Unnatural Death 15Part 2 · Temptation of St. Peter
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Unnatural Death 15
Part 2 · Temptation of St. Peter
SayersEnglish
Pierrot: “Scaramel, I am tempted.”
Scaramel: “Always yield to temptation.”
L. Housman, Prunella
As 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 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.
“I think,” said Parker, “I ought not, perhaps, to give you Mr. Templeton’s address without consulting him. But you could ’phone him—”
“Oh, yes, that would do. Is he in the book?”
“No—but I can give you his private number.”
“Thank you very much. You’ll forgive my bothering you.”
“No trouble at all.” And he named Lord Peter’s number.
Having rung off, he waited a moment and then called the number himself.
“Look here, Wimsey,” he said, “I’ve had a call from Mrs. Forrest. She wants to write to you. I wouldn’t give the address, but I’ve given her your number, so if she calls and asks for Mr. Templeton, you will remember who you are, won’t you?”
“Righty-ho! Wonder what the fair lady wants.”
“It’s probably occurred to her that she might have told a better story, and she wants to work off a few additions and improvements on you.”
“Then she’ll probably give herself away. The rough sketch is frequently so much more convincing than the worked-up canvas.”
“Quite so. I couldn’t get anything out of her myself.”
“No. I expect she’s thought it over and decided that it’s rather unusual to employ Scotland Yard to ferret out the whereabouts of errant husbands. She fancies there’s something up, and that I’m a nice soft-headed imbecile whom she can easily pump in the absence of the official Cerberus.”
“Probably. Well, you’ll deal with the matter. I’m going to make a search for that solicitor.”
“Rather a vague sort of search, isn’t it?”
“Well, I’ve got an idea which may work out. I’ll let you know if I get any results.”
Mrs. Forrest’s call duly came through in about twenty minutes’ time. Mrs. Forrest had changed her mind. Would Mr. Templeton come round and see her that evening—about 9 o’clock, if that was convenient? She had thought the matter over and preferred not to put her information on paper.
Mr. Templeton would be very happy to come round. He had no other engagement. It was no inconvenience at all. He begged Mrs. Forrest not to mention it.
Would Mr. Templeton be so very good as not to tell anybody about his visit? Mr. Forrest and his sleuths were continually on the watch to get Mrs. Forrest into trouble, and the decree absolute was due to come up in a month’s time. Any trouble with the King’s Proctor would be positively disastrous. It would be better if Mr. Templeton would come by Underground to Bond Street, and proceed to the flats on foot, so as not to leave a car standing outside the door or put a taxi-driver into a position to give testimony against Mrs. Forrest.
Mr. Templeton chivalrously promised to obey these directions.
Mrs. Forrest was greatly obliged, and would expect him at nine o’clock.
“Bunter!”
“My lord.”
“I am going out to-night. I’ve been asked not to say where, so I won’t. On the other hand, I’ve got a kind of feelin’ that it’s unwise to disappear from mortal ken, so to speak. Anything might happen. One might have a stroke, don’t you know. So I’m going to leave the address in a sealed envelope. If I don’t turn up before to-morrow mornin’, I shall consider myself absolved from all promises, what?”
“Very good, my lord.”
“And if I’m not to be found at that address, there wouldn’t be any harm in tryin’—say Epping Forest, or Wimbledon Common.”
“Quite so, my lord.”
“By the way, you made the photographs of those finger-prints I brought you some time ago?”
“Oh, yes, my lord.”
“Because possibly Mr. Parker may be wanting them presently for some inquiries he will be making.”
“I quite understand, my lord.”
“Nothing whatever to do with my excursion to-night, you understand.”
“Certainly not, my lord.”
“And now you might bring me Christie’s catalogue. I shall be attending a sale there and lunching at the club.”
And, detaching his mind from crime, Lord Peter bent his intellectual and financial powers to outbidding and breaking a ring of dealers, an exercise very congenial to his mischievous spirit.
Lord Peter duly fulfilled the conditions imposed upon him, and arrived on foot at the block of flats in South Audley Street. Mrs. Forrest, as before, opened the door to him herself. It was surprising, he considered, that, situated as she was, she appeared to have neither maid nor companion. But then, he supposed, a chaperon, however disarming of suspicion in the eyes of the world, might prove venal. On the whole, Mrs. Forrest’s principle was a sound one: no accomplices. Many transgressors, he reflected, had
“_died because they never knew
These simple little rules and few._”
Mrs. Forrest apologised prettily for the inconvenience to which she was putting Mr. Templeton.
“But I never know when I am not spied upon,” she said. “It is sheer spite, you know. Considering how my husband has behaved to me, I think it is monstrous—don’t you?”
Her guest agreed that Mr. Forrest must be a monster, jesuitically, however, reserving the opinion that the monster might be a fabulous one.
“And now you will be wondering why I have brought you here,” went on the lady. “Do come and sit on the sofa. Will you have whisky or coffee?”
“Coffee, please.”
“The fact is,” said Mrs. Forrest, “that I’ve had an idea since I saw you. I—you know, having been much in the same position myself” (with a slight laugh) “I felt so much for your friend’s wife.”
“Sylvia,” put in Lord Peter with commendable promptitude. “Oh, yes. Shocking temper and so on, but possibly some provocation. Yes, yes, quite. Poor woman. Feels things—extra sensitive—highly-strung and all that, don’t you know.”
“Quite so.” Mrs. Forrest nodded her fantastically turbanned head. Swathed to the eyebrows in gold tissue, with only two flat crescents of yellow hair plastered over her cheek-bones, she looked, in an exotic smoking-suit of embroidered tissue, like a young prince out of the Arabian Nights. Her heavily ringed hands busied themselves with the coffee-cups.
“Well—I felt that your inquiries were really serious, you know, and though, as I told you, it had nothing to do with me, I was interested and mentioned the matter in a letter to—to my friend, you see, who was with me that night.”
“Just so,” said Wimsey, taking the cup from her, “yes—er—that was very—er—it was kind of you to be interested.”
“He—my friend—is abroad at the moment. My letter had to follow him, and I only got his reply to-day.”
Mrs. Forrest took a sip or two of coffee as though to clear her recollection.
“His letter rather surprised me. He reminded me that after dinner he had felt the room rather close, and had opened the sitting-room window—that window, there—which overlooks South Audley Street. He noticed a car standing there—a small closed one, black or dark blue or some such colour. And while he was looking idly at it—the way one does, you know—he saw a man and woman come out of this block of flats—not this door, but one or two along to the left—and get in and drive off. The man was in evening dress and he thought it might have been your friend.”
Lord Peter, with his coffee-cup at his lips, paused and listened with great attention.
“Was the girl in evening dress, too?”
“No—that struck my friend particularly. She was in just a plain little dark suit, with a hat on.”
Lord Peter recalled to mind as nearly as possible Bertha Gotobed’s costume. Was this going to be real evidence at last?
“Th—that’s very interesting,” he stammered. “I suppose your friend couldn’t give any more exact details of the dress?”
“No,” replied Mrs. Forrest, regretfully, “but he said the man’s arm was round the girl as though she was feeling tired or unwell, and he heard him say, ‘That’s right—the fresh air will do you good.’ But you’re not drinking your coffee.”
“I beg your pardon—” Wimsey recalled himself with a start. “I was dreamin’—puttin’ two and two together, as you might say. So he was along here at the time—the artful beggar. Oh, the coffee. D’you mind if I put this away and have some without sugar?”
“I’m so sorry. Men always seem to take sugar in black coffee. Give it to me—I’ll empty it away.”
“Allow me.” There was no slop-basin on the little table, but Wimsey quickly got up and poured the coffee into the window-box outside. “That’s all right. How about another cup for you?”
“Thank you—I oughtn’t to take it really, it keeps me awake.”
“Just a drop.”
“Oh, well, if you like.” She filled both cups and sat sipping quietly. “Well—that’s all, really, but I thought perhaps I ought to let you know.”
“It was very good of you,” said Wimsey.
They sat talking a little longer—about plays in Town (“I go out very little, you know, it’s better to keep oneself out of the limelight on these occasions”), and books (“I adore Michael Arlen”). Had she read Young Men in Love yet? No—she had ordered it from the library. Wouldn’t Mr. Templeton have something to eat or drink? Really? A brandy? A liqueur?
No, thank you. And Mr. Templeton felt he really ought to be slippin’ along now.
“No—don’t go yet—I get so lonely, these long evenings.”
There was a desperate kind of appeal in her voice. Lord Peter sat down again.
She began a rambling and rather confused story about her “friend.” She had given up so much for the friend. And now that her divorce was really coming off, she had a terrible feeling that perhaps the friend was not as affectionate as he used to be. It was very difficult for a woman, and life was very hard.
And so on.
As the minutes passed, Lord Peter became uncomfortably aware that she was watching him. The words tumbled out—hurriedly, yet lifelessly, like a set task, but her eyes were the eyes of a person who expects something. Something alarming, he decided, yet something she was determined to have. It reminded him of a man waiting for an operation—keyed up to it—knowing that it will do him good—yet shrinking from it with all his senses.
He kept up his end of the fatuous conversation. Behind a barrage of small-talk, his mind ran quickly to and fro, analysing the position, getting the range. . .
Suddenly he became aware that she was trying—clumsily, stupidly and as though in spite of herself—to get him to make love to her.
The fact itself did not strike Wimsey as odd. He was rich enough, well-bred enough, attractive enough and man of the world enough to have received similar invitations fairly often in his thirty-seven years of life. And not always from experienced women. There had been those who sought experience as well as those qualified to bestow it. But so awkward an approach by a woman who admitted to already possessing a husband and a lover was a phenomenon outside his previous knowledge.
Moreover, he felt that the thing would be a nuisance. Mrs. Forrest was handsome enough, but she had not a particle of attraction for him. For all her make-up and her somewhat outspoken costume, she struck him as spinsterish—even epicene. That was the thing which puzzled him during their previous interview. Parker—a young man of rigid virtue and limited worldly knowledge—was not sensitive to these emanations. But Wimsey had felt her as something essentially sexless, even then. And he felt it even more strongly now. Never had he met a woman in whom “the great It,” eloquently hymned by Mrs. Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.
Her bare shoulder was against him now, marking his broadcloth with white patches of powder.
Blackmail was the first explanation that occurred to him. The next move would be for the fabulous Mr. Forrest, or someone representing him, to appear suddenly in the doorway, aglow with virtuous wrath and outraged sensibilities.
“A very pretty little trap,” thought Wimsey, adding aloud, “Well, I really must be getting along.”
She caught him by the arm.
“Don’t go.”
There was no caress in the touch—only a kind of desperation.
He thought, “If she really made a practice of this, she would do it better.”
“Truly,” he said, “I oughtn’t to stay longer. It wouldn’t be safe for you.”
“I’ll risk it,” she said.
A passionate woman might have said it passionately. Or with a brave gaiety. Or challengingly. Or alluringly. Or mysteriously.
She said it grimly. Her fingers dug at his arm.
“Well, damn it all, I’ll risk it,” thought Wimsey. “I must and will know what it’s all about.”
“Poor little woman.” He coaxed into his voice the throaty, fatuous tone of the man who is preparing to make an amorous fool of himself.
He felt her body stiffen as he slipped his arm round her, but she gave a little sigh of relief.
He pulled her suddenly and violently to him, and kissed her mouth with a practised exaggeration of passion.
He knew then. No one who has ever encountered it can ever again mistake that awful shrinking, that uncontrollable revulsion of the flesh against a caress that is nauseous. He thought for a moment that she was going to be actually sick.
He released her gently, and stood up—his mind in a whirl, but somehow triumphant. His first instinct had been right, after all.
“That was very naughty of me,” he said, lightly. “You made me forget myself. You will forgive me, won’t you?”
She nodded, shaken.
“And I really must toddle. It’s gettin’ frightfully late and all that. Where’s my hat? Ah, yes, in the hall. Now, good-bye, Mrs. Forrest, an’ take care of yourself. An’ thank you ever so much for telling me about what your friend saw.”
“You are really going?”
She spoke as though she had lost all hope.
“In God’s name,” thought Wimsey, “what does she want? Does she suspect that Mr. Templeton is not everything that he seems? Does she want me to stay the night so that she can get a look at the laundry-mark on my shirt? Should I suddenly save the situation for her by offering her Lord Peter Wimsey’s visiting-card?”
His brain toyed freakishly with the thought as he babbled his way to the door. She let him go without further words.
As he stepped into the hall he turned and looked at her. She stood in the middle of the room, watching him, and on her face was such a fury of fear and rage as turned his blood to water.
