Buried for Pleasure (9 page)

He fell silent, inhaling deeply. A series of metallic crashes, accompanied by a hoarse shouting, came to their ears, suggestive in its ferocity of a piratical sea-fight with cutlasses. Fen moved restively in his chair.

‘Did she speak before she died?' he asked.

Bussy shook his head. ‘No. She was alone in the house, and her body wasn't found until several hours after she was dead.'

‘And she didn't succeed in leaving any written message?'

‘None.' Bussy glanced at Fen with a certain respect. ‘I'm glad you see the point.' (‘I always do,' Fen grumbled.) ‘If it was the blackmailer who sent those chocolates, then he must have had some particularly urgent reason for wanting her silenced; and that reason can only have been that she'd recognized him – someone out of her past who was living in the neighbourhood. So she might have left some indication of his identity. Only she didn't. When you're dying of strychnine, you're not capable of anything very much.'

Fen considered. ‘Is it possible that the chocolates weren't sent by the blackmailer at all?'

‘It's possible, yes,' said Bussy grudgingly. ‘But as far as the investigations have gone, it's very unlikely. The husband, for various reasons with which I needn't bother you, is quite definitely out of it. And we haven't been able to unearth a shadow of motive for anyone else. It's a fair assumption that the blackmailer is also the poisoner.'

‘You said “someone who was living in the neighbourhood”.'

‘The blackmail letters were posted in Sanford Morvel; so were the chocolates. Beyond that, we haven't got any clue. The chocolates were in a small, flat container, and the poisoner was able to post them in a letter-box. So there's no lead there – as there would have been if he'd left them at the post-office counter. The wrapping doesn't help. Nor do the letters. So far, the case has been a series of dead ends.'

‘And the mechanism for conveying the blackmail money?'

‘Also a dead end. I can explain it, if you like' (‘No, no,' said Fen hastily), ‘but it's a carefully contrived scheme, and there's nothing at all useful to be deduced from it.'

‘So the result of this extensive nescience,' Fen observed, ‘is that Scotland Yard has been called in.'

‘Not at all.' Bussy grinned, ingenuously sly. ‘Scotland Yard has
not
been called in.'

‘From the point of view of the public, you mean.'

‘From the point of view of anyone. The Chief Constable is relying on Wolfe, the local Superintendent. Neither of them knows I'm here.'

‘Is this, then' – Fen stared at him rather blankly – ‘a kind of criminological holiday task?'

‘No. It's Lambert's doing. Lambert is a friend of the Assistant Commissioner. Lambert doesn't believe that the local people are capable of dealing adequately with the matter of his wife's death. Lambert consequently asked the Assistant Commissioner to intervene. The Assistant Commissioner pointed out, very properly, that he couldn't do that unless the Chief Constable asked him to – or at least, not without provoking a lot of bad blood. But he did agree to compromise between friendship and professional ethics by sending me down incognito. So I'm here officially-unofficially as it were, and Lambert is the only person locally who knows who I am and what I'm doing. For the purposes of the record, I'm on leave, and any meddling I do is simply the result of personal inquisitiveness.'

‘I should have thought that in that position you would have been hamstrung from the start.'

‘Not quite. No, not quite. It's had certain positive advantages. . . . But now' – Bussy's glance was definitely wary – ‘you've heard a brief outline of the facts. Have you made that obvious deduction I was talking about?'

‘I've made one deduction which seems to me obvious,' Fen replied cautiously.

‘Well?'

‘If the blackmailer is also the poisoner, with the motive you suggested – –'

‘Yes.'

‘And granted that Mrs Lambert's husband was away, so that she had no one but the police to confide in – –'

‘Again, yes.'

In a few words Fen explained what he thought – and Bussy sat back in the chair with a sigh of relief so heartfelt as to be almost a groan.

‘Thank God,' he said. ‘I was beginning to have doubts about my sanity. It
is
obvious, isn't it? – and yet as far as I know, no one else has thought of it.'

‘You've found nothing to militate against that theory?'

‘No.'

Fen was abnormally pensive. ‘It wouldn't stand by itself, of course,' he said. ‘You'd need additional proof.'

Bussy knocked out his pipe, returned it to his pocket, and got to his feet. The breakfast table had by now a crumby, congealed look; the insect battalions continued to riot lightheartedly in the air above it; a bar of shadow which had stolen across Niobe's milkmaid face had the effect of seeming to intensify her virtuous disquiet. Bussy glanced at her and then looked hurriedly away again, rather as a well-bred man might do who has happened on a girl undressing behind a rock.

‘I've got additional proof,' he said. ‘Or rather, I anticipate having it in a day or two.'

Fen studied him a shade sombrely. ‘Be careful,' he advised. ‘Your activities may have aroused suspicion, and a person who has risked one murder probably wouldn't mind risking a second. Does anyone else know of this – this evidence you're collecting?'

‘Not yet. It isn't complete enough for a report.'

‘Then I should be particularly careful.'

Bussy wandered to the door. With his hand on the knob he said: ‘You needn't worry. No one is likely to catch me unawares, I can assure you of that. . . . By the way, we'd better revert to the status of casual acquaintances.'

Fen nodded.

‘And you'll keep what I've said absolutely to yourself?'

‘Of course.'

‘Good.' Bussy smiled. ‘I must make a move now; there's a good deal to be done. I shall be glad to put this poisoning creature in the dock – and apart from that, it
might
mean promotion for me. . . . Thanks for listening. Good-bye for the present.' He waved a hand and was gone.

CHAPTER 9

T
HAT
evening Fen went to his first election meeting.

At the outset it did not seem likely to be a conspicuous success.

The hall in Sanford Marvel which housed it was of that kind, peculiar to the English genius, whose heating is defective, whose lights illuminate only those parts which do not require illumination, whose windows are worked by an agglomeration of screws, rods, and cog-wheels of which the motive power, a detachable handle, seems perennially to be mislaid – a hall, in brief, which the architect has designed to accommodate itself to almost any social activity from church bazaars to
The Mikado
, and which in consequence accommodates itself to none. A large gathering might have humanized it to some extent, but there was not, in this instance, a large gathering. Even Captain Watkyn was slightly taken aback by the number of empty chairs.

‘Of course, old boy,' he said
sotto voce
to Fen as they climbed on to the platform, ‘you haven't got to expect too much bang off. And Strode and Wither are both holding meetings, otherwise there'd be more people here. Still . . .'

The chairman, to Fen's surprise, proved to be Mr Judd – at the moment, perceptibly a creature moving about in worlds not realized. Fen had mentioned his name to Captain Watkyn at their previous meeting, and Captain Watkyn had coaxed him, by a considerable expenditure of energy, into officiating on Fen's behalf. Viewing him now, Captain Watkyn was inclined to regret this step, for Mr Judd's demeanour and speech embodied panic and black melancholy in about equal proportions.

‘I
hate
speaking in public,' he kept muttering aggrievedly. ‘I
detest
speaking in public.'

‘Come, come,' Fen muttered back. ‘I'm sure you'll do very well.'

‘I shall
not
do very well.'

‘I happened,' Fen pursued with shameless untruth, ‘to mention to Jacqueline that you were going to introduce me, and she said I couldn't have found a better man.'

‘Did she?' said Mr Judd doubtfully. ‘Did she really say that?'

‘Certainly she did. I gathered that she had a good deal of admiration for you.' Fen paused fractionally to evolve fresh falsehoods. ‘Unluckily she couldn't get here tonight, but I promised to tell her everything you said and did. And – quite off the record, of course – she said that if I was pleased with the show you put up, it would go a long way towards confirming her own good opinion of you.'

In a less flurried condition even Mr Judd would scarcely have swallowed this grossly implausible tale; but in the present circumstances his natural credulity was reinforced by the desire to clutch at any straw of consolation, and he brightened visibly.

‘Well, I'll do the best I can,' he conceded.

‘Of course you will. And there's no need for you to go on for long.'

In the event, however, this last inducement turned out to be singularly irrelevant. After a little initial clumsiness Mr Judd got quickly into his stride; and whereas earlier the problem had been to persuade him to start, the problem was now to persuade him to stop.

‘Hence it is,' he was saying after twenty minutes' uninterrupted magniloquence, ‘that we want – no, passionately and most urgently
need
– intelligent and disinterested men like our friend here to break and forever destroy the vicious circle of nepotism, jobbery, and Party conflict. And shall I tell you why it is in
this
constituency – this, and no other – that that great crusade must begin? The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is what we all know in our heart of hearts. And that answer is because it is in our incomparable countryside that England's strength and wisdom and endurance reside – not in the haste and waste of the great Wens' – Mr Judd was an assiduous reader of Cobbett – ‘but
here
, amid these fields and woods which have bred, and whose memory has sustained through every trial, every testing, our country's very greatest men; here in the English countryside that has endured for centuries, and shall for centuries endure.'

Upon this resounding period Mr Judd paused for breath; and at last perceiving, or anyway decoding, the surreptitious signals which Captain Watkyn had been directing at him for the past ten minutes, brought his speech with ill-concealed reluctance to a close, and sat down amid more cordial applause than either he or anyone else could previously have anticipated.

Fen followed with a speech which, if less Ciceronian and impassioned than Mr Judd's, was even more effective; and although its content does not bear summarizing, it succeeded in evoking some semblance of positive enthusiasm in the thirty or forty people present. Lecturing at Oxford had trained Fen to fluency in public speaking (though admittedly this happy consummation is inconspicuous in the majority of dons). By the highest standards his oratory was not exceptional, but it was none the less several degrees superior to anything that Wither or Strode could manage, for Strode's mind worked slowly, so that his speeches were peppered with long intervals of dead silence while he considered what to say next; and Wither was prone to a facetiousness so abominable that even the electorate of Sanford – a district not renowned for delicacy of wit – felt it an affliction. Fen consequently started with a marked advantage over his opponents, and made so good an impression, even in the chilling circumstances of this first meeting, that for the first time Captain Watkyn began seriously to envisage the possibility of his being elected.

Such few questions as were asked, Fen answered with an appearance of great candour; and he was untroubled by heckling, since at this time the professional hecklers of the Labour and Conservative Parties were respectively occupied at the Conservative and Labour meetings. The close of Fen's meeting consequently found everyone relatively gratified, and Mr Judd in a state of elation which bordered on incoherence. He fluttered about while Fen interviewed the canvassers whom Captain Watkyn had assembled in his cause, and insisted on returning to ‘The Fish Inn' to be present while his triumph was communicated to Jacqueline. It was perhaps fortunate that on arrival there they found Jacqueline absent and Myra alone behind the bar. And Mr Judd's disappointment, though great, proved possible to mitigate with cherry brandy and the vague assurance of a subsequent meeting.

Fen left him and went upstairs to change, for the evening's exertions had made him sticky and uncomfortable. He took his time over this, and was somewhat abashed, on his return, to find that the bar had closed, and that Mr Judd, relapsing after his brief interregnum of glory into a more normal diffidence, had gone home. Myra was still there, however, and he asked for beer.

‘A pint, my dear?'

‘Please. And have something for yourself.'

Fen drank largely, and was on the point of demanding news of the lunatic, and of Constable Sly's progress, when the door of the bar rattled as someone outside banged against it.

‘Now, who the devil's that?' said Myra.

She crossed to the door and unbolted it. The non-doing pig came in. It looked dusty and fatigued, as though it had just completed a very long journey.

‘My God, he's back,' said Myra.

‘Back?'

‘I sold him this afternoon. He didn't want to go, I could see that. And now he's escaped from Farmer Lumley and come all the way home.' Myra was evidently rather moved by this demonstration of fidelity. With the toe of her shoe she prodded the non-doing pig amicably in the ribs, at which it staggered visibly.