Read Online Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers - Free Book Online

sir?’
        Peter laughed.
        ‘I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours wondering why, when I’d had the blazing luck to get on to a perfectly good thing, I should be fool enough to risk the whole show on a damned silly experiment.’
        The policeman nodded sympathetically.
        ‘I see what you mean, sir. Seems to me, life’s like that. If you don’t take risks, you get nowhere. If you do, things may go wrong, and then where are you? And ’alf the time, when things happen, they happen first, before you can even think about ’em.’
        ‘Quite right,’ said Peter, and filled the glasses again. He found the policeman soothing. True to his class and training, he turned naturally in moments of emotion to the company of the common man. Indeed, when the recent domestic crisis had threatened to destroy his nerve, he had headed for the butler’s pantry with the swift instinct of the homing pigeon. There, they had treated him with great humanity, and allowed him to clean the silver.
        With a mind oddly clarified by champagne and lack of sleep, he watched the constable’s reaction to Pol Roger 1926. The first glass had produced a philosophy of life; the second produced a name – Alfred Burt – and a further hint of some mysterious grievance against the station sergeant; the third glass, as prophesied, produced the story.
        ‘You were right, sir’ (said the policeman) ‘when you spotted I was new to the beat. I only come on it at the beginning of the week, and that accounts for me not being acquainted with you, sir, nor with most of the residents about here. Jessop, now, he knows everybody and so did Pinker – but he’s been took off to another division. You’d remember Pinker – big chap, make two o’ me, with a sandy moustache. Yes, I thought you would.
        ‘Well, sir, as I was saying, me knowing the district in a general way, but not, so to speak, like the palm o’ me ’and, might account for me making a bit of a fool of myself, but it don’t account for me seeing what I did see. See it I did, and not drunk nor nothing like it. And as for making a mistake in the number, well, that might happen to anybody. All the same, sir, 13 was the number I see, plain as the nose on your face.’
        ‘You can’t put it stronger than that,’ said Peter, whose nose was of a kind difficult to overlook.
        ‘You know Merriman’s End, sir?’
        ‘I think I do. Isn’t it a long cul-de-sac running somewhere at the back of South Audley Street, with a row of houses on one side and a high wall on the other?’
        ‘That’s right, sir. Tall, narrow houses they are, all alike, with deep porches and pillars to them.’
        ‘Yes. Like an escape from the worst square in Pimlico. Horrible. Fortunately, I believe the street was never finished, or we should have had another row of the monstrosities on the opposite side. This house is pure eighteenth century. How does it strike you?’
        P.C. Burt contemplated the wide hall – the Adam fireplace and panelling with their graceful shallow mouldings, the pedimented doorways, the high round-headed window lighting hall and gallery, the noble proportions of the stair. He sought for a phrase.
        ‘It’s a gentleman’s house,’ he pronounced at length. ‘Room to breathe, if you see what I mean. Seems like you couldn’t act vulgar in it.’ He shook his head. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t call it cosy. It ain’t the place I’d choose to sit down to a kipper in me shirtsleeves. But it’s got class. I never thought about it before, but now you mention it I see what’s wrong with them other houses in Merriman’s End. They’re sort of squeezed-like. I been into more’n one o’ them tonight, and that’s what they are; they’re squeezed. But I was going to tell you about that.’
     

     
     
        ‘Just upon midnight it was’ (pursued the policeman) ‘when I turns into Merriman’s End in the ordinary course of my