Buried for Pleasure. Edmund Crispin

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СКАЧАТЬ came to a door in a part of the ground floor with which Fen was not yet acquainted, and from behind which most of the din seemed to be proceeding. ‘Look,’ said Myra.

      The opening of the door disclosed a dense cloud of plaster dust in which figures could dimly be discerned engaged, to all appearance, in a labour of unqualified destruction. One of these – a man – loomed up at them suddenly, looking like a whitewash victim in a slapstick comedy.

      ‘’Morning, Myra,’ he said with disarming heartiness. ‘Everything all right?’

      ‘Oh, quite, sir.’ Myra was distinctly bland and respectful. ‘This gentleman’s staying here, and he wondered what was going on.’

      ‘Morning to you, sir,’ said the man. ‘Hope we didn’t get you up too early.’

      ‘Not a bit,’ Fen replied without cordiality.

      ‘I feel better already’ – the man spoke, however, more with determination than with conviction – ‘for getting up at six every morning … It’s one of the highroads to health, as I’ve always said.’

      He fell into a violent fit of coughing; his face became red, and then blue. Fen banged him prophylactically between the shoulder-blades.

      ‘Well, back to the grindstone,’ he said when he had recovered a little. ‘I’ll tell you this much, sir, there’s a good deal to be said, when you want a thing done, for doing it yourself.’ Someone caught him a glancing blow on the arm with a small pick. ‘Careful, damn you, that hurt…’

      He left them in order to expostulate in more detail. They closed the door and continued on their way.

      ‘Who was that?’ Fen asked.

      ‘Mr Beaver, who owns the pub. I only manage it for him. He’s a wholesale draper, really.’

      ‘I see,’ said Fen, who saw nothing.

      ‘Have your breakfast now, my dear,’ Myra soothed him, ‘and I’ll explain later.’

      She conducted him to a small room where there was a table laid for three. Here, to his elation, she provided him with bacon, eggs, and coffee.

      He had finished these, and come to the marmalade stage, when the door opened and he was surprised to see the fair-haired girl who had been his sole fellow-passenger on the train.

      He studied her covertly as she sat down at the table. Though she had neither Diana’s fresh, open-air charm nor Myra’s vivacity nor his blonde visitant’s filmic radiance, she was none the less pretty in a shy, quiet fashion; and her features showed what seemed to be a mingling of two distinct strains. The nose, for instance, was markedly patrician, while by contrast the large mouth hinted at vulgarity; the set of the eyebrows was arrogant, but the eyes were timid; and it occurred to Fen, in a burst of rather dreary fancifulness which only the unnaturally early hour can excuse, that if a king were to marry a courtesan, a daughter very much like this might be born to them.

      It seemed to him, too, that the girl was nervous, rather as if she were about to face some new and testing experience of which the issue was uncertain. And her clothes confirmed this notion. They were good and tasteful, but something in the way she wore them suggested that they were her cared-for best, that she could not always afford to dress thus, that she was wearing them now – yes, that was it – in the hope of making a good impression.

      On whom? Fen wondered. A potential employer, perhaps. Her being here to be interviewed for a coveted job would explain her nervousness plausibly enough…

      Or, after all, would it? Somehow he sensed that the testing was to be at once more urgent and more intimate than that.

      They talked a little, on conventional topics. Fen asked her if she had heard about the lunatic, and on discovering that she had not, explained the situation to her. However, her responses, though polite and intelligent enough, showed that she was too preoccupied to be very much interested in the subject.

      He noted that she watched him steadily whenever he spoke, as if trying to assess his character from his expression. And in the fashion of her own speech there was further matter for surmise, since she pronounced her words in a slightly foreign fashion, which he found himself unable to identify. She was not – to judge from that – German or Italian or French or Dutch or Spanish; nor was there any immingled trace of dialect which might account for the oddity of the effect. Analysed, it came to this, that while her vowel sounds were pure and accurate, there was a very slight tendency to blur and confuse the individual constituents of each group of consonants – labials, gutturals, sibilants. Thus, ‘p’ was not entirely distinct from ‘b’, nor ‘s’ from ‘z’.

      Fen discovered that he was incapable of explaining this, and the effect was to make him slightly peevish.

      He finished his coffee and looked at his watch. Half past eight. In three hours he had an appointment with his election agent, but until then he was free to do what he pleased. And since the tumult of renovation made ‘The Fish Inn’ uninhabitable for long at a time, he decided to go out into the sunshine to inspect his constituency at first hand. He therefore took his leave of the girl, suspecting – though without rancour – that she was not sorry to be rid of him.

      Outside the door he encountered Myra, and asked for news of the lunatic.

      ‘Well, they haven’t caught him, my dear,’ she said, ‘though the asylum people have been traipsing about the neighbourhood all night.’

      ‘It actually was a lunatic, then?’

      ‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think it was at first. Mrs Hennessy’s just the sort of daft old woman to have – what d’you call them? – sexual delusions about naked men jumping out at her in the dark.’

      ‘But I saw him, too,’ Fen pointed out.

      Myra’s expression suggested that only politeness had prevented her from attributing sexual delusions to Fen also.

      ‘Anyway, he’s real enough,’ she said, ‘and they’ve put out he’s harmless, though, of course, they couldn’t very well say he was homicidal for fear of creating a panic. And what I say about lunatics is this: they wouldn’t be lunatics if you knew what they were going to be up to next.’

      With this sombre prognosis she left Fen, informing him parenthetically that the bar would be open at eleven.

      He was about to go out when his attention was caught by the inn register, which lay on a table almost at his elbow. Opening it, he found that the girl with whom he had breakfasted was named Jane Persimmons, that she was British, and that she lived at an address in Nottingham. And it struck him that here also he might get enlightenment about the man he had glimpsed the previous evening and whose appearance had seemed vaguely familiar.

      He turned back the page and read with some interest the entry immediately preceding his own. It ran:

       Major Rawdon Crawley, British, 201 Curzon Street, London.

      ‘Good God,’ Fen murmured to himself. ‘Either he just doesn’t care, or else he imagines that no one in this district has ever read Thackeray… Well, well, it’s none of my business, I suppose.’

      He noted that the soi-disant Crawley had arrived two days previously, closed the book, and went out into the inn-yard.

      There СКАЧАТЬ