Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin Page B

office, just inside on the left, there’s a telephone. Get an ambulance. Say it’s either concussion or a basal fracture of the skull. And if they’re going to be of any use, they’ll have to be quick about it.’
    The man – he was young, Fen saw, and trembling and on the verge of nausea – hesitated fractionally, then nodded and ran heavily towards the inn. And again Fen knelt beside Jane Persimmons, his fingers testing the bone from ankle to cervix. On the body, he found, there was no palpable injury except bruises – though internal haemorrhage remained a possibility. . . . He frowned, perplexed. The girl’s condition was consonant enough with the nature of the accident; what problem there was lay in its circumstances . The approach of the lorry had been by no means noiseless, and it had hooted, prolongedly. . . .
    Above his head, the woman spoke – timidly and in low tones. ‘I dunno if ’ee’d like to bring the poor maid in my ’ouse, sir. I’d ’elp ’ee carry ’er there.’
    Fen smiled rather wanly and shook his head. ‘She mustn’t be moved, I’m afraid.’ He stood up, brushing disjointedly at the knees of his trousers. ‘There’s nothing that can be done for her until the ambulance arrives.’
    The woman looked down at the pretty, pathetic, blood-stained face with a compassion too full to admit of mere morbid inquisitiveness, and sighed noisily, shifting a half-empty washing-basket mechanically from one arm to the other. But she was not unnerved, Fen thought, as the driver had been. Unimaginative, probably; and for that reason a reliable witness. ‘You saw the accident?’ he asked.
    She had. Disposing damp clothes on a line in the garden, she had seen Jane emerge from the inn-yard and had watched her steadily as, preoccupied and walking fast, she came up the road. Undeniably the lorry had hooted; and until she was almost at the corner, Jane had kept well in to the side of the road. But then she had turned her head to look back at the inn, and so doing had walked straight out into the middle of the road. ‘I shouted at ’er,’ the woman concluded. ‘But it didn’t do no good. And the lorry swerved, but that didn’t do no good, neither. So there it was.’
    â€˜There was no one near her when it happened? She couldn’t have been jostled or pushed, that is?’
    The woman stared. ‘Oh, no, sir, she were quite alone. No one else except me Dad ’ere in sight.’
    â€˜And you’re certain the driver didn’t run into her deliberately?’
    She was shocked, antagonized. ‘That’s a nice question!’ she ejaculated indignantly. ‘Course he didn’t, poor lad! Why’d ’e do a terrible thing like that?’ And she removed herself two or three paces from the moral leprosy which had made the inquiry, eyeing it militantly and with overt distrust.
    At this point the victim of Fen’s imputation returned; an ambulance, he reported, was on the way. His account of what had happened amply confirmed the woman’s; so also – though more inchoately – did Dad’s. And there could be no possible doubt, Fen concluded, that the thing had been a genuine accident. Whence, then, his own scepticism? Well, the girl had been preoccupied; but brooding does not inevitably result in immolation – as witness the continuing survival of one of Fen’s Oxford colleagues, whose perilous habit it was to perambulate the streets engrossed in a book. To him the senses continued to make their reports, and by some esoteric mechanism to deliver them at the very centre of the intelligence whenever his preservation required it. So also, presumably, with this girl. Only in her case the delivery had for once not been made, the alarm had not sounded. She must have heard the lorry yet have remained totally oblivious of it.
    The interval