Have His Carcase

THE EVIDENCE OF THE HOTEL-2

"By the way," said the Superintendent, "this young fellow you met on the road—what's become of him?"

Harriet stared about her as though she expected to find Mr. Perkins still at her elbow.

"I haven't the slightest idea. I'd forgotten all about him. He must have gone off while I was ringing you up."

"Odd," said Glaisher, making a note to inquire after Mr. Perkins.

"But he can't possibly know anything about it," said Harriet. "He was fearfully surprised—and frightened. That's why he came back with me."

"We'll have to check up on him, though, as a matter of routine," said the Superintendent. Harriet was about to protest that this was a waste of time, when she suddenly realised that in all probability it was her own story that was due to be "checked up on." She was silent, and the Superintendent went on:

"Well, now, Miss Vane. I'm afraid we shall have to ask you to stay within reach for a few days. What were you thinking of doing?"

"Oh, I quite understand that. I suppose I'd better put up somewhere in Wilvercombe. You needn't be afraid of my running away. I want to be in on this thing."

The policeman looked a little disapproving. Everybody is, of course, only too delighted to take the limelight in a gruesome tragedy, but a lady ought, surely, to pretend the contrary. Inspector Umpelty, however, merely replied with the modest suggestion that Cleggs's Temperance Hostel was generally reckoned to be as cheap and comfortable as you could require.

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters. "Miss Harriet Vane, when interviewed by our correspondent at Cleggs's Temperance Hostel——" That would never do.

"I don't care for Temperance Hostels," she said, firmly. "What's the best hotel in the town?"

"The Resplendent is the largest," said Glaisher.

"Then you will find me at the Resplendent," said Harriet, picking up her dusty knapsack and preparing for action.

"Inspector Umpelty will run you down there in the car," said the Superintendent, with a little nod to Umpelty.

"Very good of him," answered Harriet, amused.

Within a very few minutes the car deposited her at one of those monster seaside palaces which look as though they had been designed by a German manufacturer of children's cardboard toys. Its glass porch was crowded with hothouse plants, and the lofty dome of its reception-hall was supported on gilt pilasters rising out of an ocean of blue plush. Harriet tramped heedlessly through its spacious splendours and demanded a large single bedroom with private bath, on the first floor, and overlooking the sea.

"Ai'm afraid," said the receptionist, casting a languid glance of disfavour at Harriet's knapsack and shoes, "that all our rooms are engaged."

"Surely not," said Harriet, "so early in the season. Just ask the manager to come and speak to me for a moment." She sat down with a determined air in the nearest well-stuffed armchair and, hailing a waiter, demanded a cocktail.

"Will you join me, Inspector?"

The Inspector thanked her, but explained that a certain discretion was due to his position.

"Another time, then," said Harriet, smiling, and dropping a pound-note on the waiter's tray, with a somewhat ostentatious display of a well-filled note-case.

Inspector Umpelty grinned faintly as he saw the receptionist beckon to the waiter. Then he moved gently across to the desk and spoke a few words. Presently the assistant-receptionist approached Harriet with a deprecating smile.

"We find, madam, that we can efter all accommodate you. An American gentleman has informed us thet he is vacating his room on the first floor. It overlooks the Esplanade. Ai think you will find it quaite satisfactory."

"Has it a private bath?" demanded Harriet, without enthusiasm.

"Oh, yes, madam. And a belcony."

"All right," said Harriet. "What number? Twenty-three. It has a telephone, I suppose? Well, Inspector, you'll know where to find me, won't you?"

She grinned a friendly grin at him.

"Yes, miss," said Inspector Umpelty, grinning also. He had his private cause for amusement. If Harriet's note-case had ensured her reception at the Resplendent, it was his own private whisper of "friend of Lord Peter Wimsey" that had produced the view over the sea, the bath and the balcony. It was just as well that Harriet did not know this. It would have annoyed her.

Curiously enough, however, the image of Lord Peter kept intruding upon her mind while she was telephoning her address to the Morning Star, and even while she was working her way through the Resplendent's expensive and admirable dinner. If the relations between them had not been what they were, it would have been only fair to ring him up and tell him about the corpse with the cut throat. But under the circumstances, the action might be misinterpreted. And, in any case, the thing was probably only the dullest kind of suicide, not worth bringing to his attention. Not nearly so complicated and interesting a problem, for instance, as the central situation in The Fountain-Pen Mystery. In that absorbing mystery, the villain was at the moment engaged in committing a crime in Edinburgh, while constructing an ingenious alibi involving a steam-yacht, a wireless time-signal, five clocks and the change from summer to winter time. (Apparently the cut-throat gentleman had come from the Wilvercombe direction. By road? by train? Had he walked from Darley Halt? If not, who had brought him?) Really, she must try and concentrate on this alibi. The town-clock was the great difficulty. How could that be altered? And altered it must be, for the whole alibi depended on its being heard to strike midnight at the appropriate moment. Could the man who looked after it be made into an accomplice? Who did look after town-hall clocks? (Why gloves? And had she left her own finger-prints on the razor?) Was it, after all, going to be necessary to go to Edinburgh? Perhaps there was no town-hall and no clock. A church-clock would do, of course. But church-clocks and bodies in belfries had been rather overdone lately. (It was odd about Mr. Perkins. If the solution was murder after all, could not the murderer have walked through the water to some point? Perhaps she ought to have followed the shore and not the coast-road. Too late now, in any case.) And she had not properly worked out the speed of the steam-yacht. One ought to know about these things. Lord Peter would know, of course; he must have sailed in plenty of steam-yachts. It must be nice to be really rich. Anybody who married Lord Peter would be rich, of course. And he was amusing. Nobody could say he would be dull to live with. But the trouble was that you never knew what anybody was like to live with except by living with them. It wasn't worth it. Not even to know all about steam-yachts. A novelist couldn't possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information. Harriet pleased herself over the coffee with sketching out the career of an American detective-novelist who contracted a fresh marriage for each new book. For a book about poisons, she would marry an analytical chemist; for a book about somebody's will, a solicitor; for a book about strangling, a—a hangman, of course. There might be something in it. A spoof book, of course. And the villainess might do away with each husband by the method described in the book she was working on at the time. Too obvious? Well, perhaps.

She got up from the table and made her way into a kind of large lounge, where the middle space was cleared for dancing. A select orchestra occupied a platform at one end, and small tables were arranged all round the sides of the room, where visitors could drink coffee or liqueurs and watch the dancing. While she took her place and gave her order, the floor was occupied by a pair of obviously professional dancers, giving an exhibition waltz. The man was tall and fair, with sleek hair plastered closely to his head, and a queer, unhealthy face with a wide, melancholy mouth. The girl, in an exaggerated gown of petunia satin with an enormous bustle and a train, exhibited a mask of Victorian coyness as she revolved languidly in her partner's arms to the strains of the "Blue Danube." "Autres temps, autres mœurs," thought Harriet. She looked about the room. Long skirts and costumes of the 'seventies were in evidence—and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators. But it was so obviously an imitation. The slender-seeming waists were made so, not by savage tight-lacing, but by sheer expensive dressmaking. To-morrow, on the tennis-court, the short, loose tunic-frock would reveal them as the waists of muscular young women of the day, despising all bonds. And the side-long glances, the down-cast eyes, the mock-modesty—masks, only. If this was the "return to womanliness" hailed by the fashion-correspondents, it was to a quite different kind of womanliness—set on a basis of economic independence. Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliners' fashions? "Hardly," thought Harriet, "when they know perfectly well that one has only to remove the train and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in one's pocket. Oh, well, it's a game, and presumably they all know the rules."

The dancers twirled to a standstill with the conclusion of the waltz. The instrumentalists tweaked a string and tightened a peg here and there and rearranged their music, under cover of perfunctory applause. Then the male dancer selected a partner from one of the nearer tables, while the petunia-clad girl obeyed a summons from a stout manufacturer in tweeds on the other side of the room. Another girl, a blonde in pale blue, rose from her solitary table near the platform and led out an elderly man. Other visitors rose, accompanied by their own partners, and took the floor to the strains of another waltz. Harriet beckoned to the waiter and asked for more coffee.

Men, she thought, like the illusion that woman is dependent on their approbation and favour for her whole interest in life. But do they like the reality? Not, thought Harriet, bitterly, when one is past one's first youth. The girl over there, exercising S.A. on a group of rather possessive-looking males, will turn into a predatory hag like the woman at the next table, if she doesn't find something to occupy her mind, always supposing that she has a mind. Then the men will say she puts the wind up them.

The "predatory hag" was a lean woman, pathetically made-up, dressed in an exaggeration of the fashion which it would have been difficult for a girl of nineteen to carry off successfully. She had caught Harriet's attention earlier by her look of radiant, almost bridal exaltation. She was alone, but seemed to be expecting somebody, for her gaze roamed incessantly about the room, concentrating itself chiefly on the professionals' table near the platform. Now she appeared to be getting anxious. Her ringed hands twitched nervously, and she lighted one cigarette after another, only to stub it out, half-smoked, snatch at the mirror in her handbag, readjust her make-up, fidget, and then begin the whole process again with another cigarette.

"Waiting for her gigolo," diagnosed Harriet, with a kind of pitiful disgust. "The frog-mouthed gentleman, I suppose. He seems to have better fish to fry."

The waiter brought the coffee, and the woman at the next table caught him on his way back.

"Is Mr. Alexis not here to-night?"

"No, madam." The waiter looked a little nervous. "No. He is unavoidably absent."

"Is he ill?"

"I do not think so, madam. The manager has just said he will not be coming."

"Did he send no message?"

"I could not say, madam." The waiter was fidgeting with his feet. "Mr. Antoine will no doubt be happy...."

"No, never mind. I am accustomed to Mr. Alexis. His step suits me. It does not matter."

"No, madam, thank you, madam."

The waiter escaped. Harriet saw him exchange a word and a shrug with the head waiter. Lips and eyebrows were eloquent. Harriet felt annoyed. Did one come to this, then, if one did not marry? Making a public scorn of one's self before the waiters? She glanced again at the woman, who was rising to leave the lounge. She wore a wedding-ring. Marriage did not save one, apparently. Single, married, widowed, divorced, one came to the same end. She shivered a little, and suddenly felt fed-up with the lounge and the dance-floor. She finished her coffee and retired to the smaller lounge, where three stout women were engaged in an interminable conversation about illnesses, children and servants. "Poor Muriel—quite an invalid since the birth of her last baby.... I spoke quite firmly, I said, 'Now you quite understand, if you leave before your month you will be liable to me for the money.'... Twelve guineas a week, and the surgeon's fee was a hundred guineas.... Beautiful boys, both of them, but with Ronnie at Eton and Wilfred at Oxford.... They oughtn't to let boys run up these bills ... my dear, pounds thinner, I hardly knew her, but I wouldn't care to ... some kind of electric heat treatment, too marvellous ... and what with rates and taxes and all this terrible unemployment.... You can't argue with nervous dyspepsia, but it makes things very difficult ... left me high and dry with the house full of people, these girls have no gratitude."

"And these," thought Harriet, "are the happy ones, I suppose. Well, dash it! How about that town-clock?"

CHAPTER IV