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

noise and goin’ nowhere, but once you begin lettin’ ’em string their peas into a necklace, it’s goin’ to be strong enough to hang you, what?”

“Dear me!” said Mrs. Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, “what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!”

“Y’see,” said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, “it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it, ’nless somethin’ turns up afterwards to drive it home. F’r instance, Lady Swaffham, I told you when I came in that I’d been down to Salisbury, ’n’ that’s true, only I don’t suppose it impressed you much; ’n’ I don’t suppose it’d impress you much if you read in the paper tomorrow of a tragic discovery of a dead lawyer down in Salisbury, but if I went to Salisbury again next week ’n’ there was a Salisbury doctor found dead the day after, you might begin to think I was a bird of ill omen for Salisbury residents; and if I went there again the week after, ’n’ you heard next day that the see of Salisbury had fallen vacant suddenly, you might begin to wonder what took me to Salisbury, an’ why I’d never mentioned before that I had friends down there, don’t you see, an’ you might think of goin’ down to Salisbury yourself, an’ askin’ all kinds of people if they’d happened to see a young man in plum-coloured socks hangin’ round the Bishop’s Palace.”

“I daresay I should,” said Lady Swaffham.

“Quite. An’ if you found that the lawyer and the doctor had once upon a time been in business at Poggleton-on-the-Marsh when the Bishop had been vicar there, you’d begin to remember you’d once heard of me payin’ a visit to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh a long time ago, an’ you’d begin to look up the parish registers there an’ discover I’d been married under an assumed name by the vicar to the widow of a wealthy farmer, who’d died suddenly of peritonitis, as certified by the doctor, after the lawyer’d made a will leavin’ me all her money, and then you’d begin to think I might have very good reasons for gettin’ rid of such promisin’ blackmailers as the lawyer, the doctor an’ the bishop. Only, if I hadn’t started an association in your mind by gettin’ rid of ’em all in the same place, you’d never have thought of goin’ to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh, ’n’ you wouldn’t even have remembered I’d ever been there.”

“Were you ever there, Lord Peter?” inquired Mrs. Tommy, anxiously.

“I don’t think so,” said Lord Peter; “the name threads no beads in my mind. But it might, any day, you know.”

“But if you were investigating a crime,” said Lady Swaffham, “you’d have to begin by the usual things, I suppose⁠—finding out what the person had been doing, and who’d been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lord Peter, “but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin’ all sorts of inoffensive people. There’s lots of people I’d like to murder, wouldn’t you?”

“Heaps,” said Lady Swaffham. “There’s that dreadful⁠—perhaps I’d better not say it, though, for fear you should remember it later on.”

“Well, I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Peter, amiably. “You never know. It’d be beastly awkward if the person died suddenly tomorrow.”

“The difficulty with this Battersea case, I guess,” said Mr. Milligan, “is that nobody seems to have any associations with the gentleman in the bath.”

“So hard on poor Inspector Sugg,” said the Duchess. “I quite felt for the man, having to stand up there and answer a lot of questions when he had nothing at all to say.”

Lord Peter applied himself to the duck, having got a little behindhand. Presently he heard somebody ask the Duchess if she had seen Lady Levy.

“She is in great distress,” said the woman who had spoken, a Mrs. Freemantle, “though she clings to the hope that he will turn up. I suppose you knew him, Mr. Milligan⁠—know him, I should say, for I hope he’s still alive somewhere.”

Mrs. Freemantle was the wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives.

“Wal, I’ve dined with him,” said Mr. Milligan, good-naturedly. “I think he and I’ve done our best to ruin each other, Mrs. Freemantle. If this were the States,” he added, “I’d be much inclined to suspect myself of having put Sir Reuben in a safe place. But we can’t do business that way in your old country; no, ma’am.”

“It must be exciting work doing business in America,” said Lord Peter.

“It is,” said Mr. Milligan. “I guess my brothers are having a good time there now. I’ll be joining them again before long, as soon as I’ve fixed up a little bit of work for them on this side.”

“Well, you mustn’t go till after my bazaar,” said the Duchess.

Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.

Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages.

“All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,” he said; “they find what they are looking for.”

“Oh, they do,” agreed the detective; “but one learns to discount that almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on the other side⁠—Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people, you know, till I found they were