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 – –’
‘Would serve the purpose. The world might know that I wasn’t what I appeared, but it still wouldn’t know what I actually was, and that was all I needed.’
Fen finished his grapefruit and rang a handbell. Myra produced obese, uncompromising sausages. The two men were silent until she went away again, Fen groping in his mind among the lees left by his undergraduate days. Bussy had been his contemporary; had read English; had nourished an unqualified enthusiasm for Thackeray; had – while Fen entered upon those devious courses which issue in Oxford Fellowships – elected subsequently, from some preference which remained impenetrable, to join the Metropolitan Police Force. And here he was. The reunion was rather casual than cordial, but then, they had never been greatly attached to one another.
Bussy, his eye on the closing door, said: ‘I’m afraid I must ask for your discretion. I shan’t be here very much longer, but I want to remain incognito if possible.’
‘I shall say nothing.’ Fen reached for the toast. ‘I shall be too busy to gossip, in any case.’
‘But you’re curious?’
‘My dear chap, of course I am. Are you in a position to tell me why you’re here?’
Taking a pipe from his pocket, Bussy separated it into several pieces and began poking about in them with a bedraggled gull’s feather. In this prolonged and devout ritual of preparation, Fen recalled, he had always indulged.
‘I don’t see why not,’ he said slowly. ‘Most of the facts you could get from the papers, anyway. Perhaps you have got them from the papers, already.’
‘Perhaps I have,’ Fen agreed. ‘But until you tell me to what they relate, I can scarcely be sure of it.’
‘A murder,’ said Bussy. ‘The murder of a woman called Mrs Lambert.’
Fen shook his head. ‘I don’t remember reading about that. Following crime in the papers isn’t very rewarding, because there’s no space for details: so I don’t do it.’
‘But you yourself’ – Bussy looked at him with some calculation – ‘have been involved in a certain number of investigations. Those two murders at Castrevenford, for instance.’
‘I solved them,’ said Fen, with the impregnable air of one who asserts that the earth is a globe.
‘But all your cases have been rather recherché. I’m not sure that there’s much for you in this. Or rather – –’
Bussy paused, again in calculation, and Fen tapped the mustard spoon impatiently on the side of his plate. ‘The facts,’ he said balefully. ‘Unless, of course, the solution’s already settled and obvious. Finished histories don’t appeal to me greatly.’
‘I’ll tell you this much.’ Bussy spoke now with rather more emphasis. ‘There’s one curious aspect of the evidence which seems to me to point pretty directly to a certain conclusion.’ He paused, while Fen struggled to assimilate this uncommonly nebulous statement. ‘Only no one else seems to see it.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen reservedly.
‘Yes, you’re quite right to be sceptical,’ said Bussy, not without gloom. ‘I’ve wondered myself if I’m imagining things. Of course, when I say that others don’t see it, I don’t mean that I’ve expounded it to them and they still don’t see it.’
‘No.’
‘I just mean that it hasn’t occurred to them. And that’s what mystifies me, because to me it’s so self-evident that I can’t see why it hasn’t occurred to them.’
‘It would be better,’ said Fen with commendable patience, ‘if we clothed these bones with a little flesh. My mind isn’t at all adapted, at this hour of the day, to deciding why an undefined set of people confronted by an undefined set of facts should not have arrived at an undefined conclusion. It’s altogether too metaphysical. Expound Mrs Lambert, please.’ He poured out coffee.
‘All right.’ Bussy nodded, with a brisk movement substituting for the gull’s feather a small pen-knife, with which he proceeded to scrape about inside the bowl of the pipe. ‘See if you see what I’m getting at.’
He subjected the little room to a heavily professional scrutiny. The single sash window was open, but the table at which they sat was so near to it that no eavesdropper outside could hope to evade observation. The door was firmly shut. There were no places of concealment. The walls were admittedly thin, but the tireless labours of the Beaver ménage made it highly improbable that Bussy’s words would be audible at more than a few inches from their source. Their sole companion was a Niobe who, tastefully framed in light oak, gazed anxiously down at them, apprehensive – it was possible to surmise – of a sudden assault on her virtue. Bussy frowned at her, ejected some aspects of filter from the depths of his pipe, fumbled among his clothing for a fresh one, and said:
‘A fortnight ago – on the afternoon of August 28, to be exact – a woman living just outside Sanford Morvel was poisoned. She was married to an Englishman, a solicitor called Lambert, but she herself was French – or more accurately half French and half Russian
. Her father, a bourgeois of sorts, very sensibly got out of Russia during the Menshevik regime, and her mother was a dancer at the Opera.
‘I needn’t hold forth about them, because they haven’t anything to do with the story. The point is that they both died when this girl – Andrée – was only fifteen, and left her penniless, with the result that she became a prostitute. I don’t mean’ – Bussy gestured perturbedly – ‘that she deliberately chose that unpleasant career. Of course she may have done – it hasn’t been possible to get any details – but from what I’ve heard about her character it seems to me much more likely that she was victimized. There are a good many ways in which that could happen to a pretty, poverty-stricken girl living on the rive gauche, and no doubt you can imagine them for yourself.’
Fen, who had finished eating, concurred, with a kind of grunt, in this estimate of the more worldly capacities of his mind. He was anxious to encourage Bussy to leave as much unsaid as possible, since the neighbourhood’s insect life, sun-drunk and at present percolating into the room in increasing numbers, promised considerable discomfort to anyone who was foolish enough to sit still for any length of time. Bluebottles were settling on the backs of his hands; a wasp, impersonally vehement, hovered at his ear; platoons of mosquitoes, in places so thick as to seem almost ectoplasmic, were performing a species of Hexentanz round his head. He blew cigarette smoke at them, which they seemed to enjoy, and grunted again, with enhanced emphasis.
‘It’s clear, in any case,’ said Bussy, ‘that she wanted to abandon that sort of life as soon as she got the chance, because she contrived somehow or other to save a bit of money and have tuition at a secretarial college. And eventually, at the age of nineteen, she got a job with a firm in the Avenue Mozart Demur et Cie – which hires out secretarial workers for short-term assignments and piece-work. It also makes, or at any rate made, a speciality of training one or two girls in English, so that visiting English business men can employ them. You get rather high wages in that job, and Andrée took it on. That was how she met Lambert.’
Bussy began to reassemble his pipe. ‘Lambert isn’t a business man, of course,’ he resumed after a brief interval of manipulation. ‘He’s a solicitor, as I said, But he has money of his own, so he doesn’t practise nowadays. And as a matter of fact, he’s always been more of an academic authority than a practical lawyer. Have you heard of Lambert on Company Law?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Fen.
‘That’s the man. Anyway, he went to Paris to meet a lot of other experts on Company Law. Not my idea of a picnic’ – Bussy stirred uneasily as he contemplated this uncouth occupational mafficking – ‘but I suppose it was his. The upshot of it was that while he was there he found he needed a secretary, and Demur sent him Andrée. And the upshot of that was that he brought her back to England and married her.’
Here Bussy paused prolongedly, mentally sorting the vagaries of the erotic instinct into some kind of plausible sequence; and Fen, who guessed what he was doing and who was not anxious to have the psychological inwardness of the union explained to him, took the opportunity to say:
‘Yes, I understand that. It’s the sort of thing which happens more frequently than one imagines.’
‘Only in this case it was perhaps specially surprising.’ Bussy was not to be deterred by this ready acquiescence. ‘You’d understand that if you’d met Lambert, as I have. He’s not only orthodox and conventional: he’s militantly orthodox and conventional, with a particularly rigid code of honesty and honour and an air of moral severity which I must say is a bit daunting. And all that is very relevant to what happened a fortnight ago. The thing is, you see, that when he asked her to marry him, Andrée didn’t tell him about her seamy past. I dare say she ought to have done. But as far as I can gather she was genuinely in love with him and horribly afraid that if he knew she’d been on the streets he’d throw her out and refuse ever to see her again. So she kept silent, and I don’t suppose anyone but a prig would blame her for that. After all, her past was a misfortune rather than a fault; she’d slaved to make herself respectable; and it would have been insanity to abandon the chance of real happiness and security for the sake of a Roman principle. I imagined that if he’d asked her she’d have told the truth. Only he didn’t ask her.
‘They were married in Sanford Morvel just before the war broke out. Being a year or two above military age, Lambert got a job as one of the legal advisers to the Ministry of Supply, but it didn’t disrupt his home life to any serious extent, and the marriage undoubtedly thrived. 1 gather it was based more on mutual sympathy and good sense rather than on any deep intimacy – but still, whatever it was based on, it thrived. And until three weeks ago they were an almost ideally happy pair.’
Fen’s campaign against the incursion of insects had withered for lack of attention; by now he was a good deal interested in Bussy’s narrative.
‘I see what’s coming,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Blackmail.’
‘Exactly. Blackmail.’ Bussy examined his pipe, blew through it experimentally, and began with great deliberation to fill it from a sealskin pouch. ‘Sentimental claptrap about blackmail – “the meanest of crimes” and that sort of conventional jabber – I haven’t normally much use for. If a man has committed a crime and got away with it, then I cannot see that another man who extorts money from him as the price of silence is one half as disgusting, morally, as a thug who savages an old woman in order to steal her life’s savings. But where it’s blackmail for a mere fault – and even more for a fault for which the wretched victim can’t be held responsible – then, I agree, it’s nauseating.
‘And, of course, that was the case with Mrs Lambert.’
Brooding, Bussy stared out of the window. Beyond it were well-kept beds of vegetables; beyond them an orchard; at the far extremity of that, a thicket hedge with a small, decrepit wooden gate in it. And from hedge and gate a gentle slope of rough pasture mounted to the sky-line, with three thin birch trees – forgotten sentinels of a disbanded army – huddled together in isolation close to the top. It was a placid scene, but it seemed to heighten Bussy’s indignation rather than to allay it; he thrust tobacco into his pipe with needless violence.
Fen, whose theory it was that flies may invariably be crushed by clapping one’s hands together immediately above the place where they have settled, attempted without success to do this.
‘I suppose the business ran its normal course?’ he ventured. ‘Final demands that were never final?’
‘No,’ said Bussy irritably. ‘It didn’t. And that’s what makes it so peculiarly sickening. Everything pointed to an uncommonly happy ending, and then – –’
‘But I’d better not anticipate. Here’s what actually happened.
‘Mrs Lambert got the usual sort of letter – this happened a bit less than a month ago – threatening to tell her husband that she’d been a prostitute, and circumstantial enough (it gave the address of a brothel where she’d lived in a street just off the rue de Rennes) to convince her that the writer knew at first hand what he or she was talking about. I say “he or she,” but it appears that Mrs Lambert never had any doubt that it was a man, and probably someone who’d once slept with her. I’ve seen the letter, and I can’t make out how she deduced that from it, but I give you her opinion for what it’s worth, and the probability is that she was right.
‘Well, the sum demanded wasn’t excessive, and she could lay hands on it without any difficulty; so she paid. Her husband, she knew, was fond of her, but she couldn’t be sure how he’d take a revelation like that.
‘But, naturally, a second demand followed very rapidly. Mrs Lambert decided that that sort of thing couldn’t be allowed to go on, and made up her mind to tell her husband all about herself and damn the consequences. She was amazed to find that he wasn’t in the slightest perturbed – amazed, that is, until he told her that he’d known all along; that he’d known, in fact, even before he married her. He blamed her neither for her past nor for not mentioning it
to him, and she realized then that this business wasn’t going to make the smallest difference to their relationship: that they were going to be able to carry on as happily and as confidently as before.’
At this point Bussy produced a new-fangled pocket lighter which smelled of ether, and applied it to his pipe. ‘Well, that was settled,’ he went on, ‘and they agreed to consult the local police. Lambert had to be away for two or three days, so his wife did the consulting alone. Twenty-four hours later, a box of chocolates came for her through the post. She imagined they were from her husband, and ate several of them unsuspiciously; but someone had injected strychnine into them, and within two hours she was dead.’
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.’
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