Thrones, Dominations

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘No. Well, one other thing,’ said Wimsey. ‘The sherry glasses. Earlier on Rosamund offered you sherry, and the two of you drank some together?’

  ‘Yes. She had the table laid for dinner, but she just said, “You can’t stay long. But since you’re here, I suppose you’d better have a drink.”’

  ‘So you used two glasses? When you left the house, Mr Amery, exactly where were the glasses?’

  ‘Back in the cocktail cabinet in the sitting-room,’ said Amery without hesitation. ‘She washed them up while I was there.’

  ‘Did you see her wash them up?’

  ‘Yes. She gave me to understand I was to make myself scarce, and she took up the glasses – there was still a sip left in mine – and she went with them into the kitchen. I was still talking to her, so I followed her, and I stood in the door and she went to the sink and washed the glasses.’

  ‘Did she have any difficulty doing that?’ Wimsey’s tone was light and neutral.

  ‘Difficulty? Whatever do you mean? She wasn’t incapable or anything, just because she was beautiful. She’d had a hard life; she knew how to work. She—’

  ‘Your prints were still on the stem of one of the glasses,’ said Wimsey. ‘Can you try to remember, very closely, exactly how the glasses were handled?’

  ‘We just drank out of them in the usual way,’ said Amery, frowning. ‘Then she came across, with hers in her hand, and picked up mine from the little side table by the chair. Of course, Lord Peter, I have been wondering how fingerprints could have remained on the glasses after they were washed up. I thought that policeman had just made up my fingerprints on it, to trap me. But you see, she was holding them both together, by the rims, not the stems.’

  ‘That accounts for your prints being unsmudged on the stem of the glass,’ said Wimsey. ‘And then?’

  ‘She took them into the kitchen, and rinsed them under the tap.’

  ‘Under the tap?’

  ‘She put them down on the draining board. Then she took them one by one, holding them by the bowl, the way one does to slosh a liquid round in a glass, and swirled the water round in them. Then she put them upside down on the draining board.’

  ‘The tap was running all this time?’

  ‘Yes. Then she wiped the bowls quickly with the glass cloth – very quickly – and walked back into the living-room and put them away.’

  ‘Mr Amery, you are quite sure of the truth of this account?’

  ‘Absolutely. You mean, no doubt, that it’s funny any fingerprints survived all that?’

  ‘Fingerprints can be very durable,’ said Wimsey, standing up to take his leave.

  ‘You will do all you can to clear this up?’ said Amery. ‘I am an entirely innocent man, and it’s going to ruin me.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Wimsey. ‘A bit of notoriety is excellent publicity, don’t you know.’

  ‘Are you going to ask me where I went?’ said Peter.

  ‘I rather thought I had better not,’ said Harriet.

  ‘My dear Calpurnia! But though I am not Caesar, you are my wife; and I need to tell someone. Keep it under seven seals, but let me relieve my feelings.’

  ‘Dearest, it is sometimes exceptionally hard to tell if you are fooling about or being deadly serious.’

  ‘This time it’s serious, and may even be deadly,’ he said. ‘They asked me to recover some state papers. Now you ask me who from.’

  ‘Certainly not. I will consent to ask you from whom.’

  ‘A Babylonish dialect,

  Which learned pedants much affect,’

  murmured Peter.

  ‘From whom had you to recover them?’ said Harriet obligingly.

  ‘From the King.’

  ‘But I thought you said whatever it is had gone astray?’

  ‘The thing is, he’s been leading people the hell of a dance,’ said Peter. ‘The official papers get brought to him every day, and he sometimes looks at them and sometimes not. When he’s at the Palace it’s all right, because his staff keep a beady eye on secret papers, and they cover his tracks, and they pluck up courage and point out to him that his signature on this or that is urgent. But he goes down to Fort Belvedere every weekend, and he doesn’t take his staff with him. And there’s a panic out that when the dispatch boxes are at the Fort just about anybody could have a sight of them, and that, not to put too fine a point on it, he has funny friends.’

  ‘Well, but . . .’ said Harriet.

  ‘But, Harriet?’

  ‘Well, isn’t that a bit exaggerated? I mean, he isn’t stuffy, and all those official people round him are stuffy. But it doesn’t mean he’s showing state papers to a bunch of spies. He’s just breaking the chaps-like-us rule, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is that how it strikes you?’ said Peter. ‘Would it strike most people like that? I wonder. Anyway, something desperately important went missing last week. The Palace staff concluded it had gone to the Fort with the King. So someone went down there to fetch it, and he was not let in.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘The Fort is the King’s refuge from officialdom. Nobody on his staff dares show their face there. So a friend of mine – a Foreign Office man who was in my regiment – recruited me to talk my way in and see if I could get the document back; signed if possible, but back anyway.’

  ‘Golly, Peter. But why should you be able to get it if someone on the staff couldn’t?’

  ‘Well, there are people I know . . .’ said Peter vaguely.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I got there I was shown into the drawing-room. Some of his guests were sitting around playing cards. Nobody asked me to sit down, so I stood in the corner like a dumb waiter. They didn’t take any notice of me at all, certainly not so far as to guard their tongues. There were some appalling things being said. After a while I withdrew and asked one of the flunkeys if the King was at church. He smirked and told me the King was worshipping in his own fashion. I told him I had come to collect some papers, and he said, “Why didn’t you say so at once, sir?” and let me into the King’s study, and left me there. Harriet, I could have been anybody; he didn’t ask for identification.’

  ‘I begin to see what you are worrying about,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I couldn’t find what I wanted,’ said Peter. ‘There were dispatch boxes lying about, open, and papers spread everywhere, mostly lying face up. Then the lackey reappeared and said he thought I ought to leave. He said that if what I was looking for was not there, then it must be in the red box that His Majesty had taken with him when he left.

  ‘Left for where? I asked. He did not know, but he thought it was for France. Anyway, to cut a long story short, His Majesty had hopped into his private plane and taken off from the lawns behind the house, and he was carrying a box with him when he went.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. It was bad enough at Fort Belvedere; the damn thing was dynamite in France. I drove like hell for Oxford, and got Jerry out of bed in the House. Little beast was sleeping off Saturday night.’

  ‘Peter, I don’t follow you: what has Jerry got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing except an entrée to the Oxford University Flying Club. He came up trumps, got me an aircraft and a pilot. Do you remember Reggie Pomfret who fell for you so heavily? Well, your undergraduate admirer, would you believe it, has a pilot’s licence, and we flew to Boulogne. Air control there had monitored a plane going over to Paris. Of course it might not have been the King’s plane, but it was a Dragonfly. So I thought for a bit. I told myself he could not possibly be going to Paris; how could he go in mufti to Paris, where he is very well known, and would be recognised in two minutes? He couldn’t so much as nip from a taxi to a hotel in Paris without being all over the papers, and then the fat would be in the fire. King or not, he isn’t supposed to leave the country without telling anyone. So I just thought I’d go and look for him in Breteuil.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

>   ‘Near Paris; a little way out. I recalled that when he was Prince of Wales, ages ago, he had been sent to Breteuil to learn some French. One of the Breteuil boys was at school with me; I rather got the impression the Prince had got pally with the family. And the Count is a mixer, a political facilitator.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Trouble. Fog. Pomfret couldn’t find it at first. Then the fog began to lift, and stream away like steam from a kettle, and we spotted the château, and landed on a field in its home farm. Lovely place; absolutely simple and symmetrical, with two lodges in the shape of towers framing the approach. Makes Denver look like a mad architect’s dumping ground. So I trudged up the drive; there’s a dry moat round the house and there was a white stag and his doe grazing in it. Unnerving, like some kind of dream. And as I reached the house, there’s His Majesty emerging through the door, and a car drawing up for him. And Breteuil standing in the door to see him off. So I had to step up and intercept him and ask him for the thing. And he patted his pockets, and frowned, and then he smiled – he has a most disarming smile, Harriet – and said, “Damn! I’ve left it somewhere in the house. You’ll see to it, Wimsey, I suppose?”’

  ‘And had he left it in the house?’

  ‘Yes, he had. Breteuil made me welcome enough, and we went to look for it. It was still in the dispatch box; I don’t suppose he’d even opened it. But it was a relief not to find it lying face up where anyone could take a look at it. Anyway, I pocketed it, and then we found that the fog had thickened up, and we couldn’t take off again. We had to hang around all day, and find a hotel for the night. To cut a long story short, we were grounded for three days.’

  ‘So all’s well that ends well?’ asked Harriet. But something was weighing Peter down.

  ‘There were others staying in the hotel where we found a roof over our heads,’ he said. ‘Others that I recognised. One of Ribbentrop’s aides, for example, and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He’s been running to and fro between London and Berlin, trading on his English royal connections, and supposed closeness to the Führer.’

  ‘Mightn’t that be coincidence, Peter? In a hotel near Paris?’

  ‘Perhaps. Breteuil’s other guests included a certain Mrs Simpson. She’s the current inamorata.’

  He pushed across the table to Harriet a French newspaper, showing a slim, elegant, rather square-faced woman getting out of a car. ‘Elle qui sera la Reine d’Angleterre?’ ran the headline.

  Harriet looked at it. ‘Peter, it’s not like you to be censorious,’ she said. ‘Have you never yourself dashed across to Paris to visit a mistress?’

  ‘Oh, well, perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘I must be getting old. But talking of mistresses, Harriet, I have some friends in Vienna who might need a bit of help.’

  Harriet thought for a few minutes about the implications of that. She had heard of a certain opera singer . . . ‘What kind of help, Peter?’

  ‘Help getting out,’ he said. ‘The way things are looking, a Jewish family might like rather more than a theoretical border drawn on a map between themselves and Herr Hitler.’

  ‘Of course you must help if you can,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I don’t suppose she’d want to settle in London,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘So you wouldn’t have to deal with very much of her. New York would be more her scene. She used to complain bitterly that the theatre she sang in here was full of bad smells and damp Stygian effusions that affected her throat. Singers are awfully hypochondriac.’

  ‘Was she fun, Peter?’

  ‘Tremendous fun. Still is, I have no doubt. And you should hear her sing! Well, you will, unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless her appearance here should make you jealous.’

  Harriet laughed. A deep, spontaneous laugh like a subterranean stream suddenly surfacing.

  Peter looked suddenly shaken. ‘My dear, I believe I must be making you happy,’ he said, huskily.

  13

  Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

  Oh, where, oh where can he be?

  POPULAR SONG

  Every crime has something of the dream about it. Crimes determined to take place engender all they need: victims, circumstances, pretexts, opportunities.

  PAUL VALÉRY

  ‘Have you found the dog, Charles?’

  ‘That was sharp of you, Peter. Not exactly. But the blood on the carpet was dog’s blood, not human blood.’

  The two men were lunching together, in Peter’s little office in the Audley Square house, on piles of sandwiches supplied by Mrs Trapp, and washed down by draught bitter brought up from the servants’ hall.

  ‘I thought so. Something nasty must have happened to the dog, or it would have barked every time Amery approached, not just on the earlier occasions.’

  ‘That assumes Amery was telling the truth,’ said Charles.

  ‘So it does. And he certainly told me at least one whopper. So possibly he told more. Makes one uneasy when a fellow departs from the straight and narrow.’

  ‘I’m afraid he is an obvious suspect.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said his lordship, with his mouth full of roast beef and mustard sandwich.

  ‘I expect we shall find the dog, if we ever do, in the river,’ said Charles.

  ‘With its throat cut,’ said Peter. ‘No sign of a bloodstained knife with fingerprints, I suppose?’

  ‘Not a trace, I’m afraid. That’s probably in the river, too. We could look for it, I suppose.’

  ‘What about bloodstained clothing? It would have made a dreadful mess.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind found so far,’ said Charles. ‘There was blood on Harwell’s shoes; but then one would expect that, given that he walked around the place before calling the police.’

  ‘It’s awfully amorphous, this case,’ said Wimsey. ‘Nothing to get one’s teeth into. Let’s survey the possibilities, one by one, shall we, and see if that gets us anywhere?’

  ‘Right-oh,’ said Charles. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  ‘Start with Harwell,’ said Peter.

  ‘He’s right out of it,’ said Charles. ‘Rock-solid alibi. No motive.’

  ‘Well, as you know, old friend, I don’t like motives,’ said Peter. ‘Toys for the jury. Who can tell a motive? Springing from the deepest secrets of the human heart and all that. Give me a method and an opportunity any time.’

  ‘Even so. Harwell dined at his club, and was seen leaving at nine p.m. He could have walked home to the garages at Hyde House, picked up his car – fifteen minutes would you say? Not more. He could have driven himself down to Hampton, and arrived some time after ten; he could then have driven back to London and raised hell getting into his flat. But he couldn’t have killed his wife before midnight, because Amery saw her alive at one o’clock. And he couldn’t have left the flat and returned to Hampton in the early hours of the morning, because the porters lock all the doors at midnight and keep them locked until half past six, and you have to get them to let you out, and they didn’t let him out. So he didn’t leave again until after six thirty the following day. Face it, Wimsey, Harwell is in the clear. And you just can’t sweep away motive like that; the man loved his wife, and had nothing to gain from her death.’

  ‘It’s been known for someone you love to madden you beyond endurance,’ said Wimsey.

  ‘Now who’s plumbing the secrets of the human heart?’ asked Charles. ‘Compare Harwell’s alibi with the ramshackle farragos offered by the other suspects.’

  ‘Very well, let’s. Our blackmailers.’

  ‘Well, they admit to having been in Hampton, lurking in the garden, and harbouring ill-intent.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Well, none of the fingerprints inside the house belong to either of them. And they have a rather nebulous motive. They can’t have intended to kill, because Rosamund dead was no use to them at all. They could have attacked her intending to scare her, and held on too hard. Brown is known as Basher, and is
what one would call a heavy.’

  ‘Could they have worn gloves about their evil deeds?’

  ‘I suppose so. They’re the sort of petty crooks who would know about fingerprints, and whose fingerprints are on record. I expect we could pin it on them, but. . . The thing is, Peter, they say they got a lift back to town around midnight on a lorry going to the Garden, and if we found the driver, and if he confirmed their story, then they would have left the scene too early; Amery says he saw Mrs Harwell alive later than twelve.’

  ‘And you rather expect, I take it, that the driver will turn up?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You are probably right, Charles, but we can’t eliminate them till he does. And so to Amery.’

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, I think he’s our man. His story doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Let’s go through it all the same. He wanted to see Rosamund. He extracted the address from the porter at the flats, and took himself down there. Rosamund let him in and gave him a glass of sherry; then she saw him off. Instead of going he lurked around half the night in the freezing cold. Went off for some supper at ninish; returned to the garden. Saw a car parked there. Doesn’t know what car. Still hung around; saw, or heard rather, car leaving. Was overheard gabbling in the woodshed, but seems not to have realised anybody was outside it. Peered through windows and saw Rosamund sitting by the fire. She ignored him, whereupon he returned to London, going most of the journey on foot.’

  ‘That’s about it. Strange and unusual behaviour on the night of the crime, and a motive as wide as a cart-gate. She rejected him, and he got into a rage and killed her. And remember his story has been changed; until we found his prints on the glass he denied ever having set foot in the bungalow.’

  ‘Yes, so he did. Something about all this is teasing the old grey matter, though, Charles. If Amery is telling the truth, his story totally exonerates the other suspects. So perhaps he did it. But if he did it, why would he tell a story that turns suspicion on himself? And if he’s lying, it’s an even odder thing to do.’