“And now the finger-prints have all gone,” concluded Bunter in a hollow tone, “and what to say to his lordship I do not know.”
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” said Mrs. Venables, helplessly. Then she seized on the one point of domestic economy which seemed to call for inquiry. “How did you come to leave your dusting so late?”
“If you please ’m, I don’t know how it was. I got all behind yesterday, somehow, and I said to myself, ‘Better late than never,’ and I’m sure if I’d only have known—”
She wept loudly, and Bunter was touched.
“I am sorry I expressed myself with so much acerbity,” he said, “and I take blame to myself for not removing the key from the cupboard door. But you will understand my feelings, madam, when I think of his lordship innocently waking to a new day, if I may say so, and not knowing of the blow which is in store for him. It goes to my heart, if you will pardon my mentioning the organ in such a connection. There, madam, is his morning tea, only waiting for my hand to put the boiling water to it, and I feel, madam, as though it were the hand of a murderer which no perfumes of Arabia—supposing such to be suitable to my situation—could sweeten. He has rung twice,” added Bunter, in desperate tones, “and he will know by the delay that something of a calamitous nature has occurred—”
“Bunter!”
“My lord!” cried Bunter, in a voice like prayer.
“What the devil has happened to my tea? What the—? Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs. Venables. Excuse my language and my bath-robe, won’t you? I didn’t know you were here.”
“Oh, Lord Peter!” exclaimed Mrs. Venables, “such a dreadful thing’s happened. Your man is so terribly upset, and this silly girl—she meant well of course and it’s all a mistake—but we’ve dusted all the finger-prints off your bottle!”
“Wah-ha-ha!” sobbed Emily. “O-Oh! Wah-ha-ha! I did it. I dusted it. I didn’t know—ho-ho.”
“Bunter,” said his lordship, “what is the verse about the struck eagle stretched upon the plain, Never through something clouds to soar again? It expresses my feelings exactly. Take up my tea and throw the bottle in the dustbin. What’s done cannot be undone. In any case the finger-prints were probably of no importance. William Morris once wrote a poem called
The Man Who Never Laughed Again.
If the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast, should never again be heard upon my lips, you will know why. My friends will probably be devoutly thankful. Let it be a warning to you never to seek for happiness out of a bottle. Emily, if you cry any more, your young man won’t know you on Sunday. Don’t worry about the bottle, Mrs. Venables—it was a beastly bottle, anyhow, and I always loathed the sight of it. It is a beautiful morning for early rising. Allow me to carry the chicken-pail. I beg you will not give another thought to the bottle, or Emily either. She’s a particularly nice girl, isn’t she? What is her surname, by the way?”
“Holliday,” said Mrs. Venables. “She’s a niece of Russell’s, the undertaker, you know, and some sort of relation to Mary Thoday, though of course everybody is, in this village, related to somebody or the other, I mean. It comes of being such a small place, though now that they all have motor-bicycles and the ’buses running twice a week it isn’t so bad, and there won’t be so many unfortunate creatures like Potty Peake. All the Russells are very nice, superior people.”
“Just so,” said Lord Peter Wimsey. He did a certain amount of thinking as he spooned out mash into the chicken trough.
* * *
He spent the early part of the morning in fresh unavailing study of the cryptogram, and as soon as he thought the pubs would be open, went round to the Red Cow for a pint of beer.
“Bitter, my lord?” inquired Mr. Donnington with his hand upon the tap.
Wimsey said No, not to-day. He would have a bottle of Bass for a change.
Mr. Donnington produced the Bass, observing that his lordship would find it in very nice condition.
“Condition is nine-tenths of the bottle,” said Wimsey, “and a lot of it depends upon the bottling. Who are your bottlers?”
“Griggs of Walbeach,” said Mr. Donnington. “Very sound people they are, too; I’ve got no complaints to make. Just you try for yourself—though you can tell by the look of it, if you see what I mean. Clear as a bell—though, of course, you have to be able to trust your cellarman. I had a chap once that never could be taught not to pack his Bass ’ead down in the basket, same as if it was stout. Now stout will stand being stood on its ’ead, though it’s not a thing I ever would do myself and I don’t recommend it, but Bass must be stood right ways up and not shook about if you’re to do justice to the beer.”
“Very true indeed,” said Wimsey. “There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. Your health. Won’t you take something yourself?”
“Thank you, my lord, I don’t mind if I do. Here’s luck. Now, that,” said Mr. Donnington, raising the glass to the light, “is as nice a glass of Bass as you could wish to see.”
Wimsey asked whether he did much with quart bottles.
“Quarts?” said Mr. Donnington. “No. Not with quarts, I don’t. But I believe Tom Tebbutt down at the Wheatsheaf does a bit. Griggs bottles for him, too.”
“Ah!” said Wimsey.
“Yes. There’s one or two prefers quarts. Though, mind you, most of the business about here is draught. But there’s a farmer here and there as likes the quarts delivered at their homes. Ah! in the old days they all did their own brewing—there’s plenty farms now with the big brewing coppers still standing, and there’s a few as still cures their own sides of bacon—Mr. Ashton’s one on ’em, he won’t have nothing new-fangled. But what with these chain stores and their grocery vans, and the girls all wanting to be off to the pictures in their silk stockings and so many things coming in tins, it’s not many places where you can see a bit of real home-cured. And look at the price of pig-feed. What I say is, the farmers did ought to have some protection. I was brought up a Free Trader myself, but times has changed. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of these things, my lord. They may not come your way. Or—there—I’m forgetting. Maybe you sit in the ’Ouse of Lords, now. Harry Gotobed will have it that that’s so, but I said as he was mistook—but there I you’ll know better than me about that.”
Wimsey explained that he was not qualified to sit in the House of Lords. Mr. Donnington observed with pleasure that in that case the sexton owed him half a crown, and while he made a note of the fact on the back of an envelope, Wimsey escaped and made his way to the Wheatsheaf.
Here, by exercising a certain amount of tact, he obtained a list of those households to which Bass was regularly supplied in quarts. Most of the names were those of farmers in outlying places, but as an afterthought, Mrs. Tebbutt mentioned one which made Wimsey prick up his ears.
“Will Thoday, he had a few while Jim was at home—a dozen or so, it might be. He’s a nice chap, is Jim Thoday—makes you laugh by the hour telling his tales of foreign parts. He brought back that there parrot for Mary, though as I says to her, that bird ain’t no proper example for the children. How it do go on, to be sure. I’m sure, if you’d heard what it said to Rector the other day! I didn’t know where to look. But it’s my belief. Rector didn’t understand half of it. He’s a real gentleman, is Mr. Venables, not like old parson. He was a kind man, too, but different from Rector, and they say he used to swear something surprising in a clergyman. But there, poor man! He had a bit of a weakness, as they say. ‘Do as I say, don’t do as I do’—that’s what he used to say in his sermons. Terrible red in the face he were, and died sudden, of a stroke.”
Wimsey tried in vain to steer the conversation back to Jim Thoday. Mrs. Tebbutt was fairly launched into reminiscences of Old Rector, and it was half an hour before he was able to make his way out of the Wheatsheaf. Turning back towards the Rectory, he found himself at Will Thoday’s gate. Glancing up the path, he saw Mary, engaged in hanging out washing. He suddenly determined on a frontal attack.
“I hope you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Thoday,” he said, when he had announced himself and been invited to enter, “if I take your mind back to a rather painful episode. I mean to say, bygones are bygones and all that and one hates digging anything up, what? But when it comes to dead bodies in other people’s graves and so on, well, sometimes one gets wondering about them and all that sort of thing, don’t you know.”
“Yes, indeed, my lord. I’m sure if there’s anything I can do to help, I will. But as I told Mr. Blundell, I never knew a thing about it, and I can’t imagine how it came there. That was the Saturday night he was asking me about, and I’m sure I’ve thought and thought, but I couldn’t call to mind as I’d seen anything.”
“Do you remember a man who called himself Stephen Driver?”
“Yes, my lord. Him that was at Ezra Wilderspin’s. I remember seeing him once or twice. They said at the inquest that the body might have been him.”
“But it wasn’t,” said Wimsey.
“Wasn’t it, my lord?”
“No. Because we’ve found this chap Driver and he’s still alive and kicking. Had you ever seen Driver before he came here?”
“I don’t think so, my lord; no, I can’t say as I ever did.”
“He didn’t remind you of anybody?”
“No, my lord.”
She appeared to be answering quite frankly, and he could not see any signs of alarm in voice or expression.
“That’s odd,” said Wimsey, “because he says that he ran away from St. Paul because he thought you had recognised him.”
“Did he? Well, that’s a strange thing, my lord.”
“Did you ever hear him speak?”
“I don’t think I ever did, my lord.”
“Suppose he hadn’t been wearing a beard, now—would he remind you of anybody?”
Mary shook her head. Like most people, she found the effort of imagination beyond her.
“Well, do you recognise this?”
He took out a photograph of Cranton, taken at the time of the Wilbraham emeralds affair.
“That?” Mrs. Thoday turned pale. “Oh, yes, my lord. I remember him. That was Cranton, that took the necklace and was sent to prison same time as—as my first husband, my lord. I expect you know all about that. That’s his wicked face. Oh, dear! it’s given me quite a turn, seeing that again.”
She sat down on a bench and stared at the photograph. “This isn’t—it couldn’t be Driver?”
“That’s Driver,” said Wimsey. “You had no idea of it?”
“That I never had, my lord. If I’d ever had such a thought, I’d have spoken to him, don’t you fear! I’d have got out of him where he put those emeralds to. You see, my lord, that was what went so hard against my poor husband, this man saying as my husband had kept the necklace himself. Poor Jeff, there’s no doubt he was tempted—all through my fault, my lord, talking so free—and he did take the jewels, I’m sorry to say. But he didn’t have them afterwards; It was this Cranton had them all the time. Don’t you think it hasn’t been a bitter hard cross to me, my lord, all these years, knowing as I was suspected? The jury believed what I said, and so did the judge, but you’ll find some as thinks now that I had a hand in it and knew where the necklace was. But I never did, my lord, never. If I’d been able to find it, I’d have crawled to London on my hands and knees to give it back to Mrs. Wilbraham. I know what poor Sir Henry, suffered with the loss of it. The police searched our place, and I searched it myself, over and over—”
“Couldn’t you take Deacon’s word for it?” asked Wimsey, softly.
She hesitated, and her eyes clouded with pain.
“My lord, I did believe him. And yet, all the same—well! it was such a terrible shock to me that he could have done such a thing as rob a lady in the master’s house, I didn’t know but what he mightn’t perhaps have done the other too. I didn’t rightly know what to believe, if you understand me, my lord. But now I feel quite sure that my husband was telling the truth. He was led away by this wicked Cranton, there’s no doubt of that, but that he was deceiving us all, afterwards, I don’t believe. Indeed, my lord, I don’t think he was—I’m quite sure of it in my own mind.”
“And what do you suppose Cranton came down here for?”
“Doesn’t that show, my lord, that it was him as hid them after all? He must have got frightened and hid them away in some place that night, before he got away.”
“He says himself that Deacon told him in the dock that the emeralds were here, and he was to ask Tailor Paul and Batty Thomas to find them for him.”
Mary shook her head. “I don’t understand that, my lord. But if my husband had said such a thing to him then, Cranton wouldn’t have kept quiet about it. He’d have told the jury, he was that mad with Jeff.”
“Would he? I’m not so sure. Suppose Deacon told Cranton where to find the emeralds, don’t you think Cranton would have waited in the hope of getting hold of them when he came out of prison? And mightn’t he have come down here last January to look for them? And then, thinking you’d spotted him, mightn’t he have run away in a fright?”
“Well, my lord, I suppose he might. But then, who would that poor dead man be?”
“The police think he may have been an accomplice of Cranton’s, who helped him to find the emeralds and was killed for his pains. Do you know whether Deacon made any friends among the other convicts or the warders at Maidstone?”
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure, my lord. He was allowed to write now and again, of course, but naturally he wouldn’t tell anybody a thing like that, because his letters would be read.”
“Naturally. I wondered whether perhaps you’d had a message from him at some time—through a released prisoner, or anything like that?”
“No, my lord, never.”
“Have you ever seen this writing?”
He handed her the cryptogram.
“That writing? Why, of course—”
“Shut up you fool! Shut up you bloody fool! Come on, Joey! Show a leg there!”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Wimsey, startled. Peering round the door into the inner room, he encountered the bright eye of a grey African parrot fixed knowingly upon him. At sight of a stranger, the bird stopped talking, cocked its head aslant, and began to sidle along its perch.
“Damn your eyes!” said his lordship, pleasantly. “You made me jump.”
“Aw!” said the bird, with a long, self-satisfied chuckle.