Fen Country by Edmund Crispin Read Free Book Online Page B

sister Charlotte Blench, and I have to warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence at your trial.”
     
    “Yes,” said Fen later, over the coffee which Wyndham had brewed, “Bessie must have strangled her sister almost immediately before your arrival—presumably somewhere in the house and presumably for the sake of the money Mrs. Blench kept there.
    “Your appearance cut off her retreat. So as an emergency measure she impersonated Mrs. Blench; and during the night attempted to remove the body. The ‘grappling’ you saw in the garden was simply a small, middle-aged woman trying to cope with a heavy corpse—and of course the handkerchief with lipstick on it had precisely the opposite significance to what you imagined.”
    Wyndham nodded. “I see. When she realized I was awake, she iust had time to shove the body out of the way, somewhere near by, before I actually left the house. No wonder she didn’t want me to start looking around—and, incidentally, no wonder she was so upset when she heard I suffered from insomnia!”
    “And of course after you’d interrupted her first attempt,” Fen added-, “there was no chance for her to do anything further about the body, with any safety, before tonight. I located it, as you’ll have guessed, before I went to the police; but it was essential, they thought, to catch her in the act of moving it again.”
    “What did I miss?” Wyndham asked.
    “Oh, the significance of your fall, when you smashed the china.”
    “But she didn’t react to that.”
    “Quite,” said Fen. “That was how I realized she was shamming deafness—wasn’t, in fact, what she pretended to be. A genuinely deaf person would have felt the vibration of that heavy fall, conducted through the floor and walls, and would have turned at once.”

Outrage in Stepney
    By the close of Herr Dietrich’s peroration Gervase Fen had become decidedly restive. The hall was chilly and airless, the first delightful impact of Communism’s musty Victorian-sounding zoological similes—”Fascist jackal”, “Capitalist leeches”—had grown stale with repetition, and in general Fen felt that he had had enough of political slumming to last him for quite some time to come. He waited while an inflammatory question about the American president was asked and lengthily answered—Eisenhower, it seemed (pronounced by Herr Dietrich “Eisssenhoer” with all the sibilance of extreme hatred), was directly responsible, along with the vultures of Wall Street, for Germany’s continued partition—and then nudged his companion and crept out. In the streets, breathing soot-laden Stepney air, he lit a cigarette. And presently the other—whose name was Campbell and who belonged to Scotland Yard’s Special Branch—joined him there.
    “Well, thanks for bringing me,” said Fen. “Do you have to go back?”
    Campbell shook his head. “No, I don’t think it’s necessary. Apart from riots with Fascists, nothing interesting ever happens at these public do’s. What did you think of Dietrich?”
    Fen paused a moment before replying. Then he said slowly: “I suppose that really was Dietrich?”
    Campbell stared. “Good heavens, yes. He’s far too well-known, and far too distinctive-looking, for them to dream of trying to substitute anyone else. Anyway, why should they? From the point of view of the Stepney Communist Party, he’s a great catch.”
    “Yes, I suppose so… The sort of man,” Fen added pensively, “who would have a lot of useful information to give us about what’s going on in East Berlin.”
    “Would but won’t,” said Campbell. “You can take it as read that he’ll be kept surrounded by watchful comrades the whole time he’s over here. Since Petrov, they’ve been very cagey about that sort of thing. So that even if Dietrich did feel inclined to ask for asylum, he’d have to do a tricky escaping act first… Not,” Campbell went on, probing delicately, “that we have any