Free A Presumption of Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton Walsh Page A

to work.’
    Birdlap saluted and took himself off.
    ‘I shouldn’t think for a minute the poor chap means it,’ said the Brigadier. ‘But there might be more than one kind of peace-time rule that hardly seems to apply.’
    Later Harriet settled down to her desk to write to Miss Climpson. She didn’t exactly know why she had not spelled out to Mr Kirk that she, under the aegis of Peter, had a private agency at her command. Miss Climpson had worked ingeniously for Peter for some years. ‘Putting questions,’ he had said, ‘which a young man could not put without a blush.’ He had used her, and a little bevy of superfluous otherwise unoccupied ladies answering suspect advertisements placed by fraudsters and money-lenders and tricksters, and gathering the evidence that convicted them, and rescued their victims. A job without end. And now she had diverted the efforts of her team of ‘hens’ to keeping an eye on public opinion, the sort of women’s underground public opinion that Mass Observation might find impenetrable. Women under stress might grumble to each other, whereas they would put a good face on things in the public world. When she had heard from Miss Climpson recently, she had sounded rather fully occupied. Harriet opened the letter.
    . . . Sunday evening is my quietest time now – of course we have to have Evensong in the middle of the afternoon, what with the blackout and winter-time, and the choir-school has been evacuated and two of the assistant priests have gone to be army chaplains, so we have to have Low Mass instead of High Mass, and what with an air-raid shelter in the crypt and one thing and another, we are beginning to feel quite persecuted like early Christians in catacombs! Though indeed I oughtn’t to talk in that light-hearted way when Christians in Germany and Austria are being really persecuted – so subtly and wickedly, too, the older people being allowed to go to church, and all the CHILDREN being kept away by Hitler-Jugend meetings on Sundays, and being taught to insult Christ and despise their parents for believing in religion. It must be terrible to be a father or mother and feel that the government is deliberately ALIENATING one’s children and BREAKING UP the family and encouraging quite little boys and girls to read horrible, dirty stories about Jews and priests in that dreadful Stuermer. I believe they even teach those horrible things in schools. But I suppose a totalitarian state can’t afford to allow any group of people to have interests and ideas of its own – not even the FAMILY! And when one thinks how deeply the nicest Germans have always been attached to their
    gemütlich
    (isn’t that the word?) home-life, it seems quite heart-breaking . . .
    Miss Climpson was clearly keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, she might like a little trip down memory lane in the form of an investigation related to a murder enquiry, even if she was asked by Harriet rather than by dear Lord Peter. But pen in hand, and sheet of paper at the ready, Harriet was overwhelmed with the emotion of missing Peter. She, Harriet, had been involved before in murder enquiries, but never without Peter at her side or somewhere in the background. She was missing him desperately, on every front. But how ridiculous to be reduced to tears by writing to Miss Climpson!
    Harriet pulled herself together, and looked again at the three names: Jake Datchett; Archie Lugg; John Birdlap. Birdlap she had dealt with. She wondered what she herself knew about either of the others. Archie Lugg was a handyman, and he had put up some rough-and-ready bookcases for her only a week or so back, using old floorboards. A good-looking man, who seemed to live and work in a musing calm she associated with true craftsmen, and who smelled faintly of wood-shavings. She tried, and failed, to imagine him driven mad with love, and killing in a jealous rage; it wasn’t easy to imagine, but then she didn’t know much about him. If they