The next day brought Lord Saint-George. “My turn to visit the sick,” he said. “You’re a nice, restful aunt for a fellow to adopt, I don’t think. Do you realize that you’ve done me out of a dinner?”
“Yes,” said Harriet. “It’s a pity-Perhaps I’d better tell the Dean. You might be able to identify-”
“ Now don’t you start laying plots,” said he, “or your temperature will go up. You leave it to Uncle. He says he’ll be back tomorrow, by the way, and the evidence is rolling in nicely and you’re to keep quiet and not worry. Honour bright. Had him on the ’phone this morning. He’s all of a doodah. Says anybody could have done his business in Paris, only they’ve got it into their heads he’s the only person who can get on the right side of some tedious old mule or other who has to be placated or conciliated or something. As far as I can make out, some obscure journalist has been assassinated and somebody’s trying to make an international incident of it. Hence the pyramids. I told you Uncle Peter had a strong sense of public duty; now you see it in action.”
“Well, he’s quite right.”
“What an unnatural woman you are! He ought to be here, weeping into the sheets and letting the international situation blow itself to blazes.” Lord Saint-George chuckled “I wish I’d been on the road with him on Monday morning. He collected five summonses in the round trip between Warwickshire and Oxford and London. My mother will be delighted. How’s your head?”
“Doing fine. It was more the cut than the bump, I think.”
“Scalp-wounds do bleed, don’t they? Completely pig-like. Still, it’s as well you’re not a ‘corpse in the case with a sad, swelled face.’ You’ll be all right when they get the stitches out. Only a bit convict-like that side of the head. You’ll have to be cropped all round to even matters up and Uncle Peter can wear your discarded tresses next his heart.”
“Come, come,” said Harriet. “He doesn’t date back to the seventies.”
“He’s aging rapidly. I should think he’d nearly got to the sixties by now. With beautiful, golden side-whiskers. I really think you ought to rescue him before his bones start to creak and the spiders spin webs over his eyes.”
“You and your uncle,” said Harriet, “should be set to turn phrases for a living.”
22
O no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! As I am never better than when I am mad: then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell. At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers: were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down.
– BEN JONSON
Thursday. A heavy, gloomy and depressing Thursday, pouring down uninteresting rain from a sky like a grey box-lid. The Warden had called a meeting of the Senior Common Room for half-past two-an unconsoling hour. All three invalids were up and about again. Harriet had exchanged her bandages for some very unbecoming and unromantic strappings, and had not exactly a headache, but the sensation that a headache might begin at any moment. Miss de Vine looked like a ghost. Annie, though she had suffered less than the others physically, seemed to be still haunted by nervous terrors, and crept unhappily about her duties with the other Common Room maid always closely in attendance.
It was understood that Lord Peter Wimsey would attend the S.C.R. meeting in order to lay certain information before the staff. Harriet had received from him a brief and characteristic note, which said:
“Congratulations on not being dead yet. I have taken your collar away to have my name put on.”
She had already missed the collar. And she had had, from Miss Hillyard, a strangely vivid little picture of Peter, standing at her bedside between night and dawn, quite silent, and twisting the thick strap over and over in his hands. All morning she had expected to see him; but he arrived only at the last moment so that their meeting took place in the Common Room, under the eyes of all the dons. He had driven straight from Town without changing his suit, and above the dark cloth his head had the bleached look of a faint water-colour. He paid his respects politely to the Warden and the Senior dons before coming over and taking her hand.
“Well, and how are you?”
“Not too bad, considering.”
“That’s good.”
He smiled and went to sit by the Warden. Harriet, at the opposite side of the table, slipped into a place beside the Dean. Everything that was alive in him lay in the palm of her hand, like a ripe apple. Dr. Baring was asking him to begin and he was doing so, in the flat voice of a secretary reading the minutes of a company meeting. He had a sheaf of papers before him, including (Harriet noticed) her dossier, which he must have taken away on the Monday morning. But he went on without referring to so much as a note, addressing himself to a bowl filled with marigolds that stood on the table before him.
“I need not take up your time by going over all the details of this rather confusing case. I will first set out the salient points as they presented themselves to me when I came to Oxford last Sunday week, so as to show you the basis upon which I founded my working theory. I will then formulate that theory, and adduce the supporting evidence which I hope and think you will consider conclusive. I may say that practically all the data necessary to the formation of the theory are contained in the very valuable digest of the events prepared for me by Miss Vane and handed to me on my arrival. The rest of the proof was merely what the police call routine work.”
(This, thought Harriet, is suiting your style to your company with a vengeance. She looked round. The Common Room had the hushed air of a congregation settling down to a sermon, but she could feel the nervous tension everywhere. They did not know what they might be going to hear.) “The first point to strike an outsider,” went on Peter, “is the fact that these demonstrations began at the Gaudy. I may say that that was the first bad mistake the perpetrator made. By the way, it will save time and trouble if I refer to the perpetrator in the time-honoured way as X. If X had waited till term began, we should have had a much wider field for suspicion. I therefore asked myself what it was that so greatly excited X at the Gaudy that she could not wait for a more suitable time to begin.
“It seemed unlikely that any of the Old Students present could have roused X’s animosity, because the demonstrations continued in the following term. But they did not continue during the Long Vacation. So my attention was immediately directed to any person who entered the College for the first time at Gaudy and was in residence the following term. Only one person answered these requirements, and that was Miss de Vine.”
The first stir went round the table, like the wind running over a cornfield. “The first two communications came into the hands of Miss Vane. One of them, which amounted to an accusation of murder, was slipped into the sleeve of her gown and might, by a misleading coincidence, have been held to apply to her. But Miss Martin may remember that she placed Miss Vane’s gown in the Senior Common Room side by side with that of Miss de Vine. I Believe that X, misreading ‘H. D. Vane’ as ‘H. de Vine’ put the note in the wrong gown. This belief is, of course, not susceptible of proof; but the possibility is suggestive. The error, if it was one, distracted attention at the start from the central object of the campaign.”