Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers Read Free Book Online

code.”
    “I am,” said Miss Barton. “Our attitude to the whole thing seems to me completely savage and brutal. I have met so many murderers when visiting prisons; and most of them are very harmless, stupid people, poor creatures, when they aren’t definitely pathological.”
    “You might feel differently about it,” said Harriet, “if you’d happened to meet the victims. They are often still stupider and more harmless than the murderers. But they don’t make a public appearance. Even the jury needn’t see the body unless they like. But I saw the body in that Wilvercombe case—I found it; and it was beastlier than anything you can imagine.”
    “I’m quite sure you must be right about that,” said the Dean. “The description in the papers was more than enough for me.”
    “And,” went on Harriet to Miss Barton, “you don’t see the murderers actively engaged in murdering. You see them when they’re caught and caged and looking pathetic. But the Wilvercombe man was a cunning, avaricious brute, and quite ready to go and do it again, if he hadn’t been stopped.”
    “That’s an unanswerable argument for stopping them,” said Phoebe, “whatever the law does with them afterwards.”
    “All the same,” said Miss Stevens, “isn’t it a little cold-blooded to catch murderers as an intellectual exercise? It’s all right for the police—it’s their duty.”
    “In law,” said Harriet, “it is every citizen’s obligation—though most people don’t know that.”
    “And this man Wimsey,” said Miss Barton, “who seems to make a hobby of it—does he look upon it as a duty or as an intellectual exercise?”
    “I’m not sure,” said Harriet, “but, you know, it was just as well for me that he did make a hobby of it. The police were wrong in my case—I don’t blame them, but they were—so I’m glad it wasn’t left to them.”
    “I call that a perfectly noble speech,” said the Dean. “If anyone had accused me of doing something I hadn’t done, I should be foaming at the mouth.”
    “But it’s my job to weigh evidence,” said Harriet, “and I can’t help seeing the strength of the police case. It’s a matter of a + b, you know. Only there happened to be an unknown factor.”
    “Like that thing that keeps cropping up in the new kind of physics,” said Dean. “Planck’s constant, or whatever they call it.”
    “Surely,” said Miss de Vine, “whatever comes of it, and whatever anybody feels about it, the important thing is to get at the facts.”
    “Yes,” said Harriet; “that’s the point. I mean, the fact is that I didn’t do the murder, so that my feelings are quite irrelevant. If I had done it, I should probably have thought myself thoroughly justified, and been deeply indignant about the way I was treated. As it is, I still think that to inflict the agonies of poisoning on anybody is unpardonable. The particular trouble I got let in for was as much sheer accident as falling off a roof.”
    “I really ought to apologise for having brought the subject up at all,” said Miss Barton. It’s very good of you to discuss it so frankly.”
    “I don’t mind—now. It would have been different just after it happened. But that awful business down at Wilvercombe shed rather a new light on the matter—showed it up from the other side.”
    “Tell me,” said the Dean, “Lord Peter—what is he like?”
    “To look at, do you mean? or to work with?”
    “Well, one knows more or less what he looks like. Fair and Mayfair. I meant, to talk to.”
    “Rather amusing. He does a good deal of the talking himself, if it comes to that.”
    “A little merry and bright, when you’re feeling off-colour?”
    “I met him once at a dog-show,” put in Miss Armstrong unexpectedly. “He was giving a perfect imitation of the silly-ass-about-town.”
    “Then he was either frightfully bored or detecting something,” said Harriet, laughing. “I know that frivolous mood, and it’s mostly