MARY QUITE CONTRARY
_I am striving to take into public life what any man gets from his
mother._
LADY ASTOR
On the opening day of the York Assizes, the Grand Jury brought in a
true bill, against Gerald, Duke of Denver, for murder. Gerald, Duke of
Denver, being accordingly produced in the court, the Judge affected
to discover--what, indeed, every newspaper in the country had been
announcing to the world for the last fortnight--that he, being but
a common or garden judge with a plebeian jury, was incompetent to
try a peer of the realm. He added, however, that he would make it
his business to inform the Lord Chancellor (who also, for the last
fortnight, had been secretly calculating the accommodation in the Royal
Gallery and choosing lords to form the Select Committee). Order being
taken accordingly, the noble prisoner was led away.
* * * * *
A day or two later, in the gloom of a London afternoon, Mr. Charles
Parker rang the bell of a second-floor flat at No. 110 Piccadilly. The
door was opened by Bunter, who informed him with a gracious smile that
Lord Peter had stepped out for a few minutes but was expecting him, and
would he kindly come in and wait.
"We only came up this morning," added the valet, "and are not quite
straight yet, sir, if you will excuse us. Would you feel inclined for a
cup of tea?"
Parker accepted the offer, and sank luxuriously into a corner of the
Chesterfield. After the extraordinary discomfort of French furniture
there was solace in the enervating springiness beneath him, the
cushions behind his head, and Wimsey's excellent cigarettes. What
Bunter had meant by saying that things were "not quite straight yet"
he could not divine. A leaping wood fire was merrily reflected in the
spotless surface of the black baby grand; the mellow calf bindings of
Lord Peter's rare editions glowed softly against the black and primrose
walls; the vases were filled with tawny chrysanthemums; the latest
editions of all the papers were on the table--as though the owner had
never been absent.
Over his tea Mr. Parker drew out the photographs of Lady Mary and Denis
Cathcart from his breast pocket. He stood them up against the teapot
and stared at them, looking from one to the other as if trying to force
a meaning from their faintly smirking, self-conscious gaze. He referred
again to his Paris notes, ticking off various points with a pencil.
"Damn!" said Mr. Parker, gazing at Lady Mary. "Damn--damn--damn--"
The train of thought he was pursuing was an extraordinarily interesting
one. Image after image, each rich in suggestion, crowded into his
mind. Of course, one couldn't think properly in Paris--it was so
uncomfortable and the houses were central heated. Here, where so many
problems had been unravelled, there was a good fire. Cathcart had been
sitting before the fire. Of course, he wanted to think out a problem.
When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems. It
was odd he should not have thought of that before. When the green-eyed
cat sat before the fire one sank right down into a sort of rich, black,
velvety suggestiveness which was most important. It was luxurious to be
able to think so lucidly as this, because otherwise it would be a pity
to exceed the speed limit--and the black moors were reeling by so fast.
But now he had really got the formula he wouldn't forget it again. The
connection was just there--close, thick, richly coherent.
"The glass-blower's cat is bompstable," said Mr. Parker aloud and
distinctly.
"I'm charmed to hear it," replied Lord Peter, with a friendly grin.
"Had a good nap, old man?"
"I--what?" said Mr. Parker. "Hullo! Watcher mean, nap? I had got hold
of a most important train of thought, and you've put it out of my head.
What was it? Cat--cat--cat--" He groped wildly.
"You _said_ 'The glass-blower's cat is bompstable,'" retorted Lord
Peter. "It's a perfectly rippin' word, but I don't know what you mean
by it."
"Bompstable?" said Mr. Parker, blushing slightly. "Bomp--oh, well,
perhaps you're right--I may have dozed off. But, you know, I thought
I'd just got the clue to the whole thing. I attached the greatest
importance to that phrase. Even now--No, now I come to think of it, my
train of thought doesn't seem quite to hold together. What a pity. I
thought it was so lucid."
"Never mind," said Lord Peter. "Just back?"
"Crossed last night. Any news?"
"Lots."
"Good?"
"No."
Parker's eyes wandered to the photographs.
"I don't believe it," he said obstinately. "I'm damned if I'm going to
believe a word of it."
"A word of what?"
"Of whatever it is."
"You'll have to believe it, Charles, as far as it goes," said his
friend softly, filling his pipe with decided little digs of the
fingers. "I don't say"--dig--"that Mary"--dig--"shot Cathcart"--dig,
dig--"but she has lied"--dig--"again and again."--Dig, dig--"She knows
who did it"--dig--"she was prepared for it"--dig--"she's malingering
and lying to keep the fellow shielded"--dig--"and we shall have to make
her speak." Here he struck a match and lit the pipe in a series of
angry little puffs.
"If you can think," said Mr. Parker, with some heat, "that that
woman"--he indicated the photographs--"had any hand in murdering
Cathcart, I don't care what your evidence is, you--hang it all, Wimsey,
she's your own sister."
"Gerald is my brother," said Wimsey quietly. "You don't suppose I'm
exactly enjoying this business, do you? But I think we shall get along
very much better if we try to keep our tempers."
"I'm awfully sorry," said Parker. "Can't think why I said that--rotten
bad form--beg pardon, old man."
"The best thing we can do," said Wimsey, "is to look the evidence in
the face, however ugly. And I don't mind admittin' that some of it's a
positive gargoyle.
"My mother turned up at Riddlesdale on Friday. She marched upstairs at
once and took possession of Mary, while I drooped about in the hall
and teased the cat, and generally made a nuisance of myself. _You_
know. Presently old Dr. Thorpe called. I went and sat on the chest on
the landing. Presently the bell rings and Ellen comes upstairs. Mother
and Thorpe popped out and caught her just outside Mary's room, and
they jibber-jabbered a lot, and presently mother came barging down the
passage to the bathroom with her heels tapping and her earrings simply
dancing with irritation. I sneaked after 'em to the bathroom door,
but I couldn't see anything, because they were blocking the doorway,
but I heard mother say, 'There, now, what did I tell you'; and Ellen
said, 'Lawks! your grace, who'd 'a' thought it?'; and my mother said,
'All I can say is, if I had to depend on you people to save me from
being murdered with arsenic or that other stuff with the name like
anemones[4]--you know what I mean--that that very attractive-looking
man with the preposterous beard used to make away with his wife and
mother-in-law (who was vastly the more attractive of the two, poor
thing), I might be being cut up and analyzed by Dr. Spilsbury now--such
a horrid, distasteful job he must have of it, poor man, and the poor
little rabbits, too.'" Wimsey paused for breath, and Parker laughed in
spite of his anxiety.
[Footnote 4: Antinomy? The Duchess appears to have had Dr. Pritchard's
case in mind.]
"I won't vouch for the exact words," said Wimsey, "but it was to
that effect--you know my mother's style. Old Thorpe tried to look
dignified, but mother ruffled up like a little hen and said, looking
beadily at him: 'In _my_ day we called that kind of thing hysterics and
naughtiness. _We_ didn't let girls pull the wool over our eyes like
that. I suppose _you_ call it a neurosis, or a suppressed desire, or a
reflex, and coddle it. You might have let that silly child make herself
really ill. You are all perfectly ridiculous, and no more fit to take
care of yourselves than a lot of babies--not but what there are plenty
of poor little things in the slums that look after whole families and
show more sense than the lot of you put together. I am very angry with
Mary, advertising herself in this way, and she's not to be pitied.' You
know," said Wimsey, "I think there's often a great deal in what one's
mother says."
"I believe you," said Parker.
"Well, I got hold of mother afterwards and asked her what it was all
about. She said Mary wouldn't tell her anything about herself or
her illness; just asked to be let alone. Then Thorpe came along and
talked about nervous shock--said he couldn't understand these fits of
sickness, or the way Mary's temperature hopped about. Mother listened,
and told him to go and see what the temperature was now. Which he did,
and in the middle mother called him away to the dressing-table. But,
bein' a wily old bird, you see, she kept her eyes on the looking-glass,
and nipped round just in time to catch Mary stimulatin' the thermometer
to terrific leaps on the hotwater bottle."
"Well, I'm damned!" said Parker.
"So was Thorpe. All mother said was, that if he wasn't too old a bird
yet to be taken in by that hoary trick he'd no business to be gettin'
himself up as a grey-haired family practitioner. So then she asked the
girl about the sick fits--when they happened, and how often, and was it
after meals or before, and so on, and at last she got out of them that
it generally happened a bit after breakfast and occasionally at other
times. Mother said she couldn't make it out at first, because she'd
hunted all over the room for bottles and things, till at last she asked
who made the bed, thinkin', you see, Mary might have hidden something
under the mattress. So Ellen said she usually made it while Mary had
her bath. 'When's that?' says mother. 'Just before her breakfast,'
bleats the girl. 'God forgive you all for a set of nincompoops,' says
my mother. 'Why didn't you say so before?' So away they all trailed
to the bathroom, and there, sittin' up quietly on the bathroom shelf
among the bath salts and the Elliman's embrocation and the Kruschen
feelings and the toothbrushes and things, was the family bottle of
ipecacuanha--three-quarters empty! Mother said--well, I told you what
she said. By the way, how do you spell ipecacuanha?"
Mr. Parker spelt it.
"Damn you!" said Lord Peter. "I _did_ think I'd stumped you that time.
I believe you went and looked it up beforehand. _No_ decent-minded
person would know how to spell ipecacuanha out of his own head. Anyway,
as you were saying, it's easy to see which side of the family has the
detective instinct."
"I didn't say so--"
"I know. Why didn't you? I think my mother's talents deserve a little
acknowledgment. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied
in these memorable words: 'My dear child, you can give it a long name
if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit,
and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book
about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.' However, apart from all that,
I said to mother (in private, of course), 'It's all very well, but I
can't believe that Mary has been going to all this trouble to make
herself horribly sick and frighten us all just to show off. Surely she
isn't that sort.' Mother looked at me as steady as an owl, and quoted
a whole lot of examples of hysteria, ending up with the servant-girl
who threw paraffin about all over somebody's house to make them think
it was haunted, and finished up--that if all these new-fangled doctors
went out of their way to invent subconsciousness and kleptomania, and
complexes and other fancy descriptions to explain away when people had
done naughty things, she thought one might just as well take advantage
of the fact."
"Wimsey," said Parker, much excited, "did she mean she suspected
something?"
"My dear old chap," replied Lord Peter, "whatever can be known about
Mary by putting two and two together my mother knows. I told her all
_we_ knew up to that point, and she took it all in, in her funny way,
you know, never answering anything directly, and then she put her head
on one side and said: 'If Mary had listened to me, and done something
useful instead of that V.A.D. work, which never came to much, if you
ask me--not that I have anything against V.A.D.'s in a general way, but
that silly woman Mary worked under was the most terrible snob on God's
earth--and there were very much more sensible things which Mary might
really have done well, only that she was so crazy to get to London--I
shall always say it was the fault of that ridiculous club--what could
you expect of a place where you ate such horrible food, all packed
into an underground cellar painted pink and talking away at the tops
of their voices, and never any evening dress--only Soviet jumpers and
side-whiskers. Anyhow, I've told that silly old man what to say about
it, and they'll never be able to think of a better explanation for
themselves.' Indeed, you know," said Peter, "I think if any of them
start getting inquisitive, they'll have mother down on them like a ton
of bricks."
"What do you really think yourself?" asked Parker.
"I haven't come yet to the unpleasantest bit of the lot," said Peter.
"I've only just heard it, and it did give me a nasty jar, I'll admit.
Yesterday I got a letter from Lubbock saying he would like to see me,
so I trotted up here and dropped in on him this morning. You remember
I sent him a stain off one of Mary's skirts which Bunter had cut out
for me? I had taken a squint at it myself, and didn't like the look of
it, so I sent it up to Lubbock, _ex abundantia cautelœ_; and I'm sorry
to say he confirms me. It's human blood, Charles, and I'm afraid it's
Cathcart's."
"But--I've lost the thread of this a bit."
"Well, the skirt must have got stained the day Cathcart--died, as that
was the last day on which the party was out on the moors, and if it had
been there earlier Ellen would have cleaned it off. Afterwards Mary
strenuously resisted Ellen's efforts to take the skirt away, and made
an amateurish effort to tidy it up herself with soap. So I think we
may conclude that Mary knew the stains were there, and wanted to avoid
discovery. She told Ellen that the blood was from a grouse--which must
have been a deliberate untruth."
"Perhaps," said Parker, struggling against hope to make out a case for
Lady Mary, "she only said, 'Oh! one of the birds must have bled,' or
something like that."
"I don't believe," said Peter, "that one could get a great patch of
human blood on one's clothes like that and not know what it was. She
must have knelt right in it. It was three or four inches across."
Parker shook his head dismally, and consoled himself by making a note.
"Well, now," went on Peter, "on Wednesday night everybody comes in
and dines and goes to bed except Cathcart, who rushes out and stays
out. At 11:50 the gamekeeper, Hardraw, hears a shot which may very
well have been fired in the clearing where the--well, let's say the
accident--took place. The time also agrees with the medical evidence
about Cathcart having already been dead three or four hours when he was
examined at 4:30. Very well. At 3 a.m. Jerry comes home from somewhere
or other and finds the body. As he is bending over it, Mary arrives in
the most apropos manner from the house in her coat and cap and walking
shoes. Now what is her story? She says that at three o'clock she was
awakened by a shot. Now nobody else heard that shot, and we have the
evidence of Mrs. Pettigrew-Robinson, who slept in the next room to
Mary, with her window open according to her immemorial custom, that
she lay broad awake from 2 a.m. till a little after 3 a.m., when the
alarm was given, and heard no shot. According to Mary, the shot was
loud enough to waken her on the other side of the building. It's odd,
isn't it, that the person already awake should swear so positively
that she heard nothing of a noise loud enough to waken a healthy young
sleeper next door? And, in any case, _if_ that was the shot that killed
Cathcart, he can barely have been dead when my brother found him--and
again, in that case, how was there time for him to be carried up from
the shrubbery to the conservatory?"
"We've been over all this ground," said Parker, with an expression of
distaste. "We agreed that we couldn't attach any importance to the
story of the shot."
"I'm afraid we've got to attach a great deal of importance to it," said
Lord Peter gravely. "Now, what does Mary do? Either she thought the
shot--"
"There was no shot."
"I know that. But I'm examining the discrepancies of her story. She
said she did not give the alarm because she thought it was probably
only poachers. But, if it was poachers, it would be absurd to go down
and investigate. So she explains that she thought it might be burglars.
Now how does she dress to go and look for burglars? What would you or I
have done? I think we would have taken a dressing-gown, a stealthy kind
of pair of slippers, and perhaps a poker or a stout stick--not a pair
of walking shoes, a coat, and a cap, of all things!"
"It was a wet night," mumbled Parker.
"My dear chap, if it's burglars you're looking for you don't expect to
go and hunt them round the garden. Your first thought is that they're
getting into the house, and your idea is to slip down quietly and
survey them from the staircase or behind the dining-room door. Anyhow,
fancy a present-day girl, who rushes about bare-headed in all weathers,
stopping to embellish herself in a cap for a burglar-hunt--damn it all,
Charles, it won't wash, you know! And she walks straight off to the
conservatory and comes upon the corpse, exactly as if she knew where to
look for it beforehand."
Parker shook his head again.
"Well, now. She sees Gerald stooping over Cathcart's body. What does
she say? Does she ask what's the matter? Does she ask who it is? She
exclaims: 'O God! Gerald, you've killed him,' and _then_ she says, as
if on second thoughts, 'Oh, it's Denis! What has happened? Has there
been an accident?' Now, does that strike you as natural?"
"No. But it rather suggests to me that it wasn't Cathcart she expected
to see there, but somebody else."
"Does it? It rather sounds to me as if she was pretending not to know
who it was. First she says, 'You've killed him!' and then, recollecting
that she isn't supposed to know who 'he' is, she says, 'Why, it's
Denis!'"
"In any case, then, if her first exclamation was genuine, she didn't
expect to find the man dead."
"No--no--we must remember that. The death _was_ a surprise. Very well.
Then Gerald sends Mary up for help. And here's where a little bit of
evidence comes in that you picked up and sent along. Do you remember
what Mrs. Pettigrew-Robinson said to you in the train?"
"About the door slamming on the landing, do you mean?"
"Yes. Now I'll tell you something that happened to me the other
morning. I was burstin' out of the bathroom in my usual breezy way when
I caught myself a hell of a whack on that old chest on the landin', and
the lid lifted up and shut down, _plonk!_ That gave me an idea, and I
thought I'd have a squint inside. I'd got the lid up and was lookin' at
some sheets and stuff that were folded up at the bottom, when I heard a
sort of gasp, and there was Mary, starin' at me, as white as a ghost.
She gave me a turn, by Jove, but nothin' like the turn I'd given her.
Well, she wouldn't say anything to me, and got hysterical, and I hauled
her back to her room. But I'd seen something on those sheets."
"What?"
"Silver sand."
"Silver--"
"D'you remember those cacti in the greenhouse, and the place where
somebody'd put a suit-case or something down?"
"Yes."
"Well, there was a lot of silver sand scattered about--the sort people
stick round some kinds of bulbs and things."
"And that was inside the chest too?"
"Yes. Wait a moment. After the noise Mrs. Pettigrew-Robinson heard,
Mary woke up Freddy and then the Pettigrew-Robinsons--and then what?"
"She locked herself into her room."
"Yes. And shortly afterwards she came down and joined the others in the
conservatory, and it was at this point everybody remembered noticing
that she was wearing a cap and coat and walking shoes over pajamas and
bare feet."
"You are suggesting," said Parker, "that Lady Mary was already awake
and dressed at three o'clock, that she went out by the conservatory
door with her suit-case, expecting to meet the--the murderer of
her--damn it, Wimsey!"
"We needn't go so far as that," said Peter; "we decided that she
_didn't_ expect to find Cathcart dead."
"No. Well, she went, presumably to meet somebody."
"Shall we say, _pro tem._, she went to meet No. 10?" suggested Wimsey
softly.
"I suppose we may as well say so. When she turned on the torch and saw
the Duke stooping over Cathcart she thought--by Jove, Wimsey, I was
right after all! When she said, 'You've killed him!' she meant No.
10--she thought it was No. 10's body."
"Of course!" cried Wimsey. "I'm a fool! Yes. Then she said, 'It's
Denis--what has happened?' That's quite clear. And, meanwhile, what did
she do with the suit-case?"
"I see it all now," cried Parker. "When she saw that the body wasn't
the body of No. 10 she realized that No. 10 must be the murderer. So
her game was to prevent anybody knowing that No. 10 had been there.
So she shoved the suit-case behind the cacti. Then, when she went
upstairs, she pulled it out again, and hid it in the oak chest on
the landing. She couldn't take it to her room, of course, because if
anybody'd heard her come upstairs it would seem odd that she should run
to her room before calling the others. Then she knocked up Arbuthnot
and the Pettigrew-Robinsons--she'd be in the dark, and they'd be
flustered and wouldn't see exactly what she had on. Then she escaped
from Mrs. P., ran into her room, took off the skirt in which she had
knelt by Cathcart's side, and the rest of her clothes, and put on her
pajamas and the cap, which someone might have noticed, and the coat,
which they _must_ have noticed, and the shoes, which had probably left
footmarks already. Then she could go down and show herself. Meantime
she'd concocted the burglar story for the Coroner's benefit."
"That's about it," said Peter. "I suppose she was so desperately
anxious to throw us off the scent of No. 10 that it never occurred to
her that her story was going to help implicate her brother."
"She realized it at the inquest," said Parker eagerly. "Don't you
remember how hastily she grasped at the suicide theory?"
"And when she found that she was simply saving her--well, No. 10--in
order to hang her brother, she lost her head, took to her bed, and
refused to give any evidence at all. Seems to me there's an extra
allowance of fools in my family," said Peter gloomily.
"Well, what could she have done, poor girl?" asked Parker. He had been
growing almost cheerful again. "Anyway, she's cleared--"
"After a fashion," said Peter, "but we're not out of the wood yet by
a long way. Why is she hand-in-glove with No. 10 who is at least a
blackmailer if not a murderer? How did Gerald's revolver come on the
scene? And the green-eyed cat? How much did Mary know of that meeting
between No. 10 and Denis Cathcart? And if she was seeing and meeting
the man she might have put the revolver into his hands any time."
"No, no," said Parker. "Wimsey, don't think such ugly things as that."
"Hell!" cried Peter, exploding. "I'll have the truth of this beastly
business if we all go to the gallows together!"
At this moment Bunter entered with a telegram addressed to Wimsey. Lord
Peter read as follows:
"Party traced London; seen Marylebone Friday. Further information
from Scotland Yard.--POLICE-SUPERINTENDENT GOSLING, Ripley."
"Good egg!" cried Wimsey. "Now we're gettin' down to it. Stay here,
there's a good man, in case anything turns up. I'll run round to the
Yard now. They'll send you up dinner, and tell Bunter to give you a
bottle of the Chateau Yquem--it's rather decent. So long."
He leapt out of the flat, and a moment later his taxi buzzed away up
Piccadilly.