A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Anyway, they are a very respectable pair. Mr Percival is a bank-manager, and a local councillor, and Mrs Percival has a colourful past – she used to be an actress, and has very glamorous pictures of herself in different roles all round the house. It’s a nice Regency house at a good address, and very well furnished, in a fashion, Lady Peter, that one could call modest means with good taste. They have three daughters, but I gathered that Wendy was the favourite. I think Mrs Percival would have liked her daughter to follow her on to the stage, but Wendy didn’t like the thought of the discipline of appearing every night; she liked dancing, and she liked travel and excitement.

  ‘My daughter was a gay girl, Miss Climpson,’ Mr Percival said, ‘fun-loving and a little headstrong. But you see, she was so clever. She got a very good degree, and then she couldn’t settle down to life at home.’

  Well, the long and the short of it is, Lady Peter, that Wendy wanted to travel, and the Percivals felt that she should stand on her own feet and let them help her younger sisters find theirs. They hoped Wendy would get a good job, but she kept getting short-term work in hotels, or in shops to fund trips abroad. When the war came Mr Percival told her she should offer her language skills to the secret service, and he was disappointed when she volunteered as a land-girl. She had attended an exclusive girls’ school, and some of her old friends were going into the Women’s Land Army. Now I’m sure what you most wanted to know about was BOYFRIENDS. The trouble is that there were dozens of them, and the parents couldn’t keep up with them. Wendy didn’t confide in them; and, Lady Peter, I can see WHY. I think it would be very trying to have parents who at one and the same time were PROUD of one, and DISAPPROVING.

  ‘She broke a lot of hearts,’ the father told me, rather as though he were saying of a cricketer, ‘He scored a lot of runs.’

  I asked about letters home, but Wendy doesn’t seem to have been a great letter-writer, so that they were few and far between. Mrs Percival obviously didn’t want to let a stranger look at them, but she said there really was nothing in them that could possibly help the investigation. And I’m afraid there doesn’t seem to have been a steady boyfriend in Brighton at whom you could point the finger of suspicion.

  I must just tell you something QUITE beside the point, dear Lady Peter: Mrs Percival told me with great indignation that in the first week of the war last September troops arrived in the town, and put barbed-wire rolls along all the beaches, and those concrete tank obstacles on the promenade in case of enemy invasion. And very shortly afterwards train-loads of evacuees arrived, to take refuge in a place of safety. ‘I ask you!’ she said. I told her it wasn’t our place to ask, really, but it does make you wonder who is in charge, Lady Peter, doesn’t it?

  Ever your sincere friend, and do please give my salutations and good wishes to dear Lord Peter, if you are able to write.

  K. Climpson.

  And, well, thought Harriet, who was in charge? People like her sister-in-law, Helen, Duchess of Denver, who thought, or so she had said, that it would take only one bomb falling on a seaside resort packed with children from London and the industrial towns to create a total collapse of morale, and civic disobedience. Meanwhile their grip on their own duties was such that they could fortify a beach and send hundreds of children to play on it in the same week . . .

  Setting herself to expound the case of Wendy Percival, including everything she knew about it, in an orderly manner was an interesting discipline. Also it brought Peter’s presence almost palpably into the room; it was for him she was writing, and to his thought patterns, his likely questions and reactions that she was addressing herself. And this process brought before her very lucidly and immediately a pre-eminent difficulty. She could hear Peter’s light and rapid tones, with that undertow of seriousness audible to her when he discussed a crime; how had she ever managed to believe that he took these matters lightly, as a game of some kind? How hard it was now to remember how little she had once known and understood him! She could hear him saying that motives were a distraction. Never mind why, he used always to say, when you know how you know who. But, Peter, this time, she told him, writing rapidly in her large scrawling hand, there just isn’t any mystery about how. You could ask the pathologist if you were here, and he would tell you in rather sickening detail about a lethal assault. Why is the problem – it just is. When we know why we’ll know who, or when we know who we’ll know why. And so far attempts to find a motive are failures. Of course people are muttering about the victim’s morals, but if every young woman who behaved like that were murdered we’d have bodies piled up like haystacks. It’s just not substantial enough a reason. We must be looking for something much more personal. And the dead can’t tell us, can they?

  She began to enter Charles’s four possibilities into the account. 1) Someone knew her before. 2) There is in fact a way out of one of the shelters. 3) Someone who was above ground, fire-watching, etc. 4) It’s not who she was but where she was.

  Miss Climpson’s letter, interesting though it was, gave no help with number one. In fact one was not susceptible to further investigation by any means Harriet could think of.

  Would number three point the finger at Fred Lugg? Well, hardly. He would have had to scamper down the church tower spiral steps at high speed and up again, and there were 142 steps. She should find out as exhaustively as possible who else was on duty above ground that night. There was also of course Mrs Spright and anyone else who took French leave. Heavens! That would include even her own Mrs Trapp! How ridiculous; and yet the hard-headed truth was that anyone who didn’t participate in the shelter exercise but just went peacefully to bed . . .

  Harriet stared at Charles’s point two. There is in fact a way out of one of the shelters. She hadn’t even clapped eyes on the Methodists’ cave. And that at least suggested a practical move. She could do some legwork on that one. She took from her desk drawer a plain brown folder, labelled it PETER re Wendy Percival. To await return and put in it carefully her own letter and Miss Climpson’s. Then she put her hat on, and went out.

  Six

  O had she been a country maid,

  And I the happy country swain!

  Robert Burns, ‘The Lass o’ Ballochmyle’, 1786

  The Methodists had made use of the Paggleham Cave, a curious feature of which Harriet had heard, but which she had never seen. She went to find a battered History of Paggleham, written by one of Revered Goodacre’s predecessors as vicar, which had been among the few books Harriet had inherited from her father. The cave had not, she discovered, been built as a munitions store, though doubtless it had been used as one. It had been discovered during an excavation in 1740, when the churchyard was extended to enable the construction of a mausoleum for the Wyndham family. Clearing the ground for the elaborate proposed monument the workmen had discovered a millstone, and on moving it found beneath it a gaping hole, which turned out be a deep shaft. Further investigation – carried out in the first place by lowering a farmer’s boy down into the depths on a rope – had revealed a large bell-shaped cavern cut into the chalk, and half full of loose earth. A treasure-hunting frenzy soon got rid of the earth, and when nothing but a few shards and animal bones had been revealed, attention turned to the strange carvings on the solid chalk of the walls.

  The Very Reverend Montague Brown, writing in 1760, had identified the figures incised in the chalk in shallow relief as early Christian saints, a selection from the multitudes of ancients with strange names like St Neot, St Uny, St Chad, and St Erth, and strange stories like a capacity to cross oceans on floating leaves, and turn cattle into parishioners. His account however, by way of indignant refutation, revealed a proponent of quite a different theory, which was that the figures and symbols were much older, were pre-Christian and deeply pagan and Druidical. In the eighteenth century a vogue for antiquarianism had brought about a demand to visit the cave, and, it being clearly impractical to lower fashionable ladies and gentlemen into the bowels of the earth on ropes, a local landow
ner had financed the cutting of a passage into the cave, descending at a slope. He had recouped the expense by charging a fee to enter.

  The sensational interest aroused by the controversy about who the figures on the walls represented had long since died down, and now the parish council maintained the hole, keeping the sides of the passageway fenced and the original hole safely capped, and the whole thing had been very largely forgotten until the present need. Harriet obtained the keys without difficulty from the town clerk, descended the sloping ramp, and let herself in. The reason for Harriet’s presence – the need to check the possibility of a sneak exit – was satisfied at once. It was impossible. The roof of the hole loomed high above her, and the walls were vertical for about sixteen feet, before tapering in a conical shape like a beehive to the shaft at the crest. If the door made to the eighteenth-century exit were closed, then nobody could possibly have left without everyone else who was sheltering there being aware of it. The bunks that Bert Ruddle was supposedly making were in evidence along the back wall; but even using the top one as a foothold would not get a climber anywhere near the exit through the shaft above.

  So that was that. But Harriet lingered, shining her torch on the walls, looking at the mysterious figures. She was struck with solemnity by them. It was not particularly in her line of thinking to be impressed by something merely on account of its being old, and it was not the dizzying antiquity of these figures that moved her now, except in the context of the present. Everything she thought of as English, the buildings of Paggleham, and the towns around, the landscape still in use largely as it was laid out and farmed by Anglo-Saxons in the Dark Ages, the beloved, gritty, earthy and lyrical tongue spoken around her, the present generation of people in all their oddity and villainy and common kindness – everything that seemed threatened with obliteration by the looming conflict – was all put in a different context by this. These mysterious figures, made in England, cut in the bones of the local modest, scarcely palpable chalk hills, had survived many conquests, many convulsions, innumerable deaths and changes, had survived their own significance, so that nobody knew what they meant, and they were still here. Still a part of things. Whatever terrible fate awaits us, she told herself inwardly, we must not overestimate it. In another thousand years somebody will stand here, looking baffled, and roused as I am to an unfocused love of country by a few bumps and scratches on a subterranean wall. I wonder why they made this massive hole, with only stag bones and horns as shovels and picks? What labour! Perhaps even then it was a shelter. She noticed that the sign on the door, worn nearly past legibility, had mentioned ‘ritual worship’. Ritual worship, she thought smiling to herself, was a translation of ‘The archaeologist hasn’t a clue what this was for.’

  She was roused from reverie by a clatter of boots, and the arrival of Bert Ruddle.

  ‘Morning, mum. Wasn’t expecting anyone down here,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You won’t mind if I gets on? Only I got to get this saw back to that old misery-guts George Withers. Said he would put up ’is Anderson in ’is own garden, and keep ’is own company, and that’s what he’s a-doing.’ Bert gave Harriet a gap-toothed grin. ‘Ground’s as hard as concrete in ’is garden, and nobody wants to lend the old blighter a hand, so he’s got his work cut out.’

  ‘But you’re helping him, Bert?’

  ‘Fair exchange. I’m agreed to cut the timber for his bunk when I takes back ’is saw. That’s a lovely saw he’s got. Runs a treat. And I got to get done here before I takes it back.’ He was carrying a handsaw and a length of wood. ‘Makes a row when I get sawing,’ he remarked.

  ‘Oh, I’m going now, Bert. I was just checking up that there isn’t any other way out.’

  ‘You want to try the other shelter for that,’ he said.

  ‘The cellars of the Crown? I thought . . .’

  ‘There’s a lot of beer what’s kept down there, mum,’ he said, ‘and people have been known to get thirsty when they didn’t have money to spend. Not that I done it myself,’ he added, seeming suddenly to see what he had let slip, ‘but I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the tip-off, Bert.’

  ‘It’d more likely be a Church matter than a Chapel matter, anyways,’ he said.

  ‘What would? Pinching beer?’

  ‘Murdering wenches,’ he said. ‘Not a Methodist way of carrying on, if you ask me. Now I’ve got to get on, mum, if you don’t mind.’

  Harriet’s next call, obviously, must be to the Crown. Harriet walked across there, enjoying the fine morning, and found a shining powerful motor-bike parked beside the horse trough in the Square. A young airman seated astride it hailed her.

  ‘I say, can you help me?’

  Harriet walked across to him. ‘I heard a wild rumour that my pal Brinklow was hanging around here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Do you know where I might find him?’

  ‘He’s got a cottage just up the lane on your right,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Been there,’ the officer said. ‘He’s not at home. And I’ve only got an hour left for a two-hour drive. I seem to have missed him.’

  ‘Can I give him a message?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Good thinking. It’s a bit rich of him not to let us know where he is. We’ve all been worried sick about him. Tell him to show a leg and come and chat to his mess-mates.’

  ‘I will tell him that,’ said Harriet. ‘I understand he’s recuperating, from injuries sustained when he baled out. I don’t think he can drive, he has a broken ankle. That’s probably why he hasn’t visited base.’

  ‘Hum,’ said her interlocutor. ‘Can’t make a phone call, either? It’s the merest chance I heard he was here. Fellow mentioned hearing his name at some dance or other. I’ll post it up on the mess notice-board now, though, so tell him to drop us a line.’

  ‘I will when I see him,’ said Harriet. ‘Who shall I say was asking for him?’

  ‘Er, Mike Newcastle. I’m glad the old beggar’s all right; I’ve been missing him. He’s got a good line in wisecracks.’

  With that the stranger revved up the engine, and with a squeal of brakes on the bend in the street was off at alarming speed.

  Mr Gudgeon welcomed her, and offered her an out-of-hours beer, so long as she would step into the sitting-room; it was more than his licence was worth to have anyone drinking in the bar before opening time. Harriet thanked him and declined. She would drink beer very gladly when she was on a long walk, or thirsty from gardening, but to drink it in cold blood, so to speak, in the middle of the morning did not appeal to her.

  ‘Mrs Gudgeon would make a pot of tea, my lady, if I asks her,’ said Mr Gudgeon. ‘She’s just washing glasses, and the kettle is quite handy.’

  ‘No, please don’t put her to any trouble, Mr Gudgeon. I’m here on a particular errand, and I don’t need tea. I have heard a rumour that there is more than one way in to the cellars of the Crown, and I feel honour-bound to follow it up.’

  ‘It’s news to me, m’lady,’ said Mr Gudgeon.

  ‘Well then, I expect it’s wrong.’

  ‘Mind you, I have just wondered, now and then . . .’

  ‘Wondered?’

  ‘It has happened that a barrel has run dry before I expected it to. I thought the brewery had given short measure, but it’s hard to be sure. If someone had been taking off a pint or so behind my back, that would explain it. But I haven’t any idea how they would get in.’

  ‘There isn’t a back door, or a ventilation shaft somewhere?’

  ‘No back door. But there is a chimney sort of thing that lets a bit of air in; I’ll show you if you like.’

  He led the way down the stone steps into the vaults. There were signs of activity since Harriet had last been down here: folding chairs, a shelf of books, a beginning on building bunks. Mr Puffett had been quicker off the mark than Bert Ruddle, and the Church people would be cosy sooner than the Chapel people. Mr Gudgeon led the way through the cellars under the vaulted arches right to the far end, whe
re he had a pair of enormous barrels lying on their sides on trestles. Between them a column of grey pallid light full of floating motes of dust stood on a disc of light cast on the floor. Looking up, Harriet saw a roundel of sky at the head of the shaft, criss-crossed with brambles. Mr Gudgeon’s torch lit a few rungs of a set of metal footholds in the sides of the shaft, all rusted, and some missing.

  ‘You would have to be very thirsty, I would think,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You’d need a rope lowered from above to use this, seems to me,’ said Mr Gudgeon. ‘We could have a look outside.’

  Outside, in the overgrown orchard behind the pub, the head of the shaft took quite a bit of finding. It came up into a thick bramble patch, in which it was barely visible. Rather to Harriet’s surprise, however, there was a coil of rope, lying partly concealed in the nettles under a leaning apple tree.

  ‘When did you last miss any beer, Mr Gudgeon?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Quite a bit ago. Before the war,’ he said.

  Harriet was rather at a loss. Could the coil of rope have been used recently? She looked to see the tell-tale ring of bleached grass that it would have left if moved slightly, and could not see it. Grass grew quickly at this time of year, however. There were no fallen leaves on the rope, no grass pushing up through the loops of the coil. Obviously it was not completely impossible that the rope had been tied round the trunk of the tree a fortnight ago, and used for somebody’s ascent from the shelter. Even, conceivably, their ascent and return. But how could someone have been certain that they would not be seen, climbing up a rope between the barrels?

  Only in a certain kind of detection fiction, she reflected, could such a device be used. It would be part of a murder that could have been carried out, but which could not possibly have been planned. Several people who were in the vaults of the Crown could have realised, in theory, that Wendy Percival was not present, and therefore might be on her way there, and in that case would have been moving around alone above ground. But they could have had only a few minutes’ notice of that, and the rope would have needed to be provided ahead. There was no sense in this.