Outside the door he encountered Myra, and asked for news of the lunatic.
‘Well, they haven’t caught him, my dear,’ she said, ‘though the asylum people have been traipsing about the neighbourhood all night.’
‘It actually was a lunatic, then?’
‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think it was at first. Mrs Hennessy’s just the sort of daft old woman to have – what d’you call them? – sexual delusions about naked men jumping out at her in the dark.’
‘But I saw him, too,’ Fen pointed out.
Myra’s expression suggested that only politeness had prevented her from attributing sexual delusions to Fen also.
‘Anyway, he’s real enough,’ she said, ‘and they’ve put out he’s harmless, though, of course, they couldn’t very well say he was homicidal for fear of creating a panic. And what I say about lunatics is this: they wouldn’t be lunatics if you knew what they were going to be up to next.’
With this sombre prognosis she left Fen, informing him parenthetically that the bar would be open at eleven.
He was about to go out when his attention was caught by the inn register, which lay on a table almost at his elbow. Opening it, he found that the girl with whom he had breakfasted was named Jane Persimmons, that she was British, and that she lived at an address in Nottingham. And it struck him that here also he might get enlightenment about the man he had glimpsed the previous evening and whose appearance had seemed vaguely familiar.
He turned back the page and read with some interest the entry immediately preceding his own. It ran:
Major Rawdon Crawley, British, 201 Curzon Street, London.
‘Good God,’ Fen murmured to himself. ‘Either he just doesn’t care, or else he imagines that no one in this district has ever read Thackeray… Well, well, it’s none of my business, I suppose.’
He noted that the soi-disant Crawley had arrived two days previously, closed the book, and went out into the inn-yard.
There was no cloud in the sky, but a brief shower during the night had mitigated the dust accumulated during weeks of drought, and painted grass, leaves, and hedges, a fresher and more lively green. The non-doing pig was noisily eating potatoes. Fen crossed the yard and came out into the main street of the village.
Before setting out for the district he had studied Ordnance Survey maps, and so he was able to orientate himself fairly easily. The district is an agglomeration of Sanfords, presided over by Sanford Hall, which stands isolated on one of the few eminences which that very level country can claim. Rich pasture extends uninterruptedly almost as far as the Marlock Hills, though here and there you may see little rashes of barley, to which the soil is unsuited, but which protesting farmers have been obliged to put in by ill-informed fiats from the Ministry of Agriculture. The River Spoor, here only twenty miles from its source, meanders amiably between willows and alders, its waters reputedly inimical to fish. It is fed by a small, erratic tributary, very liable to drought, which runs down from a lake in the grounds of Sanford Hall.
Sanford Morvel is the chief town. It has no function except as a market for neighbouring farmers, and this parasitic existence gives it a blustering, unconfident air. Four miles to the south-east of it is Sanford Condover, less a defined community than a fortuitous collection of small farms loosely plastered together by some cottages, a Baptist chapel, and an unsightly pub. Six miles to the south of that is Sanford Angelorum.
A small branch line of the Great Western Railway proceeds reluctantly as far as Sanford Morvel, and an even smaller branch line proceeds even more reluctantly from Sanford Morvel to within two miles of Sanford Angelorum (taking in an almost totally disused halt at Sanford Condover on the way), where it suddenly peters out, the Company, with the optimism engendered by nineteenth-century industrial progress, having built the line thus far on the assumption that the then Lord Sanford would allow them to continue right up to the village. This supposition, however, proved to be mistaken, since the then Lord Sanford was a disciple of William Morris and nourished a fanatical hatred of railways. The station at which Fen had arrived consequently stands, futile and alone, at a place from which no human dwelling is even visible, and though amended laws would now permit the railway to carry out its original project, it has long since lost interest in the matter.
In the normal way Fen would have made Sanford Morvel his headquarters, since it is admittedly the central point of the constituency. But he had entered the political arena cavalierly and late, to find the housing shortage in Sanford Morvel so acute that neither a committee room nor a bedroom could be found for him. He had therefore been obliged to choose between Sanford Angelorum and a slum-like place, twelve miles to the north of Sanford Morvel, named Peek. Peek, an affair of mean, grey, semi-detached houses, sprang up in the eighteen-fifties as a result of the discovery of a seam of inferior coal. It declined, some twenty years later, as a result of the working out of that seam, which to the irritation of those who had financed it proved to be minute. The mining community, for which Peek had been built, departed; the more thriftless elements of the district took over and Peek, its raison d’être gone, decayed with startling rapidity.
Of all this Fen had deviously apprised himself. Peek, for his purposes, was clearly impossible. And, surveying Sanford Angelorum in the clear summer light, he was glad he had elected to stay in that charming, unpretentious village.
He admired it as he walked along the main street in the direction opposite to that of the railway station. Like most such places, it was assembled, he saw, round the church, a medium good example of the decorated style, whose ornamental conceits, being carved in red sandstone, were a good deal blurred by weathering. The Rectory, built large for an age more opulent and more philoprogenitive than this, adjoined it. There were one or two shops; there was a green with a war memorial; there was a row of delightful eighteenth-century cottages; there was, obstinately Victorian, ‘The Fish Inn’.
Outside the gate of one of the cottages Fen saw Diana talking earnestly to a young man in shabby tweeds. She waved to him, but her conversation seemed engrossing, and he did not venture to interrupt it.
Before long he reached the edge of the village and came to a spot which he suspected might be the scene of Mrs Hennessy’s encounter on the previous evening. Resisting the temptation to root about for traces of the lunatic, he passed on, and soon arrived at a miniature cross-roads, with a sign-post which added to its total illegibility the even graver defect of pointing in no particular direction.
After some hesitation he entered the lane on the left.
It was the height of summer. The hips of the dog-rose were ripe in the hedges. Barley was being cut, flecked with the scarlet of poppies. Copper butterflies roamed fragile as thistledown through the hot air. Spiders’ webs draped the twigs and leaves. In the distance a heat haze was forming, but a line of white smoke enabled you to follow the progress of a distant train.
Fen began to walk more briskly. The country, a place with which he was not normally infatuated, seemed particularly winning today…
But he had not gone a hundred yards before a startling spectacle halted him in his tracks.
He had come to a five-barred gate giving access to a large, irregularly-shaped field. Its hedges were mainly of thorn. It had a dank-looking pond – much diminished now by the lack of rain – in the middle of it. And at the pond’s margin a duck, its snow-white plumage somewhat marred by the green slime which clung to its underside, was hobbling slowly about.
But it was not these things that had