“That’s true, sir. But you’re assuming the death took place on the Wednesday or Thursday. She may have been somewhere else- living with someone in town or anywhere.”
“Crushed again,” said Wimsey. “Still, it’s a curious coincidence.”
“It is, my lord, and I’m very glad you found the things. Will you take charge of ’em, Mr. Parker, or shall I?”
“Better take them along and put them with the other things,” said Parker, extending his hand to take them from Wimsey, whom they seemed to interest quite disproportionately. “I fancy his lordship’s right and that the parcel came here along with the girl. And certainly that certainly looks as if she didn’t come alone. Possibly that young man of hers was with her. Looks like the old, old story. Take care of that bottle, old man, it may have finger-prints on it.”
“You can have the bottle,” Wimsey. “May we ne’er lack a friend or a bottle to give him, as Dick Swiveller says. But I earnestly beg that before you caution your respectable young railway clerk that anything he says may be taken down and used against him, you will cast your eye, and your nose, upon this ham sandwich.”
“What’s wrong with it?” inquired Parker.
“Nothing. It appears to be in astonishingly good preservation, thanks to this admirable oak-tree. The stalwart oak- for so many centuries Britain ’s bulwark against the invader! Heart of oak are our ships- not hearts, by the way, as it is usually misquoted. But I am puzzled by the incongruity between the sandwich and the rest of the outfit.”
“It’s an ordinary ham sandwich, isn’t it?”
“Oh, gods of the wine-flask and the board, how long? how long?- it is a ham sandwich, Goth, but not an ordinary one. Never did it see Lyons ’ kitchen, or the counter of the multiple store or the delicatessen shop in the back street. The pig that was sacrificed to make this dainty tit-bit fattened in no dull style, never knew the daily ration of pig-wash or the not unmixed rapture of the domestic garbage-pail. Observe the hard texture, the deep brownish tint of the lean; rich fat, yellow as a Chinaman’s cheek; the dark spot where the black treacle cure has soaked in, to make a dish fit to lure Zeus from Olympus. And tell me, man of no discrimination and worthy to be fed on boiled cod all the year round, tell me how it comes that your little waitress and her railway clerk come down to Epping Forest to regale themselves on sandwiches made from coal-black, treacle-cured Bradenham ham, which long ago ran as a young wild boar about the woodlands, till death translated it to an incorruptible and more glorious body? I may add that it costs about 3s. a pound uncooked- an argument which you allow to be weighty.”
“That’s odd, certainly,” said Parker. “I imagine that only rich people-”
“Only rich people or people who understand eating as a fine art,” said Wimsey. “The two classes are by no means identical, though they occasionally overlap.”
“It may be very important,” said Parker, wrapping the exhibits up carefully. “We’d better go along now and see the body.”
The examination was not a very pleasant matter, for the weather had been damp and warm and there had certainly been weasels. In fact, after a brief glance, Wimsey left the two policemen to carry on alone, and devoted his attention to the dead girl’s handbag. He glanced through the letter from Evelyn Gotobed- (now Evelyn Cropper)- and noted down the Canadian address. He turned the cutting of his own advertisement out of an inner compartment, and remained for some time in consideration of the £5 note which lay, folded up, side by side with a 10s. Treasury note, 7s. 8d. in silver and copper, a latch-key and a powder compacte.
“You’re having this note traced, Walmisley, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, my lord, certainly.”
“And the latch-key, I imagine, belongs to the girl’s lodgings.”
“No doubt it does. We have asked her landlady to come and identify the body. Not that there’s any doubt about it, just as a matter of routine. She may give us some help. Ah!”- the Superintendent peered out of the mortuary door -“I think this must be the lady.”
The stout and motherly woman who emerged from a taxi in charge of a youthful policeman, identified the body without difficulty, and amid many sobs; as that of Bertha Gotobed. “Such a nice young lady,” she mourned. “What a terrible thing, oh, dear! who would go to do a thing like that? I’ve been in such a state of worriment ever since she didn’t come home last Wednesday. I’m sure many’s the time I’ve said to myself I wished I’d had my tongue cut before I ever showed her that wicked advertisement. Ah, I see you’ve got there, sir. A dreadful thing it is that people should be luring young girls away with stories about something to their advantage. A sinful old devil- calling himself a lawyer, too! When she didn’t come back and didn’t come back I wrote to the wretch, telling him I was on his track and was coming round to have the law on him as sure as my name’s Dorcas Gulliver. He wouldn’t have got round me- not that I’d be the bird he was looking for, being sixty-one come MidSummer Day- and so I told him.”
Lord Peter’s gravity was somewhat upset by this diatribe against the highly respectable Mr. Murbles of Staple Inn, whose own version of Mrs. Gulliver’s communication had been decently expurgated. “How shocked the old boy must have been,” he murmured to Parker. “I’m for it next time I see him.”
“Mrs. Gulliver’s voice moaned on and on.
“Such respectable girls, both of them, and Miss Evelyn married to that nice young man from Canada. Deary me, it will be a terrible upset for her. And there’s poor John Ironsides, was to have married Miss Bertha, the poor lamb, this very Whitsuntide as ever is. A very steady, respectable man- a clerk on the Southern, which he always used to say, joking like, ‘Slow but safe, like the Southern- that’s me, Mrs. G.’ T’ch, t’ch- who’d a believed it? And it’s not as if she was one of the flighty sort. I give her a latch-key gladly, for she’d sometimes be on late duty, but never any staying out after her time. That’s why it worried me so, her not coming back. There’s many nowadays as would wash one’s hands and glad to be rid of them, knowing what they might be up to. No. When the time past and she didn’t come back, I said, Mark my words, I said, she’s bin kidnapped, I said, by that Murbles.”
“Had she been long with you, Mrs. Gulliver?” asked Parker.
“Not above a fifteen month or so, she hadn’t, but bless you, I don’t have to know a young lady fifteen days to know if she’s a good girl or not. You gets to know by the look of ’em almost, when you’ve’ad my experience.”
“Did she and her sister come to you together?”
“They did. They come to me when they was lookin’ for work in London. And they could a’ fallen into a deal worse hands I can tell you, two young things from the country, and them that fresh and pretty looking.”
“They were uncommonly lucky, I’m sure, Mrs. Gulliver,” said Lord Peter, “and they must have found it a great comfort to be able to confide in you and your good advice.”
“Well, I think they did,” said Mrs. Gulliver, “not that young people seems to want much guidance from them as is older. Train up a child and away she go, as the Good Book says. But Miss Evelyn, that’s now Mrs. Cropper- she’d this London idea put into her head, and up they comes with the idea of bein’ made ladies of, havin’ only been in service before, though what’s the difference between serving in one of them tea-shops at the beck of all the nasty tagrag and bobtail and serving in a lady’s home, I don’t see, except that you works harder and don’t get your meals so comfortable. Still, Miss Evelyn, she was always the go-ahead one of the two, and she did very well for herself, I will say, meetin’ Mr. Cropper as used to take his breakfast regular at the Corner House every morning and took a liking to the girl in the most honourable way.”