Murder Must Advertise

“You can’t put Pinchley in first. He’s nothing but a slogger.”

“Who else is there?”

Mr. Barrow sca

“It’s a weak bunch, Tallboy. Is that really the best you can do?”

“Afraid so.”

“Pity you’ve managed to get across Smayle and McAllister.”

“Yes-but that can’t be helped now. You’ll have to play, Mr. Barrow, or we’ll have to scratch-one or the other!”

“I know what you’d better do. Put yourself in first with me.”

“They won’t like that. They’ll think it’s swank.”

“Then put Garrett in.”

“Very well. You’ll play, then?”

“I suppose I must.”

“That’s very sporting of you, Mr. Barrow.”

Mr. Tallboy ran down, sighing, to pin the revised list on the board:

MATCH AGAINST BROTHERHOOD’S

1. Mr. Barrow

2. Mr. Garrett

3. Mr. Hankin

4. Mr. Ingleby

5. Mr. Tallboy (Captain)

6. Mr. Pinchley

7. Mr. Miller

8. Mr. Beeseley

9. Mr. Bredon

10. Mr. Haagedorn

11. Mr. Wedderburn

He stood for a moment looking at it rather hopelessly. Then he went back to his room and took up a large sheet of foolscap, with the intention of marking off the figures for a client’s appropriation over the next three months. But his mind was not on the figures. Presently he pushed the sheet aside, and sat staring blankly out of the window across the grey London roofs.

“What’s up, Tallboy?” inquired Mr. Wedderburn.

“Life’s the devil,” said Mr. Tallboy. Then, in a sudden outburst:

“My God! how I hate this blasted place. It gets on my nerves.”

“Time you had your holiday,” said Mr. Wedderburn, placidly. “How’s the wife?”

“All right,” rejoined Mr. Tallboy, “but we shan’t be able to get away till September.”

“That’s the worst of being a family man,” replied Mr. Wedderburn. “And that reminds me. Have you done anything about that series for The Nursing Times about ‘Nutrax for Nursing Mothers’?”

Mr. Tallboy thoughtlessly cursed the nursing mothers, dialled Mr. Hankin’s room on the inter-office ’phone and in a mournful tone put in a requisition for six 4-inch doubles on that inspiring subject.

Chapter XI. Inexcusable Invasion of a Ducal Entertainment

To Lord Peter Wimsey, the few weeks of his life spent in unravelling the Problem of the Iron Staircase possessed an odd dreamlike quality, noticeable at the time and still more insistent in retrospect. The very work that engaged him-or rather, the shadowy simulacrum of himself that signed itself on every morning in the name of Death Bredon-wafted him into a sphere of dim platonic archetypes, bearing a scarcely recognizable relationship to anything in the living world. Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, for ever young, for ever handsome, for ever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other’s ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filing, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Ti

Among these phantasms, Death Bredon, driving his pen across reams of office foolscap, was a phantasm too, emerging from this nightmare toil to a still more fantastical existence amid people whose aspirations, rivalries and modes of thought were alien, and earnest beyond anything in his waking experience. Nor, when the Greenwich-driven clocks had jerked on to half-past five, had he any world of reality to which to return; for then the illusionary Mr. Bredon dislimned and became the still more illusionary Harlequin of a dope-addict’s dream; an advertising figure more crude and fanciful than any that postured in the columns of the Morning Star; a thing bodiless and absurd, a mouthpiece of stale clichés shouting in dull ears without a brain. From this abominable impersonation he could not now free himself, since at the sound of his name or the sight of his unmasked face, all the doors in that other dream-city-the city of dreadful night-would be closed to him.

From one haunting disquietude, Dian de Momerie’s moment of inexplicable insight had freed him. She no longer desired him. He thought she rather dreaded him; yet, at the note of the pe

“I am here because Victor Dean died. When the world knows how he died, I shall go back to the place from which I came.”

“To the place from which you came. I’ve heard that said before, but I can’t remember where.”

“If you ever heard a man condemned to death, then you heard it said then.”

“My God, yes! That was it. I went to a murder trial once. There was a horrible old man, the Judge-I forget his name. He was like a wicked old scarlet parrot, and he said it as though he liked it. ‘And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.’ Do we have souls, Harlequin, or is that all nonsense? It is nonsense, isn’t it?”