XXV. The Evidence of the Dictionary

CHAPTER XXV

THE EVIDENCE OF THE

DICTIONARY

‘’Tis but an empty cipher.’

The Brides’ Tragedy

TUESDAY, 30 JUNE

IT WAS ALL VERY well, thought Constable Ormond, to be sure that Perkins’ evidence was false: the difficulty was to prove it. There were two possible explanations. Either Perkins was a liar, or Weldon had deliberately deceived him. If the former were the case, then the police would be faced with the notorious difficulty of proving a negative. If the latter, then a reference to Mr Polwhistle at the Darley Garage would probably clear the matter up.

Mr Polwhistle and his mechanic were ready and eager to help. They perfectly remembered Mr Perkins—which was not surprising, since the arrival of a complete stranger to hire a car was a rare event in Darley. Mr Perkins had pulled out his watch, they remembered, and compared it with the garage clock, mentioning as he did so that the watch had run down and that he had had to inquire the time of a passer-by. He had then said: ‘Oh, yes, it seems to be just right,’ and had further asked whether their clock was reliable and how long they would take to get to Wilvercombe.

‘And is your clock reliable?’

‘It was reliable that day all right’

‘How do you mean, that day?’

‘Well, she loses a bit, and that’s a fact, but we’d just set her on the Thursday morning, hadn’t we, Tom?’

Tom agreed that they had, adding that ‘she’ was an eight-day clock, and that he was accustomed to wind and set her every Thursday morning, Thursday being an important day on account of Heathbury market, the centre about which all local business seemed to revolve.

There seemed to be no shaking this evidence. It was true that neither Mr Polwhistle nor Tom had actually seen the face of Mr Perkins’ watch, but they both declared that he had said: ‘It seems to be just right.’ Therefore, if there was any discrepancy, Perkins must have been intentionally concealing the face. It was, perhaps, a little remarkable that Perkins should so insistently have drawn attention to the lightness of his watch. Constable Ormond remounted his motor-cycle and returned to Wilvercombe, more than ever convinced that Perkins was an unconscionable liar.

Inspector Umpelty agreed with him. ‘’Tisn’t natural,’ he said, ‘to my mind, for a man all upset as he was to start bothering about the exact time the minute he gets into a place. Trouble is, if he says he saw Weldon, and we can’t prove he didn’t, what are we going to do about it?’

‘Well, sir,’ suggested Ormond, with deference, ‘what I’ve been thinking is, if Weldon or whoever it was rode along the shore between Darley and the Flat-Iron, somebody ought to have seen him. Have we asked all the people who passed along the top of the cliffs round about that time?’

‘You needn’t think that hadn’t occurred to me, my lad,’ replied the Inspector, grimly. ‘I’ve interrogated everyone that went past between one o’clock and two o’clock, and not a soul of ’em saw hide nor hair of a horse.’

‘How about those people at the cottages?’

‘Them?’ The Inspector snorted. ‘They never saw anything, you bet your life—nor they wouldn’t, not if old Pollock was concerned in it, as it’s our belief he was—always supposing there was anything to be concerned in. Still, go and try your hand on them again if you like, young ’un, and if you get anything out of ’em I’ll hand it to you. Old Pollock’s got his back up, and neither him nor that brother-in-law of his, Billy Moggeridge, is out to give anything away to the police. Still, you trot along there. You’re a comely bachelor, and there’s no saying but you may be able to get something out of the women-folk.’

The blushing Ormond accordingly made his way to the cottages, where, much to his relief, he found the men-folk absent and the women employed at the wash-tub. At first he was none too cordially received, but, after he had stripped off his uniform tunic and given young Mrs Pollock a hand with the mangle and carried two buckets of water from the well for Mrs Moggeridge, the atmosphere became less frigid, and he was able to put his questions.

But the results were disappointing. The women were able to give very good reasons for having seen nothing of any horse or rider on Thursday, 18th. The family dinners had been eaten as usual at twelve o’clock, and after dinner there was the ironing to finish. There was a sight of washing, as Mr Ormond could see for himself, for Mrs Pollock and Mrs Moggeridge to deal with. There was Granpa Pollock and Granma Pollock and Jem, what was that particular about his shirts and collars, and young Arthur and Polly and Rosie and Billy Moggeridge and Susie and Fanny and little David and the baby and Jenny Moggeridge’s Baby Charles what was a accident what Mrs Moggeridge was looking after, Jenny being out in service, all of which do make work and often the washing don’t get finished till Saturday and you couldn’t be surprised, what with the men’s jerseys and stockings and one thing and another and every drop of water having to be fetched. Nobody hadn’t been out of the house that afternoon, leastways, only at the back, not till after three o’clock for sure, when Susie took the potatoes out into the front garden to peel for supper. Susie see a gentleman then, dressed in shorts and carrying a knapsack, come up the lane from the shore, but it wouldn’t be him as Mr Ormond wanted to know about, because he came in later on with a lady and told them about the body being found. Mr Ormond was quite pleased to hear about this gentleman, nevertheless. The gentleman was wearing hornrimmed spectacles and he came up the lane ‘somewhere between half-past three and four,’ and went straight off along the road towards Lesston Hoe. This must, of course, have been Perkins, and a brief calculation showed that this time fitted in reasonably well both with his own story and Harriet’s. Harriet had met him about half-a-mile further on at four o’clock. But that proved nothing, and the crucial period between 1.30 and three o’clock remained as obscure as before.

Puzzled and dissatisfied, Ormond chugged slowly back to Darley, noticing as he went how little of the beach could actually be seen from the road. It was, in fact, only for about a mile on either side of the Flat-Iron that the road ran actually close to the edge of the cliffs. Here there was the breadth of a wide field between them and the height of the cliff hid the sands from view. It would not really have been so risky a business as one might suppose to ride in broad daylight to commit a murder at the Flat-Iron, and it was hardly surprising that no traveller on the road had seen the bay mare pass. But had she passed? There was the horseshoe to prove it and there was the ring-bolt on the rock to suggest it. It was the ring-bolt that was chiefly bothering Constable Ormond, for if it was not there to hold the horse, what was it for? And Wimsey’s latest theory had made it necessary for the horse to be released and sent back before the Fiat-Iron was reached.

And that was a very hit-or-miss theory, from the murderer’s point of view. How could he be sure that the animal would go back and would not hang about the place attracting attention? In fact, after being galloped violently for four and a half miles, it was far more likely to take matters easy. If one was to ignore the ring-bolt, was it not possible that the bay mare had been tethered somewhere, to be picked up later? There were weighty objections to that. There was no post or groyne along the shore to which she could have been tied, and if the murderer had brought her close in under the cliff, then he would have had to leave two lines of footprints—the mare’s in going and his own in returning. But he might have argued that this would not greatly matter if it was at some distance from the Flat-Iron. It might just be worth while to turn back and examine the shore from that point of view.

He did so, riding right up as far as the Flat-Iron itself, scrambling down by the same path that Harriet had used, and working his way along at the foot of the cliff in the direction of Darley. After about half-an-hour’s search, he found what he was looking for. There was a recess in the cliff where at some time there had been a fall of rock. Jammed in among the boulders was a large wooden post, which had apparently formed part of a fence—erected, no doubt, to keep men or animals from straying upon the dangerous part of the cliffs. If the bay mare had been brought in there, she might easily have been tethered to the beam, while, owing to the overhang of the cliff and the accumulation of fallen stones, she would have been practically invisible, either from the sea or from the road above.

This discovery was gratifying, but it would have been more gratifying if Ormond could have found any positive indication that this had really happened. The sand was so loose and dry that no recognisable marks could be expected above high-water mark, nor, though he examined the wooden post very carefully with a lens, could he find any indications of its having been used as a horse-post. A strand of rope fibre, a horse-hair or two would have been better than a bank-note to Ormond at that moment, while a bunch of horse-droppings would have been worth its weight in rubies. But none of these simple, homely sights rewarded his anxious gaze. There was the piece of timber and there was the recess in the cliff, and that was all.

Shaking his head, he walked to the edge of the water and set out at a brisk trot for the Flat-Iron. He found that by pelting along as fast as a heavyish, fully-clothed young constable could be expected to pelt on a hot summer’s day, he could reach the rock in twelve minutes exactly. It was too far. Five minutes’ walk was the most that Weldon could possibly have allowed himself by Wimsey’s calculation. Ormond again scrambled up the cliff, remounted his bicycle and began to do sums in his head.

By the time he arrived at the police-station, these sums had taken a definite form.

‘The way I look at it is this, sir,’ he said to Superintendent Glaisher. ‘We’ve been going along the line that it was Perkins that was providing the alibi for Weldon. Suppose it was the other way round. Suppose Weldon is providing the alibi for Perkins. What do we know about Perkins? Only that he’s a school-teacher and that nobody seems to have kept tabs on him since last May. Now, he says he slept at Wilvercombe and didn’t start away that morning till one o’clock. That’s a bit thick to start with. The only proof he offers of that is that he bought some stuff at a chemist’s—he doesn’t remember the chemist and he isn’t clear about the time. Now we know that Weldon was in Wilvercombe that morning, and his rime isn’t altogether accounted for, either. Supposing those two had met and fixed it all up there. Perkins comes along to Darley and gets the horse.’

‘We’ll have to find out whether anyone saw him pass through the village.’

‘That’s so, sir. We must check that up, naturally. But say he really got there at about 1.15 or so. Then he’d have plenty of time to get along with the mare, tie her up where that there post is, and buzz along on foot to the rock and commit his murder.’

‘Wait a moment,’ said Glaisher. This place is fifteen minutes’ quick walk from the rock.’

‘More like fifteen minutes’ run, sir.’

‘Yes, but over wet sand; through water, actually. Shall we call it just over a mile? Right. Then that leaves three and a half miles for the mare. At eight miles an hour, that needs—eight miles in sixty minutes, one mile in sixty over eight—Glaisher always had to work these rule-of-three problems out on the corners of blotting-pads; it had been the worst stumbling-block he had had to overcome on his way to promotion—‘thirty multiplied by seven over eight—oh, dear! divide by two—multiply—divide—’

Ormond, who had the gift of being able to add three columns of figures at once in his head, waited respectfully.

‘I make it about twenty-six minutes,’ said Glaisher.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That means’—Glaisher gazed at the face of the station-clock with working lips. ‘Fifteen minutes from two o’clock, 1.45; twenty-six minutes from that again—that’s 1.19.’

‘Yes, sir; and we can allow him four minutes to tie the mare up; 1.15. I make it he’d have to start out from Darley.’

‘Just so; I was only verifying your figures. In that case he’d have had to be in the village at 1.10 or thereabouts.’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘And how and when did he pick the mare up again, Ormond?’

‘He didn’t, sir, not as I make it out.’

‘Then what became of it?’

‘Well, sir, I look at it like this. Where we’ve been making the mistake is in thinking as the whole job was done by one person. Supposing now as this Perkins commits his murder at two o’clock and then hides under the Flat-Iron, same as we thought. He can’t get away till 2.30; we know that, because Miss Vane was there till that time. Well, then, at 2.30 she clears and he clears, and starts to walk back.’

‘Why should he walk back? Why not go on? Oh, of course—he’s got to fix up his time to fit in with Weldon’s 1.55 alibi.’

‘Yes, sir. Well, if he was to walk straight back to Pollock’s cottage, which is two miles from the Flat-Iron, doing a steady three miles an hour, he’d be there at 3.10, but Susie Moggeridge says she didn’t see him till between 3.30 and four o’clock, and I don’t see that she’s got any call to lie about it.’

‘She may be in it too; we’ve got our doubts about old Pollock.’

‘Yes, sir; but if she was lying she’d lie the other way. She wouldn’t give him more time than he needed to come from the Flat-Iron. No, sir, it’s my belief Perkins had to stop on the way for something, and I fancy I know what that was. It’s all right for the doctor to say that the man who cut this chap’s throat may not have got blood on himself, but that’s not to say he didn’t get it—not by a long chalk. I think Perkins had to stop all that time to get his togs changed. He could easily take an extra shirt and pair of shorts in his kit. He may have given the one he was wearing a bit of a wash, too. Say he did that, and then got to Pollock’s place about 3.45. He comes up by the lane, where Susie Moggeridge sees him and he goes along another half-mile or so, and he meets Miss Vane at four o’clock—as he did.’

‘H’m!’ Glaisher revolved this idea in his mind. It had its attractive points, but it left a great deal open to question.

‘But the mare, Ormond?’

‘Well, sir, there’s only one person could have brought back the mare that we know of, and that’s Weldon, and only one time he could have done it, and that’s between four o’clock, when Polwhistle and Tom said good-bye to him, and 5.20, when Miss Vane saw him in Darley. Let’s see how that works out, sir. It’s three and a half miles from Hink’s Lane to the place where the mare was left; he could start at four, walk there in an hour or a bit less, ride back quick, and just be back at 5.20 in time to be seen by them two. It all fits in, sir, doesn’t it?’

‘It fits, as you say, Ormond, but it’s what I’d call a tight fit. Why do you suppose Perkins came back with Miss Vane instead of going on to Lesston Hoe?’

‘It might be to find out what she was going to do, sir, or it might be just to look innocent-like. He’d be surprised to see her there, I expect—not knowing about her going up to Brennerton—and it’s not wonderful he should have seemed a bit put about when she spoke to him. He might think going back with her was the boldest and best thing to do. Or he may have felt anxious and wanted to see for himself whether Weldon had got back with the nag all right. He was very careful not to speak to Weldon when they did meet—went out of his way to have nothing to do with him, as you might say. And as for his clearing off the way he did, that’s natural if you come to think of it, supposing he had those pants and things all soiled with blood in his knapsack.’

‘You’ve got an answer for everything, Ormond. Here’s another for you. Why in the name of goodness, if all this is true, didn’t Perkins ride the ruddy horse right up to the rock, while he was about it? He could have taken her back and tethered her up just the same.’

‘Yes, sir, and I fancy, judging from the ring-bolt, that must have been the first idea. But I was looking at those cliffs today and I noticed that it’s just about a mile from the Flat-Iron that the road comes so close to the edge of the cliff as to give you a proper view down on to the beach. When they came to think it over they may have said to themselves that a man riding along that open bit of beach would be conspicuous-like. So Perkins cached the gee where the cover ended and paddled the rest of the way, thinking it would be less noticeable.’

‘Yes, there’s something in that. But all this depends on the time that Perkins passed through Darley. We’ll have to get that looked into. Mind, Ormond, I’m not saying you haven’t done a good bit of thinking over this, and I like to see you having initiative and striking out a line for yourself; but we can’t go behind facts when all’s said and done.’

“No, sir; certainly not, sir. But of course, sir, even if it wasn’t Perkins, that’s not to say it wasn’t somebody else.’

‘Who wasn’t somebody else?’

‘The accomplice, sir.’

‘That’s beginning all over again, Ormond.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, cut along and see what you can make of it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Glaisher rubbed his chin thoughtfully when Ormond was gone. This business was worrying him. The Chief Constable had been chivvying him that morning and making things unpleasant. The Chief Constable, a military gentleman of the old school, thought that Glaisher was making too much fuss. To him it was obvious that the rather contemptible foreign dancing-fellow had cut his own throat, and he thought that sleeping dogs should be left alone. Glaisher only wished he could leave the thing alone, but he felt a sincere conviction that there was more to it than that. He was not comfortable in his mind—never had been. There were too many odd circumstances. The razor, the gloves, Weldon’s incomprehensible movements, the taciturnity of Mr Pollock, the horseshoe, the ring-bolt, Bright’s mistake about the tides and, above all, the cipher letters and the photograph of the mysterious Feodora—each one of these might, separately, have some ordinary and trivial explanation, but not all of them—surely, not all of them. He had put these points to the Chief Constable, and had received a grudging kind of permission to go on with his inquiries. But he was not happy.

He wondered what Umpelty was doing. He had heard the story of his excursion to town with Wimsey, and felt that this had only plunged matters into a still deeper obscurity. Then there was the tiresomeness about Bright. Bright was reported to be working his way towards London. It was going to be a job keeping an eye on him—especially as Glaisher was rather hard put to it to find a good reason for the surveillance. After all, what had Bright done? He was an unsatisfactory character and he had said it was high tide when it was, in fact, low tide—in every other respect he appeared to have been telling the exact truth. Glaisher realised that he was making himself unpopular with the police of half-a-dozen counties, on very insufficient grounds.

He dismissed the case from his mind and applied himself to a quantity of routine business connected with petty theft and motoring offences, and so got through the evening. But after his supper he found the problem of Paul Alexis gnawing at his brain again. Umpelty had reported the result of a few routine inquiries about Perkins, of which the only interesting fact was that Perkins was a member of the Soviet Club and was reported to have Communist sympathies. Just the sort of sympathies he would have, thought Glaisher: it was always these week, mild, timid-looking people who yearned for revolution and bloodshed. But, taken in connection with the cipher letters, the matter assumed a certain importance. He wondered how soon the photographs of the letters found on Alexis would come to hand: He fretted, was short with his wife, trod on the cat, and decided to go round to the Bellevue and look up Lord Peter Wimsey.

Wimsey was out, and a little further inquiry led Glaisher to Mrs Lefranc’s, where he found, not only Wimsey, but also Inspector Umpelty, seated with Harriet in the bed-sitting-room that had once housed Paul Alexis, all three apparently engaged in a Missing Word Competition. Books were strewn about the place, and Harriet, with Chambers’s Dictionary in her hand, was reading out words to her companions.

‘Hullo, Super!’ exclaimed Wimsey. ‘Come along! I’m sure our hostess will be delighted to see you. We are making discoveries.’

‘Are you, indeed, my lord? Well, so have we—at least, that lad, Ormond, has been rummaging about, as you might say.’

He plunged into his story. He was glad to try it on somebody else. Umpelty grunted. Wimsey took a map and a sheet of paper and began figuring out distances and times. They discussed it. They argued about the speed of the mare. Wimsey was inclined to think that he might have underestimated it. He would borrow the animal—make a test—

Harriet said nothing.

‘And what do you think?’ Wimsey asked her, suddenly.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Harriet.

Glaisher laughed.

‘Miss Vane’s intuition, as they call it, is against it,’ said he.

‘It’s not intuition,’ retorted Harriet. There’s no such thing. It’s common sense. It’s artistic sense, if you like. All those theories—they’re all wrong. They’re artificial—they smell of the lamp.’

Glaisher laughed again. ‘That’s beyond me, that is.’

You men,’ said Harriet, ‘have let yourselves be carried away by all these figures and time-tables and you’ve lost sight of what you’re really dealing with. But it’s all machine-made. It cracks at every joint. It’s like—like a bad plot, built up round an idea that won’t work. You’ve got it into your heads that you must get Weldon and the horse and Perkins into it somehow or other; and when you come up against an inconsistency, you say: “Oh, well —we’ll get over that somehow. We’ll make him do this. We’ll make him do that.” But you can’t make people do things to suit you—not in real life. Why are you obliged to bring all these people into it at all?’

‘You won’t deny that there’s a good deal that needs explaining,’ said Umpelty.

‘Of course there’s a lot that needs explaining, but your explanations are more incredible than the problem. It’s not possible that anyone should plan a murder like that. You’ve made them too ingenious in one way and too silly in another. Whatever the explanation is, it must be simpler that that— bigger—not so cramped. Can’t you see what I mean? You’re simply making up a case, that’s all.’

‘I see what you mean,’ said Wimsey.

‘I daresay it is a bit complicated,’ admitted Glaisher, ‘but if we don’t make up a case against Weldon and Bright and Perkins, or two of them, or one of them—whom are we to make up a case against? Against Bolshies? Well, but this Perkins is a Bolshie, or a Communist, anyhow, and if he’s in it, then Weldon must be, because of their mutual alibi.’

‘Yes, I know; but your whole case is like that. First you want Weldon to be guilty, because of getting his mother’s money, so you say that Perkins must be his accomplice because he’s giving an alibi for Weldon. Now you want Perkins to be guilty because he’s a Communist, and so you say Weldon must be the accomplice, because he’s giving an alibi for Perkins. But it’s simply impossible that both those theories should be true. And how did Weldon and Perkins get to know one another?’

‘We haven’t finished making inquiries yet.’

‘No; but it does seem unlikely, doesn’t it? A Council School teacher from the Tottenham Court Road and a Huntingdonshire farmer. What form? What likelihood? And as for Bright, you have nothing—nothing to connect him with either of them. And if his story’s true, then there’s not an atom of proof that Alexis didn’t kill himself. And in any case, if you want to prove murder, you’ve got to connect Bright with whoever did it, and you certainly haven’t found the least trace of communication between him and either Weldon or Perkins.’

‘Has Bright been receiving any letters?’ asked Wimsey of Umpelty.

‘Not a line, not since he turned up here, anyway.’

‘As for Perkins,’ said Glaisher, ‘we’ll soon get a line on him. Of course, his getting knocked down and laid up like that must have puzzled his accomplices just as much as it puzzled us. There may be a whole correspondence waiting for him at some accommodation address, under another name, in some town or other.’

‘You will insist on its being Perkins,’ protested Harriet. You really think Perkins rode a horse bare-backed along the beach and cut a man’s throat to the bone with a razor?’

‘Why not?’ said Umpelty.

‘Does he look like it?’

‘“Do I look like it? said the Knave. Which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.” I’ve never seen the bloke, but I admit that his description isn’t encouraging.’ Wimsey grinned. ‘But then, you know, friend Henry took me for something in the night-club line.’

Harriet glanced briefly at his lean limbs and springy build.

‘You needn’t fish,’ she said, coldly. ‘We all know that your appearance of languor is assumed and that you are really capable of tying pokers into knots with your artistic fingers. Perkins is flabby and has a neck like a chicken and those flip-flop hands.’ She turned to Glaisher. ‘I can’t see Perkins in the rôle of a desperado. Why, your original case against me was a better one.’

Glaisher blinked, but took the thrust stolidly.

‘Yes, miss. It had a lot to be said for it, that had.’

‘Of course. Why did you give it up, by the way?’

Some instinct seemed to warn Glaisher that he was treading on thin ice.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seemed a bit too obvious, so to say, and besides, we couldn’t trace any connection between you and the deceased.’

‘It was wise of you to make inquiries. Because, of course, you had only my word for everything, hadn’t you? And those photographs were evidence that I was pretty coldblooded? And my previous history was rather—shall we say, full of incident?’

‘Just so, miss.’ The Superintendent’s eyes were expressionless.

‘Of whom did you make the inquiries, by the way?’

‘Of your charwoman,’ said Glaisher.

‘Oh! you think she would know whether I knew Paul Alexis?’

‘In our experience,’ replied the Superintendent, ‘charwomen mostly know things of that sort.’

‘So they do. And you’ve really given up suspecting me?’

‘Oh, dear me, yes.’

‘On my charwoman’s testimony to my character?’

‘Supplemented,’ said the Superintendent, ‘by our own observation.’

‘I see.’ Harriet looked hard at Glaisher, but he was proof against this kind of third degree, and smiled blandly in response. Wimsey, who had listened with his face like a mask, determined to give the stolid policeman the first prize for tact. He now dropped a cold comment into the conversation.

‘You and Miss Vane having made short work of each other’s theories,’ he said, ‘perhaps you would like to hear what we have been doing this evening.’

‘Very much, my lord.’

‘We began,’ said Wimsey, ‘by making a new search for clues among the corpse’s belongings, hoping, of course, to get some light on Feodora or the cipher letters. Inspector Umpelty kindly lent us his sympathetic assistance. In fact, the Inspector has been simply invaluable. He has sat here now for two hours, watching us search, and every time we looked into a hole or corner and found it empty, he has been able to assure us that he had already looked into the hole or corner and found it empty too.’

Inspector Umpelty chuckled.

‘The only thing we’ve found,’ went on Lord Peter, ‘is Chambers’s Dictionary, and we didn’t find that this evening, because Miss Vane had found it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crosswords instead of getting on with her writing. We’ve found a lot of words marked with pencil. We were engaged in making a collection of them when you came in. Perhaps you’d like to hear a few specimens. Here you are. I’m reeling them off at random: Peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight, chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason, cabriolet, rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct. There are lots more. Do these words say anything to you? Some of them have an ecclesiastical ring about them, but on the other hand, some of them have not. Courtesan, for example. To which I may add tambourine, wrestling and fashion.’

Glaisher laughed.

‘Sounds to me as though the young fellow was a crossword fan himself. They’re nice long words.’

‘But not the longest. There are many longer, such as supralapsarian, monocotyledenous and diaphragmatic, but he hasn’t marked any of the real sesquipedalians. The longest we have found is rheumatics, with ten letters. They all have two peculiarities in common, though, as far as we’ve gone— that are rather suggestive.’

‘What’s that, my lord?’

‘None of them contains any repeated letter, and none of them is less than seven letters long.’

Superintendent Glaisher suddenly flung up one hand like a child at school.

‘The cipher letters!’ he cried.

‘As you say, the cipher letters. It looks to us as though these might be key-words to a cipher, and from the circumstance that no letters are repeated in any of them, I fancy one might be able to make a guess at the type of cipher. The trouble is that we have already counted a couple of hundred marked words, and haven’t finished the alphabet yet. Which leads me to a depressing inference.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That they have been changing the key-word in every letter. What I think has happened is this. I think that each letter contained in it the key-word of the next, and that these marks represent a stock of words that Alexis looked up beforehand, so as to be ready with them when it came to his turn to write.’

‘Couldn’t they be the key-words already used ?’

‘Hardly. I don’t believe he has sent out over two hundred code-letters since March, when they first began to be exchanged. Even if he wrote one letter a day, he couldn’t have got through that number.’

‘No more he could, my lord. Still, if the paper we found on him is one of these cipher letters, then the key-word will be one of those marked here. That narrows things a bit.’

‘I don’t think so. I think these are key-words for the letters Alexis sent out. In each letter he would announce his keyword for the next letter. But his correspondent would do the same, so that the key-word for the paper found on Alexis is much more likely to be one that isn’t marked here. Unless, of course, the paper is one of Alexis’ own writing, which isn’t very likely.’

‘We can’t even say that, then,’ moaned Glaisher. ‘Because the correspondent might very well hit on some word that Alexis had marked in advance. It might be anything.’

‘Perfectly true. Then the only bit of help we get from this is that the cipher used was an English word, and that the letters were probably written in English. That doesn’t absolutely follow, because they might be in French or German or Italian, all of which have the same alphabet as English; but they can’t be in Russian at any rate, which has an alphabet totally different. So that’s one mercy.’

‘If it’s anything to do with Bolsheviks,’ said Glaisher, thoughtfully, ‘it’s a bit surprising they didn’t write in Russian. It would have made it doubly safe if they had. Russian by itself would be bad enough, but a Russian cipher would be a snorter.’

‘Quite. As I’ve said before, I can’t quite swallow the Bolshevik theory. And yet—dash it all! I simply cannot fit these letters in with the Weldon side of the business.’

‘What I want to know,’ put in the Inspector, ‘is this. How did the murderers, whoever they were, get Alexis out to the Flat-Iron? Or if it was Bolsheviks that got him there, how did Weldon & Co. know he was going to be there? It must be the same party that made the appointment and did the throat-cutting. Which brings us to the point that either Weldon’s party wrote the letter or the foreign party did the murder.’

‘True, O king.’

‘And where,’ asked Harriet, ‘does Olga Kohn come in?’

‘Ah!’ said Wimsey, ‘there you are. That’s the deepest mystery of the lot. I’ll swear that girl was telling the truth, and I’ll swear that the extremely un-Irish Mr Sullivan was telling the truth too. Little flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, but, as the poet goes on to say, if I could understand I should know who the guilty man is. But I don’t understand. Who is the mysterious bearded gentleman who asked Mr Sullivan for the portrait of a Russian-looking girl, and how did the portrait get into the corpse’s pocket-book, signed with the name Feodora? These are deep waters, Watson.’

‘I’m coming back to my original opinion,’ grumbled the inspector. ‘I believe the fellow was dotty and cut his own throat and there’s an end of it. He probably had a mania for collecting girls’ photographs and sending himself letters in cipher.’

‘And posting them in Czechoslovakia?’

‘Oh, well, somebody must have done that for him. As far as I can see, we’ve no case against Weldon and no case against Bright, and the case against Perkins is as full of holes as a colander. As for Bolsheviks—where are they? Your friend Chief-Inspector Parker has put out inquiries about Bolshevik agents in this country, and the answer is that none of ’em are known to have been about here lately, and as regards Thursday, 18th, they all seem to be accounted for. You may say it’s an unknown Bolshevik agent, but there aren’t as many of those going about as you might think. These London chaps know quite a lot more than the ordinary public realises. If there’d been anything funny about Alexis and his crowd, they’d have been on to it like a shot.’

Wimsey sighed, and rose.

‘I’m going home to bed,’ he declared. ‘We must wait till we get the photographs of the paper. Life is dust and ashes. I can’t prove my theories and Bunter has deserted me again. He disappeared from Wilvercombe on the same day as William Bright, leaving me a message to say that one of my favourite socks had been lost in the wash and that he had lodged a complaint with the management. Miss Vane, Harriet, if I may call you so, will you marry me and look after my socks, and, incidentally be the only woman-novelist who ever accepted a proposal of marriage in the presence of a superintendent and inspector of Police?’

‘Not even for the sake of the headlines.’

‘I thought not. Even publicity isn’t what it was. See here, Superintendent, will you take a bet that Alexis didn’t commit suicide and that he wasn’t murdered by Bolsheviks?’

The Superintendent replied cautiously that he wasn’t a sporting man.

‘Crushed again!’ moaned his lordship. ‘All the same,’ he added, with a flash of his old spirit, ‘I’ll break that alibi if I die for it.’