The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

“What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue?” demanded Captain Fentiman, flinging aside the Evening Banner with the air of a man released from an irksome duty.

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it that,” retorted Wimsey, amiably. “Funeral Parlor at the very least. Look at the marble. Look at the furnishings. Look at the palms and the chaste bronze nude in the corner.”

“Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know⁠—‘Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he’s been dead two days.’ Look at Old Ormsby there, snoring like a hippopotamus. Look at my revered grandpa⁠—dodders in here at ten every morning, collects the Morning Post and the armchair by the fire, and becomes part of the furniture till the evening. Poor old devil. Suppose I’ll be like that one of these days. I wish to God Jerry had put me out with the rest of ’em. What’s the good of coming through for this sort of thing? What’ll you have?”

“Dry martini,” said Wimsey. “And you? Two dry martinis, Fred, please. Cheer up. All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it? It’s my belief most of us would be only too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it don’t do to say so. They’d hoof me out of the Club if I raised my voice beyond a whisper.”

“They’d do that anyway, whatever you were saying,” said Fentiman, gloomily. “What are you doing here?”

The door of the little flat in Dover Street was opened by an elderly manservant, whose anxious face bore signs of his grief at his master’s death. He informed them that Major Fentiman was at home and would be happy to receive Lord Peter Wimsey. As he spoke, a tall, soldierly man of about forty-five came out from one of the rooms and hailed his visitor cheerily.

“That you, Wimsey? Murbles told me to expect you. Come in. Haven’t seen you for a long time. Hear you’re turning into a regular Sherlock. Smart bit of work that was you put in over your brother’s little trouble. What’s all this? Camera? Bless me, you’re going to do our little job in the professional manner, eh? Woodward, see that Lord Peter’s man has everything he wants. Have you had lunch? Well, you’ll have a spot of something, I take it, before you start measuring up the footprints. Come along. We’re a bit at sixes and sevens here, but you won’t mind.”

He led the way into the small, austerely-furnished sitting room.

“Thought I might as well camp here for a bit, while I get the old man’s belongings settled up. It’s going to be a deuce of a job, though, with all this fuss about the will. However, I’m his executor, so all this part of it falls to me in any case. It’s very decent of you to lend us a hand. Queer old girl, Great-aunt Dormer. Meant well, you know, but made it damned awkward for everybody.

It was close on one o’clock when the three men emerged from the solemn portals of the Bellona Club. Mr. Murbles was very much subdued. Wimsey and Parker displayed the sober elation of men whose calculations have proved satisfactory. They had found the scratches. They had found the nail in the seat of the chair. They had even found the carpet. Moreover, they had found the origin of Oliver. Reconstructing the crime, they had sat in the end bay of the library, as Robert Fentiman might have sat, casting his eyes around him while he considered how he could best hide and cover up this extremely inopportune decease. They had noticed how the gilt lettering on the back of a volume caught the gleam from the shaded reading lamp. “Oliver Twist.” The name, not consciously noted at the time, had yet suggested itself an hour or so later to Fentiman, when, calling up from Charing Cross, he had been obliged to invent a surname on the spur of the moment.

And, finally, placing the light, spare form of the unwilling Mr. Murbles in the telephone cabinet, Parker had demonstrated that a fairly tall and strong man could have extricated the body from the box, carried it into the smoking-room and arranged it in the armchair by the fire, all in something under four minutes.

Mr. Murbles made one last effort on behalf of his client. “There were people in the smoking-room all morning, my dear Lord Peter.

“Mrs. Rushworth, this is Lord Peter Wimsey. Naomi, this is Lord Peter. He’s fearfully keen on glands and things, so I’ve brought him along. And Naomi, do tell me all about your news. Who is it? Do I know him?”

Mrs. Rushworth was a long, untidy woman, with long, untidy hair wound into bell-pushes over her ears. She beamed short-sightedly at Peter.

“So glad to see you. So very wonderful about glands, isn’t it? Dr. Voronoff, you know, and those marvelous old sheep. Such a hope for all of us. Not that dear Walter is specially interested in rejuvenation. Perhaps life is long and difficult enough as it is, don’t you think⁠—so full of problems of one kind and another. And the insurance companies have quite set their faces against it, or so I understand. That’s natural isn’t it, when you come to think of it. But the effect on character is so interesting, you know. Are you devoted to young criminals by any chance?”

Wimsey said that they presented a very perplexing problem.

“How very true. So perplexing. And just to think that we have been quite wrong about them all these thousands of years. Flogging and bread-and-water, you know, and Holy Communion, when what they really needed was a little bit of rabbit-gland or something to make them just as good as gold. Quite terrible, isn’t it? And all those poor freaks in sideshows, too⁠—dwarfs and giants, you know⁠—all pineal or pituitary, and they come right again. Though I daresay they make a great deal more money as they are, which throws such a distressing light on unemployment, does it not?”