Murder Must Advertise

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Ginger came panting back in record time. He scented adventure. Mr. Bredon, in the meantime, had attached a discreet curtain of brown paper to the glass panel of his door. Mrs. Crump was not surprised. That proceeding was familiar to her. It usually meant that a gentleman was going out, and wished to change his trousers in a decent privacy.

  “Now,” said Mr. Bredon, shutting the door, “we will see whether your catapult can tell us anything about its adventures since it left your hands.” He filled the insufflator with the grey powder and directed an experimental puff upon the edge of the desk. On blowing away the surplus powder, he thus disclosed a surprising collection of greasy finger-prints. Ginger was enthralled.

  “Coo!” he said, reverently. “Are you going to test the catapult for prints, sir?”

  “I am. It will be interesting if we find any, and still more interesting if we find none.”

  Ginger, goggle-eyed, watched the proceedings. The catapult appeared to have been well polished by use and presented an admirable surface for finger-prints, had there been any, but though they covered every half-inch of the thick Y-fork with powder, the result was a blank. Ginger looked disappointed.

  “Ah!” said Bredon. “Now is it that it will not, or that it cannot speak? We will make that point clear. Catch hold of the thing, Ginger, as though you were whanging a shot off.”

  Ginger obeyed, clutching grimly with his greasy little paw.

  “That ought to give 'em,” said his new friend, “the whole of the palms of the fingers round the handle and the ball of the thumb in the fork. Now we'll try again.”

  The insufflator came once more into play, and this time a noble set of markings sprang into view.

  “Ginger,” said Mr. Bredon, “what do you, as a detective, deduce from this?”

  “Mrs. Johnson must a-wiped it, sir.”

  “Do you think that's very likely, Ginger?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then go on deducing.”

  “Somebody else must a-wiped it, sir.”

  “And why should somebody else do that?”

  Ginger knew where he was now.

  “So that the police couldn't fix nothing on him, sir.”

  “The police, eh?”

  “Well, sir, the police–or a detective–or somebody like as it might be yourself, sir.”

  “I can find no fault with that deduction, Ginger. Can you go further and say why this unknown catapult artist should have gone to all that trouble?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Come, come.”

  “Well, sir, it ain't as though he stole it–and besides, it ain't worth nothing.”

  “No; but it looks as though somebody had borrowed it, if he didn't steal it. Who could do that?”

  “I dunno, sir. Mrs. Johnson keeps that drawer locked.”

  “So she does. Do you think Mrs. Johnson has been having a little catapult practice on her own?”

  “Oh, no, sir. Women ain't no good with catapults.”

  “How right you are. Well, now, suppose somebody had sneaked Mrs. Johnson's keys and taken the catapult and broken a window or something with it, and was afraid of being found out?”

  “There ain't been nothing broke in this office, not between Mrs. Johnson pinching my catapult and me breaking the window with the Yo-Yo. And if one of the boys had took the catapult, I don't think they'd think about finger-prints, sir.”

  “You never know. He might have been playing burglars or something and just wiped his finger-prints away out of dramatic instinct, if you know what that is.”

  “Yessir,” agreed Ginger, in a dissatisfied tone.

  “Particularly if he'd done some really bad damage with it. Or of course, it might be more than dramatic instinct. Do you realize, Ginger, that a thing like this might easily kill anybody, if it happened to catch him in just the right spot?”

  “Kill anybody? Would it, sir?”

  “I wouldn't like to try the experiment. Was your aunt's tom-cat killed?”

  “Yessir.”

  “That's nine lives at a blow, Ginger, and a man has only one. You're quite sure, sonnie, that nobody you know of was larking about with this catapult the day Mr. Dean fell downstairs?”

  Ginger flushed and turned pale; but apparently only with excitement. His small voice was hoarse as he answered:

  “No, sir. Wish I may die, sir, I never see nothing of that. You don't think somebody catapulted Mr. Dean, sir?”

  “Detectives never 'think' anything,” replied Mr. Bredon, reprovingly. “They collect facts and make deductions–God forgive me!” The last three words were a whispered lip-service to truth. “Can you remember who might have happened to be standing round or passing by when Mrs. Johnson took that catapult from you and put it in her desk?”

  Ginger considered.

  “I couldn't say right off, sir. I was just coming upstairs to the Dispatching when she spotted it. She was behind me, you see, sir, and it made me pocket stick out, like. A-jawing me, she was, all up the stairs, and took it off of me at the top and sent me down again with the basket to Mr. 'Ornby. I never see her put it away. But some of the other boys may have. 'Course, I knowed it was there, because all the things as is confisticated–”

  “Confiscated.”

  “Yessir–confiscated, gets put in there. But I'll ask round, sir.”

  “Don't let them know why you're asking.”

  “No, sir. Would it do if I said I believed somebody had been borrowing of it and spiled the elastic for me?”

  “That would do all right, provided–”

  “Yessir. Provided I recollecks to spile the elastic.”

  Mr. Bredon, who had already jabbed a penknife into his own finger that afternoon in the sacred cause of verisimilitude, smiled lovingly upon Ginger Joe.

  “You are the kind of man I am proud to do business with,” he said. “Here's another thing. You remember when Mr. Dean was killed. Where were you at the time?”

  “Sittin' on the bench in the Dispatching, sir. I got an alibi.” He grinned.

  “Find out for me, if you can, how many other people had alibis.”

  “Yessir.”

  “It's rather a job, I'm afraid.”

  “I'll do me best, sir. I'll make up somefin', don't you worry. It's easier for me to do it than it is for you, I see that, sir. I say, sir!”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you a Scotland Yard 'tec?”

  “No, I'm not from Scotland Yard.”

  “Oh! Begging your pardon for asking, sir. But I thought, if you was, you might be able, excuse me, sir, to put in a word for my brother.”

  “I might be able to do that, all the same, Ginger.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you,” replied Mr. Bredon, with the courtesy which always distinguished him. “And mum's the word, remember.”

  “Wild 'orses,” declared Ginger, finally and completely losing his grasp of the aitches with which a careful nation had endowed him at the expense of the tax-payer, “wild 'orses wouldn't get a word out o' me when I've give me word to 'old me tongue.”

  He ran off. Mrs. Crump, coming along the passage with a broom, was surprised to find him still hanging about the place. She challenged him, received an impudent answer, and went her way, shaking her head. A quarter of an hour later, Mr. Bredon emerged from his seclusion. As she had expected, he was in evening dress and looking, she thought, very much the gentleman. She obliged by working the lift for him. Mr. Bredon, the ever-polite, expanded and assumed his gibus during the descent, apparently for the express purpose of taking it off to her when he emerged.

  In a taxi rolling south-west, Mr. Bredon removed his spectacles, combed out his side-parting, stuck a monocle in his eye, and by the time he reached Piccadilly Circus was again Lord Peter Wimsey. With a vacant wonder he gazed upon the twinkling sky-signs, as though, ignorant astronomer, he knew nothing of the creative hands that had set these lesser lights to rule the night.

  CHAPTER VII

  A
LARMING EXPERIENCE OF A CHIEF-INSPECTOR

  On that same night, or rather in the early hours of the following morning, a very disagreeable adventure befell Chief-Inspector Parker. He was the more annoyed by it, in that he had done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

  He had had a long day at the Yard–no thrills, no interesting disclosures, no exciting visitors, not so much as a dis-diamonded rajah or a sinister Chinaman–only the reading and summarizing of twenty-one reports of interviews with police narks, five hundred and thirteen letters from the public in response to a broadcast S O S about a wanted man, and a score or so of anonymous letters, all probably written by lunatics. In addition, he had had to wait for a telephone call from an inspector who had gone down to Essex to investigate some curious movements of motor-boats in and about the estuary of the Blackwater. The message, if favourable, might call for immediate action, on which account Mr. Parker thought it better to wait for it in his office than go home to bed, with the prospect of being hawked out again at 1 o'clock in the morning. There, then, he sat, as good as gold, collating information and drawing up a schedule of procedure for the following day's activities, when the telephone duly rang. He glanced at the clock, and saw that it pointed to 1.10. The message was brief and unsatisfactory. There was nothing to report; the suspected boat had not arrived with that tide; no action was therefore called for; Chief-Inspector Parker could go home and get what sleep he could out of the small hours.

  Mr. Parker accepted disappointment as philosophically as the gentleman in Browning's poem, who went to the trouble and expense of taking music lessons just in case his lady-love might demand a song with lute obbligato. Waste of time, as it turned out, but–suppose it hadn't been. It was all in the day's work. Putting his papers tidily away and locking his desk, the Chief-Inspector left the building, walked down to the Embankment, took a belated tram through the subway to Theobald's Road and thence walked soberly to Great Ormond Street.

  He opened the front door with his latch-key and stepped inside. It was the same house in which he had long occupied a modest bachelor flat, but on his marriage he had taken, in addition, the flat above his own, and thus possessed what was, in effect, a seven-roomed maisonette, although, on account of a fiddling L.C.C. regulation about access to the roof for the first-floor tenants in case of fire, he was not permitted to shut his two floors completely off by means of a door across the staircase.

  The front hall, common to all the tenants, was in darkness when he got in. He switched on the light and hunted in the little glass-fronted box labelled “Flat 3–Parker” for letters. He found a bill and a circular and deduced, quite correctly, that his wife had been at home all evening and too tired or too slack to go down to fetch the 9.30 post. He was turning to go upstairs, when he remembered that there might be a letter for Wimsey, under the name of Bredon, in the box belonging to Flat 4. As a rule, of course, this box was not used, but when Wimsey had begun his impersonation at Pym's, his brother-in-law had provided him with a key to fit it and had embellished the box itself with a written label “Bredon,” for the better information of the postman.

  There was one letter in the “Bredon” box–the kind that novelists used to call a “dainty missive”; that is to say, the envelope was tinted mauve, had a gilt deckle-edge and was addressed in a flourishing feminine handwriting. Parker took it out, intending to enclose it with a note which he was sending to Wimsey in the morning, pushed it into his pocket and went on up to the first floor. Here he switched out the hall-light which, like the staircase lights, was fitted with two-way wiring, and proceeded to the second floor, containing Flat 3, which comprised his living-room, dining-room and kitchen. Here he hesitated, but, rather unfortunately for himself, decided that he did not really want soup or sandwiches. He switched off the lower light behind him and pressed down the switch that should have supplied light to the top flight. Nothing happened. Parker growled but was not surprised. The staircase lights were the affair of the landlord, who had a penurious habit of putting in cheap bulbs and leaving them there till the filament broke. By this means he alienated his tenants' affections, besides wasting more in electricity than he saved in bulbs, but then he was that kind of man. Parker knew the stairs as well as he knew the landlord's habits; he went on up in the dark, not troubling to light a match.

  Whether the little incident had, however, put his professional subconsciousness on the alert, or whether some faint stir of breath or movement gave him last-minute warning, he never afterwards knew. He had his key in his hand, and was about to insert it in the lock when he dodged suddenly and instinctively to the right, and in that very instant the blow fell, with murderous violence, on his left shoulder. He heard his collar-bone crack as he flung himself round to grapple with the villainous darkness, and even as he did so he found himself thinking: “If I hadn't dodged, my bowler would have broken the blow and saved my collar-bone.” His right hand found a throat, but it was protected by a thick muffler and a turned-up collar. He struggled to get his fingers inside this obstacle, at the same time that, with his semi-disabled left arm, he warded off the second blow which he felt was about to descend upon him. He heard the other man panting and cursing. Then the resistance suddenly gave way, and, before he could loose his grip he was lurching forward, while a jerked knee smote him with brutal violence in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He staggered, and his opponent's fist crashed upon his jaw. In his last seconds of consciousness before his head struck the ground, he thought of the weapon in the other's hand and gave up hope.

  Probably his being knocked out saved his life. The crash of his fall woke Lady Mary. For a stunned moment she lay, wondering. Then her mind rushed to the children, asleep in the next room. She turned on the light, calling out as she did so to ask whether they were all right. Receiving no answer, she sprang up, threw on a dressing-gown and ran into the nursery. All was peace. She stood puzzled, and asking herself whether she had dreamed the crash. Then she heard feet running down the staircase at headlong speed. She ran back into the bedroom, pulled out the revolver which always lay loaded in the dressing-table drawer and flung open the door which gave upon the landing. The light streaming from behind her showed her the crumpled body of her husband, and as she stared aghast at this unnerving sight, she heard the street-door slam heavily.

  “What you ought to have done,” said Mr. Parker, acidly, “was not to have bothered about me, but dashed to the window and tried to get a squint at the bloke as he went down the street.”

  Lady Mary smiled indulgently at this absurd remark, and turned to her brother.

  “So that's all I can tell you about it, and he's uncommonly lucky to be alive, and ought to be jolly well thankful instead of grumbling.”

  “You'd grumble all right,” said Parker, “with a bust collar-bone and a headache like nothing on earth and a feeling as though bulls of Bashan had been trampling on your tummy.”

  “It beats me,” said Wimsey, “the way these policemen give way over a trifling accident. In the Sexton Blake book that my friend Ginger Joe has just lent me, the great detective, after being stunned with a piece of lead-piping and trussed up for six hours in ropes which cut his flesh nearly to the bone, is taken by boat on a stormy night to a remote house on the coast and flung down a flight of stone steps into a stone cellar. Here he contrives to release himself from his bonds after three hours' work on the edge of a broken wine-bottle, when the villain gets wise to his activities and floods the cellar with gas. He is most fortunately rescued at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour and, pausing only to swallow a few ham sandwiches and a cup of strong coffee, instantly joins in a prolonged pursuit of the murderers by aeroplane, during which he has to walk out along the wing and grapple with a fellow who has just landed on it from a rope and is proposing to chuck a hand-grenade into the cockpit. And here is my own brother-in-law–a man I have known for nearly twenty years–giving way to bad temper and bandages because some three-by-four crook has slugged him one on his own comfortable st
aircase.”

  Parker grinned ruefully.

  “I'm trying to think who it could have been,” he said. “It wasn't a burglar or anybody like that–it was a deliberate attempt at murder. The light-bulb had been put out of action beforehand and he had been hiding for hours behind the coal-bunker. You can see the marks of his feet. Now, who in the name of goodness have I got it in for to that extent? It can't be Gentleman Jim or Dogsbody Dan, because that's not their line of country at all. If it had happened last week, it might well have been Knockout Wally–he uses a cosh–but we jailed him good and hard for that business down in Limehouse on Saturday night. There are one or two bright lads who have it in for me one way or another, but I can't exactly fit it on to any of them. All I know is, that whoever it was, he must have got in here before 11 p.m., when the housekeeper shuts the street door and puts out the hall light. Unless, of course, he had a latch-key, but that's not so likely. He wasn't obliging enough to leave anything behind to identify him, except a Woolworth pencil.”

  “Oh, he left a pencil, did he?”

  “Yes–one of those pocket propelling things–not a wooden one–you needn't hope for a handy mould of his front teeth on it, or anything like that.”

  “Show, show!” pleaded Wimsey.

  “All right; you can see it if you like. I've tried it for finger-prints, but I can't get much–only vague smudges, very much superimposed. I've had our finger-print wallah round to look at 'em, but he doesn't seem to have made anything of 'em. See if you can find the pencil, Mary dear, for your little brother. Oh, and by the way, Peter, there's a letter for you. I've only just remembered. In my left coat-pocket, Mary. I'd just taken it out of the Flat 4 box when all this happened.”

  Mary sped away, and returned in a few minutes with the pencil and the coat.

  “I can't find any letter.”

  Parker took the coat and, with his available hand, searched all the pockets carefully.

  “That's funny,” he said. “I know it was there. One of those fancy long-shaped mauve envelopes with gilt edges, and a lady's fist, rather sprawly.”