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

no town-hal and no clock. A church-
    clock would do, of course. But church-clocks and bodies in belfries had been
    rather overdone lately. (It was odd about Mr Perkins. If the solution was
    murder after al, could not the murderer have walked through the water to some
    point? Perhaps she ought to have folowed the shore and not the coast-road.
    Too late now, in any case.) And she had not properly worked out the speed of
    the steam-yacht. One ought to know about these things. Lord Peter would
    know, of course; he must have sailed in plenty of steam-yachts. It must be nice
    to be really rich. Anybody who married Lord Peter would be rich, of course.
    And he was amusing. Nobody could say he would be dul to live with. But the
    trouble was that you never knew what anybody was like to live with except by
    living with them. It wasn’t worth it. Not even to know al about steam-yachts. A
    novelist couldn’t possibly marry al the people from whom she wanted
    specialised information. Harriet pleased herself over the coffee with sketching
    out the career of an American detective-novelist who contracted a fresh

    marriage for each new book. For a book about poisons, she would marry an
    analytical chemist; for a book about somebody’s wil, a solicitor; for a book
    about strangling, a – a hangman, of course. There might be something in it. A
    spoof book, of course. And the vilainess might do away with each husband by
    the method described in the book she was working on at the time. Too
    obvious? Wel, perhaps.
    She got up from the table and made her way into a kind of large lounge,
    where the middle space was cleared for dancing. A select orchestra occupied a
    platform at one end, and smal tables were arranged al round the sides of the
    room, where visitors could drink coffee or liqueurs and watch the dancing.
    While she took her place and gave her order, the floor was occupied by a pair
    of obviously professional dancers, giving an exhibition waltz. The man was tal
    and fair, with sleek hair plastered closely to his head, and a queer, unhealthy
    face with a wide, melancholy mouth. The girl, in an exaggerated gown of
    petunia satin with an enormous bustle and a train, exhibited a mask of Victorian
    coyness as she revolved languidly in her partner’s arms to the strains of the
    ‘Blue Danube’. ‘ Autres temps, autres moeurs ,’ thought Harriet. She looked
    about the room. Long skirts and costumes of the seventies were in evidence –
    and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators. But it
    was so obvious an imitation. The slender-seeming waists were made so, not by
    savage tight-lacing, but by sheer expensive dressmaking. Tomorrow, on the
    tennis-court, the short, loose tunic-frock would reveal them as the waists of
    muscular young women of the day, despising al bonds. And the sidelong
    glances, the down-cast eyes, the mock-modesty – masks, only. If this was the
    ‘return to womanliness’ hailed by the fashion-correspondents, it was to a quite
    different kind of womanliness – set on a basis of economic independence.
    Were men realy stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive
    womanhood could be brought back by miliners’ fashions? ‘Hardly,’ thought
    Harriet, ‘when they know perfectly wel that one has only to remove the train
    and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in
    one’s pocket. Oh, wel, it’s a game, and presumably they al know the rules.’
    The dancers twirled to a standstil with the conclusion of the waltz. The
    instrumentalists tweaked a string and tightened a peg here and there and

    rearranged their music, under cover of perfunctory applause. Then the male
    dancer selected a partner from one of the nearer tables, while the petunia-clad
    girl obeyed a summons from a stout manufacturer in tweeds on the other side of
    the room. Another girl, a blonde in pale blue, rose from her solitary table near
    the platform and led out an