Thrones, Dominations

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Harriet had been right, thought Lord Peter. She had looked at him somewhat greenly about the gills at the very thought of this expedition, in spite of its possible literary utility to her, and he had jumped at the chance. Since he had gaily promised her a full report he was honour bound, now, to keep up with the party and stay the course.

  They reached the first weir after a few minutes. A bare iron ladder allowed them to climb over it in single file, and stand in the first of Bazalgette’s great intercepting sewers. Unlike the sluggish water of the sleeping Fleet, this was rapidly flowing. Their torches showed an opaque brown fluid swirling past the ledge on which they stood. There was a very pervasive unhealthy smell.

  ‘They used to be able to light the streets of London with the methane coming off this,’ Mr Snell told them. ‘In the days of gas light, of course. Now if any of you gentlemen has a box of matches, or a cigarette lighter in your pockets, I must ask you not to touch them. The slightest spark can cause an explosion here.’

  ‘Does all this flow west to east by simple gravity?’ asked Wimsey.

  ‘In a way, sir, it does. But we have to pump it up over inclines two or three times on its way to allow it to continue by gravity. There is enough methane collected to drive the necessary turbines.’

  Nearly opposite the point where they stood a dark tunnel entered the sewer through an arch.

  ‘That is the old Fleet, gentlemen,’ Snell told them. ‘Follow me.’

  They waded knee-deep through the sewer, and entered the tunnel carrying the Fleet. It was nearly dry under their feet. They began to walk along it.

  ‘I would have expected an old watercourse like this to carry more flow,’ said Chief Inspector Parker. His voice was muffled by the scarf he had pulled over his nose and mouth to filter the smell. Even so it boomed in the echoing passageway.

  ‘When you confine a river in a culvert, sir,’ he was told, ‘you cut it off from all the little trickles that used to run into it. These days it’s only storm water that the old rivers carry down; all the actual sewage is in these cross-routes. In dry weather the old river courses down here soon run dry.’

  His little party fell silent. They walked for some considerable time, strung out one behind the other, walking in the sludgy deposit on the floor of the culvert. Here and there side tunnels came in, some of them seeping. It seemed like an age before they reached the middle-level intercepting sewer. Once again there was an iron stepladder by which the party climbed over the weir out of the Fleet and into the Victorian tunnel of the sewer. Completely disorientated now, they entered the upper reaches of the Fleet, and soon came to an outfall of some size, entering on their left. Their torches showed it some way back, to where a bend took it out of sight.

  ‘This is what you might be looking for, gentlemen,’ said Mr Snell. ‘This is the first branch that might be draining out of Seven Dials.’

  ‘Is this the Cranbourne?’ asked Wimsey.

  ‘Not that I know of, sir,’ said Mr Snell. ‘I don’t know as there ever was a Cranbourne – not as such. To my way of thinking, I don’t know as how the marsh under Seven Dials ever did flow out into the Fleet. And I never saw any Cranbourne marked on any of our maps.’

  ‘Then what in Hades are we doing here?’ asked the Chief Inspector.

  ‘Whether it’s the Cranbourne or not isn’t the point, sir. If the marsh drains into the Fleet, then it comes in here. I would guess it comes down lots of little courses that have lost their names long ago along with their daylight. Maybe there was a Cranbourne once. Maybe it’s somewhere through here or flowing into here. Maybe the whole district drained into the Cock and Pie Ditch; but we can’t find that to walk up it.’

  ‘Do these channels get inspected regularly?’ asked Parker.

  ‘Regular, but not often, sir,’ said Mr Snell. ‘There’s hundreds and hundreds of miles of it under London. We have teams of flushers working, but it takes them a while to get round. Unless we gets a problem it might be more than a year before we come past somewhere.’

  ‘Enlighten us, Mr Snell. What is a flusher?’

  ‘A man what shovels the grit out, that accumulates in the sewers, sir. It would all silt up otherwise.’

  ‘If you think this passageway drains Seven Dials, it’s the one we want,’ said Charles. ‘Can we get up it?’

  ‘You can, sir, but not standing upright. It might come to crawling in the muck, sir, as you go further up.’

  ‘I’m afraid we must try, all the same,’ said Charles. ‘If this is the nearest outlet to Seven Dials.’

  Wimsey shuddered at the thought, but the group began to stoop and shuffle onwards. And then there was a noise, a rhythmic low booming sound like the slow firing of cannonshot.

  Mr Snell’s demeanour changed at once. ‘Back up!’ he cried. ‘Quick about it, if you don’t mind!’

  There was an undignified scramble backwards towards the Fleet tunnel. ‘This way! Look lively, sirs.’ As Mr Snell spoke the tunnel sighed in their faces a gust of its foul breath. This was followed immediately by a blast of turbulent, roaring wind.

  ‘What’s happening?’ cried Inspector Bollin in alarm.

  ‘That was the topman banging the manhole cover in its hole to let us know it’s raining up there,’ said Snell. ‘Don’t be frightened, gentlemen, we have a minute or two. Up these steps here – hurry along, please!’ A note of genuine alarm had entered his voice. One after another the group climbed on to the footholds of the ladder, going straight up through a shaft in the roof. Mr Snell was last in line. As he got his hands on the rung below Wimsey’s feet a deafening crash of sound, like the surf on a huge foreshore, rose past him. Looking down, Wimsey saw a roaring deluge rising below the man. He locked his left arm through the nearest iron rung, and, leaning down, offered Mr Snell a hand. Mr Snell got a foothold on a rung above the bubbling and rapidly rising surface, and the two men climbed clear. A disc of white daylight topped the shaft they were climbing in, with the swaying black outlines of the policemen moving above them.

  They crawled out of the ground in the Clerkenwell Road, in the middle of the street, with cars going past them on both sides. The topman stood over the manhole, holding a flag to warn the traffic. The gutters were sluicing with rain, and pouring water down the throats of the drains.

  ‘We are a good way east of Seven Dials,’ observed Wimsey.

  Mr Snell seemed untroubled by the rain, but then, a drenching with clean water must have been a welcome change for him. ‘Ah, sir, who knows where they all are?’ he asked.

  ‘All who?’ asked Wimsey, startled for the moment with spectres of many corpses, when one was bad enough.

  ‘London’s rivers,’ said Mr Snell. ‘You can bury them deep under, sir; you can bind them in tunnels, you can divert them and stop them up and forget about them, you can lose the map, and wipe the name out of mind, but in the end where a river has been, a river will always be.’

  ‘You’re a poet of the sewers, I see,’ said Lord Peter, appreciatively.

  ‘We will have to try again in drier weather, I take it?’ Chief Inspector Parker asked, turning his collar up against the battering rain.

  Meanwhile, beneath their feet the sluggish Cranbourne in its nameless course had roused itself, and spewed out its secret contents into the torrential Fleet, and the Fleet had tossed and carried it down over the succession of weirs, and out into the turning tide of the rain-dimpled Thames, which in turn took it onward, downstream, to surface below Tower Bridge on the tidal mudflats. The captain of a tug would see it, and summon the Port of London Authority launch. The body of a woman would be recovered. But nobody would be able to tell at what point it had entered the water.

  18

  See how love and murder will out.

  WILLIAM CONGREVE

  Here, take my picture; though I bid farewell

  Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells shall dwell

  JOHN DONNE

  ‘Harriet, do I smell?’

  Harriet considered the ma
tter. ‘Yes, my lord. Quite distinctly. Of carbolic soap.’

  ‘Oh, as long as it’s nothing worse. Bunter has been scrubbing me all over for twenty minutes, but it still lingers in my nostrils. Or perhaps it’s a psychological smell, a kind of olfactory battle-fatigue.’

  ‘I take it you have been searching for missing actresses?’

  ‘Down the drains. Or up them, rather, since we entered them at the outfall. We didn’t find anything, but then before we reached our destination rain stopped play.’

  ‘A pity. Robert Templeton has found his corpse while you were out, and I was hoping for a hideous detail or two to flesh out the description.’

  ‘Fleshing out is an unfortunately happy expression. I have married a ghoul. Are ghouls like the crones of fables, do you think? Do they turn into princesses if one embraces them? Upon your assurance that I do not reek I shall experiment . . .’

  Peter put his arms round Harriet, and kissed her. The moment she flinched, he released her, and said, ‘Harriet, what is it? What is wrong?’

  ‘There, love, don’t look so stricken; nothing is wrong.’

  ‘You quite frightened me. Did I hurt you? I don’t know my own strength, sometimes, what with Mr Matsu’s training.’

  ‘Peter, it’s nothing. Just this stupid collar is so stiff it scratched me.’

  ‘Let me see.’ He moved behind her, and undid the collar, one tiny hook by one, and uncurled it from her neck. ‘Yes; the blasted thing has grazed you,’ he said. ‘It’s drawn blood!’

  Harriet went to the mirror over the mantelpiece to look. Minuscule droplets of blood stood on a tiny abrasion on her neck.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Kiss me again.’

  But Peter was standing in the middle of the room behind her, the collar in his right hand, and frowning. ‘I – excuse me a minute,’ he said, and went to the telephone. She heard him through the open door asking for Sir James Lubbock.

  ‘James, something has come up . . .’

  Meredith came in. ‘Is it all right to draw the curtains, my lady?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Meredith.’

  ‘No,’ Peter was saying, ‘very tiny surface marks. Quite localised. They couldn’t have been obliterated in some way by bruising? Yes, of course you looked carefully, but – yes, I see. I see. Thank you.’

  Peter put down the telephone, and looked at Harriet abstractedly. ‘There were no such marks on Rosamund Harwell’s neck as there are now on yours,’ he said. ‘Harriet, can you think of any reason under the sun or the moon why someone might put a collar on to a woman already dead?’

  ‘To cover the marks of strangulation?’

  ‘The face was as much disfigured as the neck itself,’ he said, ‘and the face was naked.’

  ‘I don’t know; let me think. Could someone have been dressing her – could she have been naked when she was killed, and the murderer have dressed her afterwards?’

  ‘That would be harder than it sounds. Getting clothes on to a completely inert body would be a struggle. And why? Why was the murderer doing it?’

  ‘I don’t know why. But it would explain a mistake like the collar.’

  ‘A mistake? Why do you call it a mistake?’

  ‘Well, I was a bit baffled when I heard she was wearing that. So was Mango, I think. Rosamund had such exquisite taste. And nobody with the least idea at all of dress would wear the white collar with a white dress. The whole idea of the thing is to soften the effect of wearing black.’

  ‘So she was dressed after she was dead,’ said Peter miserably. ‘Oh, Harriet, I loathe this case!’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, my dear. I hate to see you miserable, but. . .’

  ‘But you don’t like to suggest that I disengage myself and go fishing because of the way I reacted to that suggestion last time?’

  ‘No; because I want to see the stupid woman avenged!’

  ‘A woman, however stupid, being on your side?’

  ‘In what conflict, Peter? Are men and women at war?’

  ‘We are not,’ he said. ‘At least we are not.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ she said. ‘I think what I meant was that I wanted to see the weak protected against the strong, and stupidity is a form of weakness.’

  ‘A potentially lethal form,’ he said. ‘Nothing is weaker than a murdered corpse; and this one was not wearing when it was murdered the collar it was wearing when it was found.’

  ‘So she was murdered when undressed?’

  ‘It would seem so. And that suggests a sexual crime.’

  ‘But are you surprised? In view of who she was and what we know about her it was always likely to be so, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was likely to be a crime of passion. But logically a man could be provoked by rage and jealousy and desire as easily by a fully dressed woman as by one lying naked in bed. More easily perhaps.’

  ‘I see what you mean; a sexual crime suggests one perpetrated by a stranger.’

  ‘A stranger who leaves no trace, no fingerprints.’

  ‘A husband or a lover, then. And acting at a level at which people are impossible to know. At which it is hard enough to understand even one’s own partner, let alone anyone else’s.’

  ‘A level at which one is doing well to understand even oneself,’ he said.

  ‘As when I took all those years to discover that I needed you?’

  ‘That was my fault. All that peacocking and manoeuvring. I was overbearing; trying to win you by overpowering your resistance. Every attempt I made made it harder for you to accept me, because acceptance would have been surrender. In my own defence all I can say is that I eventually realised that I could not win a free spirit like yours in such a way. And that never, in my most benighted and insufferable moments, could I have played such games sexually. It was all heart and mind stuff.’

  ‘Dearest,’ she said, holding out a hand to him, ‘let’s not divide the lusts of the flesh from heart and mind. And lusts are only joys – did you know? It’s just the Anglo-Saxon word for joy.’

  ‘Is it indeed?’ he said, taking her hand. ‘An insight lost with the Norman Conquest, with which my ancestors were intimately connected.’

  ‘You seem exceptionally eager to take blame for things tonight, my lord. Is it that which is making you so unhappy about all this?’

  ‘I suppose so, Harriet. Touch pitch and be defiled. There’s a game that men and women play. It isn’t our game and so our knowledge of it is anecdotal, if extensive. The woman puts up a show of reluctance. Respectability is chaste; or she doesn’t like it; the man is fired up by resistance, he storms the citadel. Perhaps she seems to like being overcome; perhaps she concedes from pity or love or mercy for his need and must be paid in gratitude. It’s a dangerous game; it contaminates love with power.’

  ‘And it could easily go too far?’

  ‘Very easily.’

  ‘Do you remember when you bought me that dog-collar in case I got strangled in Oxford, you showed me two pressure points in the neck . . .’

  ‘Yes. A human being is very fragile in certain places.’

  ‘And might be strangled almost by accident?’

  ‘Might die in hands that intended only to overpower. Or in the hands of someone who got a frisson out of a show of strength. The kind of strength disgustingly called manly.’

  ‘But that would not be murder. It fails your definition of intent.’

  ‘Yes. And if Gloria Tallant turns up unharmed a manslaughter verdict on Rosamund Harwell is the best the prosecution could hope for. If she turns up dead, that’s a very different matter.’

  ‘There could be no connection.’

  ‘Back to the realm of unhappy coincidence. I’m afraid there is a connection. But for the moment, will you tell me with your woman’s intuition whether the husband or the lover was more likely to use excessive force?’

  Harriet thought about it. She walked to the window and considered it, looking out unseeingly into the street. ‘I would have to say I think
it would be more likely to be Harwell,’ she said. ‘He has a dominant personality. Claude – whatever I might say about his powers as a poet – strikes one as rather defective in what you just called manliness.’

  ‘That’s the devil of it,’ said Peter. ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush. Again. As far as corroboration is concerned, Harwell appears to be telling the truth and Amery to be lying. One is almost tempted to suppose a conspiracy between the two of them.’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘While she was alive their rivalry would absolutely prevent that; and once she was dead whoever killed her would be so hated by the other.’

  ‘I think you are right. I must beat about the bushes some more.’

  ‘Well, before you do, how about a little unforced Anglo-Saxon joy? Here I stand, uncollared . . .’

  ‘That’s the thing about me. I could never storm a citadel, however ill-defended. The only thing that tempts me is a wide-open gate, and the trumpets sounding welcome.’

  ‘Alone of all your sex?’

  ‘Well, not quite alone. In a minority. I have always been like that, as wicked Uncle Paul could tell you. He regards it as a weakness.’

  ‘No doubt he would love to tell me. But I think I would rather explore without a guide.’

  ‘No maps of the interior?’

  ‘Just surveys of my own making. What kind of trumpets do you want to sound your welcome? Bach trumpets?’

  ‘Could you manage a natural trumpet?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I could.’

  Monsieur Gaston Chapparelle was announced unexpectedly shortly after breakfast.