Free Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy L. Sayers Page B

wide chink in the stonework. Hannah Marryat flung down hammer and chisel and groped in the gap.
        ‘There’s something,’ she gasped. ‘Lift me up; I can’t reach. Oh, it is! it is; it is it!’ And she withdrew her hand, grasping a long, sealed envelope, bearing the superscription:
     
    Positively the LAST Will and Testament
    of Meleager Finch
     
     
        Miss Marryat gave a yodel of joy and flung her arms round Lord Peter’s neck.
        Mary executed a joy-dance. ‘I’ll tell the world,’ she proclaimed.
        ‘Come and tell mother!’ cried Miss Marryat.
        Mr Bunter interposed.
        ‘Your lordship will excuse me,’ he said firmly, ‘but your lordship’s face is all over charcoal.’
        ‘Black but comely,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but I submit to your reproof. How clever we’ve all been. How topping everything is. How rich you are going to be. How late it is and how hungry I am. Yes, Bunter, I will wash my face. Is there anything else I can do for anybody while I feel in the mood?’
        ‘If your lordship would be so kind,’ said Mr Bunter, producing a small paper from his pocket, ‘I should be grateful if you could favour me with a South African quadruped in six letters, beginning with Q.’
     
        Note: The solution of the cross-word will be found at the end of the book.

THE FANTASTIC HORROR OF THE CAT IN THE BAG
    The Great North Road wound away like a flat, steel-grey ribbon. Up it, with the sun and wind behind them, two black specks moved swiftly. To the yokel in charge of the hay-waggon they were only two of ‘they dratted motor-cyclists’, as they barked and zoomed past him in rapid succession. A little farther on, a family man, driving delicately with a two-seater side-car, grinned as the sharp rattle of the o.h.v. Norton was succeeded by the feline shriek of an angry Scott Flying-Squirrel. He, too, in bachelor days, had taken a side in that perennial feud. He sighed regretfully as he watched the racing machines dwindle away northwards.
        At that abominable and unexpected S-bend across the bridge above Hatfield, the Norton man, in the pride of his heart, turned to wave a defiant hand at his pursuer. In that second, the enormous bulk of a loaded charabanc loomed down upon him from the bridgehead. He wrenched himself away from it in a fierce wobble, and the Scott, cornering melodramatically, with left and right foot-rests alternately skimming the tarmac, gained a few triumphant yards. The Norton leapt forward with wide-open throttle. A party of children, seized with sudden panic, rushed helter-skelter across the road. The Scott lurched through them in drunken swerves. The road was clear, and the chase settled down once more.
        It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every weekend grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other’s exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. They ride in a baffled fury, hating each other. They arrive with shattered nerves and fight for parking places. They return, blinded by the headlights of fresh arrivals, whom they hate even worse than they hate each other. And all the time the Great North Road winds away like a long, flat, steel-grey ribbon – a surface like a race-track, without traps, without hedges, without side-roads, and without traffic. True, it leads to nowhere in particular; but, after all, one pub is very much like another.
        The tarmac reeled away, mile after mile. The sharp turn to the right at Baldock, the involute intricacies of Biggleswade, with its multiplication of sign-posts, gave temporary check, but brought the pursuer no nearer. Through Tempsford at full speed, with blowing horn and exhaust, then, screaming like a hurricane past the R.A.C. post where the road forks in from