Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body?

«I daresay I should,» said Lady Swaffham.

«Quite. An' if you found that the lawyer and the doctor had once upon a time been in business at Poggleton-on-the-Marsh when the Bishop had been vicar there, you'd begin to remember you'd once heard of me payin' a visit to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh a long time ago, an' you'd begin to look up the parish registers there an' discover I'd been married under an assumed name by the vicar to the widow of a wealthy farmer, who'd died suddenly of peritonitis, as certified by the doctor, after the lawyer'd made a will leavin' me all her money, and then you'd begin to think I might have very good reasons for gettin' rid of such promisin' blackmailers as the lawyer, the doctor an' the bishop. Only, if I hadn't started an association in your mind by gettin' rid of 'em all in the same place, you'd never have thought of goin' to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh, 'n' you wouldn't even have remembered I'd ever been there.»

« Were you ever there, Lord Peter?» enquired Mrs. Tommy, anxiously.

«I don't think so,» said Lord Peter, «the name threads no beads in my mind. But it might, any day, you know.»

«But if you were investigating a crime,» said Lady Swaffham, «you'd have to begin by the usual things, I suppose — finding out what the person had been doing, and who'd been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn't you?»

«Oh, yes,» said Lord Peter, «but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin' all sorts of inoffensive people. There's lots of people I'd like to murder, wouldn't you?»

«Heaps,» said Lady Swaffham. «There's that dreadful — perhaps I'd better not say it, though, for fear you should remember it later on.»

«Well, I wouldn't if I were you,» said Peter, amiably. «You never know. It'd be beastly awkward if the person died suddenly to-morrow.»

«The difficulty with this Battersea case, I guess,» said Mr. Milligan, «is that nobody seems to have any associations with the gentleman in the bath.»

«So hard on poor Inspector Sugg,» said the Duchess. «I quite felt for the man, having to stand up there and answer a lot of questions when he had nothing at all to say.»

Lord Peter applied himself to the duck, having got a little behindhand. Presently he heard somebody ask the Duchess if she had seen Lady Levy.

«She is in great distress,» said the woman who had spoken, a Mrs. Freemantle, «though she clings to the hope that he will turn up. I suppose you knew him, Mr. Milligan — know him, I should say, for I hope he's still alive somewhere.»

Mrs. Freemantle was the wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of city men's wives.

«Well, I've dined with him,» said Mr. Milligan, good-naturedly. «I think he and I've done our best to ruin each other, Mrs. Freemantle. If this were the States,» he added, «I'd be much inclined to suspect myself of having put Sir Reuben in a safe place. But we can't do business that way in your old country; no, ma'am.»

«It must be exciting work doing business in America,» said Lord Peter.

«It is,» said Mr. Milligan. «I guess my brothers are having a good time there now. I'll be joining them again before long, as soon as I've fixed up a little bit of work for them on this side.»

«Well, you mustn't go till after my bazaar,» said the Duchess.

Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.

Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages.

«All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,» he said; «they find what they are looking for.»

«Oh, they do,» agreed the detective, «but one learns to discount that almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on the other side — Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people, you know, till I found they were all so busy looking for a burglar whom nobody had ever seen, that they couldn't recognize the footprints of the household, so to speak. Then I spent two years learning to be cautious.»

«Hum,» said Lord Peter, «theology must be good exercise for the brain then, for you're easily the most cautious devil I know. But I say, do go on reading — it's a shame for me to come and root you up in your off-time like this.»

«It's all right, old man,» said Parker.

The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said:

«D'you like your job?»

The detective considered the question, and replied:

«Yes — yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well — not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?»

«Oh, nothing,» said Peter. «It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it — up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job — when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do.»

Parker gave this speech his careful attention.

«I see what you mean,» he said.

«There's old Milligan, f'r instance,» said Lord Peter. «On paper, nothin' would be funnier than to catch old Milligan out. But he's rather a decent old bird to talk to. Mother likes him. He's taken a fancy to me. It's awfully entertainin' goin' and pumpin' him with stuff about a bazaar for church expenses, but when he's so jolly pleased about it and that, I feel a worm. S'pose old Milligan has cut Levy's throat and plugged him into the Thames. It ain't my business.»

«It's as much yours as anybody's,» said Parker; «it's no better to do it for money than to do it for nothing.»

«Yes, it is,» said Peter stubbornly. «Havin' to live is the only excuse there is for doin' that kind of thing.»

«Well, but look here!» said Parker. «If Milligan has cut poor old Levy's throat for no reason except to make himself richer, I don't see why he should buy himself off by giving £1,000 to Duke's Denver church roof, or why he should be forgiven just because he's childishly vain, or childishly snobbish.»

«That's a nasty one,» said Lord Peter.

«Well, if you like, even because he has taken a fancy to you.»

«No, but — »

«Look here, Wimsey — do you think he has murdered Levy?»

«Well, he may have.»

«But do you think he has?»

«I don't want to think so.»

«Because he has taken a fancy to you?»

«Well, that biases me, of course — »

«I daresay it's quite a legitimate bias. You don't think a callous murderer would be likely to take a fancy to you?»

«Well — besides, I've taken rather a fancy to him.»

«I daresay that's quite legitimate, too. You've observed him and made a subconscious deduction from your observations, and the result is, you don't think he did it. Well, why not? You're entitled to take that into account.»

«But perhaps I'm wrong and he did do it.»