A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘What a set of young savages you’ve billeted on her ladyship!’ Mrs Trapp was saying. ‘Greedy as gannets; always hungry and running wild. I’m surprised you’re not ashamed to show your face here as their mother.’

  ‘Oh, come, Mrs Trapp,’ said Mary. ‘At least they weren’t sewn into their vests for the winter and full of head-lice like the evacuees we read about in the newspapers.’

  ‘I’ll give you that, m’lady,’ said Mrs Trapp. ‘The poor little mites. Perhaps this’ll open people’s eyes to what has been going on. My niece in the Salvation Army has tales to tell as would make your blood run cold. Working in the East End is worse than missions in Africa, she says. She says the more of the slums Hitler knocks down the better it will be, as long as the people are down the Underground at the time, of course.’

  ‘Mary!’ said Harriet. ‘How good to see you.’

  ‘I’m missing the children so much Charles sent me up a day early,’ said Mary, rising to embrace her. ‘And I haven’t had sight or sound of them yet. They’re out and about somewhere.’

  ‘They’ve gone for mushrooms, so they say,’ said Mrs Trapp. ‘To help out the housekeeping.’

  ‘Goodness, is that safe?’ asked Harriet. ‘Or shall we find we’ve been done to death by toadstools supplied by our loving families?’

  ‘Bless you, I won’t cook what they bring,’ said Mrs Trapp. ‘I’ve got a nice punnet of mushrooms in the larder that Bert Ruddle let me have, and I’ll cook those instead.’

  ‘There I go, underestimating you again, Mrs Trapp. It’s impossible to overestimate you, I think.’

  ‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ said Mrs Trapp contentedly. ‘Off you go, Miss Mary, and take your tea in the drawing-room as if you’d been properly invited!’

  There wasn’t time to talk to Mary at once though. The children came home from the fields in a hand-holding group, with Sadie shepherding them, and offered to Harriet’s fascinated gaze a little family drama. Charlie ran to his mother, offered his cheeks to be kissed, and began at once to tell her about the piglet that would be coming from Bateson’s sow’s litter, and how Sam—

  ‘Who’s Sam, Charlie?’ asked Mary.

  But Charlie’s explanation was long and detailed, and kept falling over itself with his excitement, so that Mary broke into it. Polly was standing in the doorway, seeming almost shy, as though her mother had been a stranger. How long was it, Harriet wondered, since she had seen Mary? Well, it might be eight weeks, and that was a very long time in a life of only seven years.

  ‘How’s my little girl?’ asked Mary. ‘Is there a kiss for Mother?’

  But Polly did not move. She said, ‘Sadie bathes me, and Aunt Harriet reads my bednight story.’

  If Mary flinched, Harriet did not see her. She said, ‘Perhaps tonight I could help them?’

  Meanwhile little Harriet toddled straight across the room, climbed into Mary’s lap, leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder, and put her thumb peaceably into her mouth.

  Big Harriet intercepted her own two, and carried them away to her bedroom, offering stories and sweets, to give the Parker family time to re-form itself. Would Bredon be just like Charlie in six years’ time? she wondered. Was he a mirage of the future of her sons? They could do worse: he was a nice little boy with a kindly disposition towards the babies. And Bredon adored him, and imitated his every move. Only she hoped Bredon would be more light-hearted; Charlie took everything so seriously. But then look at their respective fathers . . .

  Later, when the children were asleep, the two women sat comfortably by the fire to talk.

  ‘Polly’s still a bit strange with me,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to get up here more often.’

  ‘It’s hardly your fault, when we are sternly enjoined not to travel more than necessary,’ Harriet reminded her. ‘She’ll be all right with you by lunch-time tomorrow.’

  ‘And she’s been all right here? Not pining?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. She’s been fine. It’s only when she saw you . . .’

  ‘And at least mine are with family,’ said Mary. ‘Think what it must be like to have your children with strangers. One of Charles’s officers had to borrow a police car and go and fetch his son home, and the boy had red weals all over his backside. He was being beaten for not eating. Think of it, Harriet, when this war is long over there will be people still alive in the next century who will bear the psychological marks of all this. War damage, so to speak.’

  ‘Well, I expect there are children who are better cared for than they were at home, too.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And if bombing were to really start . . .’

  ‘That would be different, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You know, Harriet, London is really strange at the moment. There are sandbags everywhere, and the other day there was an air-raid warning, I think it was another false alarm, and people were trekking through the streets at dusk to get down Underground stations. Air-raid wardens were trying to stop them and direct them to official shelters, but of course they only had to buy a ticket for the Tube, so they couldn’t be stopped, and the surface shelters look pretty flimsy. And at the same time as all this there are still bright young things in posh frocks going to night-clubs and bars, and you can still get a slap-up meal in the big hotels if you have the money, although the Ministry has just forbidden the fish course if you have the main course. And then in the morning all the people stream out of the shelters and trudge home at the same time as the toffs come out of the clubs. It’s like a London-wide version of coming out of the opera as the Covent Garden market got going – you remember what fun that was!’

  Harriet, who had not been able to afford opera tickets before her marriage, had not had that particular kind of fun. After her marriage Peter had taken her to the opera, of course, but Bunter had always brought the Daimler to the opera house steps to take them home.

  Lady Mary was smiling to herself. ‘All the coster-mongers and vegetable stall-holders and barrow-boys would stop unloading the farm lorries and stand around waiting for us,’ she said. ‘They would cat-call, and yell, “Likes your frock, ducks!” Or, “Cor, that’s cut a bit low that is. That’s a lovely pair of melons, ’ow much do you want for them?”’

  Harriet laughed.

  ‘You’d be picking up your hem to step over cabbage leaves and squashed tomatoes, and the cockneys would yell, “Don’t touch the fruit now! No prodding, just looking afore you buy!” Sometimes your escort would get annoyed,’ said Mary, ‘but the awful truth is, I liked it. Nothing like a wolf-whistle for a woman’s morale!’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve been missing,’ said Harriet. Though she was not the kind that got whistled at in the street. ‘So how is Charles?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s working far too hard. When the bombs start falling in earnest a lot will be expected of the police. I don’t see much of him, so I’ve volunteered as an ambulance driver. But now I wonder if I shouldn’t be here with the children. Or take them to Denver.’

  ‘I wouldn’t move them again just yet,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I suppose you’re missing old Peter?’

  ‘Yes. It makes it harder somehow not knowing where he is.’

  ‘I expect he’s in Sweden,’ said Mary.

  ‘Whyever? I don’t think he’s in a neutral country; I believe it’s very dangerous.’

  ‘I think Sweden might be a way in to Finland. And we have family in Sweden. Delagardies.’

  ‘But Uncle Paul Delagardie is French!’

  ‘Likes to pretend so, yes.’

  ‘Well, if he’s in Finland . . .’ said Harriet, with a sinking heart. The Finns had yesterday signed a treaty of capitulation, ceding a large part of their territory to Soviet Russia. They had exacted a terrible price – maybe as many as a million Russian dead – but they had been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. There was no comfort in this. Her unfinished sentence hung in the air between them.

  ‘Look, I haven’t a clue really where Peter is,�
�� said Mary. ‘It was just an idle guess.’

  ‘I wish he were here,’ said Harriet, ‘for all sorts of reasons, but not least because in the middle of all this the local police have a squalid ordinary murder on their hands, and I’ve been asked to help, and of course . . .’

  ‘That’s a bit much,’ said Lady Mary. ‘Do you want me to ask Charles to get at the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, and have them called off? Although, of course, you have done quite a bit of detecting yourself, one way and another, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t in the least mind being asked to help. But always before I could talk it over with Peter.’

  ‘Can’t you write to him?’

  ‘Of course I can write, care of someone – I’d better not say who; and I’ve even had one or two brief replies, and one transcribed from a telegraph message. But, Mary, think about it; Peter is in hiding and in danger, and when he gets a letter from home he surely doesn’t want reams of stuff about land-girls and villagers and who was fire-watching and who was flirting with whom. He just wants to know that we are all safe and we love him. And even if he could reply, do I want a contribution to cracking a sordid mystery in Paggleham? I don’t want him thinking about that, I want him thinking about how to accomplish his mission and get home safe and sound.’

  ‘Yes, I see. I do see.’

  ‘And yet telling him about things was always the great clarifier of thought processes. I’m lost without it.’

  ‘Then I think you’d better write to him anyway. Just write; don’t send the letters. If you haven’t got it solved when he turns up again he can read them then.’

  ‘Mary, that’s a very good idea. That’s just what I should do. Would you like a glass of Peter’s brandy as a nightcap?’

  The morrow brought both bright sunlight, and Charles. Mrs Trapp put up a picnic – bread and ham and bread and jam – and the family made up a straggling expedition to the wood, carting the picnic basket and old blankets, and a flask of hot tea, and a huge stoneware jar of lemonade. Harriet pushed Paul’s pram as far as the gate to the field below the wood, and Sadie carried him the rest of the way. The holiday atmosphere infected all the children, who were skipping and dancing around the steadily trudging adults, all except Charlie who seemed rather out of sorts.

  He tried several times to stop the march: ‘Here will do! Wouldn’t it be nice right here?’ before saying anxiously, ‘We aren’t going right into the wood, are we, Aunt Harriet?’

  ‘Not right in, Charlie, because some of us like the sunshine. Just on the edge, where we can choose between sun and shade.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, visibly relaxing. ‘As long as we don’t go right in.’

  ‘We won’t,’ said Harriet. ‘But why shouldn’t we?’

  ‘It’s forbidden,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s not. The wood belongs to your Uncle Peter. He bought it from Bateson’s farm last year.’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s just that it is very dangerous. Not forbidden, just dangerous.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Someone. Can’t remember. Might have been Sam.’

  Harriet was briefly mystified. She made a mental note to find out more about Sam Bateson, since he seemed such a strong influence on Charlie, but their arrival on the verge of the woodland, and the setting up of the picnic distracted her.

  ‘This is such a treat,’ said Charles. ‘You can’t imagine. Just a sight of green fields after months in London.’

  ‘The peaceful scene belies its appearance though,’ said Mary. ‘Harriet tells me there has been a local murder. Police baffled. What to do when Lord Peter is absent? Call in wife of famous sleuth.’

  ‘If I had a pound for every time I’ve been told the police are baffled,’ said Charles mildly, ‘we’d have a place in the country of our own. What’s it about, Harriet?’

  Harriet waited until the children were playing a little way off before beginning to explain to Charles what had happened. She put him in the picture as well as she could. ‘It’s deeply mystifying,’ she said in conclusion, ‘because nobody knows much about the poor girl, though I’ve put Miss Climpson on to that. And because all – and I mean all – the people whose feelings she had hurt, or outraged might be a better word, you know what village people are like, Charles, very conservative. Where was I? Yes, all the possible probable and improbable suspects were down one of the shelters when it happened. You could hardly think of a more solid alibi. Besides—’

  ‘Besides what?’ he said. He was propped up on one elbow, lounging on the picnic blanket, with Mary stretched out beside him. She looked as contented and sleepy as a cat in a warm spot, but Charles was giving Harriet his full attention with an expression of brotherly concern.

  ‘However infuriating she may have been, however tarty people here found her, I don’t somehow think it would add up to the way she died. The way she was killed was so violent – so hands-on violent. That’s a lot of hatred. So that a wandering maniac who just encountered her by accident in the street seems the only possibility, and it can’t be a very likely one, besides offering no leads to the police at all.’

  Charles reached round his wife for the pocket of the jacket that lay beside her, and pulled pencil and a little note-pad out of it.

  ‘Well, let’s try an orderly approach to it,’ he said. ‘If everybody in the village who had any motive based on knowing the woman was in the shelters, then either, one, the murderer knew her before she got here, and came to find her. Or, two, there is in fact a way out of one or other of those shelters. Or, three, one or other of the very few people who were outside – fire-watching or on ARP duties or what have you – is the one you want. Or, four, she wasn’t killed because of who she was, but because of where she was.’

  ‘She was in the middle of a village high street, under a bright moon,’ said Harriet. ‘And just seconds before, nearly the entire population of the village and half the airmen posted in East Anglia had been scurrying about.’

  ‘Perhaps she saw something being done by someone who had supposed that they would not be seen, precisely because everyone would be in the shelter.’

  ‘I don’t think a wandering maniac can be the right option, Charles,’ Mary chipped in, ‘because how would a wandering maniac have known about a dance for the airmen, and then a practice air-raid?’

  ‘The wandering maniac doesn’t need to have known about anything; he isn’t planning his crime, he just in a mad way does it at a moment’s notice,’ said Harriet. ‘That’s what makes him such an enticing possibility. Perhaps the only possibility.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Charles. ‘I know our dear Peter has a mind that hops all over the place, and I know how often his is the method that delivers the goods. But like most policemen I can’t do detecting by jumping to conclusions. Dogged is what I have to be. Tempting as he is, I wouldn’t go for the wandering maniac until I had carefully excluded the other possibilities.’ He tore the page he had been writing on out of his notebook, and handed it to her.

  ‘Your Superintendent Kirk is a good man,’ he added. ‘I expect he’s dogged too, but he gets results. I rather admire a policeman who doesn’t mind asking for help. Most of us can use it from time to time.’

  They were interrupted by Charlie, leaving the game of rolling down the sloping field below them to come and ask his father, ‘Dad, when we get home could you have a look at my crystal set?’

  Charles Parker promised his son that he would.

  Miss Climpson’s letter came on the following Monday. The house was very quiet, saying goodbye to their parents again having visibly depressed the Parker children, and a thin drizzling rain having ruled out cricket on the lawn. They were upstairs reading, or model making, and Harriet sat down to read Miss Climpson carefully.

  My dear Lady Peter,

  What a pleasure to be able to be of assistance in quite the old way, when life seems so much CHANGED from everything we were used to. And of course with Lord Peter away – Oh, I do so hope he’s looking aft
er himself in any way he can! It must be quite terrible for you to be married to a man like that, and have to do without him for months. I know that many people are in the same boat, but you would be surprised, Lady Peter, you really would, at how many of the women we interview for our surveys are quite glad of a little breathing space while their menfolk are away. Women keep telling us how they find they can do things they didn’t think they could manage. I spoke to one young lady, quite a girl still, and a peaky-looking little thing, who had taken on a job in an armaments factory which was short-handed, standing in for her brother when he got called up. ‘And do you know?’ she said to me. ‘It’s quite easy! Of course I get tired at the end of the shift, but he used to make such a fuss about hard work and doing a man’s job, and I find I can do it easy. It isn’t as hard work as bringing up children on the dole like my mum did, nor yet as cleaning a house. I can tell you,’ she said, ‘when things get back to normal after we’ve seen off blooming Hitler, I’m not going to run around waiting hand and foot on anybody, not even if they are doing factory work. It’s opened my eyes,’ she said. I couldn’t help wondering what sort of upheaval there would be in households up and down the land when the men get back expecting the old life, and all the women have become quite DIFFERENT while they were away.

  I went down to Brighton last week, as soon as I got your letter, and I found Wendy Percival’s parents quite easily, by asking at the offices of the local newspaper. Even in these days the murder of a local girl is headline news. The Percivals did not want to talk to me at first, although I tried my most SYMPATHETIC manner, but when I explained that Lord Peter had sent me to help in the hunt for the murderer they changed their minds, and asked me in, and helped me with all my questions. I hope you don’t think it very SHOCKING of me, Lady Peter to say that Lord Peter had sent me, but it’s very close to the truth, because I’m sure if he were at home he would have sent me, and I’m afraid I get used to telling little white lies in my line of work.