A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘Thing is, your lordship, before the wood was sold to you, everyone used to do it.’

  ‘So I have been told,’ said Peter.

  ‘But the boys felt a bit wary about it, like, not knowing what line you might be minded to take, so they kept well the other side of the slope. Down where the wood runs out into the fields at the top of Yew Tree Lane.’

  ‘Where nobody from Talboys would be likely to see them?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Roger Datchett. He had not sat down, and was shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to another. ‘So naturally they didn’t see nothing to do with what might have been a-going on down here.’

  ‘Did they see anyone moving about?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘I asked him that. Only that Twitterton woman. She was off up the lane. Jake thought it might have been to feed the other hidden pigs – the ones what survived the night, and lived to see the morning.’

  ‘So the long and the short of this story, Mr Datchett, is that you can’t help us?’ said Peter.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, my lord,’ said Mr Datchett. ‘I’ve brought you a nice side of bacon that I’ve had smoking in the back of my chimney a good little while, and I’m hoping you will feel that you’ve had a fair share of anything you should have had, and will say no more about it.’

  Peter looked so appalled that Harriet had to button back the urge to laugh. ‘But, Mr Datchett,’ he said, ‘we know that you had no hand in killing a pig that night; don’t ask me how we know, but we do. You don’t owe us anything.’

  ‘Fair exchange for poached rabbits, perhaps?’

  ‘I haven’t said I mind the rabbits,’ said Peter, almost indignantly. ‘As long as your lad knows how to set a snare to kill instantly.’

  ‘He ought to. I showed him often enough,’ said Roger Datchett.

  A silence fell. Harriet heard the clock ticking. ‘I just need to keep the boy out of trouble for another fortnight,’ Roger Datchett said. ‘His call-up papers have come through, and he’ll be gone then. He wants a clean record in the forces. And he says you could ask Archie Lugg. Archie was out with him that night, and he’ll tell you where they went.’

  ‘Mr Lugg has already declined to tell my man, here.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just sticking by his mate. In case Jake didn’t want to say. He’ll tell you now Jake has had a word with him.’

  ‘I thought Archie and Jake had fallen out, come to blows, even,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Over that land-girl? They was at odds about her, yes. But when the poor girl was killed, that quieted the quarrel. They’ve known each other from boys, them two, and it doesn’t make sense to fall out over a woman. They’ll both be taken for soldiers by next month.’

  ‘Heavens, Harriet!’ Peter exclaimed as the door closed behind Roger Datchett. ‘Of all the wickedly ill-gotten gains I have ever enjoyed, a present of bacon from Farmer Datchett is the most outrageous.’

  ‘Well, you did tell Bunter to purport to be asking for pork!’ said Harriet, laughing. ‘And I wouldn’t like to answer for Mrs Trapp’s continued calm of mind if you show her such booty, and then remove it.’

  ‘What shall we do about it?’

  ‘Eat it,’ said Harriet.

  Thirteen

  And take upon ’s the mystery of things,

  As if we were God’s spies . . .

  William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1608

  ‘That leaves only Roger Birdlap,’ remarked Harriet the next morning.

  ‘Sorry, he’s in the clear too. I was going to tell you if I hadn’t been diverted by Farmer Datchett last night. I rang that Baldock chap at Steen Manor about Birdlap. Incidentally you seem to have made a good impression on him, Harriet—’

  ‘Not reciprocated, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps I am not surprised. Stuffed shirts are not much in your line, my dear. But Baldock says he kept Birdlap confined to base, since he had threatened persons unspecified, and that obtained until he was required. Required to be parachuted behind enemy lines, which is where he was on the 30th, and where he now is. So we can cross him off the list.’

  ‘That leaves the list empty.’

  ‘We seem to be on the wrong track. Perhaps after all, as the Superintendent put it, that has nothing to do with this.’

  ‘Speaking as a fiction writer I dislike coincidence,’ said Harriet. ‘I suspect it of subterfuge.’

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ said Peter. ‘We all encounter coincidences all the time, and never disbelieve them. If a friend tells me he set out impromptu for Timbuktu, and on arriving there bumped into his old school matron’s younger son, or whoever, I don’t cry, “Ridiculous!” But if I read it in a novel, that’s just what I would say. I would know at once it was meant to be comedy. Now, why is that, Harriet?’

  ‘Aristotle again. You were told that the encounter had happened. What has happened is obviously possible, however unlikely it was that it should happen. Coincidence is history, once it has happened. Poetry, the philosopher tells us, is about what might probably or necessarily occur. The underlying logic of the world.’

  ‘But that underlying logic is full of coincidence.’

  ‘But not of any particular coincidence. And coincidence has to be particular; you can’t have coincidence in general.’

  ‘One of my commanding officers, when I served in uniform,’ remarked Peter, ‘had a notice on his office wall that said, “Expect the unexpected.”’

  ‘That’s probably good advice in war-time. Difficult to do, though.’

  ‘I think that’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Peter, am I distracting you?’

  ‘Extremely. A room with you in it vibrates with something.’

  ‘No; the subliminal scintillation is caused by you. It doesn’t happen when you are absent. Revenons à ces moutons.’

  ‘Ces cochons would be more to the point. So where are we? The idea that the man was killed in revenge for the death of Wendy lies in ruins. What is still standing? It must be to do with his mission as a spy. His own side, for purposes we can’t at the moment surmise, killed him. Or someone on our side killed him.’

  ‘That at least should be easily found out,’ said Harriet. ‘Can’t Bungo do that between one half of a ham sandwich and another?’

  ‘It would be a process of elimination,’ said Peter. ‘And there would be a lot of outfits to check up, and most of them would absolutely hate admitting they had done such a thing. The only thing they would dislike worse would be telling someone like Bungo that they hadn’t done it, in case there was any credit attached to it.’

  ‘Well, who’s in overall charge?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Good question. I don’t even know who is supposed to be in overall charge. The thing is, Harriet, that England is full of very senior people, who saw action last time round, and are desperately anxious to enlist, and too old for active service, and they are persecuting the recruitment officers, and pulling every string they can, and busting a gasket at the suggestion that they might like to help with the Home Defence Volunteers . . .’

  ‘Now what does that remind me of?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Most of them can’t speak a word of a foreign language,’ said Peter, smiling. ‘But what does one do with them? Nobody wants to command them; they will clearly be peppery and insubordinate. So each one is given permission to set up something of his own, some fanciful little unit up to something or another. Home-based counterespionage seems particularly appropriate. You swear them to secrecy, and then you never hear from them again. They’re off the backs of Buggins in Whitehall, and God only knows what they may be up to. England is hopping with them. So it is probably just as hard to find out if someone on our side unmasked pseudo-Brinklow and despatched him, as it is to find out if the enemy did it.’

  ‘You know, Peter,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ve been thinking. All three of those scenarios involving local lads have him killed for doing something after his death, so to speak. But what about before his death? What
if the real Alan Brinklow had a mortal enemy in his own right?’

  ‘My God, Harriet – you mean forget about the pretence and look into the real man?’

  ‘Well, there was a real man, I take it. They didn’t just make him up from scratch?’

  ‘No, they didn’t, and they didn’t have time to investigate him. As I understand it they didn’t do anything about him at all. It was all fixed up on a ship at sea, that had retrieved a floating body. And to report it in any way might have breached security.’

  ‘So here in England, what would appear to have happened?’

  ‘Something quite ordinary. A Flight Lieutenant takes off on a dangerous mission, and doesn’t come back. So he’s posted missing.’

  ‘Missing presumed dead?’

  ‘After a few hours, yes. I don’t know how long it takes.’

  ‘That message goes up on the board, and his family are told? And nobody ever told them later that he was known to be dead?’

  ‘Well, we know, but they don’t know,’ he said. ‘The body hasn’t been recovered. His name won’t be on a Red Cross list of prisoners of war; he won’t have written them a letter. He’s just vanished into the blue, like plenty of others.’

  ‘It’s absolute hell, you know, Peter. Fearing the worst, but unable to square up to it because of unquenchable flickering hope. Just not knowing. Not knowing whether to brace yourself for a funeral or save rations for a party. Not having a funeral. It strikes me as very cruel, knowing that someone is dead, and not telling his near and dear ones.’

  ‘Cruel? Perhaps it is. But necessary. Harriet, keeping this operation dark saved lives. It diverted German forces from one place to another, and allowed a crucial exodus of troops to take place under cover. If it was cruel it was for more than proportionate gain.’

  ‘I understand that. Can his people be told now?’

  ‘Not yet. We don’t want the enemy to guess they have lost an agent.’

  ‘They’ll guess pretty soon, when they lose touch with him, won’t they?’

  ‘Not necessarily. He was almost certainly lying low until triggered into action by a signal of some kind. If we play our cards right they won’t find he’s been taken out until they try to activate him. Look, let’s follow your hunch. Let’s keep our minds on the real Brinklow. We must start by tracing him.’

  ‘Well, what do we know about him?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘We know his group and sector if false-Brinklow was using his identity,’ said Peter.

  ‘My guess is it won’t be anywhere near,’ said Harriet. ‘There would be too much risk of someone getting to know that false-Brinklow was here. In fact, Peter, the whole thing is appallingly risky. And it’s mere chance that that friend of his – who was it? Mike Newcastle – missed him when he turned up visiting. He would have spotted at once that it wasn’t the right man, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, it was a risky operation. But no more so than many another. After all, in this case their man would have been carrying genuine papers; mostly they have to make do with forged ones. And spying is always dangerous. There is no shortage of brave men to take the chances.’

  ‘If we found out where Mike Newcastle is based, we could talk to him about the real Brinklow, couldn’t we?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll get someone on to it.’

  ‘So next we find out where the real Brinklow was based, and then—’

  ‘I’ve thought of something,’ Peter said. ‘Didn’t Jerry say there was a will form in a pay-book?’

  ‘But officers don’t have them, he said.’

  ‘But their wills must be kept somewhere,’ said Peter. ‘That should lead us to his family. I’ll find out.’

  Harriet went downstairs to romp with the children and help with tea and bath-time.

  Putting his head round the nursery door a half-hour later, Peter said to her triumphantly, ‘RAF records, Gloucester. I’ve got someone on to it,’ before dropping on all fours to be a man-eating tiger chasing his son and smallest nephew round the sofa.

  ‘Do you fancy a little trip?’ Peter asked. He was walking arm in arm with Harriet up the lane, in a gathering dusk. Bedtime was getting later and later, and seemed, now Peter was home, to be nearly uncontrollable. He was indulging himself in an orgy of childish company. But all was quiet on the home front now, and he was taking the air with his wife. ‘Could we leave the nest of monsters for, say, three days, without mutiny in the ranks?’ he asked.

  ‘I think we could,’ she said. ‘Departing with threats and bribes and binding everyone over to be on best behaviour. It sounds wonderful. Where are we going?’

  ‘A long way. Destination unknown, via Gloucester.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider Bannockburn by way of Beachy Head?’

  ‘No. It has to be as I suggest.’

  ‘To do with Brinklow, of course?’

  ‘Of course. But that wouldn’t prevent it being fun; it would just give us a clear conscience about tooling around on the roads, using petrol.’

  ‘I’d love it. When?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow all right? I take it you’d need a day to square Mrs Trapp and Sadie, and Bunter . . .’

  ‘Peter, we couldn’t take Bunter, could we? It would be just like our notorious honeymoon. Just like old times.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of driving gently enough to cradle a case of port in the boot,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So it wouldn’t be just like . . . But would you really like Bunter along?’

  ‘I think I told you once that I love Bunter, and I wish I could have married him. Weren’t you listening? But seriously, Peter, Bunter must have had a rough time abroad, too. I expect he would like a break as much as we would.’

  ‘What a scoop this would be for the newshounds that used to chase us of old!’ Peter said, laughing. ‘Famous sleuth’s wife loves another! Lady Peter in love triangle! Seriously, Harriet, I would love to take Bunter. Would the home base run along without him?’

  ‘It has been, for months,’ she said serenely. ‘I think Hope’s parents live in Evesham. Isn’t that somewhere near Gloucester?’

  ‘It’s in the right general direction.’

  ‘You could give Bunter some leave, and drop him off there on the way, or the way back.’

  ‘As I said before, I have married a practical genius.’

  ‘Didn’t you bargain for that?’

  ‘Not specially. Silly of me, really. I thought of you as slightly elsewhere, very wrapped up in your work. And I don’t seem to have had a moment to ask you what you’re doing at the moment. Has Robert Templeton got a current case?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not writing a detective novel, although people keep asking me for one. Somehow with the mayhem going on in Europe a body behind the sofa seems like one too many.’

  ‘Quite apart from two too many here.’

  ‘Exactly. I’ve been writing articles. Reading for the Le Fanu book. And writing some poems. They seem easier, more in tune with the moment.’

  Peter didn’t ask to see them. He had a delicate tact with her that spoke eloquently to her.

  ‘May I show you some, some time?’ she said.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Look, here comes Miss Twitterton, as large as life!’

  Miss Twitterton seemed, in fact, rather larger than life. She was rosy-cheeked and glowing with her evening walk, and wearing a pretty silk scarf that Harriet didn’t remember having seen before. She broke into a trot as soon as she saw them, and closed the distance between them, crying, ‘Oh, oh, oh, Lord Peter! Oh, Lord . . . Peter, oh! I am so glad to see you! Oh, I thought we might never . . .’

  Peter raised one of her outstretched hands, kissed it theatrically, and said, ‘I am just as glad to see you, Miss Twitterton, as you are to see me.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, falling in step with them down the lane. ‘You really cannot mean that, Lord Peter. I have been safely here with dear Lady Peter and the quiet village society, and you
have been in such terrible danger. Such terrible things, such atrocities happening in those poor countries. I just can’t bear to think what they do when they capture somebody. We have all been simply terrified for you. Every time we have sung Eternal Father Strong to Save, you have been the primary person I have been thinking of.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Twitterton,’ said Peter. There was not the slightest tremor of amusement in his voice. ‘I haven’t been in peril on the sea, or at least only for the last six hours of the mission. But it was a touch hazardous. Never mind, here I am you see, as large as life and as odd-looking as ever.’

  If Miss Twitterton flushed, as she always used to do when Peter gave her more than a moment’s attention, the dusk was now too deep for Harriet to see it. Instead of flustering around the conversation as she would have done only weeks ago, Miss Twitterton said, ‘Lord Peter, you are very nearly the nicest-looking man I have ever met.’

  Peter gave Harriet a gaze of consternation and amazement. ‘It’s getting rather dark,’ he observed. ‘And you have a little way to go, Miss Twitterton. May I walk you to your gate?’

  ‘That is most remarkably kind of you, Lord Peter,’ Miss Twitterton said. ‘But I am quite used to walking round the lanes by myself. There is no need. I was just wondering, Lord Peter, if you have a favourite hymn? Because I thought, to give thanks for your safe return at the morning service next Sunday . . . and if it’s a very unusual hymn we would need to learn it at choir-practice tomorrow night.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Twitterton,’ Peter said. ‘I have always rather liked the old one hundredth.’

  They had reached the bottom of the lane, and their ways home diverged.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy!’ she cried. ‘You shall have it, Lord Peter, you shall indeed. Goodnight to you both.’ And she skipped away towards Pagford with a very light step.

  ‘Peter,’ said Harriet, in amazement, ‘whoever is the absolutely nicest-looking man Miss Twitterton has ever met?’

  ‘Whoever he is,’ said Peter, ‘I owe him a debt of gratitude. He has relieved me of a most onerous and unwelcome role!’

  Harriet felt such joy the next morning, waking in Peter’s arms, and lying quite still so as not to wake him, that it brought with it also a flicker of guilt. What had she done to deserve this, and wasn’t it tempting fate; fate that was already rolling towards them, armed and malignant? Yet surely it wasn’t a duty to be glum? Wasn’t it better to seize the day?