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 was no cloud in the sky, but a brief shower during the night had mitigated the dust accumulated during weeks of drought, and painted grass, leaves, and hedges, a fresher and more lively green. The non-doing pig was noisily eating potatoes. Fen crossed the yard and came out into the main street of the village.
Before setting out for the district he had studied Ordnance Survey maps, and so he was able to orientate himself fairly easily. The district is an agglomeration of Sanfords, presided over by Sanford Hall, which stands isolated on one of the few eminences which that very level country can claim. Rich pasture extends uninterruptedly almost as far as the Marlock Hills, though here and there you may see little rashes of barley, to which the soil is unsuited, but which protesting farmers have been obliged to put in by ill-informed fiats from the Ministry of Agriculture. The River Spoor, here only twenty miles from its source, meanders amiably between willows and alders, its waters reputedly inimical to fish. It is fed by a small, erratic tributary, very liable to drought, which runs down from a lake in the grounds of Sanford Hall.
Sanford Morvel is the chief town. It has no function except as a market for neighbouring farmers, and this parasitic existence gives it a blustering, unconfident air. Four miles to the south-east of it is Sanford Condover, less a defined community than a fortuitous collection of small farms loosely plastered together by some cottages, a Baptist chapel, and an unsightly pub. Six miles to the south of that is Sanford Angelorum.
A small branch line of the Great Western Railway proceeds reluctantly as far as Sanford Morvel, and an even smaller branch line proceeds even more reluctantly from Sanford Morvel to within two miles of Sanford Angelorum (taking in an almost totally disused halt at Sanford Condover on the way), where it suddenly peters out, the Company, with the optimism engendered by nineteenth-century industrial progress, having built the line thus far on the assumption that the then Lord Sanford would allow them to continue right up to the village. This supposition, however, proved to be mistaken, since the then Lord Sanford was a disciple of William Morris and nourished a fanatical hatred of railways. The station at which Fen had arrived consequently stands, futile and alone, at a place from which no human dwelling is even visible, and though amended laws would now permit the railway to carry out its original project, it has long since lost interest in the matter.
In the normal way Fen would have made Sanford Morvel his headquarters, since it is admittedly the central point of the constituency. But he had entered the political arena cavalierly and late, to find the housing shortage in Sanford Morvel so acute that neither a committee room nor a bedroom could be found for him. He had therefore been obliged to choose between Sanford Angelorum and a slum-like place, twelve miles to the north of Sanford Morvel, named Peek. Peek, an affair of mean, grey, semi-detached houses, sprang up in the eighteen-fifties as a result of the discovery of a seam of inferior coal. It declined, some twenty years later, as a result of the working out of that seam, which to the irritation of those who had financed it proved to be minute. The mining community, for which Peek had been built, departed; the more thriftless elements of the district took over and Peek, its raison d’être gone, decayed with startling rapidity.
Of all this Fen had deviously apprised himself. Peek, for his purposes, was clearly impossible. And, surveying Sanford Angelorum in the clear summer light, he was glad he had elected to stay in that charming, unpretentious village.
He admired it as he walked along the main street in the direction opposite to that of the railway station. Like most such places, it was assembled, he saw, round the church, a medium good example of the decorated style, whose ornamental conceits, being carved in red sandstone, were a good deal blurred by weathering. The Rectory, built large for an age more opulent and more philoprogenitive than this, adjoined it. There were one or two shops; there was a green with a war memorial; there was a row of delightful eighteenth-century cottages; there was, obstinately Victorian, ‘The Fish Inn’.
Outside the gate of one of the cottages Fen saw Diana talking earnestly to a young man in shabby tweeds. She waved to him, but her conversation seemed engrossing, and he did not venture to interrupt it.
Before long he reached the edge of the village and came to a spot which he suspected might be the scene of Mrs Hennessy’s encounter on the previous evening. Resisting the temptation to root about for traces of the lunatic, he passed on, and soon arrived at a miniature cross-roads, with a sign-post which added to its total illegibility the even graver defect of pointing in no particular direction.
After some hesitation he entered the lane on the left.
It was the height of summer. The hips of the dog-rose were ripe in the hedges. Barley was being cut, flecked with the scarlet of poppies. Copper butterflies roamed fragile as thistledown through the hot air. Spiders’ webs draped the twigs and leaves. In the distance a heat haze was forming, but a line of white smoke enabled you to follow the progress of a distant train.
Fen began to walk more briskly. The country, a place with which he was not normally infatuated, seemed particularly winning today. . . .
But he had not gone a hundred yards before a startling spectacle halted him in his tracks.
CHAPTER 4
HE had come to a five-barred gate giving access to a large, irregularly-shaped field. Its hedges were mainly of thorn. It had a dank-looking pond – much diminished now by the lack of rain – in the middle of it. And at the pond’s margin a duck, its snow-white plumage somewhat marred by the green slime which clung to its underside, was hobbling slowly about.
But it was not these things that had caught Fen’s attention. It was a man who was entering the field through a gap on the far side.
He was short, stout, harassed-looking, middle-aged. He wore gloves, a reefer jacket inside out, and pale purple trousers tucked into large black gumboots. And he was moving in a crouched, furtive manner, like one who tries to evade pursuit.
On reaching the edge of the pond, however, he straightened up and glanced quickly about him; then produced from the pocket of his coat a large, antique service revolver which seemed to be attached by a length of string to his braces. This he levelled at a wizened sapling which was growing by the hedge.
‘Bang,’ he said. ‘Bang, bang, bang.’
Now a look of satisfaction appeared on his face, and, turning, he suddenly hurled the revolver, still attached to its string, into the centre of the pond. After a moment’s pause he hauled it out again, like a fish on the end of a line, removed the string both from it and from his braces, wrapped this string in a piece of newspaper, crammed it into his pocket and, leaving the revolver where it lay, hurried across to the sapling, where with much difficulty he shouldered an imaginary burden and tottered with it in Fen’s direction. The duck, which had ambled into his path, gave him one look and then fled away before him, quacking angrily, like a leaf driven by an autumn gale.
It was clear that the man had not yet become aware of Fen’s presence. H
e staggered almost as far as the gate, lowered his invisible load to the ground with a sigh of relief, pulled off his coat, removed the paper-wrapped length of string from its pocket, turned the coat delicately right side out, and with much groaning and effort began putting it on to whatever it was he imagined was lying at his feet.
He was thus engaged when, becoming abruptly conscious that he was not alone, he looked up and caught Fen’s fascinated eye.
He stood upright, slowly, and expelled his breath in a long gasp of dismay.
‘A – aaaaaah,’ he said.
They gazed rigidly at one another for a moment longer. Then the man, recovering the power of articulate speech, remarked: ‘I’m not mad.’
This discouraging social gambit touched Fen. He said kindly: ‘Of course you’re not mad.’
The man became frantic. ‘I’m really not mad, I mean,’ he said.
‘I quite believe you,’ said Fen. ‘You needn’t imagine I’m just trying to humour you.’
‘You see,’ the man nervously explained, ‘there’s a lunatic at large, and I was afraid that you, being a stranger, might assume – –’
‘No, no,’ Fen assured him. ‘I never had any doubt about what you were doing. But I imagine few detective novelists can be as scrupulous.’
The man relaxed suddenly, and began wiping his forehead with a brightly coloured handkerchief. He picked up the reefer jacket and put it on.
‘One’s plots are necessarily improbable,’ he said a trifle didactically, ‘but I believe in making sure that they are not impossible.’ His utterance was prim and selfconscious, like himself. ‘Short of murder itself, I try everything out before finally adopting it for a book, and really, you would be surprised at the number of flaws and difficulties which are revealed in the process.’
Fen put his elbows on the top bar of the gate and leaned there comfortably.
‘And of course’, he said, ‘it must enable you to get to some extent inside the mind of the murderer.’
An expression of mild repugnance appeared on the man’s face. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, it doesn’t do that.’ The subject seemed painful to him, and Fen felt that he had committed an indiscretion. ‘The fact is,’ the man went on, ‘that I have no interest in the minds of murderers, or for that matter,’ he added rather wildly, ‘in the minds of anyone else. Characterization seems to me a very overrated element in fiction. I can never see why one should be obliged to have any of it at all, if one doesn’t want to. It limits the form so.’
Fen agreed, with no special conviction, that it did, and particularly in the case of detective stories. ‘I read a good many of them,’ he said, ‘and I must know yours. May I ask your name?’
‘Judd,’ the man replied, ‘my name is Judd. But I write’ – he hesitated, in some embarrassment – ‘I write under the pseudonym of “Annette de la Tour”.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Fen. Annette de la Tour’s books, he remembered, were complicated, lurid, and splendidly melodramatic. And certainly they made no concessions to the Baal of characterization. He said: ‘Your work has given me a great deal of pleasure, Mr Judd.’
‘Has it?’ said Mr Judd eagerly. ‘Has it really? I’ve been writing for twenty years, and no one has ever said anything like that to me before. My dear fellow, I’m so grateful.’ His eyes sparkled with innocent pleasure. ‘And it’s all the better coming, as it evidently does, from an intelligent man.’
Upon this shameless quid pro quo he paused expectantly, and Fen, feeling that he was required to identify himself, did so. Mr Judd clapped his hands together with excitement.
‘But how splendid!’ he exclaimed. ‘Of course I’ve followed all your cases. We must have a very long talk together, a very long talk indeed. Are you staying here?’
‘Yes.’
‘For long?’
‘Until after polling day. I’m standing for Parliament.’
Mr Judd was taken aback.
‘Standing?’ he repeated dazedly. ‘For Parliament?’
‘It is my wish to serve the community,’ Fen said.
Confronted with this pronouncement, Mr Judd showed himself either more credulous or more courteous than Diana had been.
‘Very commendable,’ he murmured. ‘To tell you the truth, I had rather forgotten there was a by-election in progress. . . . What interest do you represent?’
‘I’m an Independent.’
‘Then you shall have my vote,’ said Mr Judd, narrowly forestalling a primitive attempt at canvassing on Fen’s part. ‘And if I had fifty votes,’ he added lyrically, ‘you should have them all. Tell me, which of my books do you think the best?’
Fen rummaged in his mind, seeking not for that book of Mr Judd’s which he thought the best, but for the one which Mr Judd was likely to cherish most. ‘The Screaming Bone,’ he said at last.
‘Admirable!’ said Mr Judd, and Fen was pleased that his diagnosis had been correct. ‘I’m so glad you enjoyed that one, because the critics were very down on it, and yet I’ve always thought it the finest thing I’ve done. Mind you, the critics are down on all my books, because they haven’t any psychology in them, but they were particularly harsh about that one. . . . You’re very perceptive, Professor Fen, very perceptive indeed.’ He beamed approval. ‘Still, we mustn’t waste time talking about my nonsense,’ he concluded insincerely. ‘Where are you heading for?’
‘I think’ – Fen glanced at his watch – ‘that it’s about time I was strolling back to the village.’
Mr Judd’s face fell. ‘What a pity – I have to go in the opposite direction, or we could have walked along together and talked,’ he said with great simplicity, ‘about my books. Still, you must come and have a meal with me – I live in a cottage only a quarter of a mile from here. What about lunch today?’
Fen said: ‘I’m afraid, you know, that I’m going to be very busy during the coming week,’ but Mr Judd’s disappointment was so manifest and poignant that he was moved to add: ‘But I dare say we can fit something in.’
‘Please try,’ said Mr Judd earnestly. ‘Please try. My telephone number is Sanford 13, and you needn’t hesitate to ring me at any time. Where are you staying?’
‘The Fish Inn,’ said Fen.
These words produced, unexpectedly enough, a marked change in Mr Judd. A new light appeared in his eyes – a light which Fen could not but associate with the more disreputable antics of satyrs in classic woods. In tones of reverence he said:
‘The Fish Inn. . . . Tell me, have you come across that beautiful girl?’
‘The blonde?’
‘The blonde.’
‘Well, yes. She brought me my early morning tea.’
Mr Judd drew in his breath sharply.
‘She brought you your tea,’ he said, somehow investing Fen’s prosaic statement with the glamour of a phallic rite. ‘And was she wearing that powder-blue frock?’
‘I can’t really remember,’ said Fen vaguely. ‘It was something tight-fitting, I think.’
‘Tight-fitting,’ Mr Judd repeated with awe. He looked at Fen as he might have looked at a man who had lit a fire with bank-notes. ‘Do you know, I think she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. . . . Do you think she reads my books? I’ve never dared ask her.’
‘I doubt if she’s intelligent enough to read anyone’s books.’
Mr Judd sighed. ‘It’s just as well, perhaps,’ he said, ‘because she mightn’t like them. . . .’ He veered from the topic with obvious reluctance. ‘Well, well, I mustn’t keep you.’
‘Don’t forget your revolver,’ said Fen.
‘No, I’d better not do that. Apart from anything else, I haven’t got a licence for it.’
‘And by the way – what is the point of throwing it into the pond and pulling it out again?’
‘That,’ Mr Judd explained, ‘is because the murderer wants to give the impression that he left it there at the time of the murder, and only retrieved it a good deal later, for fear of its discovery. The detective, of
course, finds it somewhere quite different.’
‘But why should the murderer want to give that impression?’
Mr Judd became evasive. ‘I think you’d better read the book when it comes out. I’ll send you a copy. . . . You realize about the coat, of course. It belongs to the victim, and the murderer wears it inside out so that when he carries the body the coat gets bloodstains on it where they ought to be, on the inside.’
‘Yes,’ said Fen. ‘Yes, I’d grasped that.’
‘Very quick of you. Well, you’ll let me know when you can pay me a visit, won’t you? I shall look forward to it, look forward to it enormously. I live a very solitary life, because there’s no one intelligent to talk to in Sanford Angelorum except the Rector, and his interests are confined to theology and birds and gardening, about all of which his information is tiresomely complete. Yes, you must certainly come and have a meal, and I shall be interested to hear any criticisms you may have to make about my books. . . . Yes. Well, good-bye for the present.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Fen, shaking him by the hand. ‘I’ve very much enjoyed meeting you, and I hope I didn’t interrupt your test.’
‘Not in the least,’ Mr Judd assured him. ‘All I had left to do was to take the body into the village and put it on top of the War Memorial. . . . Well, then, I shall hope to be seeing you.’
CHAPTER 5
THEY parted cordially, Mr Judd to retrieve his revolver and Fen to return to the village, full of regret at having missed seeing Mr Judd hoisting an imaginary corpse on to the War Memorial, and speculating on Mr Judd’s murderer’s motives in performing this laborious and public act.
He had reached the point provisionally identified as Sweeting’s Farm, and had worked out a rambling, intricate theory about Mr Judd’s murderer which involved the propinquity of an expatriate tulip-grower from Harlingen, when he saw approaching him, at a slow and thoughtful pace, the self-styled Crawley, who was now wearing a tweed cap and a tweed knickerbocker suit and carrying a fishing-rod in a manner which suggested that he was unused to it.
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