Buried for Pleasure. Edmund Crispin

platinum blonde. Her features were flawless. She had a figure like the quintessence of all pin-up girls. And she moved with an unselfconscious and quite unprovocative placidity, which made it evident that – incredible though it might seem – she was quite unaware of her perfections.

      With a radiant smile she deposited a tray of tea on the bedside table; left the room, returned presently with his shoes, beautifully polished; smiled at him again; and the next moment, like a fairytale vision – though he could imagine no princess of the Perilous Realm capable of offering her lover such nuptial joys as this – was gone.

      Dazed, Fen lit his early-morning cigarette; and the familiar unpleasantness of smoking it restored him to something like normality. He sipped tea and brooded over the hammering, which continued unabated. Soon it was interrupted by a noise which sounded like a very large scaffolding giving way.

      Fen got up hurriedly, washed, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs.

      The whole household was astir – as unless heavily drugged it could hardly fail to be. Fen found Myra Herbert out in the yard, contemplating a small, greyish, unalluring pig which seemed to be trying to make up its mind how to employ the day.

      ‘Good morning, my dear,’ Myra greeted him brightly. ‘Sleep well?’

      ‘Up to a point,’ said Fen with reserve.

      She indicated the pig. ‘Did you ever see anything like him?’ she asked.

      ‘Well, no, now you mention it I don’t think I have.’

      ‘I’ve been cheated,’ said Myra, and the pig grunted, apparently in assent. ‘I like a young pig to be nice and pink, you know, and cheerful-like. But him – my God. I feed him and feed him, but he never grows.’

      They meditated jointly on this phenomenon. A passing farm-labourer joined them.

      ‘’E don’t get no bigger, do ’e?’ he observed.

      ‘What’s the matter with him, Alf?’

      The farm-labourer pondered. ‘’E’m a non-doer,’ he diagnosed at last.

      ‘A what?’

      ‘Non-doer. You’re wasting your time trying to fatten ’im. ’E’ll never get no larger. Better sell ’im.’

      ‘Non-doer,’ said Myra with disgust. ‘That’s a nice cheerful ruddy thought to start the day with.’

      The farm-labourer departed.

      ‘I’ll say this for him, though,’ said Myra, referring to the pig, ‘he’s very affectionate, which is a point in his favour, I suppose.’

      They turned back to the inn. Myra suggested that Fen might now like to have breakfast, and Fen agreed.

      ‘But what is happening?’ he demanded, indicating the hammering.

      ‘Renovations, my dear. They’re renovating the interior.’

      ‘But workmen never get started as early as this.’

      ‘Oh, it isn’t workmen,’ said Myra obscurely. ‘That’s to say…’

      They 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