Lord Peter Views the Body (5 page)

    ‘Mais non, mais non, je te les ai bien donnés là-haut, avant d’aller chercher les journaux.’

    ‘Je t’assure que non. Enfin, c’est évident! J’ai cherché partout, que diable! Tu ne m’as rien donné, du tout, du tout.’

    ‘Mais, puisque je t’ai dit d’aller faire enrégistrer les bagages! Ne faut-il pas que je t’aie bien remis les billets? Me prends-tu pour un imbécile? Va! On n’est pas dépourvu de sens! Mais regarde l’heure! Le train part à 11 h. 20 m. Cherche un peu, au moins.’

    ‘Mais puisque j’ai cherché partout – le gilet, rien! Le jacquet rien, rien! Le pardessus – rien! rien! rien! C’est toi—’

    Here the porter, urged by the frantic cries and stamping of the queue, and the repeated insults of Lord Peter’s porter, flung himself into the discussion.

    ‘P’t-être qu’ m’sieur a bouté les billets dans son pantalon,’ he suggested.

    ‘Triple idiot!’ snapped the traveller, ‘je vous le demande – est-ce qu’on a jamais entendu parler de mettre des billets dans son pantalon? Jamais—’

    The French porter is a Republican, and, moreover, extremely ill-paid. The large tolerance of his English colleague is not for him.

    ‘Ah!’ said he, dropping two heavy bags and looking round for moral support. ‘Vous dîtes? En voilà du joli! Allons, mon p’tit, ce n’est pas parce qu’on porte un faux col qu’on a le droit d’insulter les gens.’

    The discussion might have become a full-blown row, had not the young man discovered the missing tickets – incidentally, they were in his trousers-pocket after all – and continued the registration of his luggage, to the undisguised satisfaction of the crowd.

    ‘Bunter,’ said his lordship, who had turned his back on the group and was lighting a cigarette, ‘I am going to change the tickets. We shall go straight on to London. Have you got that snapshot affair of yours with you?’

    ‘Yes, my lord.’

    ‘The one you can work from your pocket without anyone noticing?’

    ‘Yes, my lord.’

    ‘Get me a picture of those two.’

    ‘Yes, my lord.’

    ‘I will see to the luggage. Wire to the Duc that I am unexpectedly called home.’

    ‘Very good my lord.’

    Lord Peter did not allude to the matter again till Bunter was putting his trousers in the press in their cabin on board the
Normannia.
Beyond ascertaining that the young man and woman who had aroused his curiosity were on the boat as second-class passengers, he had sedulously avoided contact with them.

    ‘Did you get that photograph?’

    ‘I hope so, my lord. As your lordship knows, the aim from the breast-pocket tends to be unreliable. I have made three attempts, and trust that one at least may prove to be not unsuccessful.’

    ‘How soon can you develop them?’

    ‘At once, if your lordship pleases. I have all the materials in my suit case.’

    ‘What fun!’ said Lord Peter, eagerly tying himself into a pair of mauve silk pyjamas. ‘May I hold the bottles and things?’

    Mr Bunter poured 3 ounces of water into an 8-ounce measure, and handed his master a glass rod and a minute packet.

    ‘If your lordship would be so good as to stir the contents of the white packet slowly into the water,’ he said, bolting the door, ‘and, when dissolved, add the contents of the blue packet.’

    ‘Just like a Seidlitz powder,’ said his lordship happily. ‘Does it fizz?’

    ‘Not much, my lord,’ replied the expert, shaking a quantity of hypo crystals into the hand-basin.

    ‘That’s a pity,’ said Lord Peter. ‘I say, Bunter, it’s no end of a bore to dissolve.’

    ‘Yes, my lord,’ returned Bunter sedately. ‘I have always found that part of the process exceptionally tedious, my lord.’

    Lord Peter jabbed viciously with the glass rod.

    ‘Just you wait,’ he said, in a vindictive tone, ‘till we get to Waterloo.’

Three days later Lord Peter Wimsey sat in his book-lined sitting-room at 110A Piccadilly. The tall bunches of daffodils on the table smiled in the spring sunshine, and nodded to the breeze which danced in from the open window. The door opened, and his lordship glanced up from a handsome edition of the Contes de La Fontaine, whose handsome hand-coloured Fragonard plates he was examining with the aid of a lens.

    ‘Morning, Bunter. Anything doing?’

    ‘I have ascertained, my lord, that the young person in question has entered the service of the elder Duchess of Medway. Her name is Célestine Berger.’

    ‘You are less accurate than usual, Bunter. Nobody off the stage is called Célestine. You should say “under the name of Célestine Berger”. And the man?’

    ‘He is domiciled at this address in Guildford Street, Bloomsbury, my lord.’

    ‘Excellent, my Bunter. Now give me
Who’s Who
. Was it a very tiresome job?’

    ‘Not exceptionally so, my lord.’

    ‘One of these days I suppose I shall give you something to do which you
will
jib at,’ said his lordship, ‘and you will leave me and I shall cut my throat. Thanks. Run away and play. I shall lunch at the club.’

    The book which Bunter had handed his employer indeed bore the words
Who’s Who
embossed upon its cover, but it was to be found in no public library and in no bookseller’s shop. It was a bulky manuscript, closely filled, in part with the small print-like handwriting of Mr Bunter, in part with Lord Peter’s neat and altogether illegible hand. It contained biographies of the most unexpected people, and the most unexpected facts about the most obvious people. Lord Peter turned to a very long entry under the name of the Dowager Duchess of Medway. It appeared to make satisfactory reading, for after a time he smiled, closed the book, and went to the telephone.

    ‘Yes – this is the Duchess of Medway. Who is it?’

    The deep, harsh old voice pleased Lord Peter. He could see the imperious face and upright figure of what had been the most famous beauty in the London of the ’sixties.

    ‘It’s Peter Wimsey, duchess.’

    ‘Indeed, and how do you do, young man? Back from your Continental jaunting?’

    ‘Just home – and longing to lay my devotion at the feet of the most fascinating lady in England.’

    ‘God bless my soul, child, what do you want?’ demanded the duchess. ‘Boys like you don’t flatter an old woman for nothing.’

    ‘I want to tell you my sins, duchess.’

    ‘You should have lived in the great days,’ said the voice appreciatively. ‘Your talents are wasted on the young fry.’

    ‘That is why I want to talk to you, duchess.’

    ‘Well, my dear, if you’ve committed any sins worth hearing I shall enjoy your visit.’

    ‘You are as exquisite in kindness as in charm. I am coming this afternoon.’

    ‘I will be at home to you and no one else. There.’

    ‘Dear lady, I kiss your hands,’ said Lord Peter, and he heard a deep chuckle as the duchess rang off.

‘You may say what you like, duchess,’ said Lord Peter from his reverential position on the fender-stool, ‘but you are the youngest grandmother in London, not excepting my own mother.’

    ‘Dear Honoria is the merest child,’ said the duchess. ‘I have twenty years more experience of life, and have arrived at the age when we boast of them. I have every intention of being a great-grandmother before I die. Sylvia is being married in a fortnight’s time, to that stupid son of Attenbury’s.’

    ‘Abcock?’

    ‘Yes. He keeps the worst hunters I ever saw, and doesn’t know still champagne from sauterne. But Sylvia is stupid, too, poor child, so I dare say they will get on charmingly. In my day one had to have either brains or beauty to get on – preferably both. Nowadays nothing seems to be required but a total lack of figure. But all the sense went out of society with the House of Lords’ veto. I except you, Peter. You have talents. It is a pity you do not employ them in politics.’

    ‘Dear lady, God forbid.’

    ‘Perhaps you are right, as things are. There were giants in my day. Dear Dizzy. I remember so well, when his wife died, how hard we all tried to get him – Medway had died the year before – but he was wrapped up in that stupid Bradford woman, who had never even read a line of one of his books, and couldn’t have understood ’em if she had. And now we have Abcock standing for Midhurst, and married to Sylvia!’

    ‘You haven’t invited me to the wedding, duchess dear. I’m so hurt,’ sighed his lordship.

    ‘Bless you, child,
I
didn’t send out the invitations, but I suppose your brother and that tiresome wife of his will be there. You must come, of course, if you want to. I had no idea you had a passion for weddings.’

    ‘Hadn’t you?’ said Peter. ‘I have a passion for this one. I want to see Lady Sylvia wearing white satin and the family lace and diamonds, and to sentimentalise over the days when my fox-terrier bit the stuffing out of her doll.’

    ‘Very well, my dear, you shall. Come early and give me your support. As for the diamonds, if it weren’t a family tradition, Sylvia shouldn’t wear them. She has the impudence to complain of them.’

    ‘I thought they were some of the finest in existence.’

    ‘So they are. But she says the settings are ugly and old-fashioned, and she doesn’t like diamonds, and they won’t go with her dress. Such nonsense. Whoever heard of a girl not liking diamonds? She wants to be something romantic and moonshiny in pearls. I have no patience with her.’

    ‘I’ll promise to admire them,’ said Peter – ‘use the privilege of early acquaintance and tell her she’s an ass and so on. I’d love to have a view of them. When do they come out of cold storage?’

    ‘Mr Whitehead will bring them up from the Bank the night before,’ said the duchess, ‘and they’ll go into the safe in my room. Come round at twelve o’clock and you shall have a private view of them.’

    ‘That would be delightful. Mind they don’t disappear in the night, won’t you?’

    ‘Oh, my dear, the house is going to be over-run with policemen. Such a nuisance. I suppose it can’t be helped.’

    ‘Oh, I think it’s a good thing,’ said Peter. ‘I have rather an unwholesome weakness for policemen.’

On the morning of the wedding-day, Lord Peter emerged from Bunter’s hands a marvel of sleek brilliance. His primrose-coloured hair was so exquisite a work of art that to eclipse it with his glossy hat was like shutting up the sun in a shrine of polished jet; his spats, light trousers, and exquisitely polished shoes formed a tone-symphony in monochrome. It was only by the most impassioned pleading that he persuaded his tyrant to allow him to place two small photographs and a thin, foreign letter in his breast-pocket. Mr Bunter, likewise immaculately attired, stepped into the taxi after him. At noon precisely they were deposited beneath the striped awning which adorned the door of the Duchess of Medway’s house in Park Lane. Bunter promptly disappeared in the direction of the back entrance, while his lordship mounted the steps and asked to see the dowager.

    The majority of the guests had not yet arrived, but the house was full of agitated people, flitting hither and thither, with flowers and prayer-books, while a clatter of dishes and cutlery from the dining-room proclaimed the laying of a sumptuous breakfast. Lord Peter was shown into the morning-room while the footman went to announce him, and here he found a very close friend and devoted colleague, Detective-Inspector Parker, mounting guard in plain clothes over a costly collection of white elephants. Lord Peter greeted him with an affectionate handgrip.

    ‘All serene so far?’ he enquired.

    ‘Perfectly O.K.’

    ‘You got my note?’

    ‘Sure thing. I’ve got three of our men shadowing your friend in Guildford Street. The girl is very much in evidence here. Does the old lady’s wig and that sort of thing. Bit of a coming-on disposition, isn’t she?’

    ‘You surprise me,’ said Lord Peter. ‘No’ – as his friend grinned sardonically – ‘you really do. Not seriously? That would throw all my calculations out.’

    ‘Oh, no! Saucy with her eyes and her tongue, that’s all.’

    ‘Do her job well?’

    ‘I’ve heard no complaints. What put you on to this?’

    ‘Pure accident. Of course I may be mistaken.’

    ‘Did you receive any information from Paris?’

    ‘I wish you wouldn’t use that phrase,’ said Lord Peter peevishly. ‘It’s so of the Yard – yardy. One of these days it’ll give you away.’

    ‘Sorry,’ said Parker. ‘Second nature, I suppose.’

    ‘Those are the things to beware of,’ returned his lordship, with an earnestness that seemed a little out of place. ‘One can keep guard on everything but just those second-nature tricks.’ He moved across to the window, which overlooked the tradesmen’s entrance. ‘Hullo!’ he said, ‘here’s our bird.’

    Parker joined him, and saw the neat, shingled head of the French girl from the Gare St Lazare, topped by a neat black bandeau and bow. A man with a basket full of white narcissi had rung the bell, and appeared to be trying to make a sale. Parker gently opened the window, and they heard Célestine say with a marked French accent, ‘No, nossing today, sank you.’ The man insisted in the monotonous whine of his type, thrusting a big bunch of the white flowers upon her, but she pushed them back into the basket with an angry exclamation and flirted away, tossing her head and slapping the door smartly to. The man moved off muttering. As he did so a thin, unhealthy-looking lounger in a check cap detached himself from a lamppost opposite and mouched along the street after him, at the same time casting a glance up at the window. Mr Parker looked at Lord Peter, nodded, and made a slight sign with his hand. At once the man in the check cap removed his cigarette from his mouth, extinguished it, and, tucking the stub behind his ear, moved off without a second glance.