Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers [good summer reads .txt] 📗

“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 fingerprints in every case. Now see: on this 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 fingermarks 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 fingerprint 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 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 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. “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: