was rather casual than cordial, but then, they had never been greatly attached to one another.
Bussy, his eye on the closing door, said: âIâm afraid I must ask for your discretion. I shanât be here very much longer, but I want to remain incognito if possible.â
âI shall say nothing.â Fen reached for the toast. âI shall be too busy to gossip, in any case.â
âBut youâre curious?â
âMy dear chap, of course I am. Are you in a position to tell me why youâre here?â
Taking a pipe from his pocket, Bussy separated it into several pieces and began poking about in them with a bedraggled gullâs feather. In this prolonged and devout ritual of preparation, Fen recalled, he had always indulged.
âI donât see why not,â he said slowly. âMost of the facts you could get from the papers, anyway. Perhaps you have got them from the papers, already.â
âPerhaps I have,â Fen agreed. âBut until you tell me to what they relate, I can scarcely be sure of it.â
âA murder,â said Bussy. âThe murder of a woman called Mrs Lambert.â
Fen shook his head. âI donât remember reading about that. Following crime in the papers isnât very rewarding, because thereâs no space for details: so I donât do it.â
âBut you yourselfâ â Bussy looked at him with some calculation â âhave been involved in a certain number of investigations. Those two murders at Castrevenford, for instance.â
âI solved them,â said Fen, with the impregnable air of one who asserts that the earth is a globe.
âBut all your cases have been rather recherché . Iâm not sure that thereâs much for you in this. Or rather â ââ
Bussy paused, again in calculation, and Fen tapped the mustard spoon impatiently on the side of his plate. âThe facts,â he said balefully. âUnless, of course, the solutionâs already settled and obvious. Finished histories donât appeal to me greatly.â
âIâll tell you this much.â Bussy spoke now with rather more emphasis. âThereâs one curious aspect of the evidence which seems to me to point pretty directly to a certain conclusion.â He paused, while Fen struggled to assimilate this uncommonly nebulous statement. âOnly no one else seems to see it.â
âAh,â said Fen reservedly.
âYes, youâre quite right to be sceptical,â said Bussy, not without gloom. âIâve wondered myself if Iâm imagining things. Of course, when I say that others donât see it, I donât mean that Iâve expounded it to them and they still donât see it.â
âNo.â
âI just mean that it hasnât occurred to them. And thatâs what mystifies me, because to me itâs so self-evident that I canât see why it hasnât occurred to them.â
âIt would be better,â said Fen with commendable patience, âif we clothed these bones with a little flesh. My mind isnât 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. Itâs altogether too metaphysical. Expound Mrs Lambert, please.â He poured out coffee.
âAll right.â Bussy nodded, with a brisk movement substituting for the gullâs feather a small pen-knife, with which he proceeded to scrape about inside the bowl of the pipe. âSee if you see what Iâm getting at.â
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