Dorothy L. Sayers
Page 26
As I entered my own room the air blowing through the open window struck gratefully upon me. I found my bag in the dark and was rummaging for the flask among my shirts and socks when I heard a loud, triumphant mew, and turned round in time to see the Cyprian cat crouched for a moment on the sill, before it sprang in past me and out at the door. I found the flask and hastened back with it, just as Merridew and the landlord came running up the stairs.
We all went into the room together. As we did so, Mrs Merridew stirred, sat up, and asked us what in the world was the matter.
I have seldom felt quite such a fool.
Next day the weather was cooler; the storm had cleared the air. What Merridew had said to his wife I do not know. None of us made any public allusion to the night’s disturbance, and to all appearances Mrs Merridew was in the best of health and spirits. Merridew took a day off from the waterworks, and we all went for a long drive and picnic together. We were on the best of terms with one another. Ask Merridew – he will tell you the same thing. He would not – he could not, surely – say, otherwise. I can’t believe, Harringay, I simply cannot believe that he could imagine or suspect me – I say, there was nothing to suspect. Nothing.
Yes – this is the important date – the 24th of June. I can’t tell you any more details: there is nothing to tell. We came back and had dinner just as usual. All three of us were together all day, till bedtime. On my honour I had no private interview of any kind that day, either with him or with her. I was the first to go to bed, and I heard the others come upstairs about half an hour later. They were talking cheerfully.
It was a moonlight night. For once, no caterwauling came to trouble me. I didn’t even bother to shut the window or the door. I put the revolver on the chair beside me before I lay down. Yes, it was loaded. I had no special object in putting it there, except that I meant to have a go at the cats if they started their games again.
I was desperately tired, and thought I should drop off to sleep at once, but I didn’t. I must have been overtired, I suppose. I lay and looked at the moonlight. And then, about midnight, I heard what I had been half expecting: a stealthy scrabbling in the wistaria and a faint miauling sound.
I sat up in bed and reached for the revolver. I heard the ‘plop’ as the big cat sprang up on to the window-ledge; I saw her black and silver flanks, and the outline of her round head, pricked ears and upright tail. I aimed and fired, and the beast let out one frightful cry and sprang down into the room.
I jumped out of bed. The crack of the shot had sounded terrific in the silent house, and somewhere I heard a distant voice call out. I pursued the cat into the passage, revolver in hand – with some idea of finishing it off, I suppose. And then, at the door of Merridew’s room, I saw Mrs Merridew. She stood with one hand on each doorpost, swaying to and fro. Then she fell down at my feet. Her bare breast was all stained with blood. And as I stood staring at her, clutching the revolver, Merridew came out and found us – like that.
Well, Harringay, that’s my story, exactly as I told it to Peabody. I’m afraid it won’t sound very well in Court, but what can I say? The trail of blood led from my room to hers; the cat must have run that way; I know it was the cat I shot. I can’t offer any explanation. I don’t know who shot Mrs Merridew, or why. I can’t help it if the people at the inn say they never saw the Cyprian cat; Merridew saw it that other night, and I know he wouldn’t lie about it. Search the house, Harringay – that’s the only thing to do. Pull the place to pieces, till you find the body of the Cyprian cat. It will have my bullet in it.
A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) was a playwright, scholar, and acclaimed author of mysteries, best known for her books starring the gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. The Los Angeles Times hailed Sayers as “one of the greatest mystery story writers of [the twentieth] century.”
Born in Oxford, England, she was the only child of Reverend Henry Sayers, headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School and then rector of Bluntisham village. Sayers grew up in the Bluntisham rectory, then won a scholarship to Oxford University, where she studied modern languages and worked at the publishing house Blackwell’s, which in 1916 published Op. 1, Sayers’ first book of poetry.
In 1922 Sayers took a job as a copywriter for London advertising firm S. H. Benson, forerunner to the famous Ogilvy & Mather. There she created several popular slogans and campaigns, including the iconic, animal-theme Guinness advertisements that are still used today.
While working as a copywriter, Sayers began work on Whose Body? (1923), a mystery novel featuring dapper detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Over the next two decades, Sayers published ten more Wimsey novels and several short stories, crafting a character whose complexity was unusual for the mystery novels of the time. Handsome, brave, and charming, Wimsey has a few defining flaws, including his tendency to prattle, fear of responsibility, and perpetual nervousness caused by shell shock inflicted during World War I. Sayers once described him as a cross between Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster. Her writing was praised by fellow mystery writers Ruth Rendell and P. D. James; James said that Sayers “brought to the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy and wit.”
Set between the two World Wars, the Wimsey novels are more than typical manor-house mysteries. Sayers used her knowledge of various topics—including advertising, women’s education, and veterans’ health—to give her books realistic details. In 1936, she brought Wimsey to the stage in Busman’s Honeymoon, a story which Sayers would publish as a novel the following year. The play was so successful that she gave up mystery writing to focus on the stage, producing a series of religious works culminating in The Man Born to Be King (1941), a radio drama about the life of Jesus.
Sayers continued writing theological essays and criticism during and after World War II. In 1949, she published the first volume of a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She was halfway through the third volume when she died of a heart attack in 1957. Although she considered this translation to be her best work, it is for her elegantly constructed detective fiction that Sayers remains best remembered.
Sayers in the garden of her Oxford home, around 1897. She holds her two toy monkeys, Jocko and Jacko.
An 1899 studio portrait of Sayers, around six years old. (Photo courtesy of I. Palmer Clarke/Cambridge.)
The Sayers family circa 1905. Dorothy (about age twelve) posed with her family outside their home at the Bluntisham rectory. First row, left to right: Gertrude Sayers (aunt), Dorothy. Second row, left to right: Anna Breakey Sayers (grandmother), Mabel Leigh (aunt). Back row, left to right: Reverend Henry Sayers (father), Ivy Shrimpton (cousin), Helen Mary Leigh Sayers (mother).
Seventeen-year-old Sayers wearing a pageant costume in 1908.
Sayers with friends, posing as shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allen, in 1915.
A studio portrait of Sayers taken in 1926.
Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, at home in 1930 behind overflowing boxes of Sayers’s fan mail. A family friend sits to the right. (Photo courtesy of the Tropical Press Agency.)
Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, standing in doorway.
Sayers in 1950, at the unveiling of a plaque at the S. H. Benson advertising agency, where she once worked as a copywriter. The plaque was placed at the foot of a spiral staircase in the agency, a tribute to a character in Murder Must Advertise who plunges down a similar staircase.
All images used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the ex
press written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1940 by Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming
copyright renewed © 1968 by Anthony Fleming
cover design by Katrina Damkoehler
978-1-4532-5897-2
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
In The Teeth Of The Evidence
Absoultely Elsewhere
A Shot at Goal
Dirt Cheap
Bitter Almonds
False Weight
The Professor's Manuscript
The Milk-Bottles
Dilemma
An Arrow O'er the House
Scrawns
Nebuchadnezzar
The Inspiration of Mr Budd
Blood Sacrifice
Suspicion
The Leopard Lady
The Cyprian Cat
A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers
Copyright