Whose Body? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel
beastly business. Still, it’s puzzled Parker.”
“What’s the matter?” asked the Duke, getting up and yawning.
“Marching orders,” said Peter, “back to town. Many thanks for your
hospitality, old bird—I’m feelin’ no end better. Ready to tackle
Professor Moriarty or Leon Kestrel or any of ’em.”
“I do wish you’d keep out of the police courts,” grumbled the Duke.
“It makes it so dashed awkward for me, havin’ a brother makin’ himself
conspicuous.”
“Sorry, Gerald,” said the other; “I know I’m a beastly blot on the
’scutcheon.”
“Why can’t you marry and settle down and live quietly, doin’ something
useful?” said the Duke, unappeased.
“Because that was a wash-out as you perfectly well know,” said Peter;
“besides,” he added cheerfully, “I’m bein’ no end useful. You may come
to want me yourself, you never know. When anybody comes blackmailin’
you, Gerald, or your first deserted wife turns up unexpectedly from
the West Indies, you’ll realize the pull of havin’ a private detective
in the family. ‘Delicate private business arranged with tact and
discretion. Investigations undertaken. Divorce evidence a specialty.
Every guarantee!’ Come, now.”
“Ass!” said Lord Denver, throwing the newspaper violently into his
armchair. “When do you want the car?”
“Almost at once. I say, Jerry, I’m taking Mother up with me.”
“Why should she be mixed up in it?”
“Well, I want her help.”
“I call it most unsuitable,” said the Duke.
The Dowager Duchess, however, made no objection.
“I used to know her quite well,” she said, “when she was Christine
Ford. Why, dear?”
“Because,” said Lord Peter, “there’s a terrible piece of news to be
broken to her about her husband.”
“Is he dead, dear?”
“Yes; and she will have to come and identify him.”
“Poor Christine.”
“Under very revolting circumstances, Mother.”
“I’ll come with you, dear.”
“Thank you, Mother, you’re a brick. D’you mind gettin’ your things
on straight away and comin’ up with me? I’ll tell you about it in the
car.”
CHAPTER X
Mr. Parker, a faithful though doubting Thomas, had duly secured his
medical student: a large young man like an overgrown puppy, with
innocent eyes and a freckled face. He sat on the Chesterfield before
Lord Peter’s library fire, bewildered in equal measure by his errand,
his surroundings and the drink which he was absorbing. His palate,
though untutored, was naturally a good one, and he realized that
even to call this liquid a drink—the term ordinarily used by him to
designate cheap whisky, post-war beer or a dubious glass of claret in
a Soho restaurant—was a sacrilege; this was something outside normal
experience: a genie in a bottle.
The man called Parker, whom he had happened to run across the evening
before in the public-house at the corner of Prince of Wales Road,
seemed to be a good sort. He had insisted on bringing him round to
see this friend of his, who lived splendidly in Piccadilly. Parker
was quite understandable; he put him down as a government servant, or
perhaps something in the City. The friend was embarrassing; he was
a lord, to begin with, and his clothes were a kind of rebuke to the
world at large. He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but
in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun
out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped away to
something else before your retort was ready. He had a truly terrible
man-servant—the sort you read about in books—who froze the marrow in
your bones with silent criticism. Parker appeared to bear up under
the strain, and this made you think more highly of Parker; he must be
more habituated to the surroundings of the great than you would think
to look at him. You wondered what the carpet had cost on which Parker
was carelessly spilling cigar ash; your father was an upholsterer—Mr.
Piggott, of Piggott & Piggott, Liverpool—and you knew enough about
carpets to know that you couldn’t even guess at the price of this one.
When you moved your head on the bulging silk cushion in the corner of
the sofa, it made you wish you shaved more often and more carefully.
The sofa was a monster—but even so, it hardly seemed big enough to
contain you. This Lord Peter was not very tall—in fact, he was rather
a small man, but he didn’t look undersized. He looked right; he made
you feel that to be six-foot-three was rather vulgarly assertive; you
felt like Mother’s new drawing-room curtains—all over great big blobs.
But everybody was very decent to you, and nobody said anything you
couldn’t understand, or sneered at you. There were some frightfully
deep-looking books on the shelves all round, and you had looked into
a great folio Dante which was lying on the table, but your hosts were
talking quite ordinarily and rationally about the sort of books you
read yourself—clinking good love stories and detective stories. You had
read a lot of those, and could give an opinion, and they listened to
what you had to say, though Lord Peter had a funny way of talking about
books, too, as if the author had confided in him beforehand, and told
him how the story was put together, and which bit was written first. It
reminded you of the way old Freke took a body to pieces.
“Thing I object to in detective stories,” said Mr. Piggott, “is the way
fellows remember every bloomin’ thing that’s happened to ’em within
the last six months. They’re always ready with their time of day and
was it rainin’ or not, and what were they doin’ on such an’ such a
day. Reel it all off like a page of poetry. But one ain’t like that in
real life, d’you think so, Lord Peter?” Lord Peter smiled, and young
Piggott, instantly embarrassed, appealed to his earlier acquaintance.
“You know what I mean, Parker. Come now. One day’s so like another, I’m
sure I couldn’t remember—well, I might remember yesterday, p’r’aps, but
I couldn’t be certain about what I was doin’ last week if I was to be
shot for it.”
“No,” said Parker, “and evidence given in police statements sounds
just as impossible. But they don’t really get it like that, you know. I
mean, a man doesn’t just say, ‘Last Friday I went out at 10 a.m. to buy
a mutton chop. As I was turning into Mortimer Street I noticed a girl
of about twenty-two with black hair and brown eyes, wearing a green
jumper, check skirt, Panama hat and black shoes, riding a Royal Sunbeam
Cycle at about ten miles an hour turning the corner by the Church of
St. Simon and St. Jude on the wrong side of the road riding towards the
market place!’ It amounts to that, of course, but it’s really wormed
out of him by a series of questions.”
“And in short stories,” said Lord Peter, “it has to be put in statement
form, because the real conversation would be so long and twaddly and
tedious, and nobody would have the patience to read it. Writers have to
consider their readers, if any, y’see.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Piggott, “but I bet you most people would find it
jolly difficult to remember, even if you asked ’em things. I should—of
course, I know I’m a bit of a fool, but then, most people are, ain’t
they? You know what I mean. Witnesses ain’t detectives, they’re just
average idiots like you and me.”
“Quite so,” said Lord Peter, smiling as the force of the last phrase
sank into its unhappy perpetrator; “you mean, if I were to ask you in a
general way what you were doin’—say, a week ago today, you wouldn’t be
able to tell me a thing about it offhand?”
“No—I’m sure I shouldn’t.” He considered. “No. I was in at the Hospital
as usual, I suppose, and, being Tuesday, there’d be a lecture on
something or the other—dashed if I know what—and in the evening I
went out with Tommy Pringle—no, that must have been Monday—or was it
Wednesday? I tell you, I couldn’t swear to anything.”
“You do yourself an injustice,” said Lord Peter gravely. “I’m sure, for
instance, you recollect what work you were doing in the dissecting-room
on that day, for example.”
“Lord, no! not for certain. I mean, I daresay it might come back to me
if I thought for a long time, but I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of
law.”
“I’ll bet you half-a-crown to sixpence,” said Lord Peter, “that you’ll
remember within five minutes.”
“I’m sure I can’t.”
“We’ll see. Do you keep a notebook of the work you do when you dissect?
Drawings or anything?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Think of that. What’s the last thing you did in it?”
“That’s easy, because I only did it this morning. It was leg muscles.”
“Yes. Who was the subject?”
“An old woman of sorts; died of pneumonia.”
“Yes. Turn back the pages of your drawing book in your mind. What came
before that?”
“Oh, some animals—still legs; I’m doing motor muscles at present. Yes.
That was old Cunningham’s demonstration on comparative anatomy. I did
rather a good thing of a hare’s legs and a frog’s, and rudimentary legs
on a snake.”
“Yes. Which day does Mr. Cunningham lecture?”
“Friday.”
“Friday; yes. Turn back again. What comes before that?”
Mr. Piggott shook his head.
“Do your drawings of legs begin on the right-hand page or the left-hand
page? Can you see the first drawing?”
“Yes—yes—I can see the date written at the top. It’s a section of a
frog’s hind leg, on the right-hand page.”
“Yes. Think of the open book in your mind’s eye. What is opposite to
it?”
This demanded some mental concentration.
“Something round—coloured—oh, yes—it’s a hand.”
“Yes. You went on from the muscles of the hand and arm to leg- and
foot-muscles?”
“Yes; that’s right. I’ve got a set of drawings of arms.”
“Yes. Did you make those on the Thursday?”
“No; I’m never in the dissecting-room on Thursday.”
“On Wednesday, perhaps?”
“Yes; I must have made them on Wednesday. Yes; I did. I went in there
after we’d seen those tetanus patients in the morning. I did them on
Wednesday afternoon. I know I went back because I wanted to finish ’em.
I worked rather hard—for me. That’s why I remember.”
“Yes; you went back to finish them. When had you begun them, then?”
“Why, the day before.”
“The day before. That was Tuesday, wasn’t it?”
“I’ve lost count—yes, the day before Wednesday—yes, Tuesday.”
“Yes. Were they a man’s arms or a woman’s arms?”
“Oh, a man’s arms.
“Yes; last Tuesday, a week ago today, you were dissecting a man’s arms
in the dissecting-room. Sixpence, please.”
“By Jove!”
“Wait a moment. You know a lot more about it than that. You’ve no idea
how much you know. You know what kind of man he was.”
“Oh, I never saw him complete, you know. I got there a bit late that
day, I remember. I’d asked for an arm specially, because I was rather
weak in arms, and Watts—that’s the attendant—had promised to save me
one.”
“Yes. You have arrived late and found your arm waiting for you. You are
dissecting it—taking your scissors and slitting up the skin and pinning
it back. Was it very young, fair skin?”
“Oh, no—no. Ordinary skin, I think—with dark hairs on it—yes, that was
it.”
“Yes. A lean, stringy arm, perhaps, with no extra fat anywhere?”
“Oh, no—I was rather annoyed about that. I wanted a good, muscular arm,
but it was rather poorly developed and the fat got in my way.”
“Yes; a sedentary man who didn’t do much manual work.”
“That’s right.”
“Yes. You dissected the hand, for instance, and made a drawing of it.
You would have noticed any hard calluses.”
“Oh, there was nothing of that sort.”
“No. But should you say it was a young man’s arm? Firm young flesh and
limber joints?”
“No—no.”
“No. Old and stringy, perhaps.”
“No. Middle-aged—with rheumatism. I mean, there was a chalky deposit in
the joints, and the fingers were a bit swollen.”
“Yes. A man about fifty.”
“About that.”
“Yes. There were other students at work on the same body.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Yes. And they made all the usual sort of jokes about it.”