Unnatural Death

Book 0: Lord Peter Wimsey

by Dorothy L. Sayers, Chris Miller, (adaptation)

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The third book in Dorothy L Sayers' classic Lord Peter Wimsey series - a must-listen for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries.

'No sign of foul play,' says Dr Carr after the post-mortem on Agatha Dawson. The case is closed. But Lord Peter Wimsey is not satisfied . . .

With no clues to work on, he begins his own investigation. No clues, that is, until the sudden, senseless murder of Agatha's maid.

What is going on in the mysterious Mrs Forrest's Mayfair flat? And can Wimsey catch a desperate murderer before he himself becomes one of the victims?

Release date: October 20, 2015

Publisher: HarperPerennial Classics

Print pages: 240

Sample

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Communicated by Paul Austin Delagardie

I am asked by Miss Sayers to fill up certain lacunae and correct a few trifling errors of fact in her account of my nephew Peter’s career. I shall do so with pleasure. To appear publicly in print is every man’s ambition, and by acting as a kind of running footman to my nephew’s triumph I shall only be showing a modesty suitable to my advanced age.

    The Wimsey family is an ancient one – too ancient, if you ask me. The only sensible thing Peter’s father ever did was to ally his exhausted stock with the vigorous French-English strain of the Delagardies. Even so, my nephew Gerald (the present Duke of Denver) is nothing but a beef-witted English squire, and my niece Mary was flighty and foolish enough till she married a policeman and settled down. Peter, I am glad to say, takes after his mother and me. True, he is all nerves and nose – but that is better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brother, or a bundle of emotions, like Gerald’s boy, Saint-George. He has at least inherited the Delagardie brains, by way of safeguard to the unfortunate Wimsey temperament.

    Peter was born in 1890. His mother was being very much worried at the time by her husband’s behaviour (Denver was always tiresome, though the big scandal did not break out till the Jubilee year), and her anxieties may have affected the boy. He was a colourless shrimp of a child, very restless and mischievous, and always much too sharp for his age. He had nothing of Gerald’s robust physical beauty, but he developed what I can best call a kind of bodily cleverness, more skill than strength. He had a quick eye for a ball and beautiful hands for a horse. He had the devil’s own pluck, too: the intelligent sort of pluck that sees the risk before it takes it. He suffered badly from nightmares as a child. To his father’s consternation he grew up with a passion for books and music.

    His early school days were not happy. He was a fastidious child, and I suppose it was natural that his school-fellows should call him ‘Flimsy’ and treat him as a kind of comic turn. And he might, in sheer self-protection, have accepted the position and degenerated into a mere licensed buffoon, if some games-master at Eton had not discovered that he was a brilliant natural cricketer. After that, of course, all his eccentricities were accepted as wit, and Gerald underwent the salutary shock of seeing his despised younger brother become a bigger personality than himself. By the time he reached the Sixth Form, Peter had contrived to become the fashion – athlete, scholar, arbiter elegantiarum – nec pluribus impar. Cricket had a great deal to do with it – plenty of Eton men will remember the ‘Great Flim’ and his performance against Harrow – but I take credit to myself for introducing him to a good tailor, showing him the way about Town, and teaching him to distinguish good wine from bad. Denver bothered little about him – he had too many entanglements of his own and in addition was taken up with Gerald, who by this time was making a prize fool of himself at Oxford. As a matter of fact Peter never got on with his father, he was a ruthless young critic of the paternal misdemeanours, and his sympathy for his mother had a destructive effect upon his sense of humour.

    Denver, needless to say, was the last person to tolerate his own failings in his offspring. It cost him a good deal of money to extricate Gerald from the Oxford affair, and he was willing enough to turn his other son over to me. Indeed, at the age of seventeen, Peter came to me of his own accord. He was old for his age and exceedingly reasonable, and I treated him as a man of the world. I established him in trustworthy hands in Paris, instructing him to keep his affairs upon a sound business footing and to see that they terminated with goodwill on both sides and generosity on his. He fully justified my confidence. I believe that no woman has ever found cause to complain of Peter’s treatment; and two at least of them have since married royalty (rather obscure royalties, I admit, but royalty of a sort). Here again, I insist upon my due share of the credit; however good the material one has to work upon it is ridiculous to leave any young man’s social education to chance.

    The Peter of this period was really charming, very frank, modest and well-mannered, with a pretty, lively wit. In 1909 he went up with a scholarship to read History at Balliol, and here, I must confess, he became rather intolerable. The world was at his feet, and he began to give himself airs. He acquired affectations, an exaggerated Oxford manner and a monocle, and aired his opinions a good deal, both in and out of the Union, though I will do him the justice to say that he never attempted to patronise his mother or me. He was in his second year when Denver broke his neck out hunting and Gerald succeeded to the title. Gerald showed more sense of responsibility than I had expected in dealing with the estate; his worst mistake was to marry his cousin Helen, a scrawny, over-bred prude, all county from head to heel. She and Peter loathed each other cordially; but he could always take refuge with his mother at the Dower House.

    And then, in his last year at Oxford, Peter fell in love with a child of seventeen and instantly forgot everything he had ever been taught. He treated that girl as if she was made of gossamer, and me as a hardened old monster of depravity who had made him unfit to touch her delicate purity. I won’t deny that they made an exquisite pair – all white and gold – a prince and princess of moonlight, people said. Moonshine would have been nearer the mark. What Peter was to do in twenty years’ time with a wife who had neither brains nor character nobody but his mother and myself ever troubled to ask, and he, of course, was completely besotted. Happily, Barbara’s parents decided that she was too young to marry; so Peter went in for his final Schools in the temper of a Sir Eglamore achieving his first dragon; laid his First-Class Honours at his lady’s feet like the dragon’s head, and settled down to a period of virtuous probation.

    Then came the War. Of course the young idiot was mad to get married before he went. But his own honourable scruples made him mere wax in other people’s hands. It was pointed out to him that if he came back mutilated it would be very unfair to the girl. He hadn’t thought of that, and rushed off in a frenzy of self-abnegation to release her from the engagement. I had no hand in that; I was glad enough of the result, but I couldn’t stomach the means.

    He did very well in France; he made a good officer and the men liked him. And then, if you please, he came back on leave with his captaincy in ’16, to find the girl married – to a hardbitten rake of a Major Somebody, whom she had nursed in the V.A.D. hospital, and whose motto with women was catch ’em quick and treat ’em rough. It was pretty brutal; for the girl hadn’t had the nerve to tell Peter beforehand. They got married in a hurry when they heard he was coming home, and all he got on landing was a letter, announcing the fait accompli and reminding him that he had set her free himself.

    I will say for Peter that he came straight to me and admitted that he had been a fool. ‘All right,’ said I, ‘you’ve had your lesson. Don’t go and make a fool of yourself in the other direction.’ So he went back to his job with (I am sure) the fixed intention of getting killed; but all he got was his majority and his D.S.O. for some recklessly good intelligence work behind the German front. In 1918 he was blown up and buried in a shell-hole near Caudry, and that left him with a bad nervous breakdown, lasting, on and off, for two years. After that, he set himself up in a flat in Piccadilly, with the man Bunter (who had been his sergeant and was, and is, devoted to him), and started out to put himself together again.

    I don’t mind saying that I was prepared for almost anything. He had lost all his beautiful frankness, he shut everybody out of his confidence, including his mother and me, adopted an impenetrable frivolity of manner and a dilettante pose, and became, in fact, the complete comedian. He was wealthy and could do as he chose, and it gave me a certain amount of sardonic entertainment to watch the efforts of post-war feminine London to capture him. ‘It can’t,’ said one solicitous matron, ‘be good for poor Peter to live like a hermit.’ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘if he did, it wouldn’t be.’ No; from that point of view he gave me no anxiety. But I could not but think it dangerous that a man of his ability should have no job to occupy his mind, and I told him so.

    In 1921 came the business of the Attenbury Emeralds. That affair has never been written up, but it made a good deal of noise, even at that noisiest of periods. But the trial of the thief was a series of red-hot sensations, and the biggest sensation of the bunch was when Lord Peter Wimsey walked into the witness-box as chief witness for the prosecution.

    That was notoriety with a vengeance. Actually, to an experienced intelligence officer, I don’t suppose the investigation had offered any great difficulties; but a ‘noble sleuth’ was something new in thrills. Denver was furious; personally, I didn’t mind what Peter did, provided he did something. I thought he seemed happier for the work, and I liked the Scotland Yard man he had picked up during the run of the case. Charles Parker is a quiet, sensible, well-bred fellow, and has been a good friend and brother-in-law to Peter. He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.

    The only trouble about Peter’s new hobby was that it had to be more than a hobby, if it was to be any hobby for a gentleman. You cannot get murderers hanged for your private entertainment. Peter’s intellect pulled him one way and his nerves another, till I began to be afraid they would pull him to pieces. At the end of every case we had the old nightmares and shell-shock over again. And then Denver, of all people – Denver, the crashing great booby, in the middle of his fulminations against Peter’s degrading and notorious police activities, must needs get himself indicated on a murder charge and stand his trial in the House of Lords, amid a blaze of publicity which made all Peter’s efforts in that direction look like damp squibs.

    Peter pulled his brother out of that mess, and, to my relief, was human enough to get drunk on the strength of it. He now admits that his ‘hobby’ is his legitimate work for society, and has developed sufficient interest in public affairs to undertake small diplomatic jobs from time to time under the Foreign Office. Of late he has become a little more ready to show his feelings, and a little less terrified of having to show.

    His latest eccentricity had been to fall in love with that girl whom he cleared of the charge of poisoning her lover. She refused to marry him, as any woman of character would. Gratitude and a humiliating inferiority complex are no foundation for matrimony; the position was false from the start. Peter had the sense, this time, to take my advice. ‘My boy,’ I said, ‘what was wrong for you twenty years back is right now. It’s not the innocent young things that need gentle handling – it’s the ones that have been frightened and hurt. Begin again from the beginning – but I warn you that you will need all the self-discipline you have ever learnt.’

    Well, he has tried. I don’t think I have ever seen such patience. The girl has brains and character and honesty; but he has got to teach her how to take, which is far more difficult than learning to give. I think they will find one another, if they can keep their passions from running ahead of their wills. He does realise, I know, that in this case there can be no consent but free consent.

    Peter is forty-five now, it is really time he was settled. As you will see, I have been one of the important formative influences in his career, and, on the whole, I feel he does me credit. He is a true Delagardie, with little of the Wimseys about him except (I must be fair) that underlying sense of social responsibility which prevents the English landed gentry from being a total loss, spiritually speaking. Detective or no detective, he is a scholar and a gentleman; it will amuse me to see what sort of shot he makes at being a husband and father. I am getting an old man, and have no son of my own (that I know of); I should be glad to see Peter happy. But as his mother says, ‘Peter has always had everything except the things he really wanted,’ and I suppose he is luckier than most.

       Paul Austin Delagardie

10

THE WILL AGAIN

‘The will! the will! We will hear Caesar’s will!’

       Julius Caesar

 

‘Oh, Miss Evelyn, my dear, oh, poor dear!’

    The tall girl in black started, and looked round.

    ‘Why, Mrs Gulliver – how very, very kind of you to come and meet me!’

    ‘And glad I am to have the chance, my dear, all owing to these kind gentlemen,’ cried the landlady, flinging her arms round the girl and clinging to her to the great annoyance of the other passengers pouring off the gangway. The elder of the two gentlemen referred to gently put his hand on her arm, and drew them out of the stream of traffic.

    ‘Poor lamb!’ mourned Mrs Gulliver, ‘coming all this way by your lonesome, and poor dear Miss Bertha in her grave and such terrible things said, and her such a good girl always.’

    ‘It’s poor Mother I’m thinking about,’ said the girl. ‘I couldn’t rest. I said to my husband, “I must go,” I said, and he said, “My honey, if I could come with you I would, but I can’t leave the farm, but if you feel you ought to go, you shall,” he said.’

    ‘Dear Mr Cropper – he was always that good and kind,’ said Mrs Gulliver, ‘but here I am, forgittin’ all about the good gentlemen as brought me all this way to see you. This is Lord Peter Wimsey, and this is Mr Murbles, as put in that unfortnit advertisement, as I truly believes was the beginnin’ of it all. ‘Ow I wish I’d never showed it to your poor sister, not but wot I believe the gentleman acted with the best intentions, ’avin’ now seen ’im, which at first I thought ’e was a wrong’un.’

    ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mrs Cropper, turning with the ready address derived from service in a big restaurant. ‘Just before I sailed I got a letter from poor Bertha enclosing your ad. I couldn’t make anything of it, but I’d be glad to know anything which can clear up this shocking business. What have they said it is – murder?’

    ‘There was a verdict of natural death at the inquiry,’ said Mr Murbles, ‘but we feel that the case presents some inconsistencies, and shall be exceedingly grateful for your co-operation in looking into the matter, and also in connection with another matter which may or may not have some bearing upon it.’

    ‘Righto,’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘I’m sure you’re proper gentlemen, if Mrs Gulliver answers for you, for I’ve never known her mistaken in a person yet, have I, Mrs G.? I’ll tell you anything I know, which isn’t much, for it’s all a horrible mystery to me. Only I don’t want you to delay me, for I’ve got to go straight on down to Mother. She’ll be in a dreadful way, so fond as she was of Bertha, and she’s all alone except for the young girl that looks after her, and that’s not much comfort when you’ve lost your daughter so sudden.’

    ‘We shall not detain you a moment, Mrs Cropper,’ said Mr Murbles. ‘We propose, if you will allow us, to accompany you to London, and to ask you a few questions on the way, and then – again with your permission – we should like to see you safely home to Mrs Gotobed’s house, wherever that may be.’

    ‘Christchurch, near Bournemouth,’ said Lord Peter. ‘I’ll run you down straight away, if you like. It will save time.’

    ‘I say, you know all about it, don’t you?’ exclaimed Mrs Cropper with some admiration. ‘Well, hadn’t we better get a move on, or we’ll miss this train?’

    ‘Quite right,’ said Mr Murbles. ‘Allow me to offer you my arm.’

    Mrs Cropper approving of this arrangement, the party made its way to the station, after the usual disembarkation formalities. As they passed the barrier on the platform Mrs Cropper gave a little exclamation and leaned forward as though something had caught her eye.

    ‘What is it, Mrs Cropper?’ said Lord Peter’s voice in her ear. ‘Did you think you recognised somebody?’

    ‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter – you would – not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows. Yes, I did think I saw someone, but it couldn’t be, because the minute she caught my eye she went away.’

    ‘Who did you think it was?’

    ‘Why, I thought it looked like Miss Whittaker, as Bertha and me used to work for.’

    ‘Where was she?’

    ‘Just down by that pillar there, a tall dark lady in a crimson hat and grey fur. But she’s gone now.’

    ‘Excuse me.’

    Lord Peter unhitched Mrs Gulliver from his arm, hitched her smartly on to the unoccupied arm of Mr Murbles, and plunged into the crowd. Mr Murbles, quite unperturbed by this eccentric behaviour, shepherded the two women into an empty first-class carriage which, Mrs Cropper noted, bore a large label, ‘Reserved for Lord Peter Wimsey and party.’ Mrs Cropper made some protesting observation about her ticket, but Mr Murbles merely replied that everything was provided for, and that privacy could be more conveniently secured in this way.

    ‘Your friend’s going to be left behind,’ said Mrs Cropper as the train moved out.

    ‘That would be very unlike him,’ replied Mr Murbles, calmly unfolding a couple of rugs and exchanging his old-fashioned top-hat for a curious kind of travelling cap with flaps to it. Mrs Cropper, in the midst of her anxiety, could not help wondering where in the world he had contrived to purchase this Victorian relic. As a matter of fact, Mr Murbles’s caps were especially made to his own design by an exceedingly expensive West End hatter, who held Mr Murbles in deep respect as a real gentleman of the old school.

    Nothing, however, was seen of Lord Peter for something like a quarter of an hour, when he suddenly put his head in with an amiable smile and said:

    ‘One red-haired woman in a crimson hat; three dark women in black hats; several nondescript women in those pull-on sort of dust-coloured hats; old women with grey hair, various; sixteen flappers without hats – hats on rack, I mean, but none of ’em crimson; two obvious brides in blue hats; innumerable fair women in hats of all colours; one ash-blonde dressed as a nurse, none of ’em our friend as far as I know. Thought I best just toddle along the train to make sure. There’s just one dark sort of female whose hat I can’t see because it’s tucked down beside her. Wonder if Mrs Cropper would mind doin’ a little stagger down the corridor to take a squint at her.’

    Mrs Cropper, with some surprise, consented to do so.

    ‘Right you are. ’Splain later. About four carriages along. Now, look here, Mrs Cropper, if it should be anybody you know, I’d rather on the whole she didn’t spot you watching her. I want you to walk along behind me, just glancin’ into the compartments but keepin’ your collar turned up. When we come to the party I have in mind, I’ll make a screen for you, what?’

    These manoeuvres were successfully accomplished, Lord Peter lighting a cigarette opposite the suspected compartment, while Mrs Cropper viewed the hatless lady under cover of his raised elbows. But the result was disappointing. Mrs Cropper had never seen the lady before, and a further promenade from end to end of the train produced no better results.

    ‘We must leave it to Bunter, then,’ said his lordship, cheerfully, as they returned to their seats. ‘I put him on the trail as soon as you gave me the good word. Now, Mrs Cropper, we really get down to business. First of all, we should be glad of any suggestions you may have to make about your sister’s death. We don’t want to distress you, but we have got an idea that there might, just possibly, be something behind it.’

    ‘There’s just one thing, sir – your lordship, I suppose I should say. Bertha was a real good girl – I can answer for that absolutely. There wouldn’t have been any carryings-on with her young man – nothing of that. I know people have been saying all sorts of things, and perhaps, with lots of girls as they are, it isn’t to be wondered at. But, believe me, Bertha wouldn’t go for to do anything that wasn’t right. Perhaps you’d like to see this last letter she wrote to me. I’m sure nothing could be nicer and properer from a girl just looking forward to a happy marriage. Now, a girl as wrote like that wouldn’t be going larking about, sir, would she? I couldn’t rest, thinking they was saying that about her.’

    Lord Peter took the letter, glanced through it, and handed it reverently to Mr Murbles.

    ‘We’re not thinking that at all, Mrs Cropper, though of course we’re very glad to have your point of view, don’t you see. Now, do you think it possible your sister might have been – what shall I say? – got hold of by some woman with a plausible story and all that, and – well – pushed into some position which shocked her very much? Was she cautious and up to the tricks of London people and all that?’

    And he outlined Parker’s theory of the engaging Mrs Forrest and the supposed dinner in the flat.

    ‘Well, my lord, I wouldn’t say Bertha was a very quick girl – not as quick as me, you know. She’d always be ready to believe what she was told and give people credit for the best. Took more after her father, like. I’m Mother’s girl, they always said, and I don’t trust anybody farther than I can see them. But I’d warned her very careful against taking up with women as talks to a girl in the street, and she did ought to have been on her guard.’

    ‘Of course,’ said Peter, ‘it may have been somebody she’d got to know quite well – say, at the restaurant, and she thought she was a nice lady and there’d be no harm in going to see her. Or the lady might have suggested taking her into good service. One never knows.’

    ‘I think she’d have mentioned it in her letters if she’d talked to the lady much, my lord. It’s wonderful what a lot of things she’d find to tell me about the customers. And I don’t think she’d be for going into service again. We got real fed up with service, down in Leahampton.’

    ‘Ah, yes. Now that brings us to quite a different point – the thing we wanted to ask you or your sister about before this sad accident took place. You were in service with this Miss Whittaker whom you mentioned just now. I wonder if you’d mind telling us just exactly why you left. It was a good place, I suppose?’

    ‘Yes, my lord, quite a good place as places go, though of course a girl doesn’t get her freedom the way she does in a restaurant. And naturally there was a good deal of waiting on the old lady. Not as we minded that, for she was a very kind, good lady, and generous too.’

    ‘But when she became so ill, I suppose Miss Whittaker managed everything, what?’

    ‘Yes, my lord; but it wasn’t a hard place – lots of the girls envied us. Only Miss Whittaker was very particular.’

    ‘Especially about the china, what?’

    ‘Ah, they told you about that, then?’

    ‘I told ’em dearie,’ put in Mrs Gulliver, ‘I told ’em all about how you come to leave your place and go to London.’

    ‘And it struck us,’ put in Mr Murbles, ‘that it was, shall we say, somewhat rash of Miss Whittaker to dismiss so competent and, if I may put it so, so well-spoken and personable a pair of maids on so trivial a pretext.’

    ‘You’re right there, sir. Bertha – I told you she was the trusting one – she was quite ready to believe as she done wrong, and thought how good it was of Miss Whittaker to forgive her breaking the china, and take so much interest in sending us to London, but I always thought there was something more than met the eye. Didn’t I, Mrs Gulliver?’

    ‘That you did, dear; something more than meets the eye, that’s what you says to me, and what I agrees with.’

    ‘And did you, in your own mind,’ pursued Mr Murbles, ‘connect this sudden dismissal with anything which had taken place?’

    ‘Well, I did then,’ replied Mrs Cropper, with some spirit. ‘I said to Bertha . . .