Buried for Pleasure (26 page)

‘Damn it all, the man was criminal; and we're always being told that it's the duty of every citizen to prevent criminals from escaping from justice; and I warn you that if my fourteen points are not adopted, Western Europe will be at war again within a decade.'

Still chatting sociably, he was led away.

CHAPTER 22

‘J
ANE
P
ERSIMMONS
has been deaf from birth,' said Fen. ‘And once one realized that, it became painfully obvious who had killed Bussy.'

He scrutinized his audience without pleasure. The process of explaining his cases was not as a rule at all disagreeable to him, but on this occasion his personal disgust at being a member of the Mother of Parliaments deprived his recital of all zest. Moreover, his listeners struck him as being irritatingly unaware of the disaster he had suffered; their complacency offended him. They seemed to imagine that God was in His Heaven and all was well with the world – and from their point of view, no doubt, such optimism was justified. . . . Fen's expression of disapproval deepened to a scowl.

It was half past nine on the Sunday evening, and they were on the lawn of ‘The Fish Inn'. The bar was no longer habitable but, in view of the continuing splendour of the weather, to drink outside was a pleasure rather than an inconvenience. A window of the bar was being used as a serving-hatch, and Jacqueline was behind it. Sitting or lying on the grass in a circle round Fen were Diana, Lord Sanford, Myra, and Mr Judd. On the outskirts of the group lurked two other figures, Mr Beaver and Captain Watkyn, both of them oppressed, it seemed, by some testing intellectual or moral quandary. Beyond them, a few villagers stood drinking and arguing about the events of the afternoon.

‘The case was a simple one,' Fen resumed, ‘and needn't take long to explain. I can't regard it as one of my successes, because I was so unconscionably slow in seeing the truth. However . . .

‘My first clue came from Bussy's account of the murder of Mrs Lambert; it lay in that special oddity of the affair which both Bussy and I observed. Suppose I am blackmailing you, Judd; and suppose I become aware that you have recognized me as an individual having special knowledge of your seamy past; and suppose that in view of this I decide you must be killed before you can betray me to the police. What is the one thing, in those circumstances, that I am
not
likely to do? The answer is obvious: I am not likely to devise a method of murder – such as sending poisoned chocolates through the post – which will leave you a comfortable twelve hours beforehand in which to give me away. If I am to kill you at all, the job must obviously be done as quickly as possible – or the reason for doing it will cease to exist.

‘But the blackmailer of Mrs Lambert chose the poisoned chocolates method. And from that it was possible provisionally to infer that he was not afraid of being betrayed to the police before his device could take effect. And why not? Mrs Lambert's husband was away from home, but on a previous occasion she had gone to the police alone – in order to inform them of the blackmail – and there was nothing to stop her doing so again. The only thing I could think of that
would
stop her was the fact that the blackmailer, the revenant from her past, was actually a member of the local police, and in all probability the head of the organization. Mrs Lambert would then have no one in whom she could confide except her husband – who was away; blackmail, on account of a prostitute's career, is not, after all, the sort of thing one communicates even to one's closest friends. And although you may say that she could have gone with her story to the police in some other district, you have only to picture yourself telling one police superintendent that another is guilty of blackmail to realize that it isn't the sort of task one undertakes lightly. Mrs Lambert then decided to wait for the return of her husband before taking any action; and on just such a decision Wolfe, posting the poisoned chocolates, could perfectly rely. So she died, and her information died with her.

‘I don't say, of course, that the reasoning I've outlined was by any means conclusive. But it was confirmed by the fact that, as he told me, Bussy had collected or was about to collect substantial evidence tending to the same verdict. And that was why he, too, had to die. What his evidence was, and what he intended by his overt departure and surreptitious return, we shall never know; but Wolfe clearly regarded it as quite sufficient to make his death a crying necessity.

‘You'll remember that when the evidence in connexion with Bussy's murder had been sifted, and it had been established that all the rigmarole which pointed to Elphinstone was faked, we were left with one crucial problem: how had the murderer known that Bussy was going to turn up at the golf-course hut at all? How had he known to set his stage, and lay his ambush, in such an unlikely place? The rendezvous had not been conceived until my chance meeting with Bussy, and I myself had suggested it quite out of the blue; so the murderer could not have been aware of it
prior
to that moment. And afterwards – well, I said nothing about it, it was wholly unreasonable to suppose that Bussy did, and there was no possibility of our having been overheard. What, then, had happened?

‘It took the attempt on Jane Persimmons' life to enlighten me; and it took the incident of the lost field-glasses, and their secret return, wiped clean of finger-prints, to complete that enlightenment. At long last I realized that Jane Persimmons was deaf.
That
was why she had walked straight into a particularly noisy lorry;
that
was why, lip-reading, she watched one attentively whenever one spoke;
that
was why her accent seemed to us slightly foreign – for consonants of the same group
look
the same when one's pronouncing them, and if you have to learn to speak entirely by lip-reading you're liable to blur and confuse them.

‘From that point onwards everything was clear. If you can lip-read, and if you have a pair of field-glasses, you can “overhear” conversations going on many hundreds of yards beyond earshot. The inn's guest-rooms look out on the slope where Bussy and I arranged our rendezvous. And Jane was probably in one of them, and standing by the window at the relevant time.

‘Now,
she
didn't kill Bussy, since she was unconscious at the time. She must therefore have communicated my conversation with Bussy to some other person or persons. And she had precious little time in which to do this, since less than ten minutes later she was knocked down by the lorry, remaining unconscious for nearly four days thereafter. All of that narrowed the field decisively. The only persons Jane Persimmons went near during the brief space of time between the fatal conversation and her accident were Myra, Jacqueline, and Wolfe; and there was no time for her to have committed anything to paper. Myra and Jacqueline I could easily exonerate, on four separate counts. They were: (i) the blackmailer of Mrs Lambert was almost certainly a man, an old client of hers; (ii) both Myra and Jacqueline had an unshakeable alibi for the time of Bussy's murder; (iii) ordinary common sense made it inconceivable that they were guilty accomplices of the murderer; and (iv) if they were innocent, and Jane had informed them of my conversation with Bussy, then they had no possible reason for keeping quiet about it subsequently. It was not in them, then, that Jane Persimmons had confided. And since unquestionably she confided in
somebody
, that somebody can only have been Wolfe.'

Fen paused, and Mr Judd said:

‘All that is amply clear, I think. And it is corroborated beyond all possible doubt by the attempt to kill Jane Persimmons. That, I take it, became necessary as soon as it was obvious that the scheme of implicating Elphinstone had failed.'

‘Quite so,' said Fen. ‘At first it seemed that Jane might die of her own accord, but as soon as it became likely that she would recover, Wolfe was impelled to silence her; for
if
she recovered, she would be in a position to publish the utterly damning fact that he knew of my rendezvous with Bussy.'

‘And the field-glasses,' said Mr Judd. ‘I presume that she picked them up when she was out that day and brought them back here with her, intending to return them to the Rector.'

‘Exactly. And Wolfe removed them from her room when he visited it on the evening of the accident.'

Myra said: ‘Then it was him, my dear, who wiped them and put them back in the Rector's study?'

‘Yes. He wouldn't want to give us any chance of suspecting that Jane was deaf, and therefore in a position to know of the golf-course rendezvous and to hand on the information to him.'

‘There's only one thing I don't understand,' said Mr Judd. ‘I can visualize Jane, out of idle curiosity, “overhearing” your conversation with Bussy. But I can't see why she should tell Wolfe about it.'

Fen smiled. ‘You must remember that to her I was at that time an unknown quantity, while Bussy was patently not what he pretended to be. She couldn't know that in our grotesque fashion we represented the Law; on the contrary, we must have seemed to her decidedly suspicious characters. And up to the moment when, the church clock striking six, Myra interrupted her, this is what she heard – or rather, saw:

‘“
I hadn't hoped to find you so easily. Fen, I need help. You must help me. There's a small element of risk, I'm afraid, but you won't mind that.”

‘“
No, I shan't mind that.”

‘“
Good. It's to do with this Lambert affair, of course. Something I can't manage single-handed. I can't give you the details now, I'm afraid, because I've got to catch a train.”

‘“
You're leaving?”

‘“
To all appearances, yes. I want it to be thought that I've returned to London. But after dark I shall sneak back again, and you must meet me. I can explain the position then.”

‘“
And where do you propose to spend the night?”

‘“
In the open.”

‘“
That will be cold and disagreeable. You ought to find a shelter of some kind
–
if you're proposing to sleep, that is.”

‘“
All right. No doubt a haystack or a barn
—”

‘“
Or you might try one of the huts on the golf-course.”

‘“
Whatever you say. That would certainly have the advantage of providing a
locus in quo
for our meeting.”

‘“
And the time?”

‘“
Let's say midnight. I shall almost certainly be back by then, but if I'm not, wait for me.”

‘“
Yes. I suggest the hut at the fourth green. It's reasonably commodious.”

‘“
That will do.”

‘Well, at best it was an equivocal sounding interchange; we
might
have been planning to commit a burglary; and it's not therefore surprising that when, on emerging from the inn, Jane saw a police-officer tinkering with his car, she should feel it her duty to tell him about it.

‘The case against Wolfe, then, was conclusive; no other explanation would cover all the facts. And thereafter it was easy to visualize how events looked from his angle. He came to this district about two months ago; he recognized Mrs Lambert; he wanted money (who doesn't?); he decided to blackmail the woman, thinking that after so brief and professional contact with her so many years before she would never remember him. His first demand was met; he sent a second. And then the whole scheme collapsed when she visited the police-station to inform the law of what was going on.

‘Undoubtedly he himself interviewed her on that occasion; she recognized him – and must have hurriedly fabricated a false pretext for her presence there. But such recognition is not easily disguised, and such fabrications ring hollow. He knew that she knew him; he knew why she had come to the police; he knew he must silence her in order to escape gaol. Secure in the knowledge that she would take no action till her husband returned, he sent her the poisoned chocolates. She died – and he, “investigating” the case, had ample opportunity to destroy any evidence against him which might remain.

‘He must have thought himself completely safe; the shock of learning that Bussy was on his tail must have been severe. How he learned it we don't know, but learn it he undeniably did. Murder breeds murder; Bussy constituted a second and graver threat to his security, so Bussy, too, had to die. When Jane Persimmons told him of my conversation with Bussy, of the golf-course meeting-place, he saw his opportunity. The knife was stolen that evening from Judd's house, with trimmings to suggest that Elphinstone had stolen it (the details of Elphinstone's lunacy, remember, were given to the police at the time of his escape). At the golf-course hut, the scene was set. As regards the pince-nez, I imagine that Etphinstone dropped them somewhere and that Wolfe subsequently picked them up, but the point isn't important. It was a clever idea, this attempt to shift the responsibility on to the lunatic; and but for the unavoidable mistake of the fire it would, the way things were going, have almost certainly succeeded. So Bussy died, and Wolfe escaped to his home in time to be called out to “investigate” the second of his murders.

‘But my discovery of Boysenberry's reticence about Elphinstone's phobia reopened the case. It was now Jane who was the danger. For a day or two it seemed that she was going to die as a result of the accident, but on Wednesday the news was abroad that she was better. That night he made his attempt on her life – an attempt so framed as to make it appear that death had been natural. It failed, and he found himself in the ironic position of having to organize precautions against himself. No doubt he intended ultimately to evade those precautions and finish the job. But by yesterday morning the main outlines of the affair were clear to me. I needed time in which to tidy up the loose ends, so I went to Wolfe and spun him a long and circumstantial tale about Myra having killed Bussy – sorry, Myra – with the idea of lulling him into a false sense of security. Whether it did or not I haven't the slightest idea, but in any event I got my breathing-space. When he was confronted by the warrant, his nerve failed him, and then' – Fen shrugged – ‘well, the rest you know.'