Dorothy Sayers - Five Red Herrings

‘No,’ said Wimsey. ‘It was your habit of putting paints in your pocket. Did you realise that you had carried off Campbell’s flake white?’

‘I didn’t notice it till I got back home. But it never occurred to me that anybody would spot that, I suppose you were the intelligent sleuth, Wimsey. I’d have taken it up to the Minnoch and dropped it somewhere, only that you had seen it the day you came to the studio. That was the first real fright I got. But afterwards I thought I could rely on the alibi, I was rather proud of that ticket-forgery. And I hoped you would overlook the possibilities of Ikey-Mo.’

‘There’s only one thing I don’t understand,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘why didn’t you start out earlier from the Minnoch? There wasn’t any need to do such a lot to the painting.’

Ferguson smiled faintly.

‘That was a big bloomer. You reconstructed the events of the night, and you know what a lot I had to do? Well — I forgot one thing. I forgot to wind up my watch, which I usually do at bedtime. I was going to pack up my painting things, after I’d done a goodish bit, when I heard a lorry coming along. I waited for that to go by and looked at my watch. It said half-past ten. I thought I could easily give it another half-hour. I didn’t want to hang about at Barrhill for fear of being recognized. I estimated another half-hour, and looked at my watch again. It was still half-past ten.

‘That put me into a panic. I booted the body over the bank and packed up as though the devil was after me. That must have been how I came to overlook the flake-white. I scorched away as fast as I could, but that bicycle I borrowed was too small for me and geared rather low. A beast. I missed the train by a hair’s-breadth — it was just moving out of the station as I got to the station turn. I rode on in a kind of desperation — and then that car came along and I thought I was saved. But apparently I wasn’t.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to kill Campbell. And I still say, and say again, it was not murder.’

Wimsey got up.

‘Look here, Ferguson,’ he said. ‘I’m damned sorry, and I always thought it couldn’t really be murder. Will you forgive me?’

‘I’m glad,’ said Ferguson. ‘I’ve felt like hell ever since. I’d really rather stand my trial. I’d like to tell everybody that it wasn’t murder. You do believe that, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ said Wimsey, ‘and if the jury are sensible people, they’ll bring it in self-defence or justifiable homicide.’

The jury, after hearing of Mr. Gowan’s experiences, took a view mid-way between murder and self-defence. They brought it in manslaughter, with a strong recommendation to mercy, on the ground that Campbell was undoubtedly looking for trouble, and the beard of Samson was not sacrificed altogether in vain.

WIMSEY, Peter Death Bredon, d.s.o.; born 1890, 2nd son of Mortimer Gerald Bredon Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and of Honoria Lucasta, daughter of Francis Delagardie of Bellingham Manor, Hants.

Educated: Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford (1st class honours, Sch. of Mod. Hist 1912); served with H.M. Forces 1914/18 (Major, Rifle Brigade). Author of: ‘Notes on the Collecting of Incunabula’, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum’, etc. Recreations: Criminology; bibliophily; music; cricket.

Clubs: Marlborough; Egotists’. Residences: 110A Piccadilly, W.; Bredon Hall, Duke’s Denver, Norfolk.

Arms: Sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat couched as to spring, proper; motto: As my Whimsy takes me.

A short biography of Lord Peter Wimsey, brought up to date (May 1935) and communicated by his uncle Paul Austin Delagardie.

I am asked by Miss Sayers to fill up certain lacunae and correct a few trifling errors of fact in her account of my nephew Peter’s career. I shall do so with pleasure. To appear publicly in print is every man’s ambition, and by acting as a kind of running footman to my nephew’s triumph I shall only be showing a modesty suitable to my advanced age.

The Wimsey family is an ancient one — too ancient, if you ask me. The only sensible thing Peter’s father ever did was to ally his exhausted stock with the vigorous French-English strain of the Delagardies. Even so, my nephew Gerald (the present Duke of Denver) is nothing but a beef-witted English squire, and my niece Mary was flighty and foolish enough till she married a policeman and settled down. Peter, I am glad to say, takes after his mother and me. True, he is all nerves and nose — but that is better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brother, or a mere bundle of emotions, like Gerald’s boy, Saint-George. He has at least inherited the Delagardie brains, by way of safeguard to the unfortunate Wimsey temperament.

Peter was born in 1890. His mother was being very much worried at the time by her husband’s behaviour (Denver was always tiresome, though the big scandal did not break out till the Jubilee year), and her anxieties may have affected the boy. He was a colourless shrimp of a child, very restless and mischievous, and always much too sharp for his age. He had nothing of Gerald’s robust physical beauty, but he developed what I can best call a kind of bodily cleverness, more skill than strength. He had a quick eye for a ball and beautiful hands for a horse. He had the devil’s own pluck, too: the intelligent sort of pluck that sees the risk before he takes it. He suffered badly from nightmares as a child. To his father’s consternation he grew up with a passion for books and music.

His early school-days were not happy. He was a fastidious child, and I suppose it was natural that his school-fellows should call him ‘Flimsy’ and treat him as a kind of comic turn. And he might, in sheer self-protection, have accepted the position and degenerated into a mere licensed buffoon, if some games-master at Eton had not discovered that he was a brilliant natural cricketer. After that, of course, all his eccentricities were accepted as wit, and Gerald underwent the salutary shock of seeing his despised younger brother become a bigger personality than himself. By the time he reached the Sixth Form, Peter had contrived to become the fashion — athlete, scholar, arbiter elegantiarum — nec pluribus impar . Cricket had a great deal to do with it — plenty of Eton men will remember the ‘Great Flim’ and his performance against Harrow — but I take credit to myself for introducing him to a good tailor, showing him the way about Town, and teaching him to distinguish good wine from bad. Denver bothered little about him — he had too many entanglements of his own and in addition was taken up with Gerald, who by this time was making a prize fool of himself at Oxford. As a matter of fact Peter never got on with his father, he was a ruthless young critic of the paternal misdemeanours, and his sympathy for his mother had a destructive effect upon his sense of humour.

Denver, needless to say, was the last person to tolerate his own failings in his offspring. It cost him a good deal of money to extricate Gerald from the Oxford affair, and he was willing enough to turn his other son over to me. Indeed, at the age of seventeen, Peter came to me of his own accord. He was old for his age and exceedingly reasonable, and I treated him as a man of the world. I established him in trustworthy hands in Paris, instructing him to keep his affairs upon a sound business footing and to see that they terminated with goodwill on both sides and generosity on his. He fully justified my confidence. I believe that no woman has ever found cause to complain of Peter’s treatment; and two at least of them have since married royalty (rather obscure royalties, I admit, but royalty of a sort). Here again, I insist upon my due share of the credit; however good the material one has to work upon it is ridiculous to leave any young man’s social education to chance.