Have His Carcase (47 page)

received a grudging kind of permission to go on with his inquiries. But he was

not happy.

He wondered what Umpelty was doing. He had heard the story of his

excursion to town with Wimsey, and felt that this had only plunged matters into

a stil deeper obscurity. Then there was the tiresomeness about Bright. Bright

was reported to be working his way towards London. It was going to be a job

keeping an eye on him – especialy as Glaisher was rather hard put to it to find

a good reason for the surveilance. After al, what had Bright done? He was an

unsatisfactory character and he had said it was high tide when it was, in fact,

low tide – in every other respect he appeared to have been teling the exact

truth. Glaisher realised that he was making himself unpopular with the police of

half-a-dozen counties, on very insufficient grounds.

He dismissed the case from his mind and applied himself to a quantity of

routine business connected with petty theft and motoring offences, and so got

through the evening. But after his supper he found the problem of Paul Alexis

gnawing at his brain again. Umpelty had reported the result of a few routine

inquiries about Perkins, of which the only interesting fact was that Perkins was a

member of the Soviet Club and was reported to have Communist sympathies.

Just the sort of sympathies he would have, thought Glaisher: it was always these

week, mild, timid-looking people who yearned for revolution and bloodshed.

But, taken in connection with the cipher letters, the matter assumed a certain

importance. He wondered how soon the photographs of the letters found on

Alexis would come to hand. He fretted, was short with his wife, trod on the cat,

and decided to go round to the Belevue and look up Lord Peter Wimsey.

Wimsey was out, and a little further inquiry led Glaisher to Mrs Lefranc’s,

where he found, not only Wimsey, but also Inspector Umpelty, seated with

Harriet in the bed-sitting-room that had once housed Paul Alexis, al three

apparently engaged in a Missing Word Competition. Books were strewn about

the place, and Harriet, with
Chambers
’s
Dictionary
in her hand, was reading

out words to her companions.

‘Hulo, Super!’ exclaimed Wimsey. ‘Come along! I’m sure our hostess wil

be delighted to see you. We are making discoveries.’

‘Are you, indeed, my lord? Wel, so have we – at least, that lad, Ormond,

has been rummaging about, as you might say.’

He plunged into his story. He was glad to try it on somebody else. Umpelty

grunted. Wimsey took a map and a sheet of paper and began figuring out

distances and times. They discussed it. They argued about the speed of the

mare. Wimsey was inclined to think that he might have underestimated it. He

would borrow the animal – make a test – Harriet said nothing.

‘And what do
you
think?’ Wimsey asked her, suddenly.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Harriet.

Glaisher laughed.

‘Miss Vane’s intuition, as they cal it, is against it,’ said he.

‘It’s not intuition,’ retorted Harriet. ‘There’s no such thing. It’s common

sense. It’s artistic sense, if you like. Al those theories – they’re al wrong.

They’re artificial – they smel of the lamp.’

Glaisher laughed again.

‘That’s beyond me, that is.’

‘You men,’ said Harriet, ‘have let yourselves be carried away by al these

figures and time-tables and you’ve lost sight of what you’re realy dealing with.

But it’s al machine-made. It cracks at every joint. It’s like – like a bad plot,

built up round an idea that won’t work. You’ve got it into your heads that you

must get Weldon and the horse and Perkins into it somehow or other; and

when you come up against an inconsistency, you say: “Oh, wel – we’l get over

that somehow. We’l make him do this. We’l make him do that.” But you can’t

make people do things to suit you – not in real life. Why are you obliged to

bring al these people into it at al?’

‘You won’t deny that there’s a good deal that needs explaining,’ said

Umpelty.

‘Of course there’s a lot that needs explaining, but your explanations are more

incredible than the problem. It’s not possible that anyone should plan a murder

like that. You’ve made them too ingenious in one way and too sily in another.

Whatever the explanation is, it must be simpler that that – bigger – not so

cramped. Can’t you see what I mean? You’re simply making up a case, that’s

al.’

‘I see what you mean,’ said Wimsey.

‘I daresay it is a bit complicated,’ admitted Glaisher, ‘but if we don’t make

up a case against Weldon and Bright and Perkins, or two of them, or one of

them – whom are we to make up a case against? Against Bolshies? Wel, but

this Perkins is a Bolshie, or a Communist, anyhow, and if he’s in it, then

Weldon must be, because of their mutual alibi.’

‘Yes, I know; but your whole case is like that. First you want Weldon to be

guilty, because of getting his mother’s money, so you say that Perkins must be

his accomplice because he’s giving an alibi for Weldon. Now you want Perkins

to be guilty because he’s a Communist, and so you say Weldon must be the

accomplice, because he’s giving an alibi for Perkins. But it’s simply impossible

that both those theories should be true. And how did Weldon and Perkins get

to know one another?’

‘We haven’t finished making inquiries yet.’

‘No; but it does seem unlikely, doesn’t it? A Council School teacher from

the Tottenham Court Road and a Huntingdonshire farmer. What form? What

likelihood? And as for Bright, you have nothing –
nothing
to connect him with

either of them. And if his story’s true, then there’s not an atom of proof that

Alexis didn’t kil himself. And in any case, if you want to prove murder, you’ve

got to connect Bright with whoever did it, and you certainly haven’t found the

least trace of communication between him and either Weldon or Perkins.’

‘Has Bright been receiving any letters?’ asked Wimsey of Umpelty.

‘Not a line, not since he turned up here, anyway.’

‘As for Perkins,’ said Glaisher, ‘we’l soon get a line on him. Of course, his

getting knocked down and laid up like that must have puzzled his accomplices

just as much as it puzzled us. There may be a whole correspondence waiting for

him at some accommodation address, under another name, in some town or

other.’

‘You wil insist on its being Perkins,’ protested Harriet. ‘You realy think

Perkins rode a horse bare-backed along the beach and cut a man’s throat to

the bone with a razor?’

‘Why not?’ said Umpelty.

‘Does he look like it?’

‘ “Do I look like it? said the Knave. Which he certainly did not, being made

entirely of cardboard.” I’ve never seen the bloke, but I admit that his

description isn’t encouraging.’ Wimsey grinned. ‘But then, you know, friend

Henry took
me
for something in the night-club line.’

Harriet glanced briefly at his lean limbs and springy build.

‘You needn’t fish,’ she said, coldly. ‘We al know that your appearance of

langour is assumed and that you are realy capable of tying pokers into knots

with your artistic fingers. Perkins is flabby and has a neck like a chicken and

those flipflop hands.’ She turned to Glaisher. ‘I can’t see Perkins in the rôle of a

desperado. Why, your original case against me was a better one.’

Glaisher blinked, but took the thrust stolidly.

‘Yes, miss. It had a lot to be said for it, that had.’

‘Of course. Why did you give it up, by the way?’

Some instinct seemed to warn Glaisher that he was treading on thin ice.

‘Wel,’ he said, ‘it seemed a bit too obvious, so to say – and besides, we

couldn’t trace any connection between you and the deceased.’

‘It was wise of you to make inquiries. Because, of course, you had only my

word for everything, hadn’t you? And those photographs were evidence that I

was pretty cold-blooded? And my previous history was rather – shal we say,

ful of incident?’

‘Just so, miss.’ The Superintendent’s eyes were expressionless.

‘Of whom did you make the inquiries, by the way?’

‘Of your charwoman,’ said Glaisher.

‘Oh! you think she would know whether I knew Paul Alexis?’

‘In our experience,’ replied the Superintendent, ‘charwomen mostly know

things of that sort.’

‘So they do. And you’ve realy given up suspecting me?’

‘Oh, dear me, yes.’

‘On my charwoman’s testimony to my character?’

‘Supplemented,’ said the Superintendent, ‘by our own observation.’

‘I see.’ Harriet looked hard at Glaisher, but he was proof against this kind of

third degree, and smiled blandly in response. Wimsey, who had listened with his

face like a mask, determined to give the stolid policeman the first prize for tact.

He now dropped a cold comment into the conversation.

‘You and Miss Vane having made short work of each other’s theories,’ he

said, ‘perhaps you would like to hear what we have been doing this evening.’

‘Very much, my lord.’

‘We began,’ said Wimsey, ‘by making a new search for clues among the

corpse’s belongings, hoping, of course, to get some light on Feodora or the

cipher letters. Inspector Umpelty kindly lent us his sympathetic assistance. In

fact, the Inspector has been simply invaluable. He has sat here now for two

hours, watching us search, and every time we looked into a hole or corner and

found it empty, he has been able to assure us that he had already looked into

the hole or corner and found it empty too.’

Inspector Umpelty chuckled.

‘The only thing we’ve found,’ went on Lord Peter, ‘is
Chambers’s

Dictionary
, and we didn’t find that this evening, because Miss Vane had found

it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crosswords instead of

getting on with her writing. We’ve found a lot of words marked with pencil. We

were engaged in making a colection of them when you came in. Perhaps you’d

like to hear a few specimens. Here you are. I’m reeling them off at random:

Peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight,

chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason, cabriolet,

rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct. There are lots more. Do these words

say anything to you? Some of them have an ecclesiastical ring about them, but

on the other hand, some of them have not. Courtesan, for example. To which I

may add tambourine, wrestling and fashion.’

Glaisher laughed.

‘Sounds to me as though the young felow was a crossword fan himself.

They’re nice long words.’

‘But not the longest. There are many longer, such as supralapsarian,

monocotyledenous and diaphragmatic, but he hasn’t marked any of the real

sesquipedalians. The longest we have found is rheumatics, with ten letters. They

al have two peculiarities in common, though, as far as we’ve gone – that are

rather suggestive.’

‘What’s that, my lord?’

‘None of them contains any repeated letter, and none of them is less than

seven letters long.’

Superintendent Glaisher suddenly flung up one hand like a child at school.

‘The cipher letters!’ he cried.

‘As you say, the cipher letters. It looks to us as though these might be key-

words to a cipher, and from the circumstance that no letters are repeated in any

of them, I fancy one might be able to make a guess at the type of cipher. The

trouble is that we have already counted a couple of hundred marked words,

and haven’t finished the alphabet yet. Which leads me to a depressing

inference.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That they have been changing the key-word in every letter. What I think has

happened is this. I think that each letter contained in it the key-word of the next,

and that these marks represent a stock of words that Alexis looked up

beforehand, so as to be ready with them when it came to his turn to write.’

‘Couldn’t they be the key-words already used?’

‘Hardly. I don’t believe he has sent out over two hundred code-letters since

March, when they first began to be exchanged. Even if he wrote one letter a

day, he couldn’t have got through that number.’

‘No more he could, my lord. Stil, if the paper we found on him is one of

these cipher letters, then the key-word wil be one of those marked here. That

narrows things a bit.’

‘I don’t think so. I think these are key-words for the letters Alexis sent out.

In each letter he would announce
his
keyword for
his
next letter. But his

correspondent would do the same, so that the key-word for the paper found on

Alexis is much more likely to be one that isn’t marked here. Unless, of course,

the paper is one of Alexis’ own writing, which isn’t very likely.’

‘We can’t even say that, then,’ moaned Glaisher. ‘Because the