Whose Body? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel
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 far-fetched 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.
CHAPTER 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 gathered about him. He traced out this line and
that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out
from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales
Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr.
Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the
sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far
down—
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
By leaning his head down, it seemed to Lord Peter that he could hear
them, very faintly, lipping and gurgling somewhere in the darkness. But
where? He felt quite sure that somebody had told him once, only he had
forgotten.
He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which
the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the
excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club.
It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s “Physiological Bases of the
Conscience,” which he had seen reviewed two days before.
“This ought to send one to sleep,” said Lord Peter; “if I can’t leave
these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.”
He opened the book slowly, and glanced carelessly through the preface.
“I wonder if that’s true about Levy being ill,” he thought, putting the
book down; “it doesn’t seem likely. And yet—Dash it all, I’ll take my
mind off it.”
He read on resolutely for a little.
“I don’t suppose Mother’s kept up with the Levys much,” was the next
importunate train of thought. “Dad always hated self-made people and
wouldn’t have ’em at Denver. And old Gerald keeps up the tradition. I
wonder if she knew Freke well in those days. She seems to get on with
Milligan. I trust Mother’s judgment a good deal. She was a brick about
that bazaar business. I ought to have warned her. She said something
once—”
He pursued an elusive memory for some minutes, till it vanished
altogether with a mocking flicker of the tail. He returned to his
reading.
Presently another thought crossed his mind aroused by a photograph of
some experiment in surgery.
“If the evidence of Freke and that man Watts hadn’t been so positive,”
he said to himself, “I should be inclined to look into the matter of
those shreds of lint on the chimney.”
He considered this, shook his head and read with determination.
Mind and matter were one thing, that was the theme of the physiologist.
Matter could erupt, as it were, into ideas. You could carve passions in
the brain with a knife. You could get rid of imagination with drugs and
cure an outworn convention like a disease. “The knowledge of good and
evil is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of
the brain-cells, which is removable.” That was one phrase; and again:
“Conscience in man may, in fact, be compared to the sting of a
hive-bee, which, so far from conducing to the welfare of its possessor,
cannot function, even in a single instance, without occasioning its
death. The survival-value in each case is thus purely social; and
if humanity ever passes from its present phase of social development
into that of a higher individualism, as some of our philosophers have
ventured to speculate, we may suppose that this interesting mental
phenomenon may gradually cease to appear; just as the nerves and
muscles which once controlled the movements of our ears and scalps
have, in all save a few backward individuals, become atrophied and of
interest only to the physiologist.”
“By Jove!” thought Lord Peter, idly, “that’s an ideal doctrine for the
criminal. A man who believed that would never—”
And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously
expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise.
He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical
succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect,
complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as
if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely
dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to
think about it. He knew it.
There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and
is required to make a word out of them, as thus:
C O S S S S R I
The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations
and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of
letters, as:
S S S I R C
or
S C S R S O
Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no
logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some
adventitious external stimulus, the combination:
S C I S S O R S
presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need
to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.
Even so, the scattered elements of two grotesque conundrums, flung
higgledy-piggledy into Lord Peter’s mind, resolved themselves,
unquestioned henceforward. A bump on the roof of the end house—Levy
in a welter of cold rain talking to a prostitute in the Battersea
Park Road—a single ruddy hair—lint bandages—Inspector Sugg calling
the great surgeon from the dissecting-room of the hospital—Lady
Levy with a nervous attack—the smell of carbolic soap—the Duchess’s
voice—“not really an engagement, only a sort of understanding with her
father”—shares in Peruvian Oil—the dark skin and curved, fleshy profile
of the man in the bath—Dr. Grimbold giving evidence, “In my opinion,
death did not occur for several days after the blow”—india-rubber
gloves—even, faintly, the voice of Mr. Appledore, “He called on me,
sir, with an anti-vivisectionist pamphlet”—all these things and many
others rang together and made one sound, they swung together like bells
in a steeple, with the deep tenor booming through the clamour:
“The knowledge of good and evil is a phenomenon of the brain, and is
removable, removable, removable. The knowledge of good and evil is
removable.”
Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very
seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. “It’s impossible,”
said his reason, feebly; “_credo quia impossibile_,” said his interior