Whose Body? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel
you’ve got to do is to prevent people from associatin’ their ideas.
Most people don’t associate anythin’—their ideas just roll about like
so many dry peas on a tray, makin’ a lot of noise and goin’ nowhere,
but once you begin lettin’ ’em string their peas into a necklace, it’s
goin’ to be strong enough to hang you, what?”
“Dear me!” said Mrs. Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, “what a
blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!”
“Y’see,” said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and
frowning, “it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that
people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you
somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’
an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it, ’nless
somethin’ turns up afterwards to drive it home. F’r instance, Lady
Swaffham, I told you when I came in that I’d been down to Salisbury,
’n’ that’s true, only I don’t suppose it impressed you much; ’n’ I
don’t suppose it’d impress you much if you read in the paper tomorrow
of a tragic discovery of a dead lawyer down in Salisbury, but if I went
to Salisbury again next week ’n’ there was a Salisbury doctor found
dead the day after, you might begin to think I was a bird of ill omen
for Salisbury residents; and if I went there again the week after,
’n’ you heard next day that the see of Salisbury had fallen vacant
suddenly, you might begin to wonder what took me to Salisbury, an’
why I’d never mentioned before that I had friends down there, don’t
you see, an’ you might think of goin’ down to Salisbury yourself, an’
askin’ all kinds of people if they’d happened to see a young man in
plum-coloured socks hangin’ round the Bishop’s Palace.”
“I daresay I should,” said Lady Swaffham.
“Quite. An’ if you found that the lawyer and the doctor had once upon
a time been in business at Poggleton-on-the-Marsh when the Bishop
had been vicar there, you’d begin to remember you’d once heard of me
payin’ a visit to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh a long time ago, an’ you’d
begin to look up the parish registers there an’ discover I’d been
married under an assumed name by the vicar to the widow of a wealthy
farmer, who’d died suddenly of peritonitis, as certified by the doctor,
after the lawyer’d made a will leavin’ me all her money, and _then_
you’d begin to think I might have very good reasons for gettin’ rid of
such promisin’ blackmailers as the lawyer, the doctor an’ the bishop.
Only, if I hadn’t started an association in your mind by gettin’ rid
of ’em all in the same place, you’d never have thought of goin’ to
Poggleton-on-the-Marsh, ’n’ you wouldn’t even have remembered I’d ever
been there.”
“_Were_ you ever there, Lord Peter?” inquired Mrs. Tommy, anxiously.
“I don’t think so,” said Lord Peter; “the name threads no beads in my
mind. But it might, any day, you know.”
“But if you were investigating a crime,” said Lady Swaffham, “you’d
have to begin by the usual things, I suppose—finding out what the
person had been doing, and who’d been to call, and looking for a
motive, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lord Peter, “but most of us have such dozens of motives
for murderin’ all sorts of inoffensive people. There’s lots of people
I’d like to murder, wouldn’t you?”
“Heaps,” said Lady Swaffham. “There’s that dreadful—perhaps I’d better
not say it, though, for fear you should remember it later on.”
“Well, I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Peter, amiably. “You never know.
It’d be beastly awkward if the person died suddenly tomorrow.”
“The difficulty with this Battersea case, I guess,” said Mr. Milligan,
“is that nobody seems to have any associations with the gentleman in
the bath.”
“So hard on poor Inspector Sugg,” said the Duchess. “I quite felt for
the man, having to stand up there and answer a lot of questions when he
had nothing at all to say.”
Lord Peter applied himself to the duck, having got a little behindhand.
Presently he heard somebody ask the Duchess if she had seen Lady Levy.
“She is in great distress,” said the woman who had spoken, a Mrs.
Freemantle, “though she clings to the hope that he will turn up. I
suppose you knew him, Mr. Milligan—know him, I should say, for I hope
he’s still alive somewhere.”
Mrs. Freemantle was the wife of an eminent railway director, and
celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her _faux pas_ in
this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives.
“Wal, I’ve dined with him,” said Mr. Milligan, good-naturedly. “I think
he and I’ve done our best to ruin each other, Mrs. Freemantle. If this
were the States,” he added, “I’d be much inclined to suspect myself of
having put Sir Reuben in a safe place. But we can’t do business that
way in your old country; no, ma’am.”
“It must be exciting work doing business in America,” said Lord Peter.
“It is,” said Mr. Milligan. “I guess my brothers are having a good
time there now. I’ll be joining them again before long, as soon as I’ve
fixed up a little bit of work for them on this side.”
“Well, you mustn’t go till after my bazaar,” said the Duchess.
Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran
him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.
Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his
feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary
on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet
pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a
whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and
glanced over the pages.
“All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,” he
said; “they find what they are looking for.”
“Oh, they do,” agreed the detective; “but one learns to discount that
almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on
the other side—Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people,
you know, till I found they were all so busy looking for a burglar
whom nobody had ever seen, that they couldn’t recognise the footprints
of the household, so to speak. Then I spent two years learning to be
cautious.”
“Hum,” said Lord Peter, “theology must be good exercise for the brain
then, for you’re easily the most cautious devil I know. But I say,
do go on reading—it’s a shame for me to come and root you up in your
off-time like this.”
“It’s all right, old man,” said Parker.
The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said:
“D’you like your job?”
The detective considered the question, and replied:
“Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it
quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take
a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to
the mark and not get slack. And there’s a future to it. Yes, I like it.
Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Peter. “It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up
when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was
so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point.
If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning
of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting
and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and
getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if
there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my
livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But
I do.”
Parker gave this speech his careful attention.
“I see what you mean,” he said.
“There’s old Milligan, f’r instance,” said Lord Peter. “On paper,
nothin’ would be funnier than to catch old Milligan out. But he’s
rather a decent old bird to talk to. Mother likes him. He’s taken a
fancy to me. It’s awfully entertainin’ goin’ and pumpin’ him with stuff
about a bazaar for church expenses, but when he’s so jolly pleased
about it and that, I feel a worm. S’pose old Milligan has cut Levy’s
throat and plugged him into the Thames. It ain’t my business.”
“It’s as much yours as anybody’s,” said Parker; “it’s no better to do
it for money than to do it for nothing.”
“Yes, it is,” said Peter stubbornly. “Havin’ to live is the only excuse
there is for doin’ that kind of thing.”
“Well, but look here!” said Parker. “If Milligan has cut poor old
Levy’s throat for no reason except to make himself richer, I don’t see
why he should buy himself off by giving £1,000 to Duke’s Denver church
roof, or why he should be forgiven just because he’s childishly vain,
or childishly snobbish.”
“That’s a nasty one,” said Lord Peter.
“Well, if you like, even because he has taken a fancy to you.”
“No, but—”
“Look here, Wimsey—do you think he _has_ murdered Levy?”
“Well, he may have.”
“But do you think he has?”
“I don’t want to think so.”
“Because he has taken a fancy to you?”
“Well, that biases me, of course—”
“I daresay it’s quite a legitimate bias. You don’t think a callous
murderer would be likely to take a fancy to you?”
“Well—besides, I’ve taken rather a fancy to him.”
“I daresay that’s quite legitimate, too. You’ve observed him and made
a subconscious deduction from your observations, and the result is, you
don’t think he did it. Well, why not? You’re entitled to take that into
account.”
“But perhaps I’m wrong and he did do it.”
“Then why let your vainglorious conceit in your own power of estimating
character stand in the way of unmasking the singularly cold-blooded
murder of an innocent and lovable man?”
“I know—but I don’t feel I’m playing the game somehow.”
“Look here, Peter,” said the other with some earnestness, “suppose you
get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and
for all. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that something unpleasant
has happened to Sir Reuben Levy. Call it murder, to strengthen the
argument. If Sir Reuben has been murdered, is it a game? and is it fair
to treat it as a game?”
“That’s what I’m ashamed of, really,” said Lord Peter. “It _is_ a game
to me, to begin with, and I go on cheerfully, and then I suddenly see
that somebody is going to be hurt, and I want to get out of it.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the detective, “but that’s because you’re
thinking about your attitude. You want to be consistent, you want to
look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets
or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and
things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way
of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude
that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That’s all
right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value
in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s
that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport
of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard
luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like
that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You
can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”
“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter.
“It has a brutalizing influence.”
He got up and paced about the room, looking idly over the bookshelves.
Then he sat down again, filled and lit his pipe, and said:
“Well, I’d better tell you about the ferocious and hardened
Crimplesham.”
He detailed his visit to Salisbury. Once assured of his bona fides, Mr.
Crimplesham had given him the fullest details of his visit to town.
“And 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