Free Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin Page B

instinct into some kind of plausible sequence; and Fen, who guessed what he was doing and who was not anxious to have the psychological inwardness of the union explained to him, took the opportunity to say:
    â€˜Yes, I understand that. It’s the sort of thing which happens more frequently than one imagines.’
    â€˜Only in this case it was perhaps specially surprising.’ Bussy was not to be deterred by this ready acquiescence. ‘You’d understand that if you’d met Lambert, as I have. He’s not only orthodox and conventional: he’s militantly orthodox and conventional, with a particularly rigid code of honesty and honour and an air of moral severity which I must say is a bit daunting. And all that is very relevant to what happened a fortnight ago. The thing is, you see, that when he asked her to marry him, Andrée didn’t tell him about her seamy past. I dare say she ought to have done. But as far as I can gather she was genuinely in love with him and horribly afraid that if he knew she’d been on the streets he’d throw her out and refuse ever to see her again. So she kept silent, and I don’t suppose anyone but a prig would blame her for that. After all, her past was a misfortune rather than a fault; she’d slaved to make herself respectable; and it would have been insanity to abandon the chance of real happiness and security for the sake of a Roman principle. I imagined that if he’d asked her she’d have told the truth. Only he didn’t ask her.
    â€˜They were married in Sanford Morvel just before the war broke out. Being a year or two above military age, Lambert got a job as one of the legal advisers to the Ministry of Supply, but it didn’t disrupt his home life to any serious extent, and the marriage undoubtedly thrived. 1 gather it was based more on mutual sympathy and good sense rather than on any deep intimacy – but still, whatever it was based on, it thrived. And until three weeks ago they were an almost ideally happy pair.’
    Fen’s campaign against the incursion of insects had withered for lack of attention; by now he was a good deal interested in Bussy’s narrative.
    â€˜I see what’s coming,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Blackmail.’
    â€˜Exactly. Blackmail.’ Bussy examined his pipe, blew through it experimentally, and began with great deliberation to fill it from a sealskin pouch. ‘Sentimental claptrap about blackmail – “the meanest of crimes” and that sort of conventional jabber – I haven’t normally much use for. If a man has committed a crime and got away with it, then I cannot see that another man who extorts money from him as the price of silence is one half as disgusting, morally, as a thug who savages an old woman in order to steal her life’s savings. But where it’s blackmail for a mere fault – and even more for a fault for which the wretched victim can’t be held responsible – then, I agree, it’s nauseating.
    â€˜And, of course, that was the case with Mrs Lambert.’
    Brooding, Bussy stared out of the window. Beyond it were well-kept beds of vegetables; beyond them an orchard; at the far extremity of that, a thicket hedge with a small, decrepit wooden gate in it. And from hedge and gate a gentle slope of rough pasture mounted to the sky-line, with three thin birch trees – forgotten sentinels of a disbanded army – huddled together in isolation close to the top. It was a placid scene, but it seemed to heighten Bussy’s indignation rather than to allay it; he thrust tobacco into his pipe with needless violence.
    Fen, whose theory it was that flies may invariably be crushed by clapping one’s hands together immediately above the place where they have settled, attempted without success to do this.
    â€˜I suppose the business ran its normal course?’ he ventured. ‘Final demands that were never