Busman's Honeymoon

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘Oh, my God, sir, my God! I never done it! I swear I never done it! ’Eaven knows I ’ad cause enough, but I never done it – I never laid a ’and on ’im—’

  ‘Cause? What cause? . . . Come on, now. Out with it! What were you doing with Mr Noakes?’

  Sellon looked round wildly. At his shoulder stood Peter Wimsey with an inscrutable face.

  ‘I never touched ’im. I never done nothing to ’im. If I was to die the next minute, sir, I’m innocent!’

  Kirk shook his massive head, like a bull teased by gadflies.

  ‘What were you doing up here at nine o’clock?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ said Sellon, stubbornly. The excitement died out of him. ‘Only to pass the time of day.’

  ‘Time o’ day!’ echoed Kirk, with so much contempt and irritation that Peter nerved himself to interfere.

  ‘Look here, Sellon,’ he said, in a voice that had induced many a troubled private to disclose his pitiful secrets. ‘You’d much better make a clean breast of it to Mr Kirk. Whatever it is.’

  ‘This,’ growled Kirk, ‘is a nice thing, this is. A police officer—’

  ‘Go easy with him, Superintendent,’ said Peter. ‘He’s only a youngster.’ He hesitated. Perhaps it would be easier for Sellon without an outside witness. ‘I’ll push along into the garden,’ he said, reassuringly. Sellon turned in a flash.

  ‘No, no! I’ll come clean. Oh, my God, sir! – Don’t go, my lord. Don’t you go! . . . I’ve made a damn’ bloody fool of myself.’

  ‘We all do that at times,’ said Peter, softly.

  ‘You’ll believe me, my lord. . . . Oh, God – this’ll break me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Kirk, grimly.

  Peter glanced at the Superintendent, saw that he, too, recognised the appeal to an authority older than his own, and sat down on the edge of the table.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Sellon. Mr Kirk’s not the man to be hard or unjust to anybody. Now, what was it all about?’

  ‘Well . . . that there note-case of Mr Noakes’s – what he lost—’

  ‘Two years ago – well, yes, what happened to it?’

  ‘I found it . . . I – I – he’d dropped it in the road – ten pound it had in it. I – my wife was desperate bad after the baby – doctor said she ought to have special treatment – I hadn’t saved nothing – and the pay’s not much, nor the allowance – I been a damned fool – I meant to put it back right away. I thought he could spare it, being well off. I know we’re supposed to be honest, but it’s a dreadful temptation in a man’s way.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘A generous country expects a lot of honesty for two or three pounds a week.’ Kirk seemed incapable of speech, so he went on:

  ‘And what happened about it?’

  ‘He found out, my lord. I dunno how, but he did. Threatened to report me. Well, of course, that’d have been the end of me. Out of a job, and who’d a-given me work after that? So I ’ad to pay him what he said, to stop his tongue.’

  ‘Pay him?’

  ‘That’s blackmail,’ said Kirk, coming out of his stupefaction with a pounce. He spoke the words as though they were, somehow, a solution of this incredible situation. ‘It’s an indictable offence. Blackmail. And compounding a felony.’

  ‘Call it what you like, sir – it was life and death to me. Five bob a week he been bleeding me for these last two years.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Peter, disgusted.

  ‘And I tell you, my lord, when I came in this room this morning and ’eard as he was dead, it was like a breath of ’Eaven to me. . . . But I didn’t kill him – I swear I didn’t. You do believe me? My lord, you believe me. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘I don’t know that I could blame you if you had.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ said Sellon, eagerly. Peter’s face was non-committal and he turned to Kirk again. ‘It’s all right, sir. I know I been a fool – and worse – and I’ll take my medicine; but as sure as I stand here, I didn’t kill Mr Noakes.’

  ‘Well, Joe,’ said the Superintendent, heavily, ‘it’s bad enough without that. You’ve been a fool and no mistake. We’ll have to see about that later. You’d better tell us now what did happen.’

  ‘I came up to see him, to tell him I hadn’t got the money that week. He laughed in my face, the old devil. I—’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I came up here by the path and I looked in at that there window. The curtains wasn’t drawn, and it was all dark. Only then I see him coming in from the kitchen with a candle in his hand. He holds the candle up to the clock there, and I see it was five minutes past nine.’

  Peter shifted his position and spoke quickly:

  ‘You saw the clock from the window. You’re sure?’

  The witness failed to catch the note of warning, and said briefly, ‘Yes, my lord.’ He licked his lips nervously and went on:

  ‘Then I taps on the window and he comes over and opens it. I tells him I ain’t got the money and he laughs at me, nasty-like. “All right,” he says, “I’ll report you in the morning.” So then I plucks up ’eart and says to him, “You can’t. It’s blackmail. All this money you’ve been takin’ off of me is blackmail, and I’ll see you in the dock for it.” And he says, “Money? You can’t prove you ever paid me money. Where’s your receipts? You got nothing on paper.” So I swears at him.’

  ‘No wonder,’ said Peter.

  ‘ “Get out,” he says, and slams the window shut. I tried the doors, but they was locked. So I gets out, and that’s the last I seen of him.’

  Kirk drew a long breath.

  ‘You didn’t go into the house?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Are you telling all the truth?’

  ‘Honest to God, I am, sir.’

  ‘Sellon, are you sure?’

  This time, the warning was unmistakable.

  ‘It’s God’s truth, my lord.’

  Peter’s face changed. He got up and walked slowly over to the fireplace.

  ‘H’m, well,’ said Kirk. ‘I don’t rightly know what to say. See here, Joe; you better go over straight away to Pagford and check up that alibi for Crutchley. See this man Williams at the garage and get a statement from him.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Sellon in a subdued tone.

  ‘I’ll talk to you when you come back.’

  Sellon said again, ‘Very good, sir.’ He looked at Peter, who was gazing down at the burning logs and made no movement. ‘I hope you won’t be too hard on me, sir.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Kirk, not unkindly. The constable went out, his big shoulders drooping.

  ‘Well,’ said the Superintendent, ‘and what do you think of that?’

  ‘It sounded straight enough – so far as the note-case was concerned. So there’s a motive for you – a nice new motive, all a-growing and a-blowing. Widens the field a bit, doesn’t it? Blackmailers don’t as a rule stop at a single victim.’

  Kirk scarcely noticed this ingenious attempt to divert him from his natural suspicions. It was the breach of duty by one of his own officers that hurt him. Theft and the concealment of evidence –! He hammered on at this wretched worry, the angrier because it was the kind of thing that need not ever have occurred.

  ‘Why couldn’t the young fool have come to his sergeant, if he was short – or to me? This is the devil and all. Beats me altogether. I wouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ said Peter, with a kind of melancholy amusement.

  ‘That’s so, my lord. There’s a lot of truth in Hamlet.’

  ‘Hamlet?’ Peter’s bark of harsh laughter astonished the Superintendent. ‘By God, you’re right. Village or hamlet of this merry land. Stir up the mud of the village pond and the stink will surprise you.’ He paced the room restlessly. The light thrown on Mr Noakes’s activities had only confirmed his own suspicions, and if there was one sort of criminal whom he would have been ready to strangle with his bare
hands, it was the blackmailer. Five shillings a week for two years. He could not doubt that part of the story; no man would so pile up the evidence against himself unless he were telling the truth. All the same – He stopped abruptly at Kirk’s side.

  ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘You’ve had no official information about that theft, have you? And the money’s been paid back – twice over.’

  Kirk fixed him with a steady eye. ‘It’s easy enough for you to be soft-’earted, my lord. It ain’t your responsibility.’

  This time the kid gloves were off, and Peter took it on the chin.

  ‘Coo!’ added Kirk, reflectively. ‘That there Noakes he must have been a proper old twister.’

  ‘It’s a damned ugly story. It’s enough to make a man—’

  But it was not. Nothing was enough for that. ‘Oh, hell!’ said Peter, beaten and exasperated.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Superintendent, I’m sorry for that poor devil, but – curse it – I suppose I’ve got to say it—’

  ‘Well?’

  Kirk knew that something was coming and braced himself to meet it. Force Peter’s sort to the wall, and they will tell the truth. He had said so, and now his words were to be proved upon him, and he had got to take the punishment.

  ‘That story of his. It sounded all right. . . . But it wasn’t. . . . One bit of it was a lie.’

  ‘A lie?’

  ‘Yes. . . . He said he never came into the house. . . . He said he saw the clock from that window. . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I tried to do the same thing just now, when I was out in the garden. I wanted to set my watch. Well . . . it can’t be done, that’s all. . . . That damned awful cactus is in the way.’

  ‘What!’

  Kirk sprang to his feet.

  ‘I say, that infernal bloody cactus is in the way. It covers the face of the clock. You can’t see the time from that window.’

  ‘You can’t?’

  Kirk darted towards the window, knowing only too well what he would find there.

  ‘You can try it,’ said Peter, ‘from any point you like. It’s absolutely and definitely impossible. You can not see the clock from that window.’

  10

  FOUR-ALE BAR

  ‘What should I have done?’ I cried, with some heat.

  ‘Gone to the nearest public-house. That is the centre of country gossip.’

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: The Solitary Cyclist.

  THE POLICE were out of the house by tea-time. Indeed the unhappy Kirk, having ascertained that by no dodging, stooping or standing on tip-toe could anyone obtain a sight of the clock-face from the window, found himself with but little zest to prolong his inquiries. He made the half-hearted suggestion that Noakes might have temporarily removed the cactus from its pot after 6.20 and replaced it before 9.30; but he could offer himself no plausible explanation of any such aimless proceeding. There was, of course, only Crutchley’s word for it that the plant had been there at 6.20 – if there was even that; Crutchley had mentioned watering it – he might have taken it down and left it for Noakes to put back. One could ask – but even as he made a note of this intention, Kirk felt little hope of any result. He examined the bedrooms in a dispirited way, impounded a number of books and papers from a cupboard and again examined Mrs Ruddle about Sellon’s interview with Noakes.

  The result of all this was not very satisfactory. A notebook was discovered, containing, among other entries, a list of weekly payments, five shillings at a time, under the initials ‘J.S.’ This corroborated a story that scarcely needed corroboration. It also suggested that Sellon’s frankness might be less a virtue than a necessity, since, had he suspected the existence of such a document, he would have realised that it was better to confess before being confronted with it. Peter’s comment was, Why, if Sellon were the murderer, had he not searched the house for compromising papers? With this consideration Kirk tried hard to comfort himself.

  There was nothing else that could be interpreted as evidence of blackmailing payments from anybody, though plenty of testimony going to show that Noakes’s affairs were in an even worse state of confusion than had hitherto appeared. An interesting item was a bundle of newspaper cuttings and jottings in Noakes’s hand, concerning cheap cottages on the west coast of Scotland – a country in which it is notoriously difficult to proceed for the recovery of civil debts contracted elsewhere. That Noakes had been the ‘proper twister’ Kirk had supposed him was clear enough; unhappily, it was not his misdoings that needed proof.

  Mrs Ruddle was unhelpful. She had heard Noakes slam the window shut and seen Sellon retreat in the direction of the front door. Supposing that the show was over, she had hastened home with her pail of water. She thought she had heard a knocking at the doors a few minutes later, and thought, ‘He’s got some hopes!’ Asked whether she had heard what the quarrel was about, she admitted, with regret, that she had not, but (with a malicious grin) ‘supposed as Joe Sellon knew all about it.’ Sellon, she added, ‘often came up to see Mr Noakes’ – her own opinion, if Kirk wanted it, was that he was ‘a-trying to borrer money’ and that Noakes had refused to lend any more. Mrs Sellon was thriftless, everybody knew that. Kirk would have liked to ask her whether, having last seen Mr Noakes engaged in a violent quarrel, she had had no qualms about his subsequent disappearance; but the question stuck in his throat. He would be saying in so many words that an officer of the law could be suspected of a murder; without better evidence he could not bring himself to do it. His next dreary job was to question the Sellons, and he was not looking forward to that. In a mood of the blackest depression, he went off to interview the coroner.

  In the meantime, Mr Puffett, having cleared the kitchen chimney from above and assisted at the lighting of the fire, had taken his fee and gone home, uttering many expressions of sympathy and goodwill. Finally, Miss Twitterton, tearful but flattered, was conveyed to Pagford by Bunter in the car, with her bicycle perched ‘high and disposedly’ upon the back seat. Harriet saw her off and returned to the sitting-room, where her lord and master was gloomily building a house of cards with a greasy old pack which he had unearthed from the what-not.

  ‘Well!’ said Harriet, in unnaturally cheerful tones, ‘they’ve gone. At last we are alone!’

  ‘That’s a blessing,’ said he, glumly.

  ‘Yes; I couldn’t have stood much more. Could you?’

  ‘Not any more. . . . And I can’t stand it now.’

  The words were not said rudely; he sounded merely helpless and exhausted.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Harriet.

  He made no reply, seeming absorbed in adding the fourth storey to his structure. She watched him for a few moments, then decided he was best left alone and wandered upstairs to fetch pen and paper. She thought it might be a good thing to write a few lines to the Dowager Duchess.

  Passing through Peter’s dressing-room, she found that somebody had been at work there. The curtains had been hung, the rugs put down and the bed made up. She paused to wonder what might be the significance of this – if any. In her own room, the traces of Miss Twitterton’s brief occupation had been removed – the eiderdown shaken, the pillows made smooth, the hot-water bottle taken away, the disorder of washstand and dressing-table set to rights. The doors and drawers left open by Kirk had been shut, and a bowl of chrysanthemums stood on the window-sill. Bunter, like a steam-roller, had passed over everything, flattening out all traces of upheaval. She got the things she needed and carried them down. The card house had reached the sixth storey. At the sound of her step, Peter started, his hand shook, and the whole flimsy fabric dissolved into ruins. He muttered something and began doggedly to rebuild it.

  Harriet glanced at the clock; it was nearly five, and she felt she could do with some tea. She had coerced Mrs Ruddle into putting the kettle on and doing some work; it could not take very long now. She sat down on the settle and began her letter. The news was not exactly what the Duchess would expect t
o receive, but it was urgently necessary to write something that she might get before the headlines broke out in the London papers. Besides, there were things Harriet wanted to tell her – things she would have told her in any case. She finished the first page and looked up. Peter was frowning; the house, risen once again to the fourth storey, was showing signs of imminent collapse. Without meaning to, she began to laugh.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ said Peter. The tottering cards immediately slid apart, and he damned them fretfully. Then his face suddenly relaxed, and the familiar, sidelong smile lifted the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I was seeing the funny side of it,’ said Harriet, apologetically. ‘This looks not like a nuptial.’

  ‘True, O God!’ said he, ruefully. He got up and came over to her. ‘I rather think,’ he observed in a detached and dubious manner, ‘I am behaving like a lout.’

  ‘Do you? Then all I can say is, your notion of loutishness is exceedingly feeble and limited. You simply don’t know how to begin.’

  He was not comforted by her mockery. ‘I didn’t mean things to be like this,’ he said, lamely.

  ‘My dear cuckoo—’

  ‘I wanted it all to be wonderful for you.’

  She waited for him to find his own answer to this, which he did with disarming swiftness.

  ‘That’s vanity, I suppose. Take pen and ink and write it down. His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.’

  ‘Shall I tell your mother so?’

  ‘Are you writing to her? Good Lord, I never thought about it, but I’m dashed glad you did. Poor old Mater, she’ll be horribly upset about it all. She’d got it firmly into her head that to be married to her white-headed boy meant an untroubled elysium, world without end, amen. Strange, that one’s own mother should know so little about one.’

  ‘Your mother is the most sensible woman I ever met. She has a much better grasp of the facts of life than you have.’