Two places were set at the table — untouched — waiting for George.
Wimsey plunged into the kitchen premises, followed by Sheila uttering agitated remonstrances. He found some disagreeable remnants — a watery stew, cold and sodden; a basin half-full of some kind of tinned soup; a chill suet pudding put away on a shelf.
“Does your woman cook for you? I suppose she does, as you’re both out all day. Well, she can’t cook, my child. No matter, here’s some Bovril — she can’t have hurt that. You go and sit down and I’ll make you some.”
“Mrs. Munns—”
“Blow Mrs. Munns!”
“But I must tell you about George.”
He looked at her, and decided that she really must tell him about George.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bully. One has an ancestral idea that women must be treated like imbeciles in a crisis. Centuries of the ‘women-and-children first’ idea, I suppose. Poor devils!”
“Who, the women?”
“Yes. No wonder they sometimes lose their heads. Pushed into corners, told nothing of what’s happening and made to sit quiet and do nothing. Strong men would go dotty in the circs. I suppose that’s why we’ve always grabbed the privilege of rushing about and doing the heroic bits.”
“That’s quite true. Give me the kettle.”
“No, no, I’ll do that. You sit down and — I mean, sorry, take the kettle. Fill it, light the gas, put it on. And tell me about George.”
The trouble, it seemed, had begun at breakfast. Ever since the story of the murder had come out, George had been very nervy and jumpy, and, to Sheila’s horror, had “started muttering again.” “Muttering,” Wimsey remembered, had formerly been the prelude to one of George’s “queer fits.” These had been a form of shell-shock, and they had generally ended in his going off and wandering about in a distraught manner for several days, sometimes with partial and occasionally with complete temporary loss of memory. There was the time when he had been found dancing naked in a field among a flock of sheep, and singing to them. It had been the more ludicrously painful in that George was altogether tone-deaf, so that his singing, though loud, was like a hoarse and rumbling wind in the chimney. Then there was a dreadful time when George had deliberately walked into a bonfire. That was when they had been staying down in the country. George had been badly burnt, and the shock of the pain had brought him round. He never remembered afterwards why he had tried to do these things, and had only the faintest recollection of having done them at all. The next vagary might be even more disconcerting.
At any rate, George had been “muttering.”
They were at breakfast that morning, when they saw two men coming up the path. Sheila, who sat opposite the window, saw them first, and said carelessly: “Hallo! who are these? They look like plainclothes policemen.” George took one look, jumped up and rushed out of the room. She called to him to know what was the matter, but he did not answer, and she heard him “rummaging” in the back room, which was the bedroom. She was going to him when she heard Mr. Munns open the door to the policemen and then heard them inquiring for George. Mr. Munns ushered them into the front room with a grim face on which “police” seemed written in capital letters. George—
At this point the kettle boiled. Sheila was taking it off the stove to make the Bovril, when Wimsey became aware of a hand on his coat-collar. He looked round into the face of a gentleman who appeared not to have shaved for several days.
“Now then,” said this apparition, “what’s the meaning of this?”
“Which,” added an indignant voice from the door, “I thought as there was something behind all this talk of the Captain being missing. You didn’t expect him to be missing, I suppose, ma’am. Oh, dear no! Nor your gentleman friend, neither, sneaking up in a taxi and you waiting at the door so’s Munns and me shouldn’t hear. But I’d have you know this is a respectable house, Lord Knows Who or whatever you call yourself — more likely one of these lowdown confidence fellers, I expect, if the truth was known. With a monocle too, like that man we was reading about in the News of the World. And in my kitchen too, and drinking my Bovril in the middle of the night, the impudence! Not to speak of the goings-in-and-out all day, banging the front door, and that was the police come here this morning, you think I didn’t know? Up to something, that’s what they’ve been, the pair of them, and the Captain as he says he is but that’s as may be. I daresay he had his reasons for clearing off, and the sooner you goes after him my fine madam, the better I’ll be pleased, I can tell you.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Munns—“ow!”
Lord Peter had removed the intrusive hand from his collar with a sharp jerk which appeared to cause anguish out of all proportion to the force used.
“I’m glad you’ve come along,” he said. “In fact, I was just going to give you a call. Have you anything to drink in the house, by the way?”
“Drink?” cried Mrs. Munns on a high note, “the impudence! And if I see you, Joe, giving drinks to thieves and worse in the middle of the night in my kitchen, you’ll get a piece of my mind. Coming in here as bold as brass, and the captain run away, and asking for drink—”
“Because,” said Wimsey, fingering his note-case, “the public houses in this law-abiding neighbourhood are of course closed. Otherwise a bottle of Scotch—”
Mr. Munns appeared to hesitate.
“Call yourself a man!” said Mrs. Munns.
“Of course,” said Mr. Munns, “if I was to go in a friendly manner to Jimmy Rowe at the Dragon, and ask him to give me a bottle of Johnny Walker as a friend to a friend, and provided no money was to pass between him and me, that is—”
“A good idea,” said Wimsey, cordially.
Mrs. Munns gave a loud shriek.
“The ladies,” said Mr. Munns, “gets nervous at times.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“I daresay a drop of Scotch wouldn’t do Mrs. Munns’s nerves any harm, said Wimsey.
“If you dare, Joe Munns,” said the landlady, “if you dare to go out at this time of night, hob-nobbing with Jimmy Rowe and making a fool of yourself with burglars and such—”
Mr. Munns executed a sudden volte-face.
“You shut up!” he shouted. “Always sticking your face in where you aren’t wanted.”
“Are you speaking to me?”
“Yes. Shut up!”
Mrs. Munns sat down suddenly on a kitchen chair and began to sniff.
“I’ll just hop round to the Dragon now, sir.” said Mr. Munns, “before old Jimmy goes to bed. And then we’ll go into this here.”
He departed. Possibly he forgot what he had said about no money passing for he certainly took the note which Wimsey absent-mindedly held out to him.
“Your drink’s getting cold,” said Wimsey to Sheila.
She came across to him.
“Can’t we get rid of these people?”
“In half a jiff. It’s no good having a row with them. I’d do it like a shot, only, you see, you’ve got to stay on here for a bit, in case George comes back.”
“Of course. I’m sorry for all this upset, Mrs. Munns,” she added, a little stiffly, “but I’m so worried about my husband.”
“Husband?” snorted Mrs. Munns. “A lot husbands are to worry about. Look at that Joe. Off he goes to the Dragon, never mind what I say to him. They’re dirt, that’s what husbands are, the whole pack of them. And I don’t care what anybody says.”
“Are they?” said Wimsey. “Well, I’m not one — yet — so you needn’t mind what you say to me.”
“It’s the same thing,” said the lady viciously, “husbands and parricide there’s not a half-penny to choose between them. Only parricides aren’t respectable — but then, they’re easier got rid of.”
“Oh!” replied Wimsey, “but I’m not a parricide either — not Mrs. Fentiman’s parricide at any rate, I assure you. Hallo! here’s Joe. Did you get the doings, old man? You did? Good work. Now, Mrs. Munns, have just a spot wit
h us. You’ll feel all the better for it. And why shouldn’t we go into the sitting-room where it’s warmer?”
Mrs. Munns complied. “Oh, well,” she said, “here’s friends all round. But you’ll allow it all looked a bit queer, now, didn’t it? And the police this morning, asking all those questions, and emptying the dustbin all over the backyard.”
“Whatever did they want with the dustbin?”
“Lord knows; and that Cummins woman looking on all the time over the wall. I can tell you, I was vexed. ‘Why, Mrs. Munns,’ she said, ‘have you been poisoning people?’ she said. ‘I always told you, she said, ‘your cooking ’ud do for somebody one of these days.’ The nasty cat.”
“What a rotten thing to say,” said Wimsey, sympathetically. “Just jealousy I expect. But what did the police find in the dust-bin?”
“Find? Them find anything? I should like to see them finding things in my dust-bin. The less I see of their interfering ways the better I’m pleased. I told them so. I said, ‘If you want to come upsetting my dust-bin,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to come with a search-warrant,’ I said. That’s the law and they couldn’t deny it. They said Mrs. Fentiman had given them leave to look, so I told them Mrs. Fentiman had no leave to give them. It was my dust-bin, I told them, not hers. So they went off with a flea in their ear.”
“That’s the stuff to give ’em, Mrs. Munns.”
“Not but what I’m respectable. If the police come to me in a right and lawful manner, I’ll gladly give them any help they want. I don’t want to get into trouble, not for any number of captains. But interference with a free-born woman and no search-warrant I will not stand. And they can either come to me in a fitting way or they can whistle for their bottle.”
“What bottle?” asked Wimsey, quickly.
“The bottle they were looking for in my dust-bin, what the Captain put there after breakfast.”
Sheila gave a faint cry.
“What bottle was that, Mrs. Munns?”
“One of them little tablet bottles,” said Mrs. Munns, “same as you have standing on the wash-hand stand, Mrs. Fentiman. When I saw the Captain smashing it up in the yard with a poker—”
“There now, Primrose,” said Mr. Munns, “can’t you see as Mrs. Fentiman ain’t well?”
“I’m quite all right,” said Sheila, hastily, pushing away the hair which clung damply to her forehead. “What was my husband doing?”
“I saw him,” said Mrs. Munns, “run out into the back-yard — just after your breakfast it was, because I recollect Munns was letting the officers into the house at the time. Not that I knew then who it was, for, if you will excuse me mentioning of it, I was in the outside lavatory, and that was how I come to see the Captain. Which ordinarily, you can’t see the dust-bin from the house — my lord I should say, I suppose, if you really are one, but you meet so many bad characters nowadays that one can’t be too careful — on account of the lavatory standing out as you may say and hiding it.”
“Just so,” said Wimsey.
“So when I saw the captain breaking the bottle as I said, and throwing the bits into the dust-bin, ‘Hallo!’ I said, ‘that’s funny,’ and I went to see what it was and I put it in an envelope, thinking, you see, as it might be something poisonous, and the cat such a dreadful thief as he is, I never can keep him out of that dustbin. And when I came in, I found the police here. So after a bit, I found them poking about in the yard and I asked them what they were doing there. Such a mess as they’d made, you never would believe. So they showed me a little cap they’d found, same as it might be off that tablet bottle. ‘Did I know where the rest of it was?’ they said. And I said, what business had they got with the dust-bin at all. So they said—”
“Yes, I know,” said Wimsey. “I think you acted very sensibly, Mrs. Munns. “And what did you do with the envelope and things?”
“I kept it,” replied Mrs. Munns, nodding her head, “I kept it. Because you see, if they did return with a warrant and I’d destroyed that bottle, where should I be?”
“Quite right,” said Wimsey, with his eye on Sheila.
“Always keep on the right side of the law,” agreed Mr. Munns, “and nobody can’t interfere with you. That’s what I say. I’m a Conservative, I am. I don’t hold with these Socialist games. Have another.”
“Not just now,” said Wimsey. “And we really must not keep you and Mrs. Munns up any longer. But, look here! You see, Captain Fentiman had shell-shock after the War, and he is liable to do these little odd things at times — break things up, I mean, and lose his memory and go wandering about. So Mrs Fentiman is naturally anxious about his not having turned up this evening.”
“Ay,” said Mr. Munns, with relish, “I knew a fellow like that. Went clean off his rocker he did one night. Smashed up his family with a beetle — a paviour he was by profession, and that’s how he came to have a beetle in his house — pounded ’em to a jelly, he did, his wife and five little children, and went off and drownded himself in the Regent’s Canal. And, what’s more, when they got him out, he didn’t remember a word about it, not one word. So they sent him to — what’s that place? Dartmoor? no, Broadmoor, that’s it, where Ronnie True went to with his little toys and all.”
“Shut up, you fool,” said Wimsey, savagely.
“Haven’t you got feelings?” demanded his wife.
Sheila got up, and made a blind effort in the direction of the door.
“Come and lie down,” said Wimsey. “you’re worn out. Hallo! there’s Robert, I expect. I left a message for him to come round as soon as he got home.”
Mr. Munns went to answer the bell.
“We’d better get her to bed as quick as possible,” said Wimsey to the landlady. “Have you got such a thing as a hot-water bottle?
Mrs. Munns departed to fetch one, and Sheila caught Wimsey’s hand.
“Can’t you get hold of that bottle? Make her give it to you. You can. You can do anything. Make her.”
“Better not,” said Wimsey. “Look suspicious. Look here, Sheila, what is the bottle?”
“My heart medicine. I missed it. It’s something to do with digitalin.”
“Oh, lord,” said Wimsey, as Robert came in.
* * *
“It’s all pretty damnable,” said Robert.
He thumped the fire gloomily; it was burning badly, the lower bars were choked with the ashes of a day and night.
“I’ve been having a talk with Frobisher,” he added. “All this talk in the Club — and the papers — naturally he couldn’t overlook it.”
“Was he decent?”
“Very decent. But of course I couldn’t explain the thing. I’m sending in my papers.”
Wimsey nodded. Colonel Frobisher could scarcely overlook an attempted fraud — not after things had been said in the papers.
“If I’d only let the old man alone. Too late now. He’d have been buried. Nobody would have asked questions.”
“I didn’t want to interfere,” said Wimsey, defending himself against the unspoken reproach.
“Oh, I know. I’m not blaming you. People… money oughtn’t to depend on people’s deaths… old people, with no use for their lives… it’s a devil of a temptation. Look here, Wimsey, what are we to do about this woman?”
“The Munns female?”
“Yes. It’s the devil and all she should have got hold of the stuff. If they find out what it’s supposed to be, we shall be blackmailed for the rest of our lives.”
“No,” said Wimsey, “I’m sorry, old man, but the police have got to know about it.”
Robert sprang to his feet.
“My God! — you wouldn’t—”
“Sit down, Fentiman. Yes, I must. Don’t you see I must? We can’t suppress things. It always means trouble. It’s not even as though they hadn’t got their eye on us already. They’re suspicious—”
“Yes, and why?” burst out Robert, violently. “Who put it into their heads?… For God’s sake don’t start talking about la
w and justice. Law and justice! You’d sell your best friend for the sake of making a sensational appearance in the witness-box, you infernal little police spy!”
“Chuck that, Fentiman!”
“I’ll not chuck it! You’d go and give away a man to the police — when you know perfectly well he isn’t responsible — just because you can’t afford to be mixed up in anything unpleasant. I know you. Nothing’s too dirty for you to meddle in, provided you can pose as the pious little friend of justice. You make me sick!”
“I tried to keep out of this—”
“You tried! — don’t be a blasted hypocrite! You get out of it now, and stay out — do you hear?”
“Yes, but listen a moment—”
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