Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

I’ve substantiated it all,” groaned Lord Peter, “and unless he’s corrupted half Balham, there’s no doubt he spent the night there. And the afternoon was really spent with the bank people. And half the residents of Salisbury seem to have seen him off on Monday before lunch. And nobody but his own family or young Wicks seems to have anything to gain by his death. And even if young Wicks wanted to make away with him, it’s rather farfetched to go and murder an unknown man in Thipps’s place in order to stick Crimplesham’s eyeglasses on his nose.”

“Where was young Wicks on Monday?” asked Parker.

“At a dance given by the Precentor,” said Lord Peter, wildly. “David⁠—his name is David⁠—dancing before the ark of the Lord in the face of the whole Cathedral Close.”

There was a pause.

“Tell me about the inquest,” said Wimsey.

Parker obliged with a summary of the evidence.

“Do you believe the body could have been concealed in the flat after all?” he asked. “I know we looked, but I suppose we might have missed something.”

“We might. But Sugg looked as well.”

“Sugg!”

“You do Sugg an injustice,” said Lord Peter; “if there had been any signs of Thipps’s complicity in the crime, Sugg would have found them.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because he was looking for them. He’s like your commentators on Galatians. He thinks that either Thipps, or Gladys Horrocks, or Gladys Horrocks’s young man did it. Therefore he found marks on the window sill where Gladys Horrocks’s young man might have come in or handed something in to Gladys Horrocks. He didn’t find any signs on the roof, because he wasn’t looking for them.”

“But he went over the roof before me.”

“Yes, but only in order to prove that there were no marks there. He reasons like this: Gladys Horrocks’s young man is a glazier. Glaziers come on ladders. Glaziers have ready access to ladders. Therefore Gladys Horrocks’s young man had ready access to a ladder. Therefore Gladys Horrocks’s young man came on a ladder. Therefore there will be marks on the window sill and none on the roof. Therefore he finds marks on the window sill but none on the roof. He finds no marks on the ground, but he thinks he would have found them if the yard didn’t happen to be paved with asphalt. Similarly, he thinks Mr. Thipps may have concealed the body in the box-room or elsewhere. Therefore you may be sure he searched the box-room and all the other places for signs of occupation. If they had been there he would have found them, because he was looking for them. Therefore, if he didn’t find them it’s because they weren’t there.”

“All right,” said Parker, “stop talking. I believe you.”

He went on to detail the medical evidence.

“By the way,” said Lord Peter, “to skip across for a moment to the other case, has it occurred to you that perhaps Levy was going out to see Freke on Monday night?”

“He was; he did,” said Parker, rather unexpectedly, and proceeded to recount his interview with the nerve-specialist.

“Humph!” said Lord Peter. “I say, Parker, these are funny cases, ain’t they? Every line of inquiry seems to peter out. It’s awfully exciting up to a point, you know, and then nothing comes of it. It’s like rivers getting lost in the sand.”

“Yes,” said Parker. “And there’s another one I lost this morning.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, I was pumping Levy’s secretary about his business. I couldn’t get much that seemed important except further details about the Argentine and so on. Then I thought I’d just ask round in the City about those Peruvian Oil shares, but Levy hadn’t even heard of them so far as I could make out. I routed out the brokers, and found a lot of mystery and concealment, as one always does, you know, when somebody’s been rigging the market, and at last I found one name at the back of it. But it wasn’t Levy’s.”

“No? Whose was it?”

“Oddly enough, Freke’s. It seems mysterious. He bought a lot of shares last week, in a secret kind of way, a few of them in his own name, and then quietly sold ’em out on Tuesday at a small profit⁠—a few hundreds, not worth going to all that trouble about, you wouldn’t think.”

“Shouldn’t have thought he ever went in for that kind of gamble.”

“He doesn’t as a rule. That’s the funny part of it.”

“Well, you never know,” said Lord Peter; “people do these things just to prove to themselves or somebody else that they could make a fortune that way if they liked. I’ve done it myself in a small way.”

He knocked out his pipe and rose to go.

“I say, old man,” he said suddenly, as Parker was letting him out, “does it occur to you that Freke’s story doesn’t fit in awfully well with what Anderson said about the old boy having been so jolly at dinner on Monday night? Would you be, if you thought you’d got anything of that sort?”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Parker; “but,” he added with his habitual caution, “some men will jest in the dentist’s waiting-room. You, for one.”

“Well, that’s true,” said Lord Peter, and went downstairs.

VIII

Lord Peter reached home about midnight, feeling extraordinarily wakeful and alert. Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. He felt as though he were looking at a complicated riddle, of which he had once been told the answer but had forgotten it and was always on the point of remembering.

“Somewhere,” said Lord Peter to himself, “somewhere I’ve got the key to these two things. I know I’ve got it, only I can’t remember what it is. Somebody said it. Perhaps I said it. I can’t remember where, but I know I’ve got it. Go to bed, Bunter, I shall sit up a little. I’ll just slip on a dressing-gown.”

Before the fire he sat down with his pipe in his mouth and his jazz-coloured peacocks