Dorothy L. Sayers - [Lord Peter Wimsey 03]

by Unnatural Death

  Certainly the little sheet of paper was not in her writing. Somebody must have dropped it. It was natural to look and see whether it was anything of importance.

  Miss Climpson was one of those people who say: “I am not the kind of person who reads other people’s postcards.” This is clear notice to all and sundry that they are, precisely, that kind of person. They are not untruthful; the delusion is real to them. It is merely that Providence has provided them with a warning rattle, like that of the rattle-snake. After that, if you are so foolish as to leave your correspondence in their way, it is your own affair.

  Miss Climpson perused the paper.

  In the manuals for self-examination issued to the Catholic-minded, there is often included an unwise little paragraph which speaks volumes for the innocent unworldliness of the compilers. You are advised, when preparing for confession, to make a little list of your misdeeds, lest one or two peccadilloes should slip your mind. It is true that you are cautioned against writing down the names of other people or showing your list to your friends, or leaving it about. But accidents may happen—and it may be that this recording of sins is contrary to the mind of the church, who bids you whisper them with fleeting breath into the ear of a priest and bids him, in the same moment that he absolves, forget them as though they had never been spoken.

  At any rate, somebody had been recently shriven of the sins set forth upon the paper—probably the previous Saturday—and the document had fluttered down unnoticed between the confession-box and the hassock, escaping the eye of the cleaner. And here it was—the tale that should have been told to none but God—lying open upon Mrs. Budge’s round mahogany table under the eye of a fellow-mortal.

  To do Miss Climpson justice, she would probably have destroyed it instantly unread, if one sentence had not caught her eye:

  “The lies I told for M. W.’s sake.” At the same moment she realised that this was Vera Findlater’s handwriting, and it “came over her like a flash”—as she explained afterwards, exactly what the implication of the words was.

  For a full half-hour Miss Climpson sat alone, struggling with her conscience. Her natural inquisitiveness said “Read”; her religious training said, “You must not read”; her sense of duty to Wimsey, who employed her, said, “Find out”; her own sense of decency said, “Do no such thing”; a dreadful, harsh voice muttered gratingly, “Murder is the question. Are you going to be the accomplice of Murder?” She felt like Lancelot Gobbo between conscience and the fiend—but which was the fiend and which was conscience?

  “To speak the truth and boldly rebuke vice.”

  Murder.

  There was a real possibility now.

  But was it a possibility? Perhaps she had read into the sentence more than it would bear.

  In that case, was it not—almost—a duty to read further and free her mind from this horrible suspicion?

  She would have liked to go to Mr. Tredgold and ask his advice. Probably he would tell her to burn the paper promptly and drive suspicion out of her mind with prayer and fasting.

  She got up and began searching for the match-box. It would be better to get rid of the thing quickly.

  What, exactly, was she about to do?—To destroy the clue to the discovery of a Murder?

  Whenever she thought of the word, it wrote itself upon her brain in large capitals, heavily underlined. MURDER—like a police-bill.

  Then she had an idea. Parker was a policeman—and probably also he had no particular feelings about the sacred secrecy of the Confessional. He had a Protestant appearance—or possibly he thought nothing of religion one way or the other. In any case, he would put his professional duty before everything. Why not send him the paper, without reading it, briefly explaining how she had come upon it? Then the responsibility would be his.

  On consideration, however, Miss Climpson’s innate honesty scouted this scheme as jesuitical. Secrecy was violated by this open publication as much as if she had read the thing—or more so. The old Adam, too, raised his head at this point, suggesting that if anybody was going to see the confession, she might just as well satisfy her own reasonable curiosity. Besides—suppose she was quite mistaken. After all, the “lies” might have nothing whatever to do with Mary Whittaker’s alibi. In that case, she would have betrayed another person’s secret wantonly, and to no purpose. If she did decide to show it, she was bound to read it first—in justice to all parties concerned.

  Perhaps—if she just glanced at another word or two, she would see that it had nothing to do with—MURDER—and then she could destroy it and forget it. She knew that if she destroyed it unread she never would forget it, to the end of her life. She would always carry with her that grim suspicion. She would think of Mary Whittaker as—perhaps—a Murderess. When she looked into those hard blue eyes, she would be wondering what sort of expression they had when the soul behind them was plotting—MURDER. Of course, the suspicions had been there before, planted by Wimsey, but now they were her own suspicions. They crystallised—became real to her.

  “What shall I do?”

  She gave a quick, shamefaced glance at the paper again. This time she saw the word “London.”

  Miss Climpson gave a kind of little gasp, like a person stepping under a cold shower-bath.

  “Well,” said Miss Climpson, “if this is a sin I am going to do it, and may I be forgiven.”

  With a red flush creeping over her cheeks as though she were stripping something naked, she turned her attention to the paper.

  The jottings were brief and ambiguous. Parker might not have made much of them, but to Miss Climpson, trained in this kind of devotional shorthand, the story was clear as print.

  “Jealousy”—the word was written large and underlined. Then there was a reference to a quarrel, to wicked accusations and angry words and to a pre-occupation coming between the penitent’s soul and God. “Idol”—and a long dash.

  From these few fossil bones, Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

  “Beastly, blood-sucking woman,” said Miss Climpson, viciously. “It’s too bad. She’s only making use of the girl.”

  But the self-examiner was now troubled with a more difficult problem. Piecing the hints together, Miss Climpson sorted it out with practised ease. Lies had been told—that was wrong, even though done to help a friend. Bad confessions had been made, suppressing those lies. This ought to be confessed and put right. But (the girl asked herself) had she come to this conclusion out of hatred of the lies or out of spite against the friend? Difficult, this searching of the heart. And ought she, not content with confessing the lies to the priest, also to tell the truth to the world?

  Miss Climpson had here no doubt what the priest’s ruling would be. “You need not go out of your way to betray your friend’s confidence. Keep silent if you can, but if you speak you must speak the truth. You must tell your friend that she is not to expect any more lying from you. She is entitled to ask for secrecy—no more.”

  So far, so good. But there was a further problem.

  “Ought I to connive at her doing what is wrong?”—and then a sort of explanatory aside—“the man in South Audley Street.”

  This was a little mysterious. … No!—on the contrary, it explained the whole mystery, jealousy, quarrel and all.

  In those weeks of April and May, when Mary Whittaker had been supposed to be all the time in Kent with Vera Findlater, she had been going up to L
ondon. And Vera had promised to say that Mary was with her the whole time. And the visits to London had to do with a man in South Audley Street, and there was something sinful about it. That probably meant a love-affair. Miss Climpson pursed her lips virtuously, but she was more surprised than shocked. Mary Whittaker! she would never have suspected it of her, somehow. But it so explained the jealousy and the quarrel—the sense of desertion. But how had Vera found out? Had Mary Whittaker confided in her?—No; that sentence again, under the heading “Jealousy”—what was it—“following M. W. to London.” She had followed then, and seen. And then, at some moment, she had burst out with her knowledge—reproached her friend. Yet this expedition to London must have happened before her own conversation with Vera Findlater, and the girl had then seemed so sure of Mary’s affection. Or had it been that she was trying to persuade herself, with determined self-deception, that there was “nothing in” this business about the man? Probably. And probably some brutality of Mary’s had brought all the miserable suspicions boiling to the surface, vocal, reproachful and furious. And so they had gone on to the row and the break.

  “Queer,” thought Miss Climpson, “that Vera has never come and told me about her trouble. But perhaps she is ashamed, poor child. I haven’t seen her for nearly a week. I think I’ll call and see her and perhaps she’ll tell me all about it. In which case”—cried Miss Climpson’s conscience, suddenly emerging with a bright and beaming smile from under the buffets of the enemy—“in which case I shall know the whole history of it legitimately and can quite honourably tell Lord Peter about it.”

  The next day—which was the Friday—she woke, however, with an unpleasant ache in the conscience. The paper—still tucked into the office-book—worried her. She went round early to Vera Findlater’s house, only to hear that she was staying with Miss Whittaker. “Then I suppose they’ve made it up,” she said. She did not want to see Mary Whittaker, whether her secret was murder or mere immorality; but she was tormented by the desire to clear up the matter of the alibi for Lord Peter.

  In Wellington Avenue she was told that the two girls had gone away on the Monday and had not yet returned. She tried to reassure the maid, but her own heart misgave her. Without any real reason, she was uneasy. She went round to the church and said her prayers, but her mind was not on what she was saying. On an impulse, she caught Mr. Tredgold as he pottered in and out of the Sacristy, and asked if she might come the next evening to lay a case of conscience before him. So far, so good, and she felt that a “good walk” might help to clear the cob-webs from her brain.

  So she started off, missing Lord Peter by a quarter of an hour, and took the train to Guildford and then walked and had lunch in a wayside tea-shop and walked back into Guildford and so came home, where she learnt that “Mr. Parker and ever so many gentlemen had been asking for her all day, and what a dreadful thing, miss, here was Miss Whittaker and Miss Findlater disappeared and the police out looking for them, and them motor-cars was such dangerous things, miss, wasn’t they? It was to be hoped there wasn’t an accident.”

  And, into Miss Climpson’s mind there came, like an inspiration, the words, “South Audley Street.”

  Miss Climpson did not, of course, know that Wimsey was at Crow’s Beach. She hoped to find him in Town. For she was seized with a desire, which she could hardly have explained even to herself, to go and look at South Audley Street. What she was to do when she got there she did not know, but go there she must. It was the old reluctance to make open use of that confession paper. Vera Findlater’s story at first hand—that was the idea to which she obscurely clung. So she took the first train to Waterloo, leaving behind her, in case Wimsey or Parker should call again, a letter so obscure and mysterious and so lavishly underlined and interlined that it was perhaps fortunate for their reason that they were never faced with it.

  In Piccadilly she saw Bunter, and learned that his lordship was at Crow’s Beach with Mr. Parker, where he, Bunter, was just off to join him. Miss Climpson promptly charged him with a message to his employer slightly more involved and mysterious than her letter, and departed for South Audley Street. It was only when she was walking up it that she realised how vague her quest was and how little investigation one can do by merely walking along a street. Also, it suddenly occurred to her that if Miss Whittaker was carrying on anything of a secret nature in South Audley Street, the sight of an acquaintance patrolling the pavement would put her on her guard. Much struck by this reflection, Miss Climpson plunged abruptly into a chemist’s shop and bought a toothbrush, by way of concealing her movements and gaining time. One can while away many minutes comparing the shapes, sizes and bristles of toothbrushes, and sometimes chemists will be nice and gossipy.

  Looking round the shop for inspiration, Miss Climpson observed a tin of nasal snuff labelled with the chemist’s own name.

  “I will take a tin of that, too, please,” she said. “What excellent stuff it is—quite wonderful. I have used it for years and am really delighted with it. I recommend it to all my friends, particularly for hay fever. In fact, there’s a friend of mine who often passes your shop, who told me only yesterday what a martyr she was to that complaint. ‘My dear,’ I said to her, ‘you have only to get a tin of this splendid stuff-and you will be quite all right all summer.’ She was so grateful to me for telling her about it. Has she been in for it yet?” And she described Mary Whittaker closely.

  It will be noticed, by the way, that in the struggle between Miss Climpson’s conscience and what Wilkie Collins calls “detective fever,” conscience was getting the worst of it and was winking at an amount of deliberate untruth which a little time earlier would have staggered it.

  The chemist, however, had seen nothing of Miss Climpson’s friend. Nothing, therefore, was to be done but to retire from the field and think what was next to be done. Miss Climpson left, but before leaving she neatly dropped her latchkey into a large basket full of sponges standing at her elbow. She felt she might like to have an excuse to visit South Audley Street again.

  Conscience sighed deeply, and her guardian angel dropped a tear among the sponges.

  Retiring into the nearest tea-shop she came to, Miss Climpson ordered a cup of coffee and started to think out a plan for honey-combing South Audley Street. She needed an excuse—and a disguise. An adventurous spirit was welling up in her elderly bosom, and her first dozen or so ideas were more lurid than practical.

  At length a really brilliant notion occurred to her. She was (she did not attempt to hide it from herself) precisely the type and build of person one associates with the collection of subscriptions. Moreover, she had a perfectly good and genuine cause ready to hand. The church which she attended in London ran a slum mission, which was badly in need of funds, and she possessed a number of collecting cards, bearing full authority to receive subscriptions on its behalf. What more natural than that she should try a little house-to-house visiting in a wealthy quarter?

  The question of disguise, also, was less formidable than it might appear. Miss Whittaker had only known her well-dressed and affluent in appearance. Ugly, clumping shoes, a hat of virtuous ugliness, a shapeless coat and a pair of tinted glasses would disguise her sufficiently at a distance. At close quarters, it would not matter if she was recognised, for if once she got to close quarters with Mary Whittaker, her job was done and she had found the house she wanted.

  Miss Climpson rose from the table, paid her bill and hurried out to buy the glasses, remembering that it was Saturday. Having secured a pair which hid her eyes effectively without looking exaggeratedly mysterious, she made for her rooms in St. George’s Square, to choose suitable clothing for her adventure. She realised, of course, that she could hardly start work till Monday—Saturday afternoon and Sunday are hopeless from the collector’s point of view.

  The choice of clothes and accessories occupied her for the better part of the afternoon. When she was at last satisfied she went downstairs to ask her landlady for some tea.

  “Certa
inly, miss,” said the good woman. “Ain’t it awful, miss, about this murder?”

  “What murder?” asked Miss Climpson, vaguely.

  She took the Evening Views from her landlady’s hand, and read the story of Vera Findlater’s death.

  Sunday was the most awful day Miss Climpson had ever spent. An active woman, she was condemned to inactivity, and she had time to brood over the tragedy. Not having Wimsey’s or Parker’s inside knowledge, she took the kidnapping story at its face value. In a sense, she found it comforting, for she was able to acquit Mary Whittaker of any share in this or the previous murders. She put them down—except, of course, in the case of Miss Dawson, and that might never have been a murder after all—to the mysterious man in South Audley Street. She formed a nightmare image of him in her mind—blood-boltered, sinister, and—most horrible of all—an associate and employer of debauched and brutal black assassins. To Miss Climpson’s credit be it said that she never for one moment faltered in her determination to track the monster to his lurking-place. She wrote a long letter to Lord Peter, detailing her plans. Bunter, she knew, had left 110A Piccadilly, so, after considerable thought, she addressed it to Lord Peter Wimsey, c/o Inspector Parker, The Police-Station, Crow’s Beach. There was, of course, no Sunday post from Town. However, it would go with the midnight collection.

  On the Monday morning she set out early, in her old clothes and her spectacles, for South Audley Street. Never had her natural inquisitiveness and her hard training in third-rate boarding-houses stood her in better stead. She had learned to ask questions without heeding rebuffs—to be persistent, insensitive and observant. In every flat she visited she acted her natural self, with so much sincerity and such limpet-like obstinacy that she seldom came away without a subscription and almost never without some information about the flat and its inmates.