Free Hangmans Holiday by Dorothy L. Sayers Page A

and have ordinary healthy children.
    “Nobody, naturally, knew anything about this thyroid business except the girl herself and her husband. All goes well till you come along. Then Wetherall gets jealous—”
    “He had no cause.”
    Wimsey shrugged his shoulders.
    “Possibly, my lad, the lady displayed a preference—we needn’t go into that. Anyhow, Wetherall did get jealous and saw a perfectly marvellous revenge in his power. He carried his wife off to the Pyrenees, isolated her from all help, and then simply sat back and starved her of her thyroid extract. No doubt he told her what he was going to do, and why. It would please him to hear her desperate appeals—to let her feel herself slipping back day by day, hour by hour, into something less than a beast—”
    “Oh, God!”
    “As you say. Of course, after a time, a few months, she would cease to know what was happening to her. He would still have the satisfaction of watching her—seeing her skin thicken, her body coarsen, her hair fall out, her eyes grow vacant, her speech die away into mere animal noises, her brain go to mush, her habits—”
    “Stop it, Wimsey.”
    “Well, you saw it all yourself. But that wouldn’t be enough for him. So, every so often, he would feed her the thyroid again and bring her back sufficiently to realise her own degradation—”
    “If only I had the brute here!”
    “Just as well you haven’t. Well then, one day—by a stroke of luck—Mr. Langley, the amorous Mr. Langley, actually turns up. What a triumph to let him see—”
    Langley stopped him again.
    “Right-ho! but it was ingenious, wasn’t it? So simple. The more I think of it, the more it fascinates me. But it was just that extra refinement of cruelty that defeated him. Because, when you told me the story, I couldn’t help recognising the symptoms of thyroid deficiency, and I thought, ‘Just supposing’—so I hunted up the chemist whose name you saw on the parcel, and, after unwinding a lot of red tape, got him to admit that he had several times sent Wetherall consignments of thyroid extract. So then I was almost sure, don’t you see.
    “I got a doctor’s advice and a supply of gland extract, hired a tame Spanish conjurer and some performing cats and things, and barged off complete with disguise and a trick cabinet devised by the ingenious Mr. Devant. I’m a bit of a conjurer myself, and between us we didn’t do so badly. The local superstitions helped, of course, and so did the gramophone records. Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ is first class for producing an atmosphere of gloom and mystery, so are luminous paint and the remnants of a classical education.”
    “Look here, Wimsey, will she get all right again?”
    “Right as ninepence, and I imagine that any American court would give her a divorce on the grounds of persistent cruelty. After that—it’s up to you!”
    Lord Peter’s friends greeted his reappearance in London with mild surprise.
    “And what have you been doing with yourself?” demanded the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot.
    “Eloping with another man’s wife,” replied his lordship. “But only,” he hastened to add, “in a purely Pickwickian sense. Nothing in it for yours truly. Oh, well! Let’s toddle round to the Holborn Empire, and see what George Robey can do for us.”

THE QUEEN’S SQUARE
    “Y OU JACK O’ DI’MONDS, YOU Jack o’ Di’monds,” said Mark Sambourne, shaking a reproachful head, “I know you of old.” He rummaged beneath the white satin of his costume, panelled with gigantic oblongs and spotted to represent a set of dominoes. “Hang this fancy rig! Where the blazes has the fellow put my pockets? You rob my pocket, yes, you rob-a my pocket, you rob my pocket of silver and go-ho-hold. How much do you make it?” He extracted a fountain-pen and a cheque-book.
    “Five-seventeen-six,” said Lord Peter Wimsey. “That’s right, isn’t it, partner?” His huge blue-and-scarlet sleeves rustled as he turned to Lady