Lord Peter Views the Body Read Online Free PDF Page B

old bird; so one moonlight night Bunter and I carried the thing out in the car to his own little church, some miles out of the city, and gave it Christian burial in a corner of the graveyard. It seemed the best thing to do.’

THE ENTERTAINING EPISODE OF THE ARTICLE IN QUESTION
    The unprofessional detective career of Lord Peter Wimsey was regulated (though the word has no particular propriety in this connection) by a persistent and undignified inquisitiveness. The habit of asking silly questions – natural, though irritating, in the immature male – remained with him long after his immaculate man, Bunter, had become attached to his service to shave the bristles from his chin and see to the due purchase and housing of Napoleon brandies and Villar y Villar cigars. At the age of thirty-two his sister Mary christened him Elephant’s Child. It was his idiotic enquiries (before his brother, the Duke of Denver, who grew scarlet with mortification) as to what the Woolsack was really stuffed with that led the then Lord Chancellor idly to investigate the article in question, and to discover, tucked deep within its recesses, that famous diamond necklace of the Marchioness of Writtle, which had disappeared on the day Parliament was opened and been safely secreted by one of the cleaners. It was by a continual and personal badgering of the Chief Engineer at 2LO on the question of ‘Why is Oscillation and How is it Done?’ that his lordship incidentally unmasked the great Ploffsky gang of Anarchist conspirators, who were accustomed to converse in code by a methodical system of howls, superimposed (to the great annoyance of listeners in British and European stations) upon the London wave-length and duly relayed by 5XX over a radius of some five or six hundred miles. He annoyed persons of more leisure than decorum by suddenly taking into his head to descend to the Underground by way of the stairs, though the only exciting thing he ever actually found there were the bloodstained boots of the Sloane Square murderer; on the other hand when the drains were taken up at Glegg’s Folly, it was by hanging about and hindering the plumbers at their job that he accidentally made the discovery which hanged that detestable poisoner, William Girdlestone Chitty.
        Accordingly, it was with no surprise at all that the reliable Bunter, one April morning, received the announcement of an abrupt change of plan.
        They had arrived at the Gare St Lazare in good time to register the luggage. Their three months’ trip to Italy had been purely for enjoyment, and had been followed by a pleasant fortnight in Paris. They were now intending to pay a short visit to the Duc de Sainte-Croix in Rouen on their way back to England. Lord Peter paced the Salle des Pas Perdus for some time, buying an illustrated paper or two and eyeing the crowd. He bent an appreciative eye on a slim, shingled creature with the face of a Paris gamin , but was forced to admit to himself that her ankles were a trifle on the thick side; he assisted an elderly lady who was explaining to the bookstall clerk that she wanted a map of Paris and not a carte postale , consumed a quick cognac at one of the little green tables at the far end, and then decided he had better go down and see how Bunter was getting on.
        In half an hour Bunter and his porter had worked themselves up to the second place in the enormous queue – for, as usual, one of the weighing-machines was out of order. In front of them stood an agitated little group – the young woman Lord Peter had noticed in the Salle des Pas Perdus, a sallow-faced man of about thirty, their porter, and the registration official, who was peering eagerly through his little guichet .
        ‘Mais je te répète que je ne les ai pas,’ said the sallow man heatedly. ‘Voyons, voyons. C’est bien toi qui les as pris, n’est-ce pas? Eh bien, alors, comment veux-tu que je les aie, moi?’
        ‘Mais non, mais non, je te les ai bien