“Society is at the mercy of a murderer who is remorseless, who takes no accomplices and who keeps his head.” Edmund Pearson, Murder at Smutty Nose
Letter from Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson to Lord Peter Wimsey.
“Fair View,”
Nelson Avenue,
Leahampton.
12 May, 1927.
My dear Lord Peter,
I have not yet been able to get ALL the information you ask for, as Miss Whittaker has been away for some weeks, inspecting chicken-farms!! With a view to purchase, I mean of course, and not in any sanitary capacity(!). I really think she means to set up farming with Miss Findlater, though what Miss Whittaker can see in that very gushing and really silly young woman I cannot think. However, Miss Findlater has evidently quite a “pash” (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two—But I must not take up your time with my TWADDLE!!
Miss Murgatroyd, who was quite a friend of old Miss Dawson, however, has been able to tell me a little about her past life.
It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a “character,” as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very “advanced” and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair short(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady—or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.
Agatha Dawson was a school-fellow of hers, and deeply attached to her. And as a result of this friendship, Agatha’s sister, Harriet, married Clara Whittaker’s brother James! But Agatha did not care about marriage, any more than Clara, and the two ladies lived together in a big old house, with immense stables, in a village in Warwickshire—Crofton, I think the name was. Clara Whittaker turned out to be a remarkably good business woman, and worked up a big connection among the hunting folk in those parts. Her hunters became quite famous, and from a capital of a few thousand pounds with which she started she made quite a fortune, and was a very rich woman before her death! Agatha Dawson never had anything to do with the horsey part of the business. She was the “domestic” partner, and looked after the house and the servants.
When Clara Whittaker died, she left all her money to Agatha, passing over her own family, with whom she was not on very good terms—owing to the narrow-minded attitude they had taken up about her horse-dealing!! Her nephew, Charles Whittaker, who was a clergyman, and the father of our Miss Whittaker, resented very much not getting the money, though, as he had kept up the feud in a very un-Christian manner, he had really no right to complain, especially as Clara had built up her fortune entirely by her own exertions. But, of course, he inherited the bad, old-fashioned idea that women ought not to be their own mistresses, or make money for themselves, or do what they liked with their own!
He and his family were the only surviving Whittaker relations, and when he and his wife were killed in a motor-car accident, Miss Dawson asked Mary to leave her work as a nurse and make her home with her. So that, you see, Clara Whittaker’s money was destined to come back to James Whittaker’s daughter in the end!! Miss Dawson made it quite CLEAR that this was her intention, provided Mary would come and cheer the declining days of a lonely old lady!
Mary accepted, and as her aunt—or, to speak more exactly, her great-aunt—had given up the big old Warwickshire house after Clara’s death, they lived in London for a short time and then moved to Leahampton. As you know, poor old Miss Dawson was then already suffering from the terrible disease of which she died, so that Mary did not have to wait very long for Clara Whittaker’s money!!
I hope this information will be of some use to you. Miss Murgatroyd did not, of course, know anything about the rest of the family, but she always understood that there were no other surviving relatives, either on the Whittaker or the Dawson side.
When Miss Whittaker returns, I hope to see more of her. I enclose my account for expenses up to date. I do trust you will not consider it extravagant. How are your money-lenders progressing? I was sorry not to see more of those poor women whose cases I investigated—their stories were so PATHETIC!
I am,
Very sincerely yours,
Alexandra K. Climpson.
P.S.—I forgot to say that Miss Whittaker has a little motor-car. I do not, of course, know anything about these matters, but Mrs. Budge’s maid tells me that Miss Whittaker’s maid says it is an Austin 7 (is this right?). It is grey, and the number is XX9917.
Mr. Parker was announced, just as Lord Peter finished reading this document, and sank rather wearily in a corner of the chesterfield.
“What luck?” inquired his lordship, tossing the letter over to him. “Do you know, I’m beginning to think you were right about the Bertha Gotobed business, and I’m rather relieved. I don’t believe one word of Mrs. Forrest’s story, for reasons of my own, and I’m now hoping that the wiping out of Bertha was a pure coincidence and nothing to do with my advertisement.”
“Are you?” said Parker, bitterly, helping himself to whisky and soda. “Well, I hope you’ll be cheered to learn that the analysis of the body has been made, and that there is not the slightest sign of foul play. There is no trace of violence or of poisoning. There was a heart weakness of fairly long standing, and the verdict is syncope after a heavy meal.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” said Wimsey. “We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?”
“Proving it is the difficulty, that’s all. By the way, there were no finger-marks on the bottle—only smears.”
“Gloves, I suppose. Which looks like camouflage, anyhow. An ordinary picnicking couple wouldn’t put on gloves to handle a bottle of Bass.”
“I know. But we can’t arrest all the people who wear gloves.”
“I weep for you, the Walrus said, I deeply sympathise. I see the difficulty, but it’s early days yet. How about those injections?”
“Perfectly O.K. We’ve interrogated the chemist and interviewed the doctor. Mrs. Forrest suffers from violent neuralgic pains, and the injections were duly prescribed. Nothing wrong there, and no history of doping or anything. The prescription is a very mild one, and couldn’t possibly be fatal to anybody. Besides, haven’t I told you that there was no trace of morphia or any other kind of poison in the body?”
“Oh, well!” said Wimsey. He sat for a few minutes looking thoughtfully at the fire.
“I see the case has more or less died out of the papers,” he resumed, suddenly.
“Yes. The analysis has been sent to them, and there will be a paragraph to-morrow and a verdict of natural death, and that will be the end of it.”
“Good. The less fuss there is about it the better. Has anything been heard of the sister in Canada?”
“Oh, I forgot. Yes. We had a cable three days ago. She’s coming over.”
“Is she? By Jove! What boat?”
“The Star of Quebec—due in next Friday.”
“H’m! We’ll have to get hold of her. Are you meeting the boat?”
“Good heavens, no! Why should I?”
“I think someone ought to. I’m reassured—but not altogether happy. I think I’ll go myself, if you don’t mind. I want to get that Dawson story—and this time I want to make sure the young woman doesn’t have a heart attack before I interview her.”
“I really think you’re exaggerating, Peter.”
“Better safe than sorry,” said his lordship. “Have another peg, won’t you? Meanwhile, what do you think of Miss Climpson’s latest?”
“I don’t see much in it.”
“No?”
“It’s a bit confusing, but it all seems quite straightforward.”
“Yes. The only thing we know now is that Mary Whittaker’s father was annoyed about Miss Dawson’s getting his aunt’s money and thought it ought to have come to him.”
“Well, you don’t suspect him of having murdered Miss Dawson, do you? He died before her, and the daughter’s got the money, anyhow.”
“Yes, I know. But suppose Miss Dawson had changed her mind? She might have quarrelled with Mary Whittaker and wanted to leave her money elsewhere.”
“Oh, I see—and been put out of the way before she could make a will?”
“Isn’t it possible?”
“Yes, certainly. Except that all the evidence we have goes to show that will-making was about the last job anybody could persuade her to do.”
“True—while she was on good terms with Mary. But how about that morning Nurse Philliter mentioned, when she said people were trying to kill her before her time? Mary may really have been impatient with her for being such an unconscionable time a-dying. If Miss Dawson became aware of that, she would certainly have resented it and may very well have expressed an intention of making her will in someone else’s favour—as a kind of insurance against premature decease!”
“Then why didn’t she send for her solicitor?”
“She may have tried to. But after all, she was bed-ridden and helpless. Mary may have prevented the message from being sent.”
“That sounds quite plausible.”
“Doesn’t it? That’s why I want Evelyn Cropper’s evidence. I’m perfectly certain those girls were packed off because they had heard more than they should. Or why such enthusiasm over sending them to London?”
“Yes. I thought that part of Mrs. Gulliver’s story was a bit odd. I say, how about the other nurse?”
“Nurse Forbes? That’s a good idea. I was forgetting her. Think you can trace her?”
“Of course, if you really think it important.”
“I do. I think it’s damned important. Look here, Charles, you don’t seem very enthusiastic about this case.”
“Well, you know, I’m not so certain it is a case at all. What makes you so fearfully keen about it? You seem dead set on making it a murder, with practically nothing to go upon. Why?”
Lord Peter got up and paced the room. The light from the solitary reading-lamp threw his lean shadow, diffused and monstrously elongated, up to the ceiling. He walked over to a book-shelf, and the shadow shrank, blackened, settled down. He stretched his hand, and the hand’s shadow flew with it, hovering over the gilded titles of the books and blotting them out one by one.
“Why?” repeated Wimsey. “Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue. The norm. All these”—he swept his extended hand across the book-shelf, and the shadow outlined a vaster and more menacing gesture—“all these books on this side of the room are books about crimes. But they only deal with the abnormal crimes.”
“What do you mean by abnormal crimes?”
“The failures. The crimes that have been found out. What proportion do you suppose they bear to the successful crimes—the ones we hear nothing about?”
“In this country,” said Parker, rather stiffly, “we manage to trace and convict the majority of criminals—”
“My good man, I know that where a crime is known to have been committed, you people manage to catch the perpetrator in at least sixty per cent of the cases. But the moment a crime is even suspected, it falls, ipso facto, into the category of failures. After that, the thing is merely a question of greater or less efficiency on the part of the police. But how about the crimes which are never even suspected?”
Parker shrugged his shoulders.
“How can anybody answer that?”
“Well—one may guess. Read any newspaper to-day. Read the News of the World. Or, now that the Press has been muzzled, read the divorce court lists. Wouldn’t they give you the idea that marriage is a failure? Isn’t the sillier sort of journalism packed with articles to the same effect? And yet, looking round among the marriages you know of personally, aren’t the majority of them a success, in a hum-drum, undemonstrative sort of way? Only you don’t hear of them. People don’t bother to come into court and explain that they dodder along very comfortably on the whole, thank you. Similarly, if you read all the books on this shelf, you’d come to the conclusion that murder was a failure. But bless you, it’s always the failures that make the noise. Successful murderers don’t write to the papers about it. They don’t even join in imbecile symposia to tell an inquisitive world ‘What Murder means to me,’ or ‘How I became a Successful Poisoner.’ Happy murderers, like happy wives, keep quiet tongues. And they probably bear just about the same proportion to the failures as the divorced couples do to the happily mated.”
“Aren’t you putting it rather high?”
“I don’t know. Nor does anybody. That’s the devil of it. But you ask any doctor, when you’ve got him in an unbuttoned, well-lubricated frame of mind, if he hasn’t often had grisly suspicions which he could not and dared not take steps to verify. You see by our friend Carr what happens when one doctor is a trifle more courageous than the rest.”
“Well, he couldn’t prove anything.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be proved. Look at the scores and scores of murders that have gone unproved and unsuspected till the fool of a murderer went too far and did something silly which blew up the whole show. Palmer, for instance. His wife and brother and mother-in-law and various illegitimate children, all peacefully put away—till he made the mistake of polishing Cook off in that spectacular manner. Look at George Joseph Smith. Nobody’d have thought of bothering any more about those first two wives he drowned. It was only when he did it the third time that he aroused suspicion. Armstrong, too, is supposed to have got away with many more crimes than he was tried for—it was being clumsy over Martin and the Chocolates that stirred up the hornets’ nest in the end. Burke and Hare were convicted of murdering an old woman, and then brightly confessed that they’d put away sixteen people in two months and no one a penny the wiser.”
“But they were caught.”
“Because they were fools. If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who had previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you’re first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your effects too often, and you’re safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature’s unaided work. Murder’s so easy, Charles, so damned easy—even without special training.”
Parker looked troubled.
“There’s something in what you say. I’ve heard some funny tales myself. We all do, I suppose. But Miss Dawson—”
“Miss Dawson fascinates me, Charles. Such a beautiful subject. So old and ill. So likely to die soon. Bound to die before long. No near relations to make inquiries. No connections or old friends in the neighbourhood. And so rich. Upon my soul, Charles, I lie in bed licking my lips over ways and means of murdering Miss Dawson.”
“Well, anyhow, till you can think of one that defies analysis and doesn’t seem to need a motive, you haven’t found the right one,” said Parker, practically, rather revolted by this ghoulish conversation.
“I admit that,” replied Lord Peter, “but that only shows that as yet I’m merely a third-rate murderer. Wait till I’ve perfected my method and then I’ll show you—perhaps. Some wise old buffer has said that each of us holds the life of one other person between his hands—but only one, Charles, only one.”
