“Riddle-me-right, and riddle-meree,” said Wimsey, imperturbably. “We’ve overlooked something, that’s all. Probably something quite obvious. Give me the statutory dressing-gown and ounce of shag, and I will undertake to dispose of this little difficulty for you in a brace of shakes. In the meantime, you will no doubt take steps to secure, in an official and laborious manner, the evidence which our kind friends here have already so ably gathered in by unconventional methods, and will stand by to arrest the right man when the time comes?”
“I will,” said Parker, “gladly. Apart from all personal considerations, I’d far rather see that oily-haired fellow in the dock than any woman, and if the Force has made a mistake, the sooner it’s put right the better for all concerned.”
Wimsey sat late that night in the black and-primrose library, with the tall folios looking down at him. They represented the world’s accumulated hoard of mellow wisdom and poetical beauty, to say nothing of thousands of pounds in cash. But all these counsellors sat mute upon their shelves. Strewn on tables and chairs lay the bright scarlet volumes of the Notable British Trials – Palmer, Pritchard, Maybrick, Seddon, Armstrong, Madeleine Smith – the great practitioners in arsenic – huddled together with the chief authorities on Forensic Medicine and Toxicology.
The theatre-going crowds surged home in saloon and taxi, the lights shone over the empty width of Piccadilly, the heavy night-lorries rumbled slow and seldom over the black tarmac, the long night waned and the reluctant winter dawn struggled wanly over the piled roofs of London. Bunter, silent and anxious, sat in his kitchen, brewing coffee on the stove and reading the same page of the “British Journal of Photography” over and over again.
At half-past eight the library bell rang.
“My lord?”
“My bath, Bunter.”
“Very good, my lord ”
“And some coffee.”
“Immediately, my lord.”
“And put back all the books except these.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I know now how it was done.”
“Indeed, my lord? Permit me to offer my respectful congratulations.”
“I’ve still got to prove it.”
“A secondary consideration, my lord.”
“Wimsey yawned. When Bunter returned a minute or two later with the coffee, he was asleep.
Bunter put the books quietly away, and looked with some curiosity at the chosen few left on the table. They were: The Trial of Florence Maybrick; Dixon Mann’s Forensic Medicine and Toxicology; a book with a German title which Bunter could not read; and A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.
Bunter studied these for a few moments, and then slapped his thigh softly.
“Why, of course!” he said under his breath, “why, what a mutton-headed set of chumps we’ve all been!” He touched his master lightly on the shoulder,
“Your coffee, my lord.”
CHAPTER XXI
“Then you won’t marry me?” said Lord Peter.
The prisoner shook her head.
“No. It wouldn’t be fair to you. And besides -”
“Well?”
“I’m frightened of it. One couldn’t get away. I’ll live with you, if you like, but I won’t marry you.”
Her tone was so unutterably dreary that Wimsey could feel no enthusiasm for this handsome offer.
“But that sort of thing doesn’t always work,” he expostulated. “Dash it all, you ought to know – forgive my alluding to it and all that – but it’s frightfully inconvenient, and one has just as many rows as if one was married.”
“I know that. But you could cut loose any time you wanted to.”
“But I shouldn’t want to.”
“Oh, yes, you would. You’ve got a family and traditions, you know. Caesar’s wife and that sort of thing.”
“Blast Caesar’s wife! And as for the family traditions – they’re on my side, for what they’re worth. Anything a Wimsey does is right and heaven help the person who gets in the way. We’ve even got a damned old family motto about it – ‘I hold by my Whimsy’ – quite right too. I can’t say that when I look in the glass I exactly suggest to myself the original Gerald de Wimsey, who bucked about on a cart horse at the Siege of Acre, but I do jolly well intend to do what I like about marrying. Who’s to stop me? They can’t eat me. They can’t even cut me, if it comes to that. Joke, unintentional, officers, for the use of.”
Harriet laughed.
“No, I suppose they can’t cut you. You wouldn’t have to slink abroad with your impossible wife and live at obscure continental watering-places like people in Victorian novels.”
“Certainly not.”
“People would forget I’d had a lover?“
“My dear child, they’re forgetting that kind of thing every day. They’re experts at it.”
“And was supposed to have murdered him?”
“And were triumphantly acquitted of having murdered him, however greatly provoked.”
“Well, I won’t marry you. If people can forget all that, they can forget we’re not married.”
“Oh, yes, they could. I couldn’t, that’s all. We don’t seem to be progressing very fast with this conversation. I take it the general idea of living with me does not hopelessly repel you?”
“But this is all so preposterous,” protested the girl. “How can I say what I should or shouldn’t do if I were free and certain of – surviving?”
“Why not? I can imagine what I should do even in the most unlikely circumstances, whereas this really is a dead cert, straight from the stables.”
“I can’t,” said Harriet, beginning to wilt. “Do please stop asking me. I don’t know. I can’t think. I can’t see beyond the – beyond the – beyond the next few weeks. I only want to get out of this and be left alone.”
“All right,” said Wimsey, “I won’t worry you. Not fair. Abusing my privilege and so on. You can’t say ‘Pig’ and sweep out, under the circs., so I won’t offend again. As a matter of fact I’ll sweep out myself, having an appointment – with a manicurist. Nice little girl, but a trifle refained in her vowels. Cheerio!”
The manicurist, who had been discovered by the help of Chief-Inspector Parker and his sleuths, was a kitten-faced child with an inviting manner and a shrewd eye. She made no bones about accepting her client’s invitation to dine and showed no surprise when he confidentially murmured that he had a little proposition to put before her. She put her plump elbows on the table, cocked her head at a coy angle, and prepared to sell her honour dear.
As the proposition unfolded itself, her manner underwent an alteration that was almost comical. Her eyes lost their round innocence, her very hair seemed to grow less fluffy, and her eyebrows puckered in genuine astonishment.
“Why, of course I could,” she said finally, “but whatever do you want them for? Seems funny to me.”
“Call it just a joke,” said Wimsey.
“No.” Her mouth hardened. “I wouldn’t like it. It doesn’t make sense, if you see what I mean. What I mean, it sounds a queer sort of joke and that kind of thing might get a girl into trouble. I say, it’s not one of those, what do they call ’em? – there was a bit about it in Madame Crystal’s column last week, in Susie’s Snippets – spells, you know, witchcraft – the occult, that sort of thing? I wouldn’t like it if it was to do any harm to anybody.”
“I’m not going to make a waxen image, if that’s what you mean. Look here, are you the sort of girl who can keep a secret?”
“Oh, I don’t talk. I never was one to let my tongue wag around. I’m not like ordinary girls.”
“No, I thought you weren’t. That’s why I asked you to come out with me. Well, listen, and I’ll tell you.”
He leaned forward and talked. The little painted face upturned to his grew so absorbed and so excited that a bosom friend, dining at a table some way off, grew quite peevish with envy, making sure that darling Mabel was being offered a flat in Paris, a Daimler car and a thousand-pound necklace, and quarrelled fatally with her own escort in consequence.