Ask a Policeman

by Detection Club

  “Don’t be an ass, Peter,” Parker said severely. “You know perfectly well you’re going to take this case up. Considering what the H.S. said, you can’t very well do anything else. Anyhow, I’ve been told off to give you the facts first and guide your faltering footsteps afterwards, and I’m jolly well going to do it. But I’ll hold up the facts till the savoury, if you like.”

  “My lord, I will inflame thy noble liver,” groaned Wimsey. “Very well, have it your own way. But I warn you, there isn’t going to be a savoury, so I don’t quite know what you’ll do about that. No, don’t tell me. I prefer not to know.”

  A dish of tripes à la mode de Caen succeeded the sole. The hock was good, and Wimsey found himself becoming mellowed. Parker strictly observed the ban against murder and sudden death, but Wimsey himself introduced a reference to the Little Cadbury case.

  “The clue of that rusty file petered out this afternoon? Of course it did. I warned Churchill he was on the wrong lines with that ironmonger’s assistant. You tell him from me to look into the butcher’s alibi. It’s not nearly so cast-iron as you people think. Churchill will be making a mucker of the case if he isn’t careful. And has he asked the dustman yet what he found in the bin outside the cottage the next morning? Yes, offcourse he hedged, but Churchill could get it out of him if he threatened to apply to the council for a permit to search the refuse-dump. No, I know it wouldn’t be on the dump; but that would show the man that Churchill knows. Anyhow, he ought to try it.”

  Over the dessert Parker was allowed at last to proceed with his exposition without interruption. It was the evening of Lord Comstock’s murder, and so far only a short account of the facts had been made public. Even the recital in the Clarion, though not lacking in length, had been more of a howl for vengeance than a statement of fact.

  As the story went on, Wimsey threw off more and more of the pretence of indifference with which he had begun to listen. The fact that three such notable hounds on Comstock’s trail had been in at the death, struck him as particularly piquant. When Parker explained how the Archbishop had pushed his way out of the study, muttering frenziedly about “the wages of sin,” Wimsey grew quite excited.

  “Oh, bosh, the worthy bishop said, and bumped him off as in the picture. Only, unfortunately, in this case there isn’t a picture. Charles, this is beginning to grow on me. I hadn’t realized all the possibilities. I knew, of course, that those three were there, but I hadn’t gathered that it was probably one of them who did the ’orrible deed. Even the good old Clarion didn’t go so far as to hint that. At the moment my money’s on the Archbish.3 Very ominous, that line of patter of his; very ominous indeed. And why not? No doubt he looked on Comstock as a direct emissary of the Antichrist. And if good Bishop Odo could batter in the heads of the enemies of the Church with a thumping great club in 1066, why shouldn’t a modern prelate poop ’em off equally with a gent.’s natty racing pistol? Echo answers why? Tell me some more, Charles.”

  Parker told him more.

  “Do you know,” said Wimsey, when the story had at last been brought up to 2.30 p.m. that same afternoon, and a great many questions asked and answered, and more than one glass of a wholly admirable old brandy consumed—” do you know, Charles, I believe you were right all the time. I have that sensation of internal gloating which has never let me down yet. By the pricking of my thumbs, something jolly well worth investigation this way comes. The fever is upon me, said the Lady of Shalott.”

  “Of course I knew you’d want to get your nose into it,” said Mr. Parker complacently.

  “And you are right, and I am right, and all is right as right can be. Anyhow, I’ll take these notes of yours back with me now and study them till pearly dawn; and I must say it’s very nice and considerate of your people, Charles, to have got out such a full dossier already. Then to-morrow morning I’ll get busy. I think,” Wimsey said meditatively, “I’ll begin with the Archbishop. I don’t know why, but the Archbishop does attract me strangely. Do you really think he could have done it, Charles, at his time of life? Oh, wild Archbish, thou breath of autumn’s being! Anyhow, I believe my mother knows him pretty well, so I’ll see what can be done. And with Hope-Fairweather too, of course, for that matter.”

  “Yes, and don’t forget the Major,” said Parker, in a voice of such concentrated sarcasm that a waiter came hurrying across in alarm, under the impression that there had been a mistake in the bill.

  “No,” Wimsey said gravely. “No, I won’t forget Major Littleton.”

  Parker raised his eyebrows, and then evidently thought better of what he had been going to say. Instead he asked, conventionally: “And how do you propose to tackle His Grace?”

  Wimsey reflected.

  “I will leer upon him as a’ comes by; and (if, Charles, you happen to be near) do but mark the countenance he will give me. Enough, said he, throwing back the ear-flaps of the deer-stalker and disclosing the well-known lantern jaws. I’m Hawkshaw, the detective, and I have my methods.”

  (II)

  Lord Peter emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in magenta silk, and called for Bunter.

  “My lord?”

  “Bunter, what do you advise in the matter of suitings for a call on an Archbishop whom one suspects of having committed a murder?”

  “I regret, my lord, to have seen no recent fashions designed to impress homicidal Archbishops. I would suggest, my lord, any suit which your lordship considers might be said to combine an air of holiness with a certain flavour of the man of action.”

  “I don’t fancy,” said Wimsey thoughtfully, “that I possess any suit that could be said to produce quite that effect.”

  “Then may I advise, my lord, the pale grey willow-pussy with the mauye pin-stripe? That should convey a delicate hint of half-mourning which would not be out of place; and if worn with a subdued amethyst tie and socks, I think should convey to His Grace that note of cautious sympathy and understanding which I take it your lordship would wish to imply in view of the object of His Grace’s onslaught.”

  “With a soft hat, of course.”

  “A soft hat, my lord, undoubtedly. A bowler would introduce quite the wrong note.”

  “And, I fancy, no stick.”

  “Subject to your lordship’s better judgment, I should like to point out that by tensing the muscles of the hand on a stick, a highly eloquent whitening of the knuckles may be produced. This might perhaps serve your lordship more usefully at certain moments than words, which in the circumstances can hardly fail to be difficult.”

  “Bunter,” said Wimsey, “you’re always right.”

  “It is kind of your lordship to make the observation. Breakfast is ready at any moment your lordship pleases.”

  “Early bacon, early bacon,” said Wimsey with enthusiasm.

  An hour later, having breakfasted, dressed, and smoked a thoughtful cigarette, he summoned from her fastness in a neighbouring garage his Daimler Twin-Six (called “Mrs. Merdle” on account of that lady’s notable aversion from row) and turned her long black nose in the direction of the Dowager Duchess of Denver’s town house.

  The Dowager Duchess greeted her son with her usual vague affection.

  “How early you are, Peter! But then I suppose you’re working on this dreadful affair of the Comstock person. Such an odd title to choose, though really not so odd when one remembers what he looks like; but I don’t suppose he chose it for that, because people so seldom know what they look like, do they? I remember so well that your Uncle Adolphus always reminded me of a seal, even when he was quite young; but I don’t expect he ever knew he looked like one, because of course I never mentioned it to him, people are so touchy about that sort of thing.”

  Lord Peter tucked his arm through that of the Duchess. “Well, what do I look like, Mater? It might be useful to know, in case I ever want a nice original disguise.”

  “You, dear? I know when you were a baby I used to think you were rather like a dormouse; but now you’re much more like a cra
ne, aren’t you? Or, aren’t you?” added the Duchess uneasily.

  “I expect I am, if you say so,” Wimsey laughed. “Anyhow, Mater, you’re perfectly right. I am working on the Comstock case, and I want you to give me a line to the Archbishop, or ring him up and tell him I’m coming. I don’t know him, you see, and what with Convocation and this and that, there might be some difficulty in getting admitted to the presence. I just want to ask him a question or two.”

  “Yes, dear, of course I will,” agreed the Duchess, sitting down at once at her writing-table. “But don’t ask him why he did it, because he’ll feel bound to deny it, and then, of course, his conscience will worry him afterwards. So inconvenient, I always think, being a clergyman and unable to tell lies; I suppose they have to be at home to every caller. Dear me, poor Willy (the Archbishop, you know, dear, though I never can get used to the idea of Willy being an Archbishop, he used to use hair-oil so very freely when he was a boy), one can’t help sympathizing with him, I feel, remembering the Comstock person, though I suppose murder always is murder really, even when done with a very small pistol, and after all so medieval for a bishop, though I remember now Willy always was old-fashioned. Do you think they’ll hang him, dear? I do hope not, because really I don’t think one should hang Archbishops, almost sacrilegious in a way, and in any case most disrespectful to the Church; but then I suppose he’d be a martyr, and we haven’t had a martyr for a very long time now. Here’s your note, dear. Must you go already? Well, do be as nice as you can to poor Willy, and don’t accuse him of anything too plainly, because he certainly wouldn’t like that at all, having been a headmaster and all that kind of thing before they made him a bishop, and you know how headmasters get. Good-bye, dear. Come and see me again soon.”

  Wimsey kissed his mother affectionately, and turned Mrs. Merdle’s rakish black lines and polished copper twin-exhausts towards Lambeth Palace.

  (III)

  “And except for the fact that he thinks he may have bumped into something on his way out of the study,” said Lord Peter resentfully, “I got nothing out of the old sharpshooter that we don’t know already.”

  “That would account for the overturned chair by the door, of course,” nodded Parker.

  “And the first crash,” Wimsey said sharply.

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  “Yes, certainly. My dear Charles, you haven’t seriously been considering those two crashes as anything but mere crashes, have you? You haven’t been thinking that anyone could possibly describe the tiny little crack of a pistol like that as a ‘crash’? Charles Parker and Scotland Yard, lend me your ears; I come to poop off Cæsar, not to bomb him.”

  “His Grace didn’t by any chance admit to you that he’d done it, I suppose?” asked Parker, disregarding this side issue.

  “His Grace did not. And I omitted to ask him. To tell the truth, Charles, I realized as soon as I saw the old boy that the good old tradition of militant Bishops isn’t by any means extinct. I had the dickens of a job to find a plausible excuse for asking him questions; I simply hadn’t got the nerve to say I was working for the police—quite officially and all that, for once. I can tell you, when he shot his eyes out at me from under their thickets I wobbled in front of him like any mere prebendary. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised at any minute if he’d picked me up by the scruff of the neck, put me across his knee, and given me six of the juiciest—and I believe I should have let him! I wonder,” said Wimsey,” if that’s just what happened to Comstock, and Comstock shot himself after it in sheer shame. Oh, death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling now, you know. Have some more spuds. Bunter chips rather a marvellous spud, doesn’t he?”

  Parker helped himself, and agreed that Bunter chipped an impeccable potato.

  “I must say,” remarked Wimsey, doing the same, “that a proper bloody steak is a relief now and then. One does get a bit tired of restaurant meals.”

  “Yes,” said Parker, who had no chance of doing so. “Well, failing the Archbishop, what are you going to do this afternoon, Peter? You’ve only got till to-morrow evening, you know.”

  “By to-morrow evening Brackenthorpe shall have the miscreant, manacled and fettered; I swear it on my honour as a sleuth, This afternoon? Well, I thought we might run down and visit what the newspapers call the scene of the crime. But before we go, I’d like you to throw your eye over a few notes I made last night. You may find something illuminatin’ in ’em, for I’m blessed if I can.”

  When lunch was over, the two men moved into the adjoining room. The day was warm and sunny, and the deep windows stood open to Piccadilly. Streaming in, the sun lit up with a mellow glow the rich old calf bindings of the books which lined the walls, and danced on the rosewood case of the grand piano that stood open on one side of the room. Two or three bowls of vivid crimson roses added a brighter note in shaded corners. Wimsey waved his guest into one of the two deep armchairs, and himself perched on an arm of the enormous Chesterfield, loaded with cushions. Bunter put down the coffee-tray on an exquisite little Sheraton table near the Chesterfield, and retired with the noiseless, gliding tread of the man-servant who really knows his job.

  Wimsey poured out the coffee, and then dropped a little sheaf of papers on Parker’s knee.

  “I fancy those make things a bit dearer,” he said, “but otherwise I don’t seem to have done much good. The most interesting thing’s the time-table. It shows something that I hadn’t realized before I made it out, and that is, that there were no less than seven minutes between the Archbishop’s exit and Littleton’s discovery of the body. That is, if we can rely on Littleton’s account; there’s corroborative evidence for the Archbishop. So there is quite a chance, you see, that somebody else did it and not the old boy at all.”

  “We hadn’t made up our minds about His Grace,” said Parker, studying the time-table in question. “Yes, this seems pretty accurate.”

  “Of course it’s accurate,” said Wimsey, with some indignation. “Dash it all, Charles, you ought to know me better than that by now. I only wish you were always equally so. Accuracy! The very word is like a bell, to toll me back from thee to my sole self, Charles.”

  The time-table was as follows:

  11.35 a.m. Comstock interviews Archbishop.

  11.50 a.m. Farrant announces Hope-Fairweather.

  11.55 a.m. Mills finds Hope-Fairweather in hall.

  11.58 a.m. Littleton arrives.

  12 noon. Littleton in drawing-room, looking out of window on to lawn.

  12 noon. Hope-Fairweather in waiting-room.

  12 noon. Archbishop in study with Comstock.

  12 noon. Mills in office.

  12 noon. Comstock undoubtedly alive.

  12.8 p.m. First crash, in study.

  12.9 p.m. Archbishop comes out.

  12.12 p.m. Mills opens drawing-room door.

  12.13 p.m. Second crash.

  12.13 p.m. Mills runs into office and finds H.-F.

  12.16 p.m. Littleton goes into study. Comstock dead.

  12.17 p.m. Mills escorts H.-F. to front door.

  12.18 p.m. Mills says drawing-room empty, door into study shut.

  12.19 p.m. Hope-Fairweather starts up his car.

  12.19 p.m. Littleton still in study.

  12.20 p.m. Hope-Fairweather’s car disappears.

  12.20 p.m. Littleton running across lawn.

  12.22 p.m. Mills resumes work.

  “All that is assumin’ that each of those four is telling the truth, of course,” said Wimsey, flicking through the pages of the official police report. “One of them probably isn’t, so we’ve got to allow for that. But it’s interestin’, that interval of seven minutes, isn’t it? And possibly illuminatin’.”

  “Yes,” Parker agreed. “I’ll admit I hadn’t realized it was so long.”

  Wimsey was still turning carelessly through the police dossier of the case. Suddenly he stiffened.

  “Hullo! what’s this? Ha! do mine eyes deceive me, or is this Banquo’s ghost?
Funny, isn’t it, Charles, how one can look and look at a thing and never see it at all?”

  “What have you seen now?”

  “Why, that we’ve been wasting our time on the Archbish. He was a phantom of delight when first he gleamed upon my sight, Charles, but unfortunately he was only a lovely apparition sent to be a moment’s ornament. In other words, Innocence hath privilege in him to dignify Archbishop’s laughing eyes. Those seven minutes let him out. Litteton says that when he found the body, the wound was still bleeding. No wound of that nature would be bleedin’ at least seven whole minutes after it had been inflicted.”

  “Well, that’s one of our four out of the way,” Wimsey resumed. “I wonder if we can eliminate any of the others? Turn, Charles, to the page headed ‘Corroborations.’ That’s rather illuminatin’, too, don’t you think?”

  Parker nodded.

  “Take Mills, for instance. At 12.10 p.m. he was still with the Archbish; from 12.13–12.16 p.m. he was with Hope-Fairweather. That only leaves him two minutes, 12.11–12.12 p.m., without an alibi. Hope-Fairweather similarly gets his alibi from Mills for 12.13–12.16 p.m.; he’s got only the three minutes 12.10–12.12 p.m. uncorroborated. Well, I suppose either of them could have put his head round the study door and had a pot at Comstock in those times, but the trouble is that in either case that puts Comstock’s death at not later than 12.12 p.m. Would the wound have been bleedin’ when Littleton found him at 12.16 p.m.? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t. And since the butler, you tell me, gets an alibi for all that time from the cook. …” Wimsey paused.

  “Yes?” said Parker.

  “Well, it’s pretty beastly, but you see what I mean.”

  “Major Littleton?” said Parker, without expression.

  Wimsey nodded. “There’s no gettin’ away from it, he’s the most likely. He’s the only one, you see, whose statement isn’t corroborated by anyone else at all. And there was always that convenient door between him and the study. Mind you, I don’t think we need give too much importance to Mills’ statement about opening the drawing-room door at 12.12 p.m. and fancying afterwards that the room was empty. If Littleton had been in the study then, Mills would certainly have heard the voices; because it’s pretty well out of the question that Littleton would have walked into the study and taken a pot at Comstock without saying a single word. And in any case, if Littleton’s speaking the truth that the wound was bleeding at 12.16 p.m., it’s almost certain that the shot must have been fired not much before 12.14 p.m. Deuced fine margins we’ve got to work in. But you see the trouble, Charles, and we can’t shut our eyes to it. If Comstock was killed between 12.14 p.m. and 12.16 p.m., as it seems most likely that he was, neither Mills nor Hope-Fairweather could have done it. And what’s more, they were probably too occupied with each other just then to hear anything that might have been goin’ on in the study.”