Dorothy Sayers - Unnatural Death

“The Star of Quebec- due in next Friday.”

“H’m! We’ll have to get hold of her. Are you meeting the boat?”

“Good heavens, no! Why should I?”

“I think someone ought to. I’m reassured- but not altogether happy; I think I’ll go myself, if you don’t mind. I want to get that Dawson story- and this time I want to make sure the young woman doesn’t have a heart attack before I interview her.”

“I really think you’re exaggerating, Peter.”

“Better safe than sorry,” said his lordship. “Have another peg, won’t you? Meanwhile, what do you think of Miss Climpson’s latest?”

“I don’t see much in it.”

“No?”

“It’s a bit confusing, but it all seems quite straightforward.”

“Yes. The only thing we know now is that Mary Whittaker’s father was annoyed about Miss Dawson’s getting his aunt’s money and thought it ought to have come to him.”

“Well, you don’t suspect him of having murdered Miss Dawson, do you? He died before her, and the daughter’s got the money anyhow.”

“Yes, I know. But suppose Miss Dawson had changed her mind? She might have quarrelled with Mary Whittaker and wanted to leave her money elsewhere.”

“Oh, I see- and been put out of the way before she could make a will?”

“Isn’t it possible?”

“Yes, certainly. Except that all the evidence we have goes to show that will-making was about the last job anybody could persuade her to do.”

“True- while she was on good terms with Mary. But how about that morning Nurse Philliter mentioned, when she said people were trying to kill her before her time? Mary may really have been impatient with her for being such an unconscionable time a-dying. If Miss Dawson became aware of that, she would certainly have resented it and may very well have expressed an intention of making her will in someone else’s favor- as a kind of insurance against premature decease!”

“Then why didn’t she send for her solicitor?”

“She may have tried to. But after all, she was bed-ridden and helpless, Mary may have prevented the message from being sent.”

“That sounds quite plausible.”

“Doesn’t it? That’s why I want Evelyn Cropper’s evidence. I’m perfectly certain those girls were packed off because they had heard more than they should. Or why such enthusiasm over sending them to London?”

“Yes. I thought that part of Mrs. Gulliver’s story was a bit odd. I say, what about the other nurse?”

“Nurse Forbes? That’s a good idea. I was forgetting her. Think you can her?”

“Of course, if you really think it important.”

“I think it’s damned important. Look here, Charles, you don’t seem very enthusiastic about this case.”

“Well, you know, I’m not so certain it isa case at all. What makes you so fearfully keen about it? You seem dead set on making it a murder, with practically nothing to go upon. Why?”

“Lord Peter got up and paced the room. The light from the solitary reading-lamp threw his lean shadow, diffused and monstrously elongated, up to the ceiling. He walked over to a book-shelf, and the shadow shrank, blackened, settled down. He stretched his hand, and the hand’s shadow flew with it, hovering over the gilded titles of the books and blotting them out one by one.

“Why?” repeated Wimsey. “Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive clue. The norm. All these”- he swept his extended hand across the book-shelf and the shadow outlined a vaster and more menacing gesture- “all these books on this side of the room are about crimes. But they only deal with the abnormal crimes.”

“What do you mean by abnormal crimes?”

“The failures. The crimes that have been found out. What proportion do you suppose they bear to the successful crimes- the ones we hear nothing about?”

“In this country,” said Parker, rather stiffly, “we manage to trace and convict the majority of criminals- ”

“My good man, I know that where a crime is known to have been committed, you people manage to catch the perpetrator in at least sixty per cent of the cases. But the moment a crime is even suspected, it falls, ipso facto, into the category of failures. After that, the thing is merely a question of greater or lesser efficiency on the part of the police. But how about the crimes which are never even suspected?”

Parker shrugged his shoulders.

“How can anybody answer that?”

“Well- one may guess. Read any newspaper to-day. Read the News of the World, now that the Press has been muzzled, read the divorce court lists. Wouldn’t they give you the idea that marriage is a failure? Isn’t the sillier sort of journalism packed with articles to the same effect? And yet, looking round among the marriages you know of personally, aren’t the majority of them a success, in a hum-drum, undemonstrative sort of way? Only you don’t hear of them. People don’t bother to come into court and explain that they dodder along very comfortably on the whole, thank you. Similarly, if you read all the books on this shelf, you’d come to the conclusion that murder was a failure. But bless you, it’s always the failures that make the noise. Successfull murderers don’t write to the papers about it. They don’t even join in imbecile symposia to tell an inquisitive world ‘What Murder means to me,’ or ‘How I became a Successful Poisoner.’ Happy murderers, like happy wives, keep quiet tongues. And they probably bear just about the same proportion to the failures as the divorced couples do to the happily mated.”

“Aren’t you putting it rather high?”

“I don’t know. Nor does anybody. That’s the devil of it. But you ask any doctor, when you’ve got him in an unbuttoned, well-lubricated frame of mind, if he hasn’t often had grisly suspicions which he could not and dared not take steps to verify. You see by our friend Carr what happens when one doctor is a trifle more courageous than the rest.”

“Well, he couldn’t prove anything.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be proved. Look at the scores and scores of murders that have unproved and unsuspected till the fool murderer went too far and did something silly which blew up the whole show. Palmer, for instance. His wife brother and mother-in-law and various illegitimate children, all peacefully put away- till he made the mistake of polishing Cook off in that spectacular manner. Look at George Joseph Smith. Nobody’d have thought of bothering any more about those first two wives he drowned. It was only when he did it the third time that he aroused suspicion. Armstrong, too, is supposed to have got away with many more crimes than he was tried for- it was being clumsy over Martin and the chocolates that stirred up the hornets’ nest in the end. Burke and Hare were convicted of murdering an old woman, and then brightly confessed that they’d put away sixteen people in two months and no one a penny the wiser.”

“But they were caught.”

“Because they were fools. If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who has previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you’re first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your effects too often, and you’re safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature’s unaided work. Murder’s so easy, Charles, so damned easy- even without special training.”