Чье тело? / Whose Body?

“It ain’t so bad,” said Lord Peter, “but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano’s too modern – all thrills and overtones. No good for our job, Parker. Have you come to any conclusion?”

“The man in the bath,” said Parker, methodically, “was not a well-off man careful of his personal appearance. He was a labouring man, unemployed, but who had only recently lost his employment. He had been tramping about looking for a job when he met with his end. Somebody killed him and washed him and scented him and shaved him in order to disguise him, and put him into Thipps’s bath without leaving a trace.

Conclusion: the murderer was a powerful man, since he killed him with a single blow on the neck, a man of cool head and masterly intellect, since he did all that ghastly business without leaving a mark, a man of wealth and refinement, since he had all the apparatus of an elegant toilet handy, and a man of bizarre, and almost perverted imagination, as is shown in the two horrible touches of putting the body in the bath and of adorning it with a pair of pince-nez. ”

“He is a poet of crime,” said Wimsey. “By the way, your difficulty about the pince-nez is cleared up. Obviously, the pince-nez never belonged to the body.”

“That only makes a fresh puzzle. One can’t suppose the murderer left them in that obliging manner as a clue to his own identity.”

“We can hardly suppose that; I’m afraid this man possessed what most criminals lack – a sense of humour.

”

“Rather macabre humour.”

“True. But a man who can afford to be humorous at all in such circumstances is a terrible fellow. I wonder what he did with the body between the murder and depositing it chez Thipps. Then there are more questions. How did he get it there? And why? Was it brought in at the door, as Sugg of our heart suggests? or through the window, as we think, on the not very adequate testimony of a smudge on the window-sill? Had the murderer accomplices? Is little Thipps really in it, or the girl? It don’t do to put the notion out of court merely because Sugg inclines to it.

Even idiots occasionally speak the truth accidentally. If not, why was Thipps selected for such an abominable practical joke? Has anybody got a grudge against Thipps? Who are the people in the other flats? We must find out that.