“Charles, old man!” said Lord Peter.
“M’m?”
“That’s important. You realize the bearing of that?”
“No.”
“Never mind. Drive on, Polly.”
“Aren’t I making your head ache?”
“Damnably; but I like it. Do go on. I’m not sprouting a lily with anguish moist and fever-dew, or anything like that. I’m getting really thrilled. What you’ve just said is more illuminating than anything I’ve struck for a week.”
“Really!” Mary stared at Peter with every trace of hostility vanished. “I thought you’d never understand that part.”
“Lord!” said Peter. “Why not?”
Mary shook her head. “Well, I’d been corresponding all the time with George, and suddenly he wrote to me at the beginning of this month to say he’d come back from Germany, and had got a job on the Thunderclap—the Socialist weekly, you know—at a beginning screw of £4 a week, and wouldn’t I chuck these capitalists and so on, and come and be an honest working woman with him. He could get me a secretarial job on the paper. I was to type and so on for him, and help him get his articles together. And he thought between us we should make £6 or £7 a week, which would be heaps to live on. And I was getting more frightened of Denis every day. So I said I would. But I knew there’d be an awful row with Gerald. And really I was rather ashamed—the engagement had been announced and there’d be a ghastly lot of talk and people trying to persuade me. And Denis might have made things horribly uncomfortable for Gerald—he was rather that sort. So we decided the best thing to do would be just to run away and get married first, and escape the wrangling.”
“Quite so,” said Peter. “Besides, it would look rather well in the paper, wouldn’t it? ‘Peer’s Daughter Weds Socialist—Romantic Sidecar Elopement—“£6 a week Plenty,” says Her Ladyship.’ ”
“Pig!” said Lady Mary.
“Very good,” said Peter, “I get you! So it was arranged that the romantic Goyles should fetch you away from Riddlesdale—why Riddlesdale? It would be twice as easy from London or Denver.”
“No. For one thing he had to be up North. And everybody knows one in town, and—anyhow, we didn’t want to wait.”
“Besides, one would miss the Young Lochinvar touch. Well, then, why at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m.?”
“He had a meeting on Wednesday night at Northallerton. He was going to come straight on and pick me up, and run me down to town to be married by special license. We allowed ample time. George had to be at the office next day.”
“I see. Well, I’ll go on now, and you stop me if I’m wrong. You went up at 9:30 on Wednesday night. You packed a suitcase. You—did you think of writing any sort of letter to comfort your sorrowing friends and relations?”
“Yes, I wrote one. But I—”
“Of course. Then you went to bed, I fancy, or, at any rate, turned the clothes back and lay down.”
“Yes. I lay down. It was a good thing I did, as it happened—”
“True, you wouldn’t have had much time to make the bed look probable in the morning, and we should have heard about it. By the way, Parker, when Mary confessed her sins to you last night, did you make any notes?”
“Yes,” said Parker, “if you can read my shorthand.”
“Quite so,” said Peter. “Well, the rumpled bed disposes of your story about never having gone to bed at all, doesn’t it?”
“And I thought it was such a good story!”
“Want of practice,” replied her brother kindly. “You’ll do better, next time. It’s just as well, really, that it’s so hard to tell a long, consistent lie. Did you, as a matter of fact, hear Gerald go out at 11:30, as Pettigrew-Robinson (damn his ears!) said?”
“I fancy I did hear somebody moving about,” said Mary, “but I didn’t think much about it.”
“Quite right,” said Peter, “when I hear people movin’ about the house at night, I’m much too delicate-minded to think anything at all.”
“Of course,” interposed the Duchess, “particularly in England, where it is so oddly improper to think. I will say for Peter that, if he can put a continental interpretation on anything, he will—so considerate of you, dear, as soon as you took to doing it in silence and not mentioning it, as you so intelligently did as a child. You were really a very observant little boy, dear.”
“And still is,” said Mary, smiling at Peter with surprising friendliness.
“Old bad habits die hard,” said Wimsey. “To proceed. At three o’clock you went down to meet Goyles. Why did he come all the way up to the house? It would have been safer to meet him in the lane.”
“I knew I couldn’t get out of the lodge-gate without waking Hardraw, and so I’d have to get over the palings somewhere. I might have managed alone, but not with a heavy suitcase. So, as George would have to climb over, anyhow, we thought he’d better come and help carry the suitcase. And then we couldn’t miss each other by the conservatory door. I sent him a little plan of the path.”
“Was Goyles there when you got downstairs?”
“No—at least—no, I didn’t see him. But there was poor Denis’s body, and Gerald bending over it. My first idea was that Gerald had killed George. That’s why I said, ‘Oh, God! you’ve killed him!’ ” (Peter glanced across at Parker and nodded.) “Then Gerald turned him over, and I saw it was Denis—and then I’m sure I heard something moving a long way off in the shrubbery—a noise like twigs snapping—and it suddenly came
