Lord Peter Views the Body (7 page)

    ‘Of course you understand,’ said Miss Marryat mournfully, ‘that if it were not for the monstrous injustice of Uncle Meleager’s other will, and mother being so ill, I shouldn’t take any steps. But when there is £250,000, and the prospect of doing real good with it—’

    ‘Naturally,’ said Lord Peter, ‘it isn’t the money you care about, as the dear old bromide says, it’s the principle of the thing. Right you are! Now supposin’ we have a look at Uncle Meleager’s letter.’

    Miss Marryat rummaged in a very large handbag and passed the paper over.

    This was Uncle Meleager’s letter, dated from Sienna twelve months previously:

‘My dear Hannah, – When I die – which I propose to do at my own convenience and not at that of my family – you will at last discover my monetary worth. It is, of course, considerably less than you had hoped, and quite fails, I assure you, adequately to represent my actual worth in the eyes of the discerning. I made my will yesterday, leaving the entire sum, such as it is, to the Primrose League – a body quite as fatuous as any other in our preposterous state, but which has the advantage of being peculiarly obnoxious to yourself. This will will be found in the safe in the library.

    ‘I am not, however, unmindful of the fact that your mother is my sister, and you and she my only surviving relatives. I shall accordingly amuse myself by drawing up today a second will, superseding the other and leaving the money to you.

    ‘I have always held that woman is a frivolous animal. A woman who pretends to be serious is wasting her time and spoiling her appearance. I consider that you have wasted your time to a really shocking extent. Accordingly, I intend to conceal this will, and that in such a manner that you will certainly never find it unless by the exercise of a sustained frivolity.

    ‘I hope you will contrive to be frivolous enough to become the heiress of your affectionate

    ‘Uncle Meleager’

    ‘Couldn’t we use that letter as proof of the testator’s intention, and fight the will?’ asked Mary anxiously.

    ‘’Fraid not,’ said Lord Peter. ‘You see, there’s no evidence here that the will was ever actually drawn up. Though I suppose we could find the witnesses.’

    ‘We’ve tried,’ said Miss Marryat, ‘but, as you see, Uncle Meleager was travelling abroad at the time, and he probably got some obscure people in some obscure Italian town to witness it for him. We advertised, but got no answer.’

    ‘H’m. Uncle Meleager doesn’t seem to have left things to chance. And, anyhow, wills are queer things, and so are the probate and divorce wallahs. Obviously the thing to do is to find the other will. Did the clues he speaks of turn up among his papers?’

    ‘We hunted through everything. And, of course, we had the whole house searched from top to bottom for the will. But it was quite useless.’

    ‘You’ve not destroyed anything, of course. Who were the executors of the Primrose League will?’

    ‘Mother and Mr Sands, Uncle Meleager’s solicitor. The will left mother a silver teapot for her trouble.’

    ‘I like Uncle Meleager more and more. Anyhow, he did the sporting thing. I’m beginnin’ to enjoy this case like anything. Where did Uncle Meleager hang out?’

    ‘It’s an old house down at Dorking. It’s rather quaint. Somebody had a fancy to build a little Roman villa sort of thing there, with a verandah behind, with columns and a pond in the front hall, and statues. It’s very decent there just now, though it’s awfully cold in the winter, with all those stone floors and stone stairs and the skylight over the hall! Mother said perhaps you would be very kind and come down and have a look at it.’

    ‘I’d simply love to. Can we start tomorrow? I promise you we’ll be frivolous enough to please even Uncle Meleager, if you’ll do your bit, Miss Marryat. Won’t we, Mary?’

    ‘Rather! And, I say, hadn’t we better be moving if we’re going to the Pallambra?’

    ‘I never go to music halls,’ said Miss Marryat ungraciously.

    ‘Oh, but you must come tonight,’ said his lordship persuasively. ‘It’s so frivolous. Just think how it would please Uncle Meleager.’

Accordingly, the next day found the party, including the indispensable Mr Bunter, assembled at Uncle Meleager’s house. Pending the settlement of the will question, there had seemed every reason why Mr Finch’s executrix and next-of-kin should live in the house, thus providing every facility for what Lord Peter called the ‘Treasure-hunt’. After being introduced to Mrs Marryat, who was an invalid and remained in her room, Lady Mary and her brother were shown over the house by Miss Marryat, who explained to them how carefully the search had been conducted. Every paper had been examined, every book in the library scrutinised page by page, the walls and chimneys tapped for hiding-places, the boards taken up, and so forth, but with no result.

    ‘Y’know,’ said his lordship, ‘I’m sure you’ve been going the wrong way to work. My idea is, old Uncle Meleager was a man of his word. If he said frivolous, he meant really frivolous. Something beastly silly. I wonder what it was.’

    He was still wondering when he went up to dress. Bunter was putting studs in his shirt. Lord Peter gazed thoughtfully at him, and then enquired:

    ‘Are any of Mr Finch’s old staff still here?’

    ‘Yes, my lord. The cook and the housekeeper. Wonderful old gentleman they say he was, too. Eighty-three, but as up-to-date as you please. Had his wireless in his bedroom, and enjoyed the Savoy bands every night of his life. Followed his politics, and was always ready with the details of the latest big law-cases. If a young lady came to see him, he’d like to see she had her hair shingled and the latest style in fashions. They say he took up cross-words as soon as they came in, and was remarkably quick at solving them, my lord, and inventing them. Took a £10 prize in the
Daily Yell
for one, and was wonderfully pleased to get it, they say, my lord, rich as he was.’

    ‘Indeed.’

    ‘Yes, my lord. He was a great man for acrostics before that, I understood them to say, but, when cross-words came in, he threw away his acrostics and said he liked the new game better. Wonderfully adaptable, if I may say so, he seems to have been for an old gentleman.’

    ‘Was he, by Jove?’ said his lordship absently, and then, with sudden energy:

    ‘Bunter, I’d like to double your salary, but I suppose you’d take it as an insult.’

    The conversation bore fruit at dinner.

    ‘What,’ enquired his lordship, ‘happened to Uncle Meleager’s cross-words?’

    ‘Cross-words?’ said Hannah Marryat, knitting her heavy brows. ‘Oh, those puzzle things! Poor old man, he went mad over them. He had every newspaper sent him, and in his last illness he’d be trying to fill the wretched things in. It was worse than his acrostics and his jig-saw puzzles. Poor old creature, he must have been senile, I’m afraid. Of course, we looked through them, but there wasn’t anything there. We put them all in the attic.’

    ‘The attic for me,’ said Lord Peter.

    ‘And for me,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t believe there was anything senile about Uncle Meleager.’

    The evening was warm, and they had dined in the little viridarium at the back of the house, with its tall vases and hanging baskets of flowers and little marble statues.

    ‘Is there an attic here?’ said Peter. ‘It seems such a – well, such an un-attic thing to have in a house like this.’

    ‘It’s just a horrid, poky little hole over the porch,’ said Miss Marryat, rising and leading the way. ‘Don’t tumble into the pond, will you? It’s a great nuisance having it there, especially at night. I always tell them to leave a light on.’

    Lord Peter glanced into the miniature impluvium, with its tiling of red, white, and black marble.

    ‘That’s not a very classic design,’ he observed.

    ‘No. Uncle Meleager used to complain about it and say he must have it altered. There was a proper one once, I believe, but it got damaged, and the man before Uncle Meleager had it replaced by some local idiot. He built three bay windows out of the dining-room at the same time, which made it very much lighter and pleasanter, of course, but it looks awful. Now, this tiling is all right; uncle put that in himself.’

    She pointed to a mosaic dog at the threshold, with the motto, ‘Cave canem,’ and Lord Peter recognised it as a copy of a Pompeian original.

    A narrow stair brought them to the ‘attic’, where the Wimseys flung themselves with enthusiasm upon a huge heap of dusty old newspapers and manuscripts. The latter seemed the likelier field, so they started with them. They consisted of a quantity of cross-words in manuscript – presumably the children of Uncle Meleager’s own brain. The square, the list of definitions, and the solution were in every case neatly pinned together. Some (early efforts, no doubt) were childishly simple, but others were difficult, with allusive or punning clues; some of the ordinary newspaper type, others in the form of rhymed distichs. They scrutinised the solutions closely, and searched the definitions for acrostics or hidden words, unsuccessfully for a long time.

    ‘This one’s a funny one,’ said Mary, ‘nothing seems to fit. Oh! it’s two pinned together. No, it isn’t – yes, it is – it’s only been pinned up wrong. Peter, have you seen the puzzle belonging to these clues anywhere?’

    ‘What one’s that?’

    ‘Well, it’s numbered rather funnily, with Roman and Arabic numerals, and it starts off with a thing that hasn’t got any numbers at all:

‘Truth, poor girl, was nobody’s daughter;

She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.’

    ‘Frivolous old wretch!’ said Miss Marryat.

    ‘Friv – here, gimme that!’ cried Lord Peter. ‘Look here, I say, Miss Marryat, you oughtn’t to have overlooked this.’

    ‘I thought it just belonged to that other square.’

    ‘Not it. It’s different. I believe it’s our thing. Listen:

‘Your expectation to be rich

Here will reach its highest pitch.
’

That’s one for you, Miss Marryat. Mary, hunt about. We
must
find the square that belongs to this.’

    But, though they turned everything upside-down, they could find no square with Roman and Arabic numerals.

    ‘Hang it all!’ said Peter, ‘it must be made to fit one of these others. Look! I know what he’s done. He’s just taken a fifteen-letter square, and numbered it with Roman figures one way and Arabic the other. I bet its fits into that one it was pinned up with.’

    But the one it was pinned up with turned out to have only thirteen squares.

    ‘Dash it all,’ said his lordship, ‘we’ll have to carry the whole lot down, and work away at it till we find the one it
does
fit.’

    He snatched up a great bundle of newspapers, and led the way out. The others followed, each with an armful. The search had taken some time, and the atrium was in semi-darkness.

    ‘Where shall I take them?’ asked Lord Peter, calling back over his shoulder.

    ‘Hi!’ cried Mary; and, ‘Look where you’re going!’ cried her friend.

    They were too late. A splash and a flounder proclaimed that Lord Peter had walked, like Johnny Head-in-Air, over the edge of the impluvium, papers and all.

    ‘You ass!’ said Mary.

    His lordship scrambled out, spluttering, and Hannah Marryat suddenly burst out into the first laugh Peter had ever heard her give.

‘Truth, they say, was nobody’s daughter,

She took off her clothes and fell into the water’

she proclaimed.

    ‘Well, I couldn’t take my clothes off with you here, could I?’ grumbled Lord Peter. ‘We’ll have to fish out the papers. I’m afraid they’ve got a bit damp.’

    Miss Marryat turned on the lights, and they started to clear the basin.

    ‘Truth, poor girl –’ began Lord Peter, and suddenly, with a little shriek, began to dance on the marble edge of the impluvium.

    ‘One, two, three, four, five, six—’

    ‘Quite, quite demented,’ said Mary. ‘How shall I break it to mother?’

    ‘Thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen
!’ cried his lordship, and sat down, suddenly and damply, exhausted by his own excitement.

    ‘Feeling better?’ asked his sister acidly.

    ‘I’m well. I’m all right. Everything’s all right. I
love
Uncle Meleager. Fifteen squares each way. Look at it.
Look
at it. The truth’s in the water. Didn’t he say so. Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! callay! I chortle. Mary, what became of those definitions?’

    ‘They’re in your pocket, all damp,’ said Mary.

    Lord Peter snatched them out hurriedly.

    ‘It’s all right, they haven’t run,’ he said. ‘Oh,
darling
Uncle Meleager. Can you drain the impluvium, Miss Marryat, and find a bit of charcoal. Then I’ll get some dry clothes on and we’ll get down to it. Don’t you see?
There’s
your missing cross-word square – on the floor of the impluvium!’