Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers Read Free Book Online Page B

black wood.
        The superintendent set down the white rook that had lain by the corpse at the Folly. Colour, height and weight matched with the rook on the board.
        ‘Staunton men,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘all of a pattern.’
        But the superintendent, with his back to the french window, was watching Mr Mellilow’s grey face.
        ‘He must have put it in his pocket,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘He cleared the pieces away at the end of the game.’
        ‘But he couldn’t have taken it up to Striding Folly,’ said the superintendent, ‘nor he couldn’t have done the murder, by your own account.’
        ‘Is it possible that you carried it up to the Folly yourself,’ asked the Chief Constable, ‘and dropped it there when you found the body?’
        ‘The gentleman has said that he saw this man Moses put it away,’ said the superintendent.
        They were watching him now, all of them. Mr Mellilow clasped his head in his hands. His forehead was drenched. ‘Something must break soon,’ he thought.
        Like a thunderclap there came a blow on the window; the superintendent leapt nearly out of his skin.
        ‘Lord, my lord!’ he complained, opening the window and letting a gust of fresh air into the room, ‘How you startled me!’
        Mr Mellilow gaped. Who was this? His brain wasn’t working properly. That friend of the Chief Constable’s, of course, who had disappeared somehow during the conversation. Like the bridge in his dream. Disappeared. Gone out of the picture.
        ‘Absorbin’ game, detectin’,’ said the Chief Constable’s friend. ‘Very much like chess. People come creepin’ right up on to the verandah and you never even notice them. In broad daylight, too. Tell me, Mr Mellilow – what made you go up last night to the Folly?’
        Mr Mellilow hesitated. This was the point in his story that he had made no attempt to explain. Mr Moses had sounded unlikely enough; a dream about goloshes would sound more unlikely still.
        ‘Come now,’ said the Chief Constable’s friend, polishing his monocle on his handkerchief and replacing it with an exaggerated lifting of the eyebrows. ‘What was it? Woman, woman, lovely woman? Meet me by moonlight and all that kind of thing?’
        ‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Mellilow, indignantly. ‘I wanted a breath of fresh—’ He stopped, uncertainly. There was something in the other man’s childish-foolish face that urged him to speak the reckless truth. ‘I had a dream,’ he said.
        The superintendent shuffled his feet, and the Chief Constable crossed one leg awkwardly over the other.
        ‘Warned of God in a dream,’ said the man with the monocle, unexpectedly. ‘What did you dream of?’ He followed Mr Mellilow’s glance at the board. ‘Chess?’
        ‘Of two moving castles,’ said Mr Mellilow, ‘and the dead body of a black crow.’
        ‘A pretty piece of fused and inverted symbolism,’ said the other. ‘The dead body of a black crow become a dead man with a white rook.’
        ‘But that came afterwards,’ said the Chief Constable.
        ‘So did the end-game with the two rooks,’ said Mr Mellilow.
        ‘Our friend’s memory works both ways,’ said the man with the monocle, ‘like the White Queen’s. She, by the way, could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. So can I. Pharaoh tell your dream.’
        ‘Time’s getting on, Wimsey,’ said the Chief Constable.
        ‘Let time pass,’ retorted the other, ‘for, as a great chess-player observed, it helps more than reasoning.’
        ‘What player was that?’ demanded Mr Mellilow.
        ‘A lady,’ said Wimsey, ‘who played with living men and mated kings, popes and emperors.’
        ‘Oh,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘Well—’ he told his tale from the beginning, making no secret of his grudge against Creech and his nightmare fancy of the striding electric pylons. ‘I think,’ he