Read Online Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers - Free Book Online Page B

kindly, ‘you’l dodge al these reporters.’
    ‘Not me!’ said Harriet. ‘I’ve got to see them and tel them al about my new
    book. A razor is only a razor, but good advance publicity means sales. You
    two run along; I’l folow you down.’
    She stroled away in search of the reporters. The Inspector grinned uneasily.

    ‘No flies on that young lady,’ he observed. ‘But can she be trusted to hold
    her tongue?’
    ‘Oh, she won’t chuck away a good plot,’ said Wimsey, lightly. ‘Come and
    have a drink.’
    ‘Too soon after breakfast,’ objected the Inspector.
    ‘Or a smoke,’ suggested Wimsey.
    The Inspector declined.
    ‘Or a nice sit-down in the lounge,’ said Wimsey, sitting down.
    ‘Excuse me,’ said Inspector Umpelty, ‘I must be getting along. I’l tel them
    at the Station about you wanting to look at the razor. . . . Fair tied to that young
    woman’s apronstrings,’ he reflected, as he shouldered his bulky way through
    the revolving doors. ‘The poor mutt!’
    Harriet, escaping half an hour later from Salcombe Hardy and his coleagues,
    found Wimsey faithfuly in attendance.
    ‘I’ve got rid of the Inspector,’ observed that gentleman, cheerfuly. ‘Get your
    hat on and we’l go.’
    Their simultaneous exit from the Resplendent was observed and recorded by
    the photographic contingent, who had just returned from the shore. Between an
    avenue of clicking shutters, they descended the marble steps, and climbed into
    Wimsey’s Daimler.
    ‘I feel,’ said Harriet, maliciously, ‘as if we had just been married at St
    George’s, Hanover Square.’
    ‘No, you don’t,’ retorted Wimsey. ‘If we had, you would be trembling like a
    fluttered partridge. Being married to me is a tremendous experience – you’ve
    no idea. We’l be al right at the police-station, provided the Super doesn’t turn
    sticky on us.
    Superintendent Glaisher was conveniently engaged, and Sergeant Saunders
    was deputed to show them the razor.
    ‘Has it been examined for finger-prints?’ asked Wimsey.
    ‘Yes, my lord.’
    ‘Any result?’
    ‘I couldn’t exactly say, my lord, but I believe not.’
    ‘Wel, anyway, one is alowed to handle it.’ Wimsey turned it over in his

    fingers, inspecting it carefuly, first with the naked eye and secondly with a
    watchmaker’s lens. Beyond a very slight crack on the ivory handle, it showed
    no very striking peculiarities.
    ‘If there’s any blood left on it, it wil be hanging about the joint,’ he
    observed. ‘But the sea seems to have done its work pretty thoroughly.’
    ‘You aren’t suggesting,’ said Harriet, ‘that the weapon isn’t realy the
    weapon after al?’
    ‘I should like to,’ said Wimsey. ‘The weapon never is the weapon, is it?’
    ‘Of course not; and the corpse is never the corpse. The body is, obviously,
    not that of Peter Alexis—’
    ‘But of the Prime Minister of Ruritania—’
    ‘It did not die of a cut throat—’
    ‘But of an obscure poison, known only to the Bushmen of Central Australia
    —’
    ‘And the throat was cut after death—’
    ‘By a middle-aged man of short temper and careless habits, with a stiff beard
    and expensive tastes—’
    ‘Recently returned from China,’ finished up Harriet, triumphantly.
    The sergeant, who had gaped in astonishment at the beginning of this
    exchange, now burst into a hearty guffaw.
    ‘That’s very good,’ he said, indulgently. ‘Comic, ain’t it, the stuff these
    writer-felows put into their books? Would your lordship like to see the other
    exhibits?’
    Wimsey replied gravely that he should, very much, and the hat, cigarette-
    case, shoe and handkerchief were produced.
    ‘H’m,’ said Wimsey. ‘Hat fair to middling, but not exclusive. Cranial
    capacity on the smal side. Briliantine, ordinary stinking variety. Physical
    condition pretty fair—’
    ‘The man was a dancer.’
    ‘I thought we agreed he was a Prime Minister. Hair, dark, curly and rather
    on the long side. Last