A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘I think I’ll take this with me,’ said Mr Gudgeon, looping the coil of rope over his arm. ‘Safety first.’

  ‘Talking of safety,’ she said, as they walked back across the orchard, ‘is that shaft safe? Could someone fall in?’

  ‘After they pushed through all those brambles I suppose they could,’ said Mr Gudgeon. ‘They’d have some scratches to show for it.’

  ‘Has it always been overgrown like that?’

  ‘It’s got more so since Clive Martin’s joined up,’ said Mr Gudgeon. ‘He used to scythe it off for me once in a while.’

  ‘And does everyone know about it?’

  ‘Well, local lads would know. I’ve heard of it being a bit of a dare, when I was a boy.’

  Harriet thanked him and left it at that. The murderer, if he had used that method of being in two places at once, however, would obviously have scratched his hands and face. He must also have been thin and agile. Charles’s point two didn’t lead anywhere. She could cross it off the list.

  The next morning Archie Lugg presented himself in the kitchen at Talboys, saying as how he understood some shelves were wanted. Harriet escorted him up the stairs to the landing where she showed him an alcove which could take some more of the London books if it had shelves across it, top to bottom. Archie said, ‘The job itself is no problem – a cinch, m’lady. But the timber is another thing. I can’t get a good bit of timber for love nor money.’

  ‘Oh, well then, we’ll have to manage without,’ said Harriet. ‘Pity, but it isn’t the end of the world.’

  ‘What I could do,’ said Archie musingly, ‘is use the shelves out of that old wardrobe I got at the sales the other day. There’s six good mahogany shelves in there that might be long enough. I’d have to measure.’

  ‘Mahogany is a bit too grand, isn’t it, Archie?’ said Harriet. ‘I was thinking of painting them white. Isn’t it a pity to vandalise an old wardrobe?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That’s got two broken doors and the back stove in. I paid one an’ six for that only on account of the shelves. And it’s what I’ve got to hand, m’lady. We can’t pick and choose no more.’

  ‘Okay, Archie. But we won’t actually paint them in that case.’

  ‘They’ll look lovely with a coat or two of yacht varnish,’ he said.

  ‘Fine. Archie, before you go there is something I would like to ask you about. I believe you knew Wendy Percival?’

  ‘I thought you’d get round to that. You didn’t have to order shelves from me to bring that up. I’d’ a told you anyway.’

  ‘We need the shelves anyway. How well did you know her?’

  ‘Not well enough,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not enough to tell when she was having me on, and when she meant it.’

  ‘Meant what?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘She made out she thought you were the cat’s whiskers, and then you found someone else was getting buttered up just the same. Me and Jake nearly came to blows over her, and we’re old friends. Jake had even put down the deposit on a ring. It was that bad.’

  ‘You were both very angry?’ said Harriet quietly.

  ‘Not so much angry as miserable,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill her, lady, and I’ll call you to witness that I didn’t, since I was down the shelter with my mum, and you saw me there. And I was right at the back when we was leaving, and you’d found her lying there before I got up the steps. But wherever I might have been, I couldn’t have harmed her, not to save my life.’

  His tone of voice carried a clear message to Harriet. The poor man had really loved Wendy. However foolishly.

  ‘All right, Archie. But you understand questions have to be asked.’

  ‘Oh, you go asking around till you find him that did it,’ said Archie. ‘I’m all in favour. But one thing I will say, and that’s when you find him, you get him safely locked away before I know his name, because if I get my hands on him he won’t swing – as God’s my witness I’ll kill him with my two hands and take the consequences!’

  ‘And the awful thing is,’ wrote Harriet to Peter that evening, ‘that I believed him.’

  Finding Jake Datchett was the obvious next step. Harriet went in search of him, and found him in the barn at Datchett’s farm, with his father, checking up supplies of animal feed.

  Jake did not react well. He was a gangly youth, with a shock of very red hair. ‘I’m not talking to you!’ he said, when she asked how well he knew Wendy. ‘Why should I? If that Superintendent Kirk wants to ask me things, he can come and ask me himself, not send his la-di-da friends along. You’re not even a policewoman. Push off.’

  Datchett senior said, ‘He’s very upset, and it makes him angry. Everyone’s asking him about the blasted girl, and he can’t have a drink in peace, or get it out of his head of an evening.’ To his son he said, ‘Have a bit of sense, son. You wasn’t involved and the quicker everyone realises that the better. You tell the lady what she wants to know.’

  Harriet said to Jake’s sullen silence, ‘I’ll make it quick. Do you know anything about Wendy’s whereabouts on the evening of her death? Before the all-clear?’

  ‘No I don’t. She promised me a dance. Two dances, to put Archie Lugg in his place. And then she didn’t show up at all. I could have killed her!’

  ‘She’d have led you a pretty dance as a wife, boy,’ observed Roger Datchett.

  ‘But you did think she might marry you?’ prompted Harriet.

  ‘Well, what would you think?’ Jake demanded. ‘If a girl will walk up the lane with you, have a roll in the hay with you, let you kiss her and feel her a bit? Our country girls may be rough and ready, but they don’t do that unless they means to have you. They’d be a scandal all the way to Broxford if they did. Their mothers would have something to say. I didn’t expect she was a whore. I thought Archie was lying when he said she’d a been doing the same with him, and I clopped him one.’

  ‘The long and the short of this,’ said Roger Datchett, ‘is that everyone’s running round asking about Archie and Jake here, and neither of them could have done it, because of that blessed air-raid. Thank heavens for that, I say. I thought it was stupid at the time, keeping us out of our beds for nothing when we have to be up early in the morning, but it’s turned out a blessing and no mistake.’

  ‘You are right to be angry,’ said Harriet to Jake. ‘It isn’t kind, to put it mildly, I agree, to flirt like that.’

  ‘I suppose it’s what they do in towns,’ he said dejectedly. ‘She said so. She laughed at me for having bumpkin ideas. She said’ – his voice rising to a pitch of indignation – ‘that most of the men she knew would have been grateful to have a bit of a snog and get away with it, instead of expecting you were theirs for life because of a kiss and a cuddle.’

  ‘And you don’t know anything that might throw light on this?’ said Harriet, addressing Jake. ‘You know Wendy wasn’t at the dance, and you don’t know why?’

  ‘Along of having promised the last waltz to more than one man, I thought,’ he said. ‘Perhaps more than two of us, for all I know. Perhaps she couldn’t show her face because she’d promised to dance with the whole blooming lot of us! Someone lost his rag with her,’ he added sombrely, ‘but it wasn’t me.’

  Harriet believed him. He looked too slight and stringy to be the brutal assailant they were after. But then as she turned to go, he picked up a huge bale of hay from the floor of the barn, stepped up a ladder, and heaved his burden up into the hay-loft as though it had been as light as chaff. And she noticed the backs of his hands were covered in scratches.

  But there didn’t seem to be anything of consequence to report to Superintendent Kirk.

  It was nothing but idle curiosity that moved Harriet a few days later to look for the pig-killing apparatus. Her curiosity had been triggered by the astonishing appearance on the dinner table of a splendid array of pork chops – a feast no less. This unexpectedly spectacular dinner made Harriet realise that although nobody in h
er household was actually going short, they were not exactly hungry, yet even so the sensation of being really full and satisfied, so that you couldn’t eat another mouthful, had become an unusual one. It had made Harriet very sleepy. However had one managed in peace-time to digest so much food? But the explanation for the plenty must be that someone in the pig club had slaughtered an animal that week, and there had been a share-out. Something about the indignation expressed by Mrs Ruddle over Ministry regulations meddling with what goes on in people’s own back yards made Harriet think better of asking questions; but the piglet who was coming their way had already been chosen and named Goering, and would be arriving to the joy of the children quite soon, and Harriet just thought she would inspect its future exit before it made an entry.

  Talboys had once been the house for an ample farm, with barns and byres and sheds in two courtyards extending beside it. Peter had bought the yard nearer to the house three years ago, mentioning garaging for the Daimler, stabling for ponies for the children, and a desire to keep the threshing machines a little way removed from his windows. John Bateson had readily agreed – when was a farmer not short of cash? He had kept the more distant yard, which is where he had billeted his land-girls, and he was using all his range of buildings. But quite accidentally Talboys had acquired the shed used for pig-killing. Nobody, as far as Harriet could remember, had mentioned this at the time, or perhaps Peter had known and given permission? More likely the villagers had continued to use the shed as from time immemorial, and assumed permission.

  Harriet found it easily, because it had a hasp and ring for a padlock, although there wasn’t one there. She felt a tremor of dread at stepping into it, but there was nothing to see at first as she blinked in the darkness. It smelled quite sweet and clean, because it was full of straw, baled up, and stacked against a wall. There were a number of buckets, and a wide shallow half-barrel lined up along the back wall. Her eyes got used to the dimness, and a twittering of disturbed bats made her look up. The shed had robust roof timbers and crossbeams, and the equipment was overhead. It was an elaborate rig-up and it took Harriet a moment to understand it. A hefty, yard-square chunk of concrete with a ring in the top of it was standing on a wooden platform. A rope knotted firmly to the ring ran over a large pulley attached to the ridge beam; the surplus rope then hung slack over a hook in the lowest beam in the roof space. Harriet reached up and unhooked the loops of rope, which uncoiled and reached the floor. A running noose now lay on the shed floor at her feet, and she saw that a ring had been painted on the bricks of the floor, marking the spot where the noose fell. If something dislodged the concrete block it would come crashing down, and anything caught in the noose would be hoisted suddenly upwards and left hanging. Upside down, if it was a pig, presumably.

  And sure enough, in the gloom of the roof-space she could now see that the platform supporting the block was hinged, and wedged. If you knocked the wedge out . . . she shuddered, and stepped away from the noose.

  ‘We ought to put that back out of reach,’ observed a voice behind her. ‘There’s little children playing here.’ Harriet looked round and saw that Sam Bateson had appeared in the shed door, and was watching her.

  ‘Oh, Sam,’ she said.

  ‘I thought I’d see you didn’t hurt yourself,’ he said. ‘We’re not allowed in here.’

  ‘I should think not!’ she said, gathering up the rope in loops and hooking it back on the beam, out of reach of the younger children. ‘I’ll get a padlock for that door.’

  ‘It isn’t that dangerous,’ he said. ‘It makes a noise. Someone would come.’

  ‘Would we hear it at Talboys?’ she asked. ‘Mightn’t it upset the children if they had got fond of the pig?’

  ‘It makes a crash and a rumble,’ he told her. ‘You never hear the pig. He shoots up off the ground hanging by his hind legs, and the butcher leans round from behind him, and cuts his throat before he can squeal. That don’t feel a thing. Promise.’

  He was looking anxious, and Harriet realised that he was afraid she might veto piglet Goering if she thought the creature would suffer. But she was obviously looking unconvinced, because he continued chatting. ‘We had a butcher once when we heard the pig squealing, and Dad was furious. Said it wasn’t humane and it wasn’t needful. We’re never going to have that one again. We have a friend of our uncle who farms up at Louth. He gets a lift on a vegetable truck when he’s needed, and he does it quick as a flash.’

  ‘All right, Sam, I believe you,’ said Harriet, amused at this child’s protective instinct. Sam had made sure she didn’t get tangled in the rope, and now he was making sure she didn’t have nightmares. And he could fix crystal sets too! How old was this paragon? Twelve? He might even be younger; farm children were better fed than most of the evacuees and now they were all in the village school together you could make the comparison. ‘Thank you for helping fix Charlie’s crystal set,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t fix that,’ he said. ‘That’s like Dad’s awful harvester machine – works and then doesn’t and then does. That’s always broke when we need it, and that’s mended itself when we call Jake Datchett to fix it, and as soon as he’s gone home that’s broke again.’

  ‘It’s devilish, isn’t it?’ said Harriet sympathetically. Sam seemed intent on walking her home to the front door.

  ‘I’ve got a book about how to spot enemy aircraft,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘I’ve learned it all up although I’m too young to do the sky-watching. And I haven’t seen a single enemy aircraft yet. I can’t wait!’

  ‘Oh yes, you can, Sam,’ she said. ‘The longer the better.’

  Sam Bateson, Harriet concluded, thinking over her day as she sat with a mug of Ovaltine beside the last glow of the living-room fire, was a sensible sort of boy, with a well-developed sense of responsibility. Young Charlie was not likely to come to harm playing with him. Why had she wondered about him? She couldn’t remember. And she put it out of her mind to think of other things.

  Seven

  I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras,

  and the secret magic of numbers.

  Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643

  Harriet reached home around noon, and as she entered her drawing-room found someone waiting for her. Someone who rose as she entered. Someone pin-striped, sleek, and with that ominous look of the official.

  She stopped in her tracks, arrested as she pulled off her left glove, with fear raising her heartbeat, and constricting her throat. ‘Peter?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

  She could feel a strange sensation on her cheeks which must be her colour draining from them, and it must be visible as well as palpable.

  ‘You had better sit down, Lady Peter,’ the stranger said. ‘Can I get you a glass of water? Can I ring for someone?’

  She did sit down. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but who are you?’

  ‘Call me Bungo,’ he said. The silly name rang a distant bell with her, but she couldn’t place it.

  ‘With news of Peter?’

  ‘Perhaps. There is an indecipherable in from him.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Sorry. An encoded message that our people cannot decode. He knows as much. There are four words in clear: “Donne undone – only Harriet.”’

  ‘What does he mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Almost certainly that only you can guess his cipher text. The established one was John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, used at random.’

  ‘I would have guessed that,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Someone has, I’m afraid. So for that, or some other reason, he has chosen something else, something we do not know about. And he thinks you will know. May I ask how much you understand about codes, Lady Peter?’

  ‘Very little. I was once involved in a case in which there was a letter to be decoded. It was a thing with a grid and a key-word.’

  ‘There are various ways of using grids,’ he said. ‘That sounds
like a Playfair cipher of some sort. This is a different idea – a book code. May I tell you how it works?’

  ‘Is Peter in danger?’ she asked. ‘Will this help Peter?’

  ‘I cannot tell you for certain. I can only say that he might be, and that it might.’

  ‘Then I must give it all the strength of mind I can command,’ she said.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Bungo. ‘The difficulty with many codes is that you have to send the key at some time. Or, worse, your agent has to carry the key. I need hardly spell out the dangers. Whereas if you use an agreed text as a key, then the agent can memorise it, and if he or she is captured there is nothing that can be discovered.’

  ‘I see. But how does a book work as a key?’

  ‘First you number all the words in the key text; it needs to be a certain minimum length, although even with quite a chunky one some letters – q, x – can be difficult. Then you use the number assigned to the word to stand for the initial letter of the word. Or sometimes another letter – third, last, or whatever. It’s a fairly robust code, because you can usually use several different numbers for each letter of the alphabet, so the frequency decode doesn’t work very well.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain some more. What is a frequency decode?’

  ‘Basically a method of guessing and trying based on the idea that whatever symbol is the most frequent in the encoded message is likely to represent E, the next most frequent T and so on. But look, don’t bother about that, just take my word for it. Book codes are difficult to crack quickly unless you know the key text, although one can sit patiently with a copy of the Oxford Anthology of English Verse, and the complete works of Shakespeare, or Magna Carta or something. But if you know the key text it’s a piece of cake. And your husband thinks you, and you alone, will be able to guess it.’

  ‘Let me think, let me think about this. It’s an emergency, otherwise he would use his established key.’