Free Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

getting away in the crowd, so I just tells ’em there’s nothing, only a bit of an accident farther along. And then I see Withers and glad enough I was. We stands there at the top o’ the street, and I tells him there’s a dead man laying in the hall at Number 13, and it looks to me like murder. “Number 13,” he says, “you can’t mean Number 13. There ain’t no Number 13 in Merriman’s End, you fathead; it’s all even numbers. ” And so it is, sir, for the houses on the other side were never built, so there’s no odd numbers at all barrin’ Number 1, as is the big house on the corner.
        ‘Well, that give me a bit of a jolt. I wasn’t so much put out at not having remembered about the numbers, for as I tell you, I never was on the beat before this week. No; but I knew I’d seen that there number writ up plain as pie on the fanlight, and I didn’t see how I could have been mistaken. But when Withers heard the rest of the story, he thought maybe I’d misread it for Number 12. It couldn’t be 18, for there’s only sixteen houses in the road; nor it couldn’t be 16 neither, for I knew it wasn’t the end house. But we thought it might be 12 or 10; so away we goes to look.
        ‘We didn’t have no difficulty about getting in at Number 12. There was a very pleasant old gentleman came down in his dressing-gown, asking what the disturbance was, and could he be of use. I apologised for disturbing him, and said I was afraid there’d been an accident in one of the houses, and had he heard anything. Of course, the minute he opened the door I could see it wasn’t Number 12 we wanted; there was only a little hall with polished boards, and the walls plain panelled – all very bare and neat – and no black cabinet nor naked woman nor nothing. The old gentleman said, yes, his son had heard somebody shouting and knocking a few minutes earlier. He’d got up and put his head out of the window, but couldn’t see nothing, but they both thought from the sound it was Number 14 forgotten his latch-key again. So we thanked him very much and went on to Number 14.
        ‘We had a bit of a job to get Number 14 downstairs. A fiery sort of gentleman he was, something in the military way, I thought, but he turned out to be a retired Indian Civil Servant. A dark gentleman, with a big voice, and his servant was dark, too – some sort of a nigger. The gentleman wanted to know what the blazes all this row was about, why a decent citizen wasn’t allowed to get his proper sleep. He supposed that young fool at Number 12 was drunk again. Withers had to speak a bit sharp to him; but at last the nigger came down and let us in. Well, we had to apologise once more. The hall was not a bit like – the staircase was on the wrong side, for one thing, and though there was a statue at the foot of it, it was some kind of a heathen idol with a lot of heads and arms, and the walls were covered with all sorts of brass stuff and native goods you know the kind of thing. There was a black-and-white linoleum on the floor, and that was about all there was to it. The servant had soft sort of way with him I didn’t half like. He said he slept at the back and had heard nothing till his master rang for him. Then the gentleman came to the top of the stairs and shouted out it was no use disturbing him; the noise came from Number 12 as usual, and if that young man didn’t stop his blanky Bohemian goings-on, he’d have the law on his father. I asked if he’d seen anything, and he said, no, he hadn’t. Of course, sir, me and that other chap was inside the porch, and you can’t see anything what goes on inside those porches from the other houses, because they’re filled in at the sides with coloured glass – all the lot of them.’
        Lord Peter Wimsey looked at the policeman and then looked at the bottle, as though estimating the alcoholic content of each. With deliberation, he filled both glasses again.
        ‘Well, sir,’ said P.C.