The Case of the Late Pig
Read The Case of the Late Pig Online
Authors: Margery Allingham
CONTENTS
1.
Invitations to the Funeral were Informal
9. ‘
And a Very Good Day to You, Sir
’
About the Book
Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral. Soon other corpses start to turn up, just as Peters’s body goes missing. It takes all Campion’s coolly incisive powers of detection to unravel the crime.
About the Author
Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She attended the Perse School in Cambridge before returning to London to the Regent Street Polytechnic. Her father – author H. J. Allingham – encouraged her to write, and was delighted when she contributed to her aunt’s cinematic magazine,
The Picture Show
, at the age of eight.
Her first novel was published when she was seventeen. In 1928 she published her first detective story,
The White Cottage Mystery
, which had been serialised in the
Daily Express
. The following year, in
The Crime at Black Dudley
, she introduced the character who was to become the hallmark of her writing – Albert Campion. Her novels heralded the more sophisticated suspense genre: characterised by her intuitive intelligence, extraordinary energy and accurate observation, they vary from the grave to the openly satirical, whilst never losing sight of the basic rules of the classic detective tale. Famous for her London thrillers, such as
Hide My Eyes
and
The Tiger in the Smoke
, she has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city’s shady underworld.
In 1927 she married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter. They divided their time between their Bloomsbury flat and an old house in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. Margery Allingham died in 1966.
Also by Margery Allingham
The Crime at Black Dudley
Mystery Mile
Look to the Lady
Police at the Funeral
Sweet Danger
Death of a Ghost
Dancers in Mourning
Flowers for the Judge
Mr Campion and Others
The Fashion in Shrouds
Black Plumes
Coroner’s Pidgin
Traitor’s Purse
The Casebook of Mr Campion
More Work for the Undertaker
The Tiger in the Smoke
The Beckoning Lady
Hide My Eyes
Crime and Mr Campion
The China Governess
The Mind Readers
A Cargo of Eagles
The Return of Mr Campion
Mr Campion’s Quarry
Mr Campion’s Lucky Day
For
MR MALCOLM JOHNSON
from
MR ALBERT CAMPION
Margery Allingham
T
HE
C
ASE OF THE
L
ATE
P
IG
CHAPTER 1
The Invitations to the Funeral were Informal
THE MAIN THING
to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion’s, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.
It begins with me eating in bed.
Lord Powne’s valet took lessons in elocution and since then has read
The Times
to His Lordship while His Lordship eats his unattractive nut-and-milk breakfast.
Lugg, who in spite of magnificent qualities has elements of the Oaf about him, met His Lordship’s valet in the Mayfair mews pub where they cater for gentlemen in the service of gentlemen and was instantly inspired to imitation. Lugg has not taken lessons in elocution, at least not since he left Borstal in the reign of Edward the Seventh. When he came into my service he was a parole man with a stupendous record of misplaced bravery and ingenuity. Now he reads
The Times
to me when I eat, whether I like it or not.
Since his taste does not run towards the literary in journalism he reads to me the only columns in that paper which do appeal to him. He reads the Deaths.
‘Peters …’ he read, heaving his shirt-sleeved bulk between me and the light. ‘Know anyone called Peters, cock?’
I was reading a letter which had interested me particularly because it was both flowery and unsigned and did not hear him, so presently he laid down the paper with gentle exasperation.
‘Answer me, can’t you?’ he said plaintively. ‘What’s the
good
of me trying to give this place a bit of tone if you don’t back me up? Mr Turke says ’Is Lordship is most attentive during the readings. He chews everything ’e eats forty times before ’e swallers and keeps ’is mind on everything that’s being read to ’im.’
‘So I should think,’ I said absently. I was taken by the letter. It was not the ordinary anonymous filth by any means.
‘
P
ETERS
– R. I. Peters, aged 37, on Thursday the 9th, at Tethering, after a short illness. Funeral, Tethering Church, 2.30 Saturday. No flowers. Friends will accept this as the only intimation.’
Lugg reads horribly and with effect.
The name attracted me.
‘Peters?’ I said, looking up from the letter with interest. ‘R. I. Peters.… Pig Peters. Is it in there?’
‘Oh, my
gawd!
’ Lugg threw down the paper in disgust. ‘You’re a philistine, that’s what you are, a ruddy phylis. After a perishing short illness, I keep tellin’ you. Know ’im?’
‘No,’ I said cautiously. ‘Not exactly. Not now.’
Lugg’s great white moon of a face took on an ignoble expression.
‘I get you, Bert,’ he said smugly, tucking his chins into his collarless neck. ‘Not quite our class.’
Although I realize that he is not to be altered, there are things I dare not pass.
‘Not at all,’ I said with dignity. ‘And don’t call me “Bert”.’
‘All right.’ He was magnanimous. ‘Since you’ve asked me, cock, I won’t. Mr Albert Campion to the world: Mr Albert to me. What about this bloke Peters we was discussin’?’
‘We were boys together,’ I said. ‘Sweet, downy, blue-eyed little fellows at Botolph’s Abbey. Pig Peters took three square inches of skin off my chest with a rusty penknife to show I was his branded slave. He made me weep till I was sick and
I
kicked him in the belly, whereupon he held me over an unlighted gas jet until I passed out.’
Lugg was shocked.
‘There was no doings like that at our college,’ he said virtuously.
‘That’s the evil of State control,’ I said gently, not anxious to appear unkind. ‘I haven’t seen Peters since the day I went into the sicker with CO poisoning, but I promised him then I’d go to his funeral.’
He was interested at once.
‘I’ll get out your black suit,’ he said obligingly. ‘I like a funeral – when it’s someone you know.’
I was not really listening to him. I had returned to the letter.
Why should he die? He was so young. There are thousands more fitting than he for the journey. ‘Peters, Peters,’ saith the angel. ‘Peters, Pietro, Piero, come,’ saith the angel. Why? Why should he follow him? He that was so strong, so unprepared, why should he die? The roots are red in the earth and the century creepeth on its way. Why should the mole move backwards? – it is not yet eleven
.
It was typewritten on ordinary thin quarto, as are all these things, but it was not ill-spelt and the punctuation was meticulous, which was an unusual feature in my experience. I showed it to Lugg.
He read it through laboriously and delivered himself of his judgement with engaging finality.
‘Bit out of the Prayer Book,’ he said. ‘I remember learning it when I was a nipper.’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said mildly, but he coloured and his little black eyes sank into my head.
‘Call me a liar,’ he said truculently. ‘Go on, call me a liar and then I’ll do a bit of talking.’
I know him in these moods and I realized from experience that it was impossible to shake him in a theory of this sort.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Nothing,’ he said with equal conviction.
I tried another tack.
‘What’s the machine?’
He was helpful at once.
‘A
Royal
portable, new or newish, no peculiarities to speak of. Even the E is as fresh as that bit of ’addock you’ve left. Paper’s the ordinary Plantag. – They sell reams of it everywhere. Let’s see the envelope. London
WCI
,’ he continued after a pause. ‘That’s the old central stamp. Clear, isn’t it? The address is from the telephone book. Chuck it in the fire.’
I still held the letter. Taken in conjunction with the announcement in
The Times
it had, it seemed to me, definite points of interest. Lugg sniffed at me.
‘Blokes like you who are always getting theirselves talked about are bound to get anonymous letters,’ he observed, allowing the critical note in his tone to become apparent. ‘While you remained strictly amateur you was fairly private, but now you keep runnin’ round with the busies, sticking your nose into every bit of blood there is about, and you’re gettin’ talked of. We’ll ’ave women sittin’ on the stairs waitin’ for you to sign their names on piller-cases so they can embroider it if you go on the way you are going. Why can’t you take a quiet couple o’ rooms in a good neighbour’ood and play poker while you wait for your titled relative to die? That’s what a gentleman would do.’
‘If you were female and could cook I’d marry you,’ I said vulgarly. ‘You nag like a stage wife.’
That silenced him. He got up and waddled out of the room, the embodiment of dignified disgust.
I read the letter through again after I had eaten and it sounded just as light-headed. Then I read
The Times
announcement.
R. I. Peters.… It was Pig all right. The age fitted in. I remembered him booting us to persuade us to call him ‘Rip’. I thought of us as we were then, Guffy Randall and I and Lofty and two or three others. I was a neat little squirt with sleek white hair and goggles; Guffy was a tough for his age, which was ten and a quarter; and Lofty, who is now holding down his seat in the Peers with a passionate determination more creditable than necessary, was a cross between a small tapir and a more ordinary porker.
Pig Peters was a major evil in our lives at that time. He ranked with Injustice, The Devil, and Latin Prose. When Pig Peters fed the junior study fire with my collection of skeleton leaves I earnestly wished him dead, and, remembering the incident that morning at breakfast, I was mildly surprised to find that I still did.
Apparently he was, too, according to
The Times
, and the discovery cheered me up. At twelve he was obese, red, and disgusting, with sandy lashes, and at thirty-seven I had no doubt he had been the same.