Have His Carcase

‘Yes, miss,’ said Inspector Umpelty, grinning also. He had his private cause for amusement. If Harriet’s note-case had ensured her reception at the Resplendent, — it was his own private whisper of friend of Lord Peter Wimsey that had produced the view over the sea, the bath and the balcony. It was just as well that Harriet did not know this. It would have annoyed her.

Curiously enough, however, the image of Lord Peter kept intruding upon her mind while she was telephoning her address to the Morning Star, and even, while she was working her way through the Resplendent’s expensive and admirable dinner. If the relations between them had not been what they were, it would have been only fair to ring him up and tell him about the corpse with the cut throat. But under the circumstances, the action might be misinterpreted. And, in any case, the thing was probably only the dullest kind of suicide, not worth bringing to his attention. Not nearly so complicated and interesting a problem, for instance, as the central situation in The Fountain-Pen Mystery. In that absorbing mystery, the villain was at the moment engaged in committing a crime in Edinburgh, while constructing an. ingenious alibi involving a steam-yacht, a wireless time-signal, five clocks and the change from summer to winter time. (Apparently the cut-throat gentleman had come from the Wilvercombe direction. By road? by train? Had he walked from Darley Halt? If not, who had brought him?) Really, she must try and concentrate on this alibi. The town-clock was the great difficulty. How could that be altered? And altered it must be, for the whole alibi depended on its being heard to strike midnight at the appropriate moment. Could the man who looked after it be made into an accomplice? Who did look after town-hall clocks? (Why gloves? And had she left her own finger-prints on the razor?) Was it, after all, going to be necessary to go to Edinburgh? Perhaps there was no town-hall and no clock. A church-clock would do, of course. But church-clocks and bodies in belfries had been rather overdone lately. (It was odd about Mr Perkins. If the solution, was murder after, all, could not the murderer have walked through, the water to some point? Perhaps she ought to have followed the shore and not the coast-road. Too late now, in any case.) And she, had not properly worked out the speed of the steam-yacht. One ought to know about these things. Lord Peter would know, of course; he must have sailed in plenty of steam yachts. It must be nice to be really rich. Anybody who married Lord Peter would be rich, of course. And he was amusing. Nobody could say he would be dull to live with. But the trouble was that you never knew what anybody was like to live with except by living with them. It wasn’t, worth it. Not even to know all about steam-yachts. A novelist couldn’t possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information. Harriet pleased herself over the coffee with sketching out the career of an American detective-novelist who contracted a fresh marriage for each new book. For a book about poisons, she would marry an analytical chemist; for a book about somebody’s will, a solicitor; for a book about strangling, a — a hangman, of course. There might be something in it. A spoof book, of course. And the villainess might do away with each husband by the method described in the hook she was working on at the time. Too obvious? Well, perhaps.