunks, and the hand she had pressed against it was rigid, with the knuckles white. A narrow shaft of sunlight rested on her cheeks, but her eyes were in shadow and unreadable. All Fen could tell was that what she saw interested her passionately. He thought, too, that she was not deliberately eavesdropping – that like himself she had come here accidentally, and not much before him at that. But the scene, for some reason, had gripped her, and until it was finished she was incapable of moving, whether she would or no.

Now, however, Diana and the young man were moving away, up towards the house. Jane Persimmons stiffened and made a short indecisive movement as if to follow. Then she relaxed and turned slowly away.

And turning, she saw Fen.

It was easy for him to read what was in her mind. Principally, it was shame at being caught in a harmless but equivocal act; secondarily, it was a desperate resolve to try and appear natural, as though she had a right there.

She stumbled a little on a root; attempted to smile; stammered a conventional greeting; and then turned and half ran back through the coppice. More slowly, Fen followed.

Reaching the car, he found her waiting for him there, shifting her small, neat bag from hand to hand. She had decided, evidently, that the occurrence called for stronger measures than mere flight.

‘I – I wanted to see the house,' she said. ‘It's very beautiful, isn't it?'

At that moment she seemed very small and friendless, and Fen was touched. He smiled with reassuring charm.

‘Delightful,' he answered. ‘I was trespassing, too. Can I give you a lift back to the inn?'

‘N – no, thank you. I came out for a walk, and I shan't go back yet.'

‘Then I'll be seeing you later.'

‘Just – just a minute.' She put out a hand to stop him. ‘I – Do you know Lord Sanford?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Oh!' She gave a little gasping laugh. ‘Well, I hope – I hope you won't tell him I've been spying on him.'

‘I shan't tell a soul,' Fen assured her. ‘And you must do the same for me.'

‘That's a bargain, then,' she said. And beneath the outward flippancy he knew that she was desperately in earnest.

‘That's a bargain,' he said seriously. ‘You're sure I can't take you anywhere?'

‘No, really, thank you.'

‘Good-bye for now, then.'

As he drove off, he saw in the driving-mirror that she stood looking after him until a bend in the road hid him from her. He wondered if he could have done more for her; she had seemed, somehow, so very much in need of help and advice. Better not offer those commodities, though, until he was asked for them. . . .

And of one thing at least he was sure; whatever might have been her motives in watching Diana and Lord Sanford, this girl was incapable of a mean or a flagitious act.

He parked the car in the inn-yard alongside the non-doing pig, which was lying gracelessly on its side in what appeared to be a stupor. The total quietude of the inn made it clear that Mr Beaver and his family had given up for the day and gone home. And Fen, yawning copiously, decided that the most agreeable thing to do now would be to lie on his bed and fall asleep; which accordingly he did. He was slightly troubled by a recurring dream in which Mr Judd, uttering American college cries, pursued a scantily-clad Jacqueline in and out among the Doric columns of a Greek temple, but in spite of this inconclusive drama he awoke at seven in the evening considerably refreshed.

Dinner he ate alone in the room where he had breakfasted, Myra informing him that neither of the other guests was booked to appear. This room evidently adjoined the bar, for he was able to hear the perennial argument going on within a few feet of him.

‘She'm close-'auled, I tell 'ee.'

‘No, no, Fred, you'm proper mazed. See them? Them's 'er gaff-tops'ls.'

‘Mizzen-tops'ls.'

‘Mizzen, gaff, 'tis all the bloody same.'

‘What I says is, 'er's runnin' before the wind.'

‘Look 'ere, see that ship at anchor, see? Now, if'er was moored fore
and
aft, you wouldn't be able to see which way the bloody wind was blowing. As 'tis, she's facin' out t'ards sea. An' that means – –'

‘But she
is
moored aft. You can see it. You can see the buoy.'

‘That's no buoy, Fred, that's just a drop o' bloody paint.'

‘I'm tellin' 'ee 'tes a buoy.'

‘Well, look 'ere now, if that brig's close-'auled, that means. . . .'

The meal over, Fen settled down with some beer and a detective story, becoming so engrossed that it was not until nearly closing-time that a sudden outbreak of abnormal excitement in the bar restored him to consciousness of his surroundings. Reluctantly abandoning the heroine to the suspicious circumstances in which she had foolishly contrived to entangle herself, he went to see what was happening.

The commotion, he found, was centred in a pitiful-looking middle-aged man in gamekeeper's clothes, who had the air of one who had been suddenly and horribly sobered up in the middle of a gay carouse.

‘'Ow was I to know it was 'im?' he kept saying. ‘'Ow was I to know?'

‘Poor old Frank,' said Myra. ‘He's afraid they're going to have him up for murder.'

Fen asked to be told the cause of Frank's distress, and Myra embarked willingly on a narrative of characteristic raciness and gusto.

It appeared that the lunatic, still at large, had manifested himself again. Mother-naked as before, he had jumped out at a very ancient spinster called Miss Gibbons as she was walking home from an evening spent with a great-nephew and his wife at the other end of the village. In this emergency Miss Gibbons, however, had despite age and infirmity displayed a markedly aggressive spirit; of sterner stuff than Mrs Hennessy, she had seized the lunatic by the hair and shaken him ferociously to and fro until, recovering from his surprise, he had torn himself away and fled.

Thereupon Miss Gibbons had let out an eldritch shriek which brought half the village, including Constable Sly, to her assistance.

Constable Sly had at once taken charge. He had enlisted the help of Frank the gamekeeper, as being the possessor of firearms, and the two of them had set off in pursuit, Frank carrying a loaded revolver. They had traced the lunatic up on to the dingy nine-hole golf-course which serves the neighbourhood, and had thought they saw him disappear into one of those huts which are erected on golf-courses to shelter golfers from sudden showers; and Sly had instructed Frank to remain on guard outside while he, Sly, went in to make the capture.

As it had happened, they had been mistaken, and the lunatic was not there; after a short search, therefore, Sly had emerged from the hut empty-handed. Unluckily, however, Frank the gamekeeper had spent the earlier part of the evening celebrating some undefined stroke of good fortune; and sighting Sly's unidentifiable form on its way out from the hut he had erroneously assumed that this was the lunatic, had levelled his revolver in an excess of alcoholic enthusiasm; and had shot Sly in the leg. Sly had been removed, in an unforgiving state of mind, to the hospital in Sanford Morvel, and Frank had proceeded to ‘The Fish Inn', where he was now engaged in monotonous self-justification.

‘ . . . might 'a' knocked Will out,' he was saying, ‘and 'a' bin escapin'. What I says is, Will oughter 'ave given me a sign, like. Whistled, or that. 'Ow was I to know it was 'im?'

However, there is always something pleasing to us – as La Rochefoucauld has remarked – in the misfortunes of others. The inn's customers were rather ribald than sympathetic, and the luckless Frank had to endure a good deal of facetiousness, for which he compensated by drinking deeply at other people's expense. Presently Myra, tiring of his reiterated complaint, called time. By slow degrees the company dispersed. And Fen, who was by no means immune from the application of La Rochefoucauld's pejorative law, departed contentedly to bed, where he dreamed the whole night through about a naked lunatic pursuing Mr Judd in and out among the Doric columns of a Greek temple. Psycho-analytically (he decided later) it was an improvement on the afternoon's effort.

CHAPTER 8

As on the previous morning, he was awakened promptly at seven by the onset of Mr Beaver's renovations. As punctually, that seraph-like vision which was Jacqueline brought in his tea. He arrived downstairs as the church bells began ringing for eight o'clock Communion, and was moved by this Sabbath noise to attend the service. Only half a dozen others, it appeared, had succumbed to a like impulse, but he was pleased to see Jacqueline among them. The choir sang a four-square Victorian setting with conspicuous heartiness, and Fen, accustomed to the unobtrusive sleekness of Oxford liturgies, found his attention wandering. He examined the Rector, a substantial, sallow, mephitic-looking man of some sixty years who was named in the church-porch notices as W. Scantling Mills. ‘Dark Satanic Mills', Fen thought. He walked back to the inn with Jacqueline, who continued to preserve a contented and decorative silence.

The man who called himself Crawley was alone at the breakfast table, a pencil poised inactively over the
Observer
crossword. Seen at close range, he did not inspire much disquiet. His chin receded, his nose was long, his eyes were a guileless blue, his whole appearance mocked Fen's amorphous forebodings of criminality. And identification followed quickly; it had only eluded Fen so far for want of a proper look. The name explained itself, too.

‘Bussy,' said Fen.

Bussy returned the pencil to a pocket; it was a gesture of resignation. ‘Hullo, Fen,' he said agreeably. ‘I was afraid I couldn't stave off this meeting much longer.' He paused to consider the remark, separating its more offensive suggestion from its intended meaning. ‘That is to say,' he elucidated painstakingly, ‘that for business reasons I should have preferred that we didn't meet. Personally, of course, I'm delighted. How are you, after all these years?'

‘I'm well.' Fen sat down, selected a spoon, and began delving into half a grapefruit. He eyed Bussy thoughtfully. ‘We can remain mere pub acquaintances if it suits you, you know. As I remember, you're in the C.I.D.'

Bussy nodded. ‘Detective-Inspector, by the skin of my teeth.'

‘And actively engaged on something.'

‘Yes. More or less unofficially, I should add. I'm not supposed to be here. The local police would probably be very annoyed if they knew I was.' This reflection seemed to gratify Bussy; he gave a low chuckle.

‘I see.' Fen gazed at him in mild perplexity. ‘But your disguise is very inappropriate. No one does any fishing here.'

‘As I've discovered. I was misled, in advance, by the name of this pub.'

Fen poked earnestly at a segment of grapefruit which had been inadequately cut. ‘And other people besides yourself are acquainted with
Vanity Fair
.'

‘No one has noticed that so far except yourself. But the point, Fen, is this. I'm the world's most incompetent actor. When I act, infants in arms perceive that I'm acting. So I was never specially perturbed at the thought that people would see I was not what I made myself out to be – that was inevitable, anyway.'

‘In that case, any sort of masquerade – –'