‘You’ve got an answer for everything, Ormond. Here’s another for you. Why in the name of goodness, if all this is true, didn’t Perkins ride the ruddy horse right up to the rock, while he was about it? He could have taken her back and tethered her up just the same.’
‘Yes, sir, and I fancy, judging from the ring-bolt, that must have been the first idea. But I was looking at those cliffs today and I noticed that it’s just about a mile from the Flat-Iron that the road comes so close to the edge of the cliff as to give you a proper view down on to the beach. When they came to think it over they may have said to themselves that a man riding along that open bit of beach would be conspicuous-like. So Perkins cached the gee where the cover ended and paddled the rest of the way, thinking it would be less noticable.’
‘Yes; there’s something in that. But all this depends on the time that Perkins passed through Darley. We’ll have to get that looked into. Mind, Ormond, I’m not saying you haven’t done a good bit of thinking over this, and I like to see you having initiative and striking out a line for yourself; but we can’t go behind facts when all’s said and done.’
‘No, sir; certainly not, sir. But of course, sir, even if it wasn’t Perkins, that’s not to say it wasn’t somebody else.’
‘Who wasn’t somebody else?’
‘The accomplice, sir.’
‘That’s beginning all over again, Ormond.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, cut along and see what you can make of it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Glaisher rubbed his chin thoughtfully when Ormond was gone. This business was worrying him. The Chief Constable had been chivvying him that morning and making things unpleasant. The Chief Constable, a military gentleman of the old school, thought that Glaisher was making too much fuss. To him it was obvious that the rather contemptible foreign dancing-fellow had cut his own throat, and he thought that sleeping dogs should be left alone. Glaisher only wished he could leave the thing alone, but he felt a sincere conviction that there was more to it than that. He was not comfortable in his mind – never had been. There were too many odd circumstances. The razor, the gloves, Weldon’s incomprehensible movements, the taciturnity of Mr Pollock, the horse-shoe, the ring-bolt, Bright’s mistake about the tides and, above all, the cipher letters and the photograph of the mysterious Feodora – each one of these might, separately, have some ordinary and trivial explanation, but not all of them – surely, not all of them. He had put these points to the Chief Constable, and had received a grudging kind of permission to go on with his inquiries. But he was not happy.
He wondered what Umpelty was doing. He had heard the story of his excursion to town with Wimsey, and felt that this had only plunged matters into a still deeper obscurity. Then there was the tiresomeness about Bright. Bright was reported to be working his way towards London. It was going to be a job keeping an eye on him – especially as Glaisher was rather hard put to it to find a good reason for the surveillance. After all, what had Bright done? He was an unsatisfactory character and he had said it was high tide when it was, in fact, low tide – in every other respect he appeared to have been telling the exact truth. Glaisher realised that he was making himself unpopular with the police of half-a-dozen counties, on very insufficient grounds.
He dismissed the case from his mind and applied himself to a quantity of routine business connected with petty theft and motoring offences, and so got through the evening. But after his supper he found the problem of Paul Alexis gnawing at his brain again. Umpelty had reported the result of a few routine inquiries about Perkins, of which the only interesting fact was that Perkins was a member of the Soviet Club and was reported to have Communist sympathies. Just the sort of sympathies he would have, thought Glaisher: it was always these week, mild, timid-looking people who yearned for revolution and bloodshed. But, taken in connection with the cipher letters, the matter assumed a certain importance. He wondered how soon the photographs of the letters found on Alexis would come to hand. He fretted, was short with his wife, trod on the cat, and decided to go round to the Bellevue and look up Lord Peter Wimsey.
Wimsey was out, and a little further inquiry led Glaisher to Mrs Lefranc’s, where he found, not only Wimsey, but also Inspector Umpelty, seated with Harriet in the bed-sitting-room that had once housed Paul Alexis, all three apparently engaged in a Missing Word Competition. Books were strewn about the place, and Harriet, with Chambers’s Dictionary in her hand, was reading out words to her companions.
‘Hullo, Super!’ exclaimed Wimsey. ‘Come along! I’m sure our hostess will be delighted to see you. We are making discoveries.’
‘Are you, indeed, my lord? Well, so have we – at least, that lad, Ormond, has been rummaging about, as you might say.’
He plunged into his story. He was glad to try it on somebody else. Umpelty grunted. Wimsey took a map and a sheet of paper and began figuring out distances and times. They discussed it. They argued about the speed of the mare. Wimsey was inclined to think that he might have underestimated it. He would borrow the animal – make a test – Harriet said nothing.
‘And what do you think?’ Wimsey asked her, suddenly.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Harriet.
Glaisher laughed.
‘Miss Vane’s intuition, as they call it, is against it,’ said he.
‘It’s not intuition,’ retorted Harriet. ‘There’s no such thing. It’s common sense. It’s artistic sense, if you like. All those theories – they’re all wrong. They’re artificial – they smell of the lamp.’
Glaisher laughed again.
‘That’s beyond me, that is.’
‘You men,’ said Harriet, ‘have let yourselves be carried away by all these figures and time-tables and you’ve lost sight of what you’re really dealing with. But it’s all machine-made. It cracks at every joint. It’s like – like a bad plot, built up round an idea that won’t work. You’ve got it into your heads that you must get Weldon and the horse and Perkins into it somehow or other; and when you come up against an inconsistency, you say: “Oh, well – we’ll get over that somehow. We’ll make him do this. We’ll make him do that.” But you can’t make people do things to suit you – not in real life. Why are you obliged to bring all these people into it at all?’
‘You won’t deny that there’s a good deal that needs explaining,’ said Umpelty.
‘Of course there’s a lot that needs explaining, but your explanations are more incredible than the problem. It’s not possible that anyone should plan a murder like that. You’ve made them too ingenious in one way and too silly in another. Whatever the explanation is, it must be simpler that that – bigger – not so cramped. Can’t you see what I mean? You’re simply making up a case, that’s all.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Wimsey.
‘I daresay it is a bit complicated,’ admitted Glaisher, ‘but if we don’t make up a case against Weldon and Bright and Perkins, or two of them, or one of them – whom are we to make up a case against? Against Bolshies? Well, but this Perkins is a Bolshie, or a Communist, anyhow, and if he’s in it, then Weldon must be, because of their mutual alibi.’
‘Yes, I know; but your whole case is like that. First you want Weldon to be guilty, because of getting his mother’s money, so you say that Perkins must be his accomplice because he’s giving an alibi for Weldon. Now you want Perkins to be guilty because he’s a Communist, and so you say Weldon must be the accomplice, because he’s giving an alibi for Perkins. But it’s simply impossible that both those theories should be true. And how did Weldon and Perkins get to know one another?’
‘We haven’t finished making inquiries yet.’
‘No; but it does seem unlikely, doesn’t it? A Council School teacher from the Tottenham Court Road and a Huntingdonshire farmer. What form? What likelihood? And as for Bright, you have nothing – nothing to connect him with either of them. And if his story’s true, then there’s not an atom of proof that Alexis didn’t kill
himself. And in any case, if you want to prove murder, you’ve got to connect Bright with whoever did it, and you certainly haven’t found the least trace of communication between him and either Weldon or Perkins.’
‘Has Bright been receiving any letters?’ asked Wimsey of Umpelty.
‘Not a line, not since he turned up here, anyway.’
‘As for Perkins,’ said Glaisher, ‘we’ll soon get a line on him. Of course, his getting knocked down and laid up like that must have puzzled his accomplices just as much as it puzzled us. There may be a whole correspondence waiting for him at some accommodation address, under another name, in some town or other.’
‘You will insist on its being Perkins,’ protested Harriet. ‘You really think Perkins rode a horse bare-backed along the beach and cut a man’s throat to the bone with a razor?’
‘Why not?’ said Umpelty.
‘Does he look like it?’
‘ “Do I look like it? said the Knave. Which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.” I’ve never seen the bloke, but I admit that his description isn’t encouraging.’ Wimsey grinned. ‘But then, you know, friend Henry took me for something in the night-club line.’
Harriet glanced briefly at his lean limbs and springy build.
‘You needn’t fish,’ she said, coldly. ‘We all know that your appearance of langour is assumed and that you are really capable of tying pokers into knots with your artistic fingers. Perkins is flabby and has a neck like a chicken and those flipflop hands.’ She turned to Glaisher. ‘I can’t see Perkins in the rôle of a desperado. Why, your original case against me was a better one.’
Glaisher blinked, but took the thrust stolidly.
‘Yes, miss. It had a lot to be said for it, that had.’
‘Of course. Why did you give it up, by the way?’
Some instinct seemed to warn Glaisher that he was treading on thin ice.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seemed a bit too obvious, so to say – and besides, we couldn’t trace any connection between you and the deceased.’
‘It was wise of you to make inquiries. Because, of course, you had only my word for everything, hadn’t you? And those photographs were evidence that I was pretty cold-blooded? And my previous history was rather – shall we say, full of incident?’
‘Just so, miss.’ The Superintendent’s eyes were expressionless.
‘Of whom did you make the inquiries, by the way?’
‘Of your charwoman,’ said Glaisher.
‘Oh! you think she would know whether I knew Paul Alexis?’
‘In our experience,’ replied the Superintendent, ‘charwomen mostly know things of that sort.’
‘So they do. And you’ve really given up suspecting me?’
‘Oh, dear me, yes.’
‘On my charwoman’s testimony to my character?’
‘Supplemented,’ said the Superintendent, ‘by our own observation.’
‘I see.’ Harriet looked hard at Glaisher, but he was proof against this kind of third degree, and smiled blandly in response. Wimsey, who had listened with his face like a mask, determined to give the stolid policeman the first prize for tact. He now dropped a cold comment into the conversation.
‘You and Miss Vane having made short work of each other’s theories,’ he said, ‘perhaps you would like to hear what we have been doing this evening.’
‘Very much, my lord.’
‘We began,’ said Wimsey, ‘by making a new search for clues among the corpse’s belongings, hoping, of course, to get some light on Feodora or the cipher letters. Inspector Umpelty kindly lent us his sympathetic assistance. In fact, the Inspector has been simply invaluable. He has sat here now for two hours, watching us search, and every time we looked into a hole or corner and found it empty, he has been able to assure us that he had already looked into the hole or corner and found it empty too.’
Inspector Umpelty chuckled.
‘The only thing we’ve found,’ went on Lord Peter, ‘is Chambers’s Dictionary, and we didn’t find that this evening, because Miss Vane had found it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crosswords instead of getting on with her writing. We’ve found a lot of words marked with pencil. We were engaged in making a collection of them when you came in. Perhaps you’d like to hear a few specimens. Here you are. I’m reeling them off at random: Peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight, chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason, cabriolet, rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct. There are lots more. Do these words say anything to you? Some of them have an ecclesiastical ring about them, but on the other hand, some of them have not. Courtesan, for example. To which I may add tambourine, wrestling and fashion.’
Glaisher laughed.
‘Sounds to me as though the young fellow was a crossword fan himself. They’re nice long words.’
‘But not the longest. There are many longer, such as supralapsarian, monocotyledenous and diaphragmatic, but he hasn’t marked any of the real sesquipedalians. The longest we have found is rheumatics, with ten letters. They all have two peculiarities in common, though, as far as we’ve gone – that are rather suggestive.’
‘What’s that, my lord?’
‘None of them contains any repeated letter, and none of them is less than seven letters long.’
Superintendent Glaisher suddenly flung up one hand like a child at school.
‘The cipher letters!’ he cried.
‘As you say, the cipher letters. It looks to us as though these might be key-words to a cipher, and from the circumstance that no letters are repeated in any of them, I fancy one might be able to make a guess at the type of cipher. The trouble is that we have already counted a couple of hundred marked words, and haven’t finished the alphabet yet. Which leads me to a depressing inference.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That they have been changing the key-word in every letter. What I think has happened is this. I think that each letter contained in it the key-word of the next, and that these marks represent a stock of words that Alexis looked up beforehand, so as to be ready with them when it came to his turn to write.’
‘Couldn’t they be the key-words already used?’
‘Hardly. I don’t believe he has sent out over two hundred code-letters since March, when they first began to be exchanged. Even if he wrote one letter a day, he couldn’t have got through that number.’
‘No more he could, my lord. Still, if the paper we found on him is one of these cipher letters, then the key-word will be one of those marked here. That narrows things a bit.’
‘I don’t think so. I think these are key-words for the letters Alexis sent out. In each letter he would announce his keyword for his next letter. But his correspondent would do the same, so that the key-word for the paper found on Alexis is much more likely to be one that isn’t marked here. Unless, of course, the paper is one of Alexis’ own writing, which isn’t very likely.’
‘We can’t even say that, then,’ moaned Glaisher. ‘Because the correspondent might very well hit on some word that Alexis had marked in advance. It might be anything.’
‘Perfectly true. Then the only bit of help we get from this is that the cipher used was an English word, and that the letters were probably written in English. That doesn’t absolutely follow, because they might be in French or German or Italian, all of which have the same alphabet as English; but they can’t be in Russian at any rate, which has an alphabet totally different. So that’s one mercy.’
‘If it’s anything to do with Bolsheviks,’ said Glaisher, thoughtfully, ‘it’s a bit surprising they didn’t write in Russian. It would have made it doubly safe if they had. Russian by itself would be bad enough, but a Russian cipher would be a snorter.’
‘Quite. As I’ve said before, I can’t quite swallow the Bolshevik theory. And yet – dash it all! I simply cannot fit these letters in with the Weldon side of the business.’
‘What I wa
nt to know,’ put in the Inspector, ‘is this. How did the murderers, whoever they were, get Alexis out to the Flat-Iron? Or if it was Bolsheviks that got him there, how did Weldon & Co. know he was going to be there? It must be the same party that made the appointment and did the throat-cutting. Which brings us to the point that either Weldon’s party wrote the letter or the foreign party did the murder.’
‘True, O king.’
‘And where,’ asked Harriet, ‘does Olga Kohn come in?’
‘Ah!’ said Wimsey, ‘there you are. That’s the deepest mystery of the lot. I’ll swear that girl was telling the truth, and I’ll swear that the extremely un-Irish Mr Sullivan was telling the truth too. Little flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, but, as the poet goes on to say, if I could understand I should know who the guilty man is. But I don’t understand. Who is the mysterious bearded gentleman who asked Mr Sullivan for the portrait of a Russian-looking girl, and how did the portrait get into the corpse’s pocket-book, signed with the name Feodora? These are deep waters, Watson.’
‘I’m coming back to my original opinion,’ grumbled the inspector. ‘I believe the fellow was dotty and cut his own throat and there’s an end of it. He probably had a mania for collecting girls’ photographs and sending himself letters in cipher.’
‘And posting them in Czechoslovakia?’
‘Oh, well, somebody must have done that for him. As far as I can see, we’ve no case against Weldon and no case against Bright, and the case against Perkins is as full of holes as a colander. As for Bolsheviks – where are they? Your friend Chief-Inspector Parker has put out inquiries about Bolshevik agents in this country, and the answer is that none of ’em are known to have been about here lately, and as regards Thursday, 18th, they all seem to be accounted for. You may say it’s an unknown Bolshevik agent, but there aren’t as many of those going about as you might think. These London chaps know quite a lot more than the ordinary public realises. If there’d been anything funny about Alexis and his crowd, they’d have been on to it like a shot.’