Dorothy Sayers - The Nine Tailors

“Only when you came to see me, my lord, last week.”

“When I showed you that piece of writing in Deacon’s hand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“But how did that—?” began the Superintendent. Wimsey went on, drowning his voice.

“You realised then that the man buried in Lady Thorpe’s grave must be Deacon.”

“It came over me, my lord, that that must be the way of it. I seemed to see a lot of things clear that I hadn’t understood before.”

“Yes. You’d never doubted till that moment that Deacon had died in 1918?”

“Not for a moment, my lord. I’d never have married Will else.”

“You have always been a regular communicant?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“But last Sunday you stayed away.”

“Yes, I did, my lord. I couldn’t come there, knowing as me and Will wasn’t properly married. It didn’t seem right, like.”

“Of course not,” said Wimsey. “I beg your pardon, Superintendent. I’m afraid I interrupted you,” he added, blandly.

“That’s all very well,” said Mr. Blundell. “You said you didn’t recognise that writing when his lordship showed it to you.”

“I’m afraid I did. It wasn’t true — but I had to make up my mind quick — and I was afraid—”

“I’ll bet you were. Afraid of getting Will into trouble, hey? Now, see here, Mary, how did you know that paper wasn’t written donkey’s years ago? What made you jump so quick to the idea Deacon was the corpse in the Thorpe grave? Just you answer me that, my girl, will you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, faintly. “It came over me all of a sudden.”

“Yes, it did,” thundered the Superintendent. “And why? Because Will had told you about it already, and you knew the game was up. Because you’d seen that there paper before—”

“No, no!”

“I say, Yes. If you hadn’t have known something, you’d have had no cause to deny the writing. You knew when it was written — now, didn’t you?”

“That’s a lie!” said Thoday.

“I really don’t think you’re right about that, Blundell,” said Wimsey, mildly, “because, if Mrs. Thoday had known about it all along, why shouldn’t she have gone to Church last Sunday morning? I mean, don’t you see, if she’d brazened it out all those months, why shouldn’t she do it again?”

“Well,” retorted the Superintendent, “and how about Will? He’s been going to church all right, ain’t he? You aren’t going to tell me he knew nothing about it either.”

“Did he, Mrs. Thoday?” inquired Wimsey, gently. Mary Thoday hesitated.

“I can’t tell you about that,” she said at last.

“Can’t you, by God?” snapped Mr. Blundell. “Well, now, will you tell me—?”

“It’s no good, Mary,” said Will. “Don’t answer him. Don’t say nothing. They’ll only twist your words round into what you don’t mean. We’ve got nothing to say and if I got to go through it, I got to go through it and that’s all about it.”

“Not quite,” said Wimsey. “Don’t you see that if you tell us what you know, and we’re satisfied that your wife knows nothing — then there’s nothing to prevent your marriage from going through straight away? That’s right, isn’t it, Super?”

“Can’t hold out any inducement, my lord,” said the Superintendent, stolidly.

“Of course not, but one can point out an obvious fact. You see,” went on Wimsey, “somebody must have known something, for your wife to have jumped so quickly to the conclusion that the dead man was Deacon. If she hadn’t already been suspicious about you — if you were perfectly ignorant and innocent the whole time — then she had the guilty knowledge. It would work all right that way, of course. Yes, I see now that it would. If she knew, and told you about it — then you would be the one with the sensitive conscience. You would have told her that you couldn’t kneel at the altar with a guilty woman—”

“Stop that!” said Thoday. “You say another word and I’ll — Oh, my God! it wasn’t that, my lord. She never knew. I did know. I’ll say that much, I won’t say no more, only that. As I hope to be saved, she never knew a word about it.”

“As you hope to be saved?” said Wimsey. “Well. Well. And you did know, and that’s all you’ve got to tell us?”

“Now, look here,” said the Superintendent, “you’ll have to go a bit further than that, my lad. When did you know?”

“When the body was found,” replied Thoday, “I knew then.” He spoke slowly, as though every word were being wrenched out of him. He went on more briskly: “That’s when I knew who it was.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” demanded Blundell.

“What, and have everybody know me and Mary wasn’t married? Likely, ain’t it?”

“Ah!” said Wimsey. “But why didn’t you get married then?”

Thoday shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, you see, my lord — I hoped as Mary needn’t ever know. It was a bitter hard thing for her, wasn’t it? And the children. We couldn’t ever put that right, you see. So I made up my mind to say nothing about it and take the sin — if it was a sin — on my shoulders. I didn’t want to make no more trouble for her. Can’t you understand that? Well, then — when she found it out, through seeing that there paper—” He broke off and started again. “You see, ever since the body was found I’d been worried and upset in my mind, like, and I daresay I was a bit queer in my ways and she’d noticed it — when she asked me if the dead man was Deacon after all, why, then I told her as it was, and that’s how it all came about.”

“And how did you know who the dead man was?”

There was a long silence. “He was terribly disfigured, you know,” went on Wimsey.

“You said you thought he was — that he’d been in prison,” stammered Thoday, “and I said to myself—”

“Half a mo’,” broke in the Superintendent, “when did you ever hear his lordship say that? It wasn’t brought out at the inquest, nor yet at the adjournment, because we were most particularly careful to say nothing about it. Now then!”

“I heard something about it from Rector’s Emily,” said Thoday, slowly. “She happened to hear something his lordship said to Mr. Bunter.”

“Oh, did she?” snapped Mr. Blundell. “And how much more did Rector’s Emily overhear, I’d like to know. That beer-bottle, now! Who told her to dust the fingerprints off it — come, now!”

“She didn’t mean no harm about that,” said Will. “It was nothing but girl’s curiosity. You know how they are. She came over next day and told Mary all about it. In a rare taking, she was.”

“Indeed!” said the Superintendent, unbelievingly. “So you say. Never mind. Let’s go back to Deacon. You heard that Emily heard something his lordship said to Mr. Bunter about the dead man having been in prison. Was that it? And what did you think of that?”

“I said to myself, it must be Deacon. I said, here’s that devil come out of his grave to trouble us again, that’s what I said. Mind you, I didn’t exactly know, but that’s what I said to myself.”

“And what did you imagine he had come for?”

“How was I to know? I thought he’d come, that’s all.”

“You thought he’d come after the emeralds, didn’t you?” said the Superintendent.

For the first time a look of genuine surprise and eagerness came into the haunted eyes. “The emeralds? Was that what he was after? Do you mean he had them after all? Why, we always thought the other fellow — Cranton — had got them.”

“You didn’t know that they had been hidden in the church?”