Dorothy L. Sayers - [Lord Peter Wimsey 03] (20 page)

“That reminds me,” put in Parker, “suppose the great-niece is excluded from the inheritance, where does the money go?”

“It goes to the Duchy of Lancaster—or in other words, to the Crown.”

“In fact,” said Wimsey, “to no one in particular. Upon my soul, I really can’t see that it’s very much of a crime to bump a poor old thing off a bit previously when she’s sufferin’ horribly, just to get the money she intends you to have. Why the devil should the Duchy of Lancaster have it? Who cares about the Duchy of Lancaster? It’s like defrauding the income tax.”

“Ethically,” observed Mr. Murbles, “there may be much to be said for your point of view. Legally, I am afraid, murder is murder, however frail the victim or convenient the result.”

“And Agatha Dawson didn’t want to die,” added Parker, “she said so.”

“No,” said Wimsey, thoughtfully, “and I suppose she had a right to an opinion.”

“I think,” said Mr. Murbles, “that before we go any further, we ought to consult a specialist in this branch of the law. I wonder whether Towkington is at home. He is quite the ablest authority I could name. Greatly as I dislike that modern invention, the telephone, I think it might be advisable to ring him up.”

Mr. Towkington proved to be at home and at liberty. The case of the great-niece was put to him over the phone. Mr. Towkington, taken at a disadvantage without his authorities, and hazarding an opinion on the spur of the moment, thought that in all probability the great-niece would be excluded from the succession under the new Act. But it was an interesting point, and he would be glad of an opportunity to verify his references. Would not Mr. Murbles come round and talk it over with him? Mr. Murbles explained that he was at that moment dining with two friends who were interested in the question. In that case, would not the two friends also come round and see Mr. Towkington?

“Towkington has some very excellent port,” said Mr. Murbles, in a cautious aside, and clapping his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone.

“Then why not go and try it?” said Wimsey, cheerfully.

“It’s only as far as Gray’s Inn,” continued Mr. Murbles.

“All the better,” said Lord Peter.

Mr. Murbles released the telephone and thanked Mr. Towkington. The party would start at once for Gray’s Inn. Mr. Towkington was heard to say, “Good, good,” in a hearty manner before ringing off.

On their arrival at Mr. Towkington’s chambers the oak was found to be hospitably unsported, and almost before they could knock, Mr. Towkington himself flung open the door and greeted them in a loud and cheerful tone. He was a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice. In court, he was famous for a way of saying, “Come now,” as a preface to tying recalcitrant witnesses into tight knots, which he would then proceed to slash open with a brilliant confutation. He knew Wimsey by sight, expressed himself delighted to meet Inspector Parker, and bustled his guests into the room with jovial shouts.

“I’ve been going into this little matter while you were coming along,” he said. “Awkward, eh? ha! Astonishing thing that people can’t say what they mean when they draw Acts, eh? ha! Why do you suppose it is, Lord Peter, eh? ha! Come now!”

“I suspect it’s because Acts are drawn up by lawyers,” said Wimsey with a grin.

“To make work for themselves, eh? I daresay you’re right. Even lawyers must live, eh? ha! Very good. Well now, Murbles, let’s just have this case again, in greater detail, d’you mind?”

Mr. Murbles explained the matter again, displaying the genealogical table and putting forward the point as regards a possible motive for murder.

“Eh, ha!” exclaimed Mr. Towkington, much delighted, “that’s good—very good—your idea, Lord Peter? Very ingenious. Too ingenious. The dock at the Old Bailey is peopled by gentlemen who are too ingenious. Ha! Come to a bad end one of these days, young man. Eh? Yes—well, now, Murbles, the question here turns on the interpretation of the word ‘issue’—you grasp that, eh, ha! Yes. Well, y
ou
seem to think it means issue
ad infinitum.
How do you make that out, come now?”

“I didn’t say I thought it did; I said I thought it might,” remonstrated Mr. Murbles, mildly. “The general intention of the Act appears to be to exclude any remote kin where the common ancestor is further back than the grandparents—not to cut off the descendants of the brothers and sisters.”

“Intention?” snapped Mr. Towkington. “I’m astonished at you, Murbles! The law has nothing to do with good intentions. What does the Act
say
? It says, ‘To the brothers and sisters of the whole blood and their issue.’ Now, in the absence of any new definition, I should say that the word is here to be construed as before the Act it was construed on intestacy—in so far, at any rate, as it refers to personal property, which I understand the property in question to be, eh?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Murbles.

“Then I don’t see that you and your great-niece have a leg to stand on—come now!”

“Excuse me,” said Wimsey, “but d’you mind—I know lay people are awful ignorant nuisances—but if you
would
be so good as to explain what the beastly word did or does mean, it would be frightfully helpful, don’t you know.”

“Ha! Well, it’s like this,” said Mr. Towkington, graciously. “Before 1837—”

“Queen Victoria, I know,” said Peter, intelligently.

“Quite so. At the time when Queen Victoria came to the throne, the word ‘issue’ had no legal meaning—no legal meaning at all.”

“You surprise me!”

“You are too easily surprised,” said Mr. Towkington. “Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word ‘daffy-down-dilly.’ It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you
never
to do it. Then again, words which are quite meaningless in your ordinary conversation may have a meaning in law. For instance, I might say to a young man like yourself, ‘You wish to leave such-and-such property to so-and-so.’ And you would very likely reply, ‘Oh, yes, absolutely’—meaning nothing in particular by that. But if you were to write in your will, ‘I leave such-and-such property to so-and-so
absolutely
,’ then that word would bear a definite legal meaning, and would condition your bequest in a certain manner, and might even prove an embarrassment and produce results very far from your actual intentions. Eh, ha! You see?”

“Quite.”

“Very well. Prior to 1837, the word ‘issue’ meant nothing. A grant ‘to A. and his issue’ merely gave A. a life estate. Ha! But this was altered by the Wills Act of 1837.”

“As far as a will was concerned,” put in Mr. Murbles.

“Precisely. After 1837, in a will, ‘issue’ means ‘heirs of the body’—that is to say, ‘issue
ad infinitum
.’ In a deed, on the other hand, ‘issue’ retained its old meaning—or lack of meaning, eh, ha! You follow?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Murbles, “and on intestacy of personal property—”

“I am coming to that,” said Mr. Towkington.

“—the word ‘issue’ continued to mean ‘heirs of the body,’ and that held good till 1926.”

“Stop!” said Mr. Towkington, “issue of the child or children of the deceased certainly meant ‘issue
ad infinitum
’—
but
—issue of any person not a child of the deceased only meant the child of that person and did not include other descendants. And that undoubtedly held good till 1926. And since the new Act contains no statement to the contrary, I think we must presume that it continues to hold good. Ha! Come now! In the case before us, you observe that the claimant is not the child of the deceased nor issue of the child of the deceased; nor is she the child of the deceased’s sister. She is merely the grandchild of the deceased sister of the deceased. Accordingly, I think she is debarred from inheriting under the new Act, eh? ha!”

“I see your point,” said Mr. Murbles.

“And moreover,” went on Mr. Towkington, “after 1925, ‘issue’ in a will or deed does
not
mean ‘issue
ad infinitum
.’ That at least is clearly stated, and the Wills Act of 1837 is revoked on that point. Not that that has any direct bearing on the question. But it may be an indication of the tendency of modern interpretation, and might possibly affect the mind of the court in deciding how the word ‘issue’ was to be construed for the purposes of the new Act.”

“Well,” said Mr. Murbles, “I bow to your superior knowledge.”

“In any case,” broke in Parker, “any uncertainty in the matter would provide as good a motive for murder as the certainty of exclusion from inheritance. If Mary Whittaker only
thought
she might lose the money in the event of her great-aunt’s surviving into 1926, she might quite well be tempted to polish her off a little earlier, and make sure.”

“That’s true enough,” said Mr. Murbles.

“Shrewd, very shrewd, ha!” added Mr. Towkington. “But you realise that all this theory of yours depends on Mary Whittaker’s having known about the new Act and its probable consequences as early as October, 1925, eh, ha!”

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t,” said Wimsey. “I remember reading an article in the
Evening Banner
, I think it was, some months earlier—about the time when the Act was having its second reading. That’s what put the thing into my head—I was trying to remember all evening where I’d seen that thing about washing out the long-lost heir, you know. Mary Whittaker may easily have seen it too.”

“Well, she’d probably have taken advice about it if she did,” said Mr. Murbles. “Who is her usual man of affairs?”

Wimsey shook his head.

“I don’t think she’d have asked him,” he objected. “Not if she was wise, that is. You see, if she did, and he said she probably wouldn’t get anything unless Miss Dawson either made a will or died before January, 1926, and if after that the old lady did unexpectedly pop off in October, 1925, wouldn’t the solicitor-johnnie feel inclined to ask questions? It wouldn’t be safe, don’t y’know. I ’xpect she went to some stranger and asked a few innocent little questions under another name, what?”

“Probably,” said Mr. Towkington. “You show a remarkable disposition for crime, don’t you, eh?”

“Well, if I did go in for it, I’d take reasonable precautions,” retorted. Wimsey. “ ’S wonderful, of course, the tom-fool things murderers
do
do. But I have the highest opinion of Miss Whittaker’s brains. I bet she covered her tracks pretty well.”

“You don’t think Mr. Probyn mentioned the matter,” suggested Parker, “the time he went down and tried to get Miss Dawson to make her will.”

“I
don’t
,” said Wimsey, with energy, “but I’m pretty certain he tried to explain matters to the old lady, only she was so terrified of the very idea of a will she wouldn’t let him get a word in. But I fancy old Probyn was too downy a bird to tell the heir that her only chance of gettin’ the dollars was to see that her great-aunt died off before the Act went through. Would
you
tell anybody that, Mr. Towkington?”

“Not if I knew it,” said that gentleman, grinning.

“It would be highly undesirable,” agreed Mr. Murbles.

“Anyway,” said Wimsey, “we can easily find out. Probyn’s in Italy—I was going to write to him, but perhaps you’d better do it, Murbles. And, in the meanwhile, Charles and I will think up a way to find whoever it was that did give Miss Whittaker an opinion on the matter.”

“You’re not forgetting, I suppose,” said Parker, rather dryly, “that before pinning down a murder to any particular motive, it is usual to ascertain that a murder has been committed? So far, all we know is that, after a careful postmortem analysis, two qualified doctors have agreed that Miss Dawson died a natural death.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it. You wait till I publish my epoch-making work:
The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death.
That’ll show you I’m not a man to be trifled with.”

“Oh, well!” said Parker.

But he saw the Chief Commissioner next morning and reported that he was at last disposed to take the Dawson case seriously.

PIERROT
: “Scaramel, I am tempted.”

S
CARAMEL
: “Always yield to temptation.”

L. HOUSMAN:
PRUNELLA

A
S PARKER CAME OUT
from the Chief Commissioner’s room, he was caught by an officer.

“There’s been a lady on the phone to you,” he said. “I told her to ring up at 10:30. It’s about that now.”

“What name?”

“A Mrs. Forrest. She wouldn’t say what she wanted.”

“Odd,” thought Parker. His researches in the matter had been so unfruitful that he had practically eliminated Mrs. Forrest from the Gotobed mystery—merely keeping her filed, as it were, in the back of his mind for future reference. It occurred to him, whimsically, that she had at length discovered the absence of one of her wine-glasses and was ringing him up in a professional capacity. His conjectures were interrupted by his being called to the telephone to answer Mrs. Forrest’s call.

“Is that Detective-Inspector Parker?—I’m so sorry to trouble you, but could you possibly give me Mr. Templeton’s address?”

“Templeton?” said Parker, momentarily puzzled.

“Wasn’t it Templeton—the gentleman who came with you to see me?”

“Oh, yes, of course—I beg your pardon—I—the matter had slipped my memory. Er—you want his address?”

“I have some information which I think he will be glad to hear.”

“Oh, yes. You can speak quite freely to me, you know, Mrs. Forrest.”

“Not
quite
freely,” purred the voice at the other end of the wire, “you are rather official, you know. I should prefer just to write to Mr. Templeton privately, and leave it to him to take up with you.”

“I see.” Parker’s brain worked briskly. It might be inconvenient to have Mrs. Forrest writing to Mr. Templeton at 110A, Piccadilly. The letter might not be delivered. Or, if the lady were to take it into her head to call and discovered that Mr. Templeton was not known to the porter, she might take alarm and bottle up her valuable information.