Buried for Pleasure (11 page)

The man – he was young, Fen saw, and trembling and on the verge of nausea – hesitated fractionally, then nodded and ran heavily towards the inn. And again Fen knelt beside Jane Persimmons, his fingers testing the bone from ankle to cervix. On the body, he found, there was no palpable injury except bruises – though internal haemorrhage remained a possibility. . . . He frowned, perplexed. The girl's condition was consonant enough with the
nature
of the accident; what problem there was lay in its
circumstances
. The approach of the lorry had been by no means noiseless, and it had hooted, prolongedly. . . .

Above his head, the woman spoke – timidly and in low tones. ‘I dunno if 'ee'd like to bring the poor maid in my 'ouse, sir. I'd 'elp 'ee carry 'er there.'

Fen smiled rather wanly and shook his head. ‘She mustn't be moved, I'm afraid.' He stood up, brushing disjointedly at the knees of his trousers. ‘There's nothing that can be done for her until the ambulance arrives.'

The woman looked down at the pretty, pathetic, blood-stained face with a compassion too full to admit of mere morbid inquisitiveness, and sighed noisily, shifting a half-empty washing-basket mechanically from one arm to the other. But she was not unnerved, Fen thought, as the driver had been. Unimaginative, probably; and for that reason a reliable witness. ‘You saw the accident?' he asked.

She had. Disposing damp clothes on a line in the garden, she had seen Jane emerge from the inn-yard and had watched her steadily as, preoccupied and walking fast, she came up the road. Undeniably the lorry had hooted; and until she was almost at the corner, Jane had kept well in to the side of the road. But then she had turned her head to look back at the inn, and so doing had walked straight out into the middle of the road. ‘I shouted at 'er,' the woman concluded. ‘But it didn't do no good. And the lorry swerved, but that didn't do no good, neither. So there it was.'

‘There was no one near her when it happened? She couldn't have been jostled or pushed, that is?'

The woman stared. ‘Oh, no, sir, she were quite alone. No one else except me Dad 'ere in sight.'

‘And you're certain the driver didn't run into her deliberately?'

She was shocked, antagonized. ‘That's a nice question!' she ejaculated indignantly. ‘Course he didn't, poor lad! Why'd 'e do a terrible thing like that?' And she removed herself two or three paces from the moral leprosy which had made the inquiry, eyeing it militantly and with overt distrust.

At this point the victim of Fen's imputation returned; an ambulance, he reported, was on the way. His account of what had happened amply confirmed the woman's; so also – though more inchoately – did Dad's. And there could be no possible doubt, Fen concluded, that the thing had been a genuine accident. Whence, then, his own scepticism? Well, the girl had been preoccupied; but brooding does not inevitably result in immolation – as witness the continuing survival of one of Fen's Oxford colleagues, whose perilous habit it was to perambulate the streets engrossed in a book. To him the senses continued to make their reports, and by some esoteric mechanism to deliver them at the very centre of the intelligence whenever his preservation required it. So also, presumably, with this girl. Only in her case the delivery had for once not been made, the alarm had not sounded. She must have heard the lorry yet have remained totally oblivious of it.

The interval of waiting seemed interminable. The driver sat on the running-board of the lorry and smoked, fretful at inaction, his eyes fixed miserably on the body of the unconscious girl; the woman stared defensively at Fen, anticipating – it was possible to suppose – some further enormity; the old man retired behind his garden wall and weeded, pausing from time to time to peer vacantly in the direction from which the ambulance was expected. A few pedestrians stopped, gaped, proffered futile advice, and passed soberly on. Presently Diana's taxi drove up to the inn, and Diana, emerging from it, hurried up to them.

‘Oh, Lord,' she said to Fen. ‘This looks nasty. Is there anything I can do?'

‘I don't think so, thanks. I'd ask you to drive her to the hospital only I daren't take the risk of moving her.'

‘Concussion?'

‘That or a fracture.'

Diana grimaced. ‘Sounds bad.' She picked up the handbag, restoring its contents to it, and laid it on the grass verge. ‘Do you know anything about her? Who she is, or – or what she's doing here?'

The question, Fen thought, was a little sudden. ‘No,' he said. ‘No, I'm afraid not.'

‘Well, there's rather an odd thing about her.'

‘And that is?'

But Diana was looking at her watch. ‘I'll tell you later,' she said equably. ‘If there's nothing I can do, I'd better go, because I'm supposed to be taking someone called Crawley to catch the 6.42, and it'll be a miracle if we make it. . . . By the way, I hear your meetings are rather good.'

‘They are enthralling,' said Fen complacently.

‘I shall go to one and heckle you.' She smiled, turned, and ran athletically back to the car.

Burdened with luggage, Bussy came out of the inn as she reached it. He glanced at the forlorn group along the road and seemed to ask a question. The reply clearly reassured him, for he nodded briskly and plunged into the car. It backed, turned, and was gone. Not more than a minute afterwards the ambulance came.

The doctor and attendants had neither time nor words to waste; they stowed the girl away with rapid efficiency and drove off, leaving in their wake no more potent consolation than the fact that she still lived. With aggravating deliberation, a policeman who had accompanied them recorded names, addresses, statements. He rode back in the lorry to Sanford Morvel, and Fen retired to the inn.

He found Myra alone in the bar – which already, at the encroaching threat of renovation, seemed dilapidated and sullen; just so, Fen thought, must the House of Usher have looked prior to its wholesale submersion, or Shiel's nightmare copper mansion on the island of Vaila. . . . Myra, it proved, was still in ignorance of what had happened, having been down in the cellar at the time of the accident.

‘Poor kid,' she said compassionately. ‘She wasn't much more than a kid, really. . . . You know, since she came here I've had the impression something was
worrying
her. She seemed to be fretting, like, and nervous.'

‘Yes, I thought so, too.'

‘I suppose the police'll be getting touch with her people?'

‘I imagine so,' said Fen.

Half an hour later there was a telephone call from the hospital at Sanford Morvel, requesting Jane Persimmons' address; and about nine o'clock Superintendent Wolfe, of the Sanford Morvel Constabulary, appeared at the inn. He was a burly, clean-shaven man who exhibited less consciousness of the dignity of his office than is common in the police force. When he had looked at Jane's room, he conversed affably, over a drink, with Fen.

‘Our trouble is,' he said, ‘that the Nottingham address she gives in the register is the address of a boarding-house. I've rung them up, but she's only been staying there a month, and they have no idea whether or not there are any relatives alive. No doubt there's someone we ought to communicate with, but I'm damned if I can find out who.'

‘Then there were no letters in her pockets or her bag?'

‘None. A diary without any entries was all I could find. It has the usual page for personalia, and the usual heading: “In case of accident communicate immediately with”. But she's filled it in: “the nearest hospital,” which shows a certain sense of humour but isn't useful.'

‘And nothing in her room?'

‘Nothing. I've never come across anyone so completely devoid of papers. There's this, of course.' Wolfe indicated a small, rectangular box of black steel which he carried under his arm. ‘But it's locked, and I can't find a key that fits it – which is odd – and I doubt if I'm justified in breaking it open. Still, I may hear something from the Nottingham police; they're going to go through her belongings there. . . . You don't happen to know why she was visiting this neighbourhood, do you?'

Fen shook his head. ‘I've no idea.'

‘Nor has anyone.' Wolfe finished his drink. ‘Well, I'd better be getting back. Glad to have met you.'

‘Before you go, tell me what the doctors think about her.'

‘Concussion. And they're not sure yet which way the cat will jump. She's still unconscious, of course, and probably will be for a day or two. Nasty business – and not less nasty because it was obviously her own fault. . . . Well, well.' Wolfe nodded amiably and departed.

Fen sought out Myra. He would be late returning to the inn that night, he said – or possibly he might stay with friends and not return at all.

‘Well, I'll give you a key, my dear,' she said, ‘and then you can come in at the side door as late as you like. Jackie and me'll be late too – we're going to a dance.'

‘Enjoy yourself.'

‘And you, my dear,' said Myra. ‘Give her my love,' she added pleasantly.

‘Unluckily it isn't that,' Fen said. ‘Duty, not romance. How is Samuel?'

‘He was in again this evening. Offered me a couple of eggs, on a condition.'

Fen was shocked. ‘Two eggs? That's a very poor tender. Herod offered Salome a hundred white peacocks. Two eggs I should be inclined to regard as insulting.'

‘Yes, I suppose it is, now you mention it.' Evidently this aspect of the matter had not previously occurred to Myra. ‘Small eggs, too. More like a bantam's eggs they were.'

‘Next time I should stand out for a hundred white peacocks. Or for beryls and chrysolites and sardonyx and chalcedony.'

‘Or John the Baptist's head on a charger,' Myra supplied efficiently. ‘I shall stand out, anyway. . . . You know what he says about his wife? “She'm cold”. he says, “she'm cold as a dead weasel”.'

‘Poor fellow.' Fen shook his head in commiseration. ‘Well, a pair of bantam's eggs aren't likely to buy him much consolation.' Receiving the key, he retired upstairs and dozed fitfully on his bed until half past eleven.

A quarter of an hour later he left the inn. The moon, almost at its full, bloomed amid a million stars.
The eternal silences of those infinite spaces
, Pascal's hypothetized agnostic had remarked,
terrify me
; which meant, presumably, that they did not terrify Pascal. And where the inter-stellar immensities were concerned, Fen reflected, Christians certainly had the best of it. Mathematicians might adumbrate their billions and their myriads,
libertins
might tremble in contemplation of them; the Christian, secure in a cosmology which dismissed them as irrelevance, was at liberty to regard the multitudes of remote suns as having been designed with no graver purpose than to solace his eye on such nocturnal rambles as this; at liberty to think of them as seraphic peep-holes in the floor of heaven, or (more vividly) as patines of bright gold. . . . ‘
Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars
,' Fen murmured inwardly – and thereupon abandoned theopathy and fell to considering the derivations of poetry.
Patines of bright gold. But the bright gold, with Danaë. Danaë to the stars
. Professionally meditating the possible genesis of Tennyson's line, he stalked silently through the kitchen garden and the orchard and out on to the slope behind the inn.

The three birch trees might have been steeped in rime; and as Fen came in sight of the woods, he saw that they, too, lay in a tarn of silver light. A white owl flew low across the moon, its silhouette knife-clear, a field-mouse clutched in its beak; a few yards nearer the woods, and he heard the inebriate singing of nightingales.
A forest of Nightingales;
it was not improbable that within it lurked, in the person of the lunatic, a Circe's son – his intentions less subtle than those of Comus, but basically, no doubt, the same. Moreover, there breathed somewhere beneath this moon the murderer of Mrs Lambert, so that, as regarded nightingales, Eliot's ‘stiff dishonoured shroud' was probably more apposite than Williams' oblique and lovely vision. . . . In the golf-course shelter Bussy, his mind impervious to nocturnal magic, would be brooding on strychnine – and at this dismal reflection Fen momentarily halted. Cat-like, he cherished the hours of darkness; it was his view that they belonged, inviolately, to Faëry and to high adventure; and although it was to be presumed that adventure of some sort awaited him, he suspected that it would prove to be laborious and squalid rather than swift and ennobling. It was with reluctance that, resisting the lure of renegation, he entered the wood.

No encounter, priapine, homicidal or other, enlivened his passage across it. At the far side he climbed a stile and was on the golf-course, amid a thicket of gorse whose butter-gold flowers were blanched now and obscurely sinister. The fairway of the third lay before him, and he walked down to the green. The fourth, he recalled, was a short hole which involved driving across a bramble-filled dip with steep sides. Into this he scrambled, and out again at the other side. The green, and the hut, lay before him. And there might – he halted, apprehensive – be someone moving hurriedly and silently away from it: in this deceptive light, though, it was difficult to be sure. . . . Walking more swiftly, he came to the hut and stood at the entrance; inside, a fragmentary orange glow, itself visible, yet had no power to illumine the pitch blackness.

‘Bussy!' Fen whispered.

And now there was movement – movement and a prolonged, toneless, hollow suspiration. Fen snatched a torch from his pocket and switched it on. The light fell on glazed eyes, on the glittering haft of a knife which projected from Bussy's mangled throat. His mouth moved, attempting speech; there came again that vacant, useless exhalation of breath; blood choked him; finger-nails scrabbled convulsively on wood.