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

had been looking for a blunt instrument, Archie’s toolbox would have contained plenty. Looking for a man with expertly homicidal hands was quite another thing. Disconcertingly, Harriet found she had quite a good mental picture of Archie Lugg’s hands: broad hands with rather spoon-shaped flattened fingers and thumbs. He would have the muscular strength, of course.
    She turned back to her letter.
    But the letter was out of luck this morning. She heard a child sobbing quietly on the way up the stairs, and put her head round the door to find Charlie in tears.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
    ‘Uncle Jerry’s gone!’ he wailed.
    She held out her arms to him, and briefly hugged him. At ten did he still want to be hugged? Yes, it seemed he did, for he held on to her. Lord, thought Harriet, what can I say? I can’t tell him Jerry won’t come to any harm when it’s only too likely that he will. I don’t believe in lying to children. The news was horribly depressing. An increasingly vicious air battle was developing over the North Sea. German planes and German U-boats were attacking neutral shipping and even little inshore fishing boats. The British government had decided to arm merchant ships, and the Nazis had announced that British merchant ships would count as warships. Of course that meant fighter pilots like Jerry flying sorties over the Channel and the North Sea. Anyone could see how dangerous that was. And that the need for seaborne supplies was Britain’s Achilles’ heel.
    ‘He’s gone,’ said Charlie, muffled in her loose embrace, ‘and I can’t make it work! And Sam can’t either,’ he added, in a normal tone, extricating himself.
    ‘Can’t make what work, Charlie?’
    ‘My crystal set!’ he cried.
    ‘Are you sure you’ve put it together right?’ she asked, stalling.
    ‘I’m pretty sure,’ he said. ‘But it keeps picking up the wrong wavelengths.’
    ‘I don’t suppose I can help in person, Charlie,’ she said. ‘It’s not my field. But your father and mother are coming at the weekend. Perhaps your father can help.’
    ‘That’s ages!’ lamented Charlie. But he wandered away, and when Harriet looked up from her letter a few minutes later she saw him with Bredon and Polly, playing French cricket on the lawn, and looking perfectly happy. She finished her letter to Miss Climpson, and began one to Peter.
    She had no recent letter from him to respond to, but was still hungrily reading over his last, perfectly discreet letter, in the form of an official letter-gram, reduced to the size of a postcard, closely typed in tiny letters, and bearing an official stamp from the censor.
    . . . Like the gentleman in the carol, I have seen a wonder sight – the Catholic padre and the refugee Lutheran minister having a drink together and discussing, in very bad Latin, the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia. I have seldom heard so much religious toleration or so many false quantities . . .
    Peter’s light and ironical tones came clearly off the paper, as though he were in the room, conversing with someone. The letter was censored, but he had managed to make her smile with it. Then the post-script: In case of accident I will write my own epitaph now: HERE LIES AN ANACHRONISM IN THE VAGUE EXPECTATION OF ETERNITY.
    Harriet put the letter away in her desk, alongside others, and began to compose a letter for him. The uncertainties of the correspondence made a smoothly alternating sequence of letters and replies impossible. But she could write in hope of reaching him, like Noah sending out a dove.
    If one wanted gossip in Paggleham, thought Harriet, one only had to bump into Mrs Ruddle. Not that Mr Kirk had actually asked her to find out about the two local young men, beyond getting their names from the land-girls, but, Harriet thought, either one was doing something or one wasn’t. And once involved she couldn’t be not involved. Writing to Peter caused her heart-ache, and there was no