Lord Peter Views the Body (9 page)

    ‘That’s just the childish kind of joke Uncle Meleager
would
make.’

    Gradually, however, the fascination of seeing the squares fit together caught her, and, when the first word appeared which showed that the searchers were definitely on the right track, she lay down flat on the floor and peered over Lord Peter’s shoulder as he grovelled below, writing letters in charcoal, rubbing them out with his handkerchief and mopping his heated face, till the Moor of Venice had nothing on him in the matter of blackness. Once, half scornfully, half timidly, she made a suggestion; twice, she made a suggestion; the third time she had an inspiration. The next minute she was down in the mélée, crawling over the tiles flushed and excited, wiping important letters out with her knees as fast as Peter could write them in, poring over the pages of Roget, her eyes gleaming under her tumbled black fringe.

    Hurried meals of cold meat and tea sustained the exhausted party, and towards sunset Peter, with a shout of triumph, added the last letter to the square.

    They crawled out and looked at it.

    ‘All the words can’t be clues,’ said Mary. ‘I think it must be just those four.’

    ‘Yes, undoubtedly. It’s quite clear. We’ve only got to look it up. Where’s a Bible?’

    Miss Marryat hunted it out from the pile of reference books. ‘But that isn’t the name of a Bible book,’ she said. ‘It’s those things they have at evening service.’

    ‘That’s all you know,’ said Lord Peter. ‘I was brought up religious, I was. It’s Vulgate, that’s what that is. You’re quite right, of course, but, as Uncle Meleager says, we must “look a little further back than that”. Here you are. Now, then.’

    ‘But it doesn’t say what chapter.’

    ‘So it doesn’t. I mean, nor it does.’

    ‘And, anyhow, all the chapters are too short.’

    ‘Damn! Oh! Here, suppose we just count right on from the beginning – one, two, three—’

    ‘Seventeen in chapter one, eighteen, nineteen – this must be it.’

    Two fair heads and one dark one peered excitedly at the small print, Bunter hovering decorously on the outskirts.

‘O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the steep place.’

    ‘Oh, dear!’ said Mary, disappointed, ‘that does sound rather hopeless. Are you sure you’ve counted right? It might mean
anything
.’

    Lord Peter scratched his head.

    ‘This is a bit of a blow,’ he said. ‘I don’t like Uncle Meleager half as much as I did. Old beast!’

    ‘After all our work!’ moaned Mary.

    ‘It must be right,’ cried Miss Marryat. ‘Perhaps there’s some kind of an anagram in it. We can’t give up now!’

    ‘Bravo!’ said Lord Peter. ‘That’s the spirit. ’Fraid we’re in for another outburst of frivolity, Miss Marryat.’

    ‘Well, it’s been great fun,’ said Hannah Marryat.

    ‘If you will excuse me,’ began the deferential voice of Bunter.

    ‘I’d forgotten you, Bunter,’ said his lordship. ‘Of course you can put us right – you always can. Where have we gone wrong?’

    ‘I was about to observe, my lord, that the words you mention do not appear to agree with my recollection of the passage in question. In my mother’s Bible, my lord, it ran, I fancy, some-what differently.’

    Lord Peter closed the volume and looked at the back of it.

    ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘you are right again, of course. This is a Revised Version. It’s your fault, Miss Marryat. You
would
have a Revised Version. But can we imagine Uncle Meleager with one? No. Bring me Uncle Meleager’s Bible.’

    ‘Come and look in the library,’ cried Miss Marryat, snatching him by the hand and running. ‘Don’t be so dreadfully calm.’

    On the centre of the library table lay a huge and venerable Bible – reverend in age and tooled leather binding. Lord Peter’s hands caressed it, for a noble old book was like a song to his soul. Sobered by its beauty, they turned the yellow pages over.

‘In the clefts of the rocks, in the secret places of the stairs.’

    ‘Miss Marryat,’ said his lordship, ‘if your Uncle’s will is not concealed in the staircase, then – well, all I can say is, he’s played a rotten trick on us,’ he concluded lamely.

    ‘Shall we try the main staircase, or the little one up to the porch?’

    ‘Oh, the main one, I think. I hope it won’t mean pulling it down. No. Somebody would have noticed if Uncle Meleager had done anything drastic in that way. It’s probably quite a simple hiding-place. Wait a minute. Let’s ask the housekeeper.’

    Mrs Meakers was called, and perfectly remembered that about nine months previously Mr Finch had pointed out to her a ‘kind of a crack like’ on the under surface of the staircase, and had had a man in to fill it up. Certainly, she could point out the exact place. There was the mark of the plaster filling quite clear.

    ‘Hurray!’ cried Lord Peter. ‘Bunter – a chisel or something. Uncle Meleager, Uncle Meleager, we’ve
got
you! Miss Marryat, I think yours should be the hand to strike the blow. It’s your staircase, you know – at least, if we find the will, so if any destruction has to be done it’s up to you.’

    Breathless they stood round, while with a few blows the new plaster flaked off, disclosing a wide chink in the stonework. Hannah Marryat flung down hammer and chisel and groped in the gap.

    ‘There’s something,’ she gasped. ‘Lift me up; I can’t reach. Oh, it is! it is; it
is
it!’ And she withdrew her hand, grasping a long, sealed envelope, bearing the superscription:

Positively the LAST Will and Testament

of Meleager Finch

    Miss Marryat gave a yodel of joy and flung her arms round Lord Peter’s neck.

    Mary executed a joy-dance. ‘I’ll tell the world,’ she proclaimed.

    ‘Come and tell mother!’ cried Miss Marryat.

    Mr Bunter interposed.

    ‘Your lordship will excuse me,’ he said firmly, ‘but your lordship’s face is all over charcoal.’

    ‘Black but comely,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but I submit to your reproof. How clever we’ve all been. How topping everything is. How rich you are going to be. How late it is and how hungry I am. Yes, Bunter, I will wash my face. Is there anything else I can do for anybody while I feel in the mood?’

    ‘If your lordship would be so kind,’ said Mr Bunter, producing a small paper from his pocket, ‘I should be grateful if you could favour me with a South African quadruped in six letters, beginning with Q.’

    Note:
The solution of the cross-word will be found at the end of the book.

THE FANTASTIC HORROR OF THE CAT IN THE BAG

The Great North Road wound away like a flat, steel-grey ribbon. Up it, with the sun and wind behind them, two black specks moved swiftly. To the yokel in charge of the hay-waggon they were only two of ‘they dratted motor-cyclists’, as they barked and zoomed past him in rapid succession. A little farther on, a family man, driving delicately with a two-seater side-car, grinned as the sharp rattle of the o.h.v. Norton was succeeded by the feline shriek of an angry Scott Flying-Squirrel. He, too, in bachelor days, had taken a side in that perennial feud. He sighed regretfully as he watched the racing machines dwindle away northwards.

    At that abominable and unexpected S-bend across the bridge above Hatfield, the Norton man, in the pride of his heart, turned to wave a defiant hand at his pursuer. In that second, the enormous bulk of a loaded charabanc loomed down upon him from the bridgehead. He wrenched himself away from it in a fierce wobble, and the Scott, cornering melodramatically, with left and right foot-rests alternately skimming the tarmac, gained a few triumphant yards. The Norton leapt forward with wide-open throttle. A party of children, seized with sudden panic, rushed helter-skelter across the road. The Scott lurched through them in drunken swerves. The road was clear, and the chase settled down once more.

    It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every weekend grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other’s exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. They ride in a baffled fury, hating each other. They arrive with shattered nerves and fight for parking places. They return, blinded by the headlights of fresh arrivals, whom they hate even worse than they hate each other. And all the time the Great North Road winds away like a long, flat, steel-grey ribbon – a surface like a race-track, without traps, without hedges, without side-roads, and without traffic. True, it leads to nowhere in particular; but, after all, one pub is very much like another.

    The tarmac reeled away, mile after mile. The sharp turn to the right at Baldock, the involute intricacies of Biggleswade, with its multiplication of sign-posts, gave temporary check, but brought the pursuer no nearer. Through Tempsford at full speed, with blowing horn and exhaust, then, screaming like a hurricane past the R.A.C. post where the road forks in from Bedford. The Norton rider again glanced back; the Scott rider again sounded his horn ferociously. Flat as a chessboard, dyke and field revolved about the horizon.

    The constable at Eaton Socon was by no means an anti-motor fiend. In fact, he had just alighted from his push-bike to pass the time of day with the A.A. man on point duty at the cross-roads. But he was just and God-fearing. The sight of two maniacs careering at seventy miles an hour into his protectorate was more than he could be expected to countenance – the more, that the local magistrate happened to be passing at that very moment in a pony-trap. He advanced to the middle of the road, spreading his arms in a majestic manner. The Norton rider looked, saw the road beyond complicated by the pony-trap and a traction-engine, and resigned himself to the inevitable. He flung the throttle-lever back, stamped on his squealing brakes, and skidded to a standstill. The Scott, having had notice, came up mincingly, with a voice like a pleased kitten.

    ‘Now, then,’ said the constable, in a tone of reproof, ‘ain’t you got no more sense than to come drivin’ into the town at a ’undred miles an hour. This ain’t Brooklands, you know. I never see anything like it. ’Ave to take your names and numbers, if
you
please. You’ll bear witness, Mr Nadgett, as they was doin’ over eighty.’

    The A.A. man, after a swift glance over the two sets of handlebars to assure himself that the black sheep were not of his flock, said, with an air of impartial accuracy, ‘About sixty-six and a half, I should say, if you was to ask me in court.’

    ‘Look here, you blighter,’ said the Scott man indignantly to the Norton man, ‘why the hell couldn’t you stop when you heard me hoot? I’ve been chasing you with your beastly bag nearly thirty miles. Why can’t you look after your own rotten luggage?’

    He indicated a small, stout bag, tied with string to his own carrier.

    ‘That?’ said the Norton man, with scorn. ‘What do you mean? It’s not mine. Never saw it in my life.’

    This bare-faced denial threatened to render the Scott rider speechless.

    ‘Of all the –’ he gasped. ‘Why, you crimson idiot, I saw it fall off, just the other side of Hatfield. I yelled and blew like fury. I suppose that overhead gear of yours makes so much noise you can’t hear anything else. I take the trouble to pick the thing up, and go after you, and all you do is to race off like a lunatic and run me into a cop. Fat lot of thanks one gets for trying to be decent to fools on the road.’

    ‘That ain’t neither here nor there,’ said the policeman. ‘Your licence, please, sir.’

    ‘Here you are,’ said the Scott man, ferociously flapping out his pocket-book. ‘My name’s Walters, and it’s the last time I’ll try to do anybody a good turn, you can lay your shirt.’

    ‘Walters,’ said the constable, entering the particulars laboriously in his note-book, ‘and Simpkins. You’ll ’ave your summonses in doo course. It’ll be for about a week ’ence, on Monday or thereabouts, I shouldn’t wonder.’

    ‘Another forty bob gone west,’ growled Mr Simpkins, toying with his throttle. ‘Oh, well, can’t be helped, I suppose.’

    ‘Forty bob?’ snorted the constable. ‘What do
you
think? Furious driving to the common danger, that’s wot it is. You’ll be lucky to get off with five quid apiece.’

    ‘Oh, blast!’ said the other, stamping furiously on the kick-starter. The engine roared into life, but Mr Walters dexterously swung his machine across the Norton’s path.

    ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he said viciously. ‘You jolly well take your bleeding bag, and no nonsense. I tell you, I
saw
it fall off.’

    ‘Now, no language,’ began the constable, when he suddenly became aware that the A.A. man was staring in a very odd manner at the bag and making signs to him.

    ‘’Ullo,’ he demanded, ‘wot’s the matter with the – bleedin’ bag did you say? ’Ere, I’d like to ’ave a look at that ’ere bag, sir, if you don’t mind.’