Unnatural death
heavy meal.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” said Wimsey. “We suggested shock, you know.
Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny
after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is
horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of
amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands.
Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; _exeunt omnes_, singing and
washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?”
“Proving it is the difficulty, that’s all. By the way, there were no
finger-marks on the bottle—only smears.”
“Gloves, I suppose. Which looks like camouflage, anyhow. An ordinary
picnicking couple wouldn’t put on gloves to handle a bottle of Bass.”
“I know. But we can’t arrest all the people who wear gloves.”
“I weep for you, the Walrus said, I deeply sympathise. I see the
difficulty, but it’s early days yet. How about those injections?”
“Perfectly O.K. We’ve interrogated the chemist and interviewed the
doctor. Mrs. Forrest suffers from violent neuralgic pains, and the
injections were duly prescribed. Nothing wrong there, and no history of
doping or anything. The prescription is a very mild one, and couldn’t
possibly be fatal to anybody. Besides, haven’t I told you that there was
no trace of morphia or any other kind of poison in the body?”
“Oh, well!” said Wimsey. He sat for a few minutes looking thoughtfully
at the fire.
“I see the case has more or less died out of the papers,” he resumed,
suddenly.
“Yes. The analysis has been sent to them, and there will be a paragraph
to-morrow and a verdict of natural death, and that will be the end of
it.”
“Good. The less fuss there is about it the better. Has anything been
heard of the sister in Canada?”
“Oh, I forgot. Yes. We had a cable three days ago. She’s coming over.”
“Is she? By Jove! What boat?”
“The _Star of Quebec_—due in next Friday.”
“H’m! We’ll have to get hold of her. Are you meeting the boat?”
“Good heavens, no! Why should I?”
“I think someone ought to. I’m reassured—but not altogether happy. I
think I’ll go myself, if you don’t mind. I want to get that Dawson
story—and this time I want to make sure the young woman doesn’t have a
heart attack before I interview her.”
“I really think you’re exaggerating, Peter.”
“Better safe than sorry,” said his lordship. “Have another peg, won’t
you? Meanwhile, what do you think of Miss Climpson’s latest?”
“I don’t see much in it.”
“No?”
“It’s a bit confusing, but it all seems quite straightforward.”
“Yes. The only thing we know now is that Mary Whittaker’s father was
annoyed about Miss Dawson’s getting his aunt’s money and thought it
ought to have come to him.”
“Well, you don’t suspect _him_ of having murdered Miss Dawson, do you?
He died before her, and the daughter’s got the money, anyhow.”
“Yes, I know. But suppose Miss Dawson had changed her mind? She might
have quarrelled with Mary Whittaker and wanted to leave her money
elsewhere.”
“Oh, I see—and been put out of the way before she could make a will?”
“Isn’t it possible?”
“Yes, certainly. Except that all the evidence we have goes to show that
will-making was about the last job anybody could persuade her to do.”
“True—while she was on good terms with Mary. But how about that morning
Nurse Philliter mentioned, when she said people were trying to kill her
before her time? Mary may really have been impatient with her for being
such an unconscionable time a-dying. If Miss Dawson became aware of
that, she would certainly have resented it and may very well have
expressed an intention of making her will in someone else’s favour—as a
kind of insurance against premature decease!”
“Then why didn’t she send for her solicitor?”
“She may have tried to. But after all, she was bed-ridden and helpless.
Mary may have prevented the message from being sent.”
“That sounds quite plausible.”
“Doesn’t it? That’s why I want Evelyn Cropper’s evidence. I’m perfectly
certain those girls were packed off because they had heard more than
they should. Or why such enthusiasm over sending them to London?”
“Yes. I thought that part of Mrs. Gulliver’s story was a bit odd. I say,
how about the other nurse?”
“Nurse Forbes? That’s a good idea. I was forgetting her. Think you can
trace her?”
“Of course, if you really think it important.”
“I do. I think it’s damned important. Look here, Charles, you don’t seem
very enthusiastic about this case.”
“Well, you know, I’m not so certain it is a case at all. What makes you
so fearfully keen about it? You seem dead set on making it a murder,
with practically nothing to go upon. Why?”
Lord Peter got up and paced the room. The light from the solitary
reading-lamp threw his lean shadow, diffused and monstrously elongated,
up to the ceiling. He walked over to a book-shelf, and the shadow
shrank, blackened, settled down. He stretched his hand, and the hand’s
shadow flew with it, hovering over the gilded titles of the books and
blotting them out one by one.
“Why?” repeated Wimsey. “Because I believe this is the case I have
always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without
discernible means, or motive or clue. The norm. All these”—he swept his
extended hand across the book-shelf, and the shadow outlined a vaster
and more menacing gesture—“all these books on this side of the room are
books about crimes. But they only deal with the abnormal crimes.”
“What do you mean by abnormal crimes?”
“The failures. The crimes that have been found out. What proportion do
you suppose they bear to the successful crimes—the ones we hear nothing
about?”
“In this country,” said Parker, rather stiffly, “we manage to trace and
convict the majority of criminals—”
“My good man, I know that where a crime is known to have been committed,
you people manage to catch the perpetrator in at least sixty per cent of
the cases. But the moment a crime is even suspected, it falls, _ipso
facto_, into the category of failures. After that, the thing is merely a
question of greater or less efficiency on the part of the police. But
how about the crimes which are never even suspected?”
Parker shrugged his shoulders.
“How can anybody answer that?”
“Well—one may guess. Read any newspaper to-day. Read the _News of the
World_. Or, now that the Press has been muzzled, read the divorce court
lists. Wouldn’t they give you the idea that marriage is a failure? Isn’t
the sillier sort of journalism packed with articles to the same effect?
And yet, looking round among the marriages you know of personally,
aren’t the majority of them a success, in a hum-drum, undemonstrative
sort of way? Only you don’t hear of them. People don’t bother to come
into court and explain that they dodder along very comfortably on the
whole, thank you. Similarly, if you read all the books on this shelf,
you’d come to the conclusion that murder was a failure. But bless you,
it’s always the failures that make the noise. Successful murderers don’t
write to the papers about it. They don’t even join in imbecile symposia
to tell an inquisitive world ‘What Murder means to me,’ or ‘How I became
a Successful Poisoner.’ Happy murderers, like happy wives, keep quiet
tongues. And they probably bear just about the same proportion to the
failures as the divorced couples do to the happily mated.”
“Aren’t you putting it rather high?”
“I don’t know. Nor does anybody. That’s the devil of it. But you ask any
doctor, when you’ve got him in an unbuttoned, well-lubricated frame of
mind, if he hasn’t often had grisly suspicions which he could not and
dared not take steps to verify. You see by our friend Carr what happens
when one doctor is a trifle more courageous than the rest.”
“Well, he couldn’t prove anything.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be proved. Look at the
scores and scores of murders that have gone unproved and unsuspected
till the fool of a murderer went too far and did something silly which
blew up the whole show. Palmer, for instance. His wife and brother and
mother-in-law and various illegitimate children, all peacefully put
away—till he made the mistake of polishing Cook off in that spectacular
manner. Look at George Joseph Smith. Nobody’d have thought of bothering
any more about those first two wives he drowned. It was only when he did
it the third time that he aroused suspicion. Armstrong, too, is supposed
to have got away with many more crimes than he was tried for—it was
being clumsy over Martin and the Chocolates that stirred up the hornets’
nest in the end. Burke and Hare were convicted of murdering an old
woman, and then brightly confessed that they’d put away sixteen people
in two months and no one a penny the wiser.”
“But they _were_ caught.”
“Because they were fools. If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way,
or poison someone who had previously enjoyed rollicking health, or
choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to
extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people
begin to think you’re first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re
found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances
where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible
method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your
effects too often, and you’re safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and
gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature’s
unaided work. Murder’s so easy, Charles, so damned easy—even without
special training.”
Parker looked troubled.
“There’s something in what you say. I’ve heard some funny tales myself.
We all do, I suppose. But Miss Dawson—”
“Miss Dawson fascinates me, Charles. Such a beautiful subject. So old
and ill. So likely to die soon. Bound to die before long. No near
relations to make inquiries. No connections or old friends in the
neighbourhood. And so rich. Upon my soul, Charles, I lie in bed licking
my lips over ways and means of murdering Miss Dawson.”
“Well, anyhow, till you can think of one that defies analysis and
doesn’t seem to need a motive, you haven’t found the right one,” said
Parker, practically, rather revolted by this ghoulish conversation.
“I admit that,” replied Lord Peter, “but that only shows that as yet I’m
merely a third-rate murderer. Wait till I’ve perfected my method and
then I’ll show you—perhaps. Some wise old buffer has said that each of
us holds the life of one other person between his hands—but only one,
Charles, only one.”
CHAPTER IX
The Will
“_Our wills are ours to make them thine._”
Tennyson, _In Memoriam_
“Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a
wandering voice? . . . Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my
child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth . . .
well, ring him again . . . thank you, is that Dr. Carr? . . . Lord Peter
Wimsey speaking . . . oh, yes . . . yes . . . aha! . . . not a bit of
it . . . We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with
triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods . . . No, really. . . .
we’ve come to the conclusion that the thing is serious. . . . Yes. . . .
I want Nurse Forbes’ address. . . . Right, I’ll hold on. . . .
Luton? . . . oh, Tooting, yes, I’ve got that. . . . Certainly, I’ve no
doubt she’s a tartar, but I’m the Grand Panjandrum with the little round
button a-top. . . . Thanks awfully . . . cheer-frightfully-ho!—oh! I
say!—hullo!—I say, she doesn’t do maternity work, does she? Maternity
work?—M for Mother-in-law—Maternity?—No—You’re sure? . . . It would be
simply awful if she did and came along. . . . I couldn’t possibly