Lord Peter Wimsey [01] Whose Body? Read Online Free PDF Page B

else–some discoloration–"
     
    "No," said Lord Peter, "there were hairs as well. Bristly ones. He had a beard."
     
    He took his watch from his pocket, and drew out a couple of longish, stiff hairs, which he had imprisoned between the inner and the outer case.
     
    Parker turned them over once or twice in his fingers, looked at them close to the light, examined them with a lens, handed them to the impassible Bunter, and said:
     
    "Do you mean to tell me, Wimsey, that any man alive would"–he laughed harshly–"shave off his beard with his mouth open, and then go and get killed with his mouth full of hairs? You're mad."
     
    "I don't tell you so," said Wimsey. "You policemen are all alike–only one idea in your skulls. Blest if I can make out why you're ever appointed. He was shaved after he was dead. Pretty, ain't it? Uncommonly jolly little job for the barber, what? Here, sit down, man, and don't be an ass, stumpin' about the room like that. Worse things happen in war. This is only a blinkin' old shillin' shocker. But I'll tell you what, Parker, we're up against a criminal– the criminal–the real artist and blighter with imagination–real, artistic, finished stuff. I'm enjoyin' this, Parker."
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    III
     
    Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat.
     
    "That's a wonderful instrument," said Parker.
     
    "It ain't so bad," said Lord Peter, "but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano's too modern–all thrills and overtones. No good for our job, Parker. Have you come to any conclusion?"
     
    "The man in the bath," said Parker, methodically, "was not a well-off man careful of his personal appearance. He was a labouring man, unemployed, but who had only recently lost his employment. He had been tramping about looking for a job when he met with his end. Somebody killed him and washed him and scented him and shaved him in order to disguise him, and put him into Thipps's bath without leaving a trace. Conclusion: the murderer was a powerful man, since he killed him with a single blow on the neck, a man of cool head and masterly intellect, since he did all that ghastly business without leaving a mark, a man of wealth and refinement, since he had all the apparatus of an elegant toilet handy, and a man of bizarre, and almost perverted imagination, as is shown in the two horrible touches of putting the body in the bath and of adorning it with a pair of pince-nez."
     
    "He is a poet of crime," said Wimsey. "By the way, your difficulty about the pince-nez is cleared up. Obviously, the pince-nez never belonged to the body."
     
    "That only makes a fresh puzzle. One can't suppose the murderer left them in that obliging manner as a clue to his own identity."
     
    "We can hardly suppose that; I'm afraid this man possessed what most criminals lack–a sense of humour."
     
    "Rather macabre humour."
     
    "True. But a man who can afford to be humourous at all in such circumstances is a terrible fellow. I wonder what he did with the body between the murder and depositing it chez Thipps. Then there are more questions. How did he get it there? And why? Was it brought in at the door, as Sugg of our heart suggests? or through the window, as we think, on the not very adequate testimony of a smudge on the window-sill? Had the murderer accomplices? Is little Thipps really in it, or the girl? It don't do to put the notion out of court merely because Sugg inclines to it. Even idiots occasionally speak