Unnatural Death
By Dorothy L. Sayers.
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Part I
The Medical Problem
“But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
Merchant of Venice
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.”
I
Overheard
“The death was certainly sudden, unexpected, and to me mysterious.”
Letter from Dr. Paterson to the Registrar in the case of Reg. v. Pritchard
“But if he thought the woman was being murdered—”
“My dear Charles,” said the young man with the monocle, “it doesn’t do for people, especially doctors, to go about ‘thinking’ things. They may get into frightful trouble. In Pritchard’s case, I consider Dr. Paterson did all he reasonably could by refusing a certificate for Mrs. Taylor and sending that uncommonly disquieting letter to the Registrar. He couldn’t help the man’s being a fool. If there had only been an inquest on Mrs. Taylor, Pritchard would probably have been frightened off and left his wife alone. After all, Paterson hadn’t a spark of real evidence. And suppose he’d been quite wrong—what a dustup there’d have been!”
“All the same,” urged the nondescript young man, dubiously extracting a bubbling-hot Helix Pomatia from its shell, and eyeing it nervously before putting it in his mouth, “surely it’s a clear case of public duty to voice one’s suspicions.”
“Of your duty—yes,” said the other. “By the way, it’s not a public duty to eat snails if you don’t like ’em. No, I thought you didn’t. Why wrestle with a harsh fate any longer? Waiter, take the gentleman’s snails away and bring oysters instead … No—as I was saying, it may be part of your duty to have suspicions and invite investigation and generally raise hell for everybody, and if you’re mistaken nobody says much, beyond that you’re a smart, painstaking officer though a little overzealous. But doctors, poor devils! are everlastingly walking a kind of social tightrope. People don’t fancy calling in a man who’s liable to bring out accusations of murder on the smallest provocation.”
“Excuse me.”
The thin-faced young man sitting alone at the next table had turned round eagerly.
“It’s frightfully rude of me to break in, but every word you say is absolutely true, and mine is a case in point. A doctor—you can’t have any idea how dependent he is on the fancies and prejudices of his patients. They resent the most elementary precautions. If you dare to suggest a postmortem, they’re up in arms at the idea of ‘cutting poor dear So-and-so up,’ and even if you only ask permission to investigate an obscure disease in the interests of research, they imagine you’re hinting at something unpleasant. Of course, if you let things go, and it turns out afterwards there’s been any jiggery-pokery, the coroner jumps down your throat and the newspapers make a butt of you, and, whichever way it is, you wish you’d never been born.”
“You speak with personal feeling,” said the man with the monocle, with an agreeable air of interest.
“I do,” said the thin-faced man, emphatically. “If I had behaved like a man of the world instead of a zealous citizen, I shouldn’t be hunting about for a new job today.”
The man with the monocle glanced round the little Soho restaurant with a faint smile. The fat man on their right was unctuously entertaining two ladies of the chorus; beyond him, two elderly habitués were showing their acquaintance with the fare at the Au Bon Bourgeois by consuming a Tripes à la Mode de Caen (which they do very excellently there) and a bottle of Chablis Moutonne 1916; on the other side of the room a provincial and his wife were stupidly clamouring for a cut off the joint with lemonade for the lady and whisky and soda for the gentleman, while at the adjoining table, the handsome silver-haired proprietor, absorbed in fatiguing a salad for a family party, had
