Whose Body? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel, Dorothy L. Sayers [ebook smartphone .txt] 📗

Yours very truly,
Thos. Crimplesham

Lord Peter Wimsey,
110, Piccadilly, W.
(Encl.)

“Dear me,” said Parker, “this is what you might call unexpected.”

“Either it is some extraordinary misunderstanding,” said Lord Peter, “or Mr. Crimplesham is a very bold and cunning villain. Or possibly, of course, they are the wrong glasses. We may as well get a ruling on that point at once. I suppose the glasses are at the Yard. I wish you’d just ring ’em up and ask ’em to 92 send round an optician’s description of them at once—and you might ask at the same time whether it’s a very common prescription.”

“Right you are,” said Parker, and took the receiver off its hook.

“And now,” said his friend, when the message was delivered, “just come into the library for a minute.”

On the library table, Lord Peter had spread out a series of bromide prints, some dry, some damp, and some but half-washed.

“These little ones are the originals of the photos we’ve been taking,” said Lord Peter, “and these big ones are enlargements all made to precisely the same scale. This one here is the footmark on the linoleum; we’ll put that by itself at present. Now these finger-prints can be divided into five lots. I’ve numbered ’em on the prints—see?—and made a list:

“A. The finger-prints of Levy himself, off his little bedside book and his hair-brush—this and this—you can’t mistake the little scar on the thumb.

“B. The smudges made by the gloved fingers of the man who slept in Levy’s room on Monday night. They show clearly on the water-bottle and on the boots—superimposed on Levy’s. They are very distinct on the boots—surprisingly so for gloved hands, and I deduce that the gloves were rubber ones and had recently been in water.

“Here’s another interestin’ point. Levy walked in the rain on Monday night, as we know, and these dark marks are mud-splashes. You see they lie over Levy’s finger-prints in every case. Now see: on this 93 left boot we find the stranger’s thumb-mark over the mud on the leather above the heel. That’s a funny place to find a thumb-mark on a boot, isn’t it? That is, if Levy took off his own boots. But it’s the place where you’d expect to see it if somebody forcibly removed his boots for him. Again, most of the stranger’s finger-marks come over the mud-marks, but here is one splash of mud which comes on top of them again. Which makes me infer that the stranger came back to Park Lane, wearing Levy’s boots, in a cab, carriage or car, but that at some point or other he walked a little way—just enough to tread in a puddle and get a splash on the boots. What do you say?”

“Very pretty,” said Parker. “A bit intricate, though, and the marks are not all that I could wish a finger-print to be.”

“Well, I won’t lay too much stress on it. But it fits in with our previous ideas. Now let’s turn to:

“C. The prints obligingly left by my own particular villain on the further edge of Thipps’s bath, where you spotted them, and I ought to be scourged for not having spotted them. The left hand, you notice, the base of the palm and the fingers, but not the tips, looking as though he had steadied himself on the edge of the bath while leaning down to adjust something at the bottom, the pince-nez perhaps. Gloved, you see, but showing no ridge or seam of any kind—I say rubber, you say rubber. That’s that. Now see here:

“D and E come off a visiting-card of mine. There’s this thing at the corner, marked F, but that you can disregard; in the original document it’s a sticky mark 94 left by the thumb of the youth who took it from me, after first removing a piece of chewing-gum from his teeth with his finger to tell me that Mr. Milligan might or might not be disengaged. D and E are the thumb-marks of Mr. Milligan and his red-haired secretary. I’m not clear which is which, but I saw the youth with the chewing-gum hand the card to the secretary, and when I got into the inner shrine I saw John P. Milligan standing with it in his hand, so it’s one or the other, and for the moment it’s immaterial to our purpose which is which. I boned the card from the table when I left.

“Well, now, Parker, here’s what’s been keeping Bunter and me up till the small hours. I’ve measured and measured every way backwards and forwards till my head’s spinnin’, and I’ve stared till I’m nearly blind, but I’m hanged if I can make my mind up. Question 1. Is C identical with B? Question 2. Is D or E identical with B? There’s nothing to go on but the size and shape, of course, and the marks are so faint—what do you think?”

Parker shook his head doubtfully.

“I think E might almost be put out of the question,” he said; “it seems such an excessively long and narrow thumb. But I think there is a decided resemblance between the span of B on the water-bottle and C on the bath. And I don’t see any reason why D shouldn’t be the same as B, only there’s so little to judge from.”

“Your untutored judgment and my measurements have brought us both to the same conclusion—if you 95 can call it a conclusion,” said Lord Peter, bitterly.

“Another thing,” said Parker. “Why on earth should we try to connect B with C? The fact that you and I happen to be friends doesn’t make it necessary to conclude that the two cases we happen to be interested in have any organic connection with one another. Why should they? The only person who thinks they have is Sugg, and he’s nothing to go by. It would be different if there were any truth in the suggestion that the man in the bath was Levy, but we know for a certainty he wasn’t. It’s ridiculous to suppose that the same man was employed in committing two totally distinct crimes on the same night, one in Battersea and the other in Park Lane.”

“I know,” said Wimsey, “though of course we mustn’t forget that Levy was in Battersea at the time, and now we know he didn’t return home at twelve as was supposed, we’ve no reason to think he ever left Battersea at all.”

“True. But there are other places in Battersea besides Thipps’s bathroom. And he wasn’t in Thipps’s bathroom. In fact, come to think of it, that’s the one place in the universe where we know definitely that he wasn’t. So what’s Thipps’s bath got to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” said Lord Peter. “Well, perhaps we shall get something better to go on today.”

He leaned back in his chair and smoked thoughtfully for some time over the papers which Bunter had marked for him.

“They’ve got you out in the limelight,” he said. 96 “Thank Heaven, Sugg hates me too much to give me any publicity. What a dull Agony Column! ‘Darling Pipsey—Come back soon to your distracted Popsey’—and the usual young man in need of financial assistance, and the usual injunction to ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’ Hullo! there’s the bell. Oh, it’s our answer from Scotland Yard.”

The note from Scotland Yard enclosed an optician’s specification identical with that sent by Mr. Crimplesham, and added that it was an unusual one, owing to the peculiar strength of the lenses and the marked difference between the sight of the two eyes.

“That’s good enough,” said Parker.

“Yes,” said Wimsey. “Then Possibility No. 3 is knocked on the head. There remain Possibility No. 1: Accident or Misunderstanding, and No. 2: Deliberate Villainy, of a remarkably bold and calculating kind—of a kind, in fact, characteristic of the author or authors of our two problems. Following the methods inculcated at that University of which I have the honour to be a member, we will now examine severally the various suggestions afforded by Possibility No. 2. This Possibility may be again subdivided into two or more Hypotheses. On Hypothesis 1 (strongly advocated by my distinguished colleague Professor Snupshed), the criminal, whom we may designate as X, is not identical with Crimplesham, but is using the name of Crimplesham as his shield, or aegis. This hypothesis may be further subdivided into two alternatives. Alternative A: Crimplesham is an innocent and unconscious accomplice, and X is in his employment. 97 X writes in Crimplesham’s name on Crimplesham’s office-paper and obtains that the object in question, i.e., the eyeglasses, be despatched to Crimplesham’s address. He is in a position to intercept the parcel before it reaches Crimplesham. The presumption is that X is Crimplesham’s charwoman, office-boy, clerk, secretary or porter. This offers a wide field of investigation. The method of inquiry will be to interview Crimplesham and discover whether he sent the letter, and if not, who has access to his correspondence. Alternative B: Crimplesham is under X’s influence or in his power, and has been induced to write the letter by (a) bribery, (b) misrepresentation or (c) threats. X may in that case be a persuasive relation or friend, or else a creditor, blackmailer or assassin; Crimplesham, on the other hand, is obviously venal or a fool. The method of inquiry in this case, I would tentatively suggest, is again to interview Crimplesham, put the facts of the case strongly before him, and assure him in the most intimidating terms that he is liable to a prolonged term of penal servitude as an accessory after the fact in the crime of murder— Ah-hem! Trusting, gentlemen, that you have followed me thus far, we will pass to the consideration of Hypothesis No. 2, to which I personally incline, and according to which X is identical with Crimplesham.

“In this case, Crimplesham, who is, in the words of an English classic, a man-of-infinite-resource-and-sagacity, correctly deduces that, of all people, the last whom we shall expect to find answering our advertisement 98 is the criminal himself. Accordingly, he plays a bold game of bluff. He invents an occasion on which the glasses may very easily have been lost or stolen, and applies for them. If confronted, nobody will be more astonished than he to learn where they were found. He will produce witnesses to prove that he left Victoria at 5.45 and emerged from the train at Balham at the scheduled time, and sat up all Monday night playing chess with a respectable gentleman well known in Balham. In this case, the method of inquiry will be to pump the respectable gentleman in Balham, and if he should happen to be a single gentleman with a deaf housekeeper, it may be no easy matter to impugn the alibi, since, outside detective romances, few ticket-collectors and ’bus-conductors keep an exact remembrance of all the passengers passing between Balham and London on any and every evening of the week.

“Finally, gentlemen, I will frankly point out the weak point of all these hypotheses, namely: that none of them offers any explanation as to why the incriminating article was left so conspicuously on the body in the first instance.”

Mr. Parker had listened with commendable patience to this academic exposition.

“Might not X,” he suggested, “be an enemy of Crimplesham’s, who designed to throw suspicion upon him?”

“He might. In that case he should be easy to discover, since he obviously lives in close proximity to Crimplesham and his glasses, and Crimplesham in fear 99 of his life will then be a valuable ally for the prosecution.”

“How about the first possibility of all, misunderstanding or accident?”

“Well! Well, for purposes of discussion, nothing, because it really doesn’t afford any