Free Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin Page A

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:
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Vaguely,’ said Fen.
    â€˜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