“Yes. We must wash him out. Well, these little setbacks will occur.”

They finished their notes, bade farewell to the Rev. Hallelujah, and emerged to find Esmeralda valiantly defending Mrs. Merdle against all comers. Lord Peter handed over the half-crown and took delivery of the car.

“The more I hear of Mary Whittaker,” he said, “the less I like her. She might at least have given poor old Cousin Hallelujah his hundred quid.”

“She’s a rapacious female,” agreed Parker. “Well, anyway, Father Paul’s safely dead, and Cousin Hallelujah is illegitimately descended. So there’s an end of the long-lost claimant from overseas.”

“Damn it all!” cried Wimsey, taking both hands from the steering-wheel and scratching his head, to Parker’s extreme alarm, “that strikes a familiar chord. Now where in thunder have I heard those words before?”

Murbles is coming round to dinner tonight, Charles,” said Wimsey. “I wish you’d stop and have grub with us too. I want to put all this family history business before him.”

“Where are you dining?”

“Oh, at the flat. I’m sick of restaurant meals. Bunter does a wonderful bloody steak and there are new peas and potatoes and genuine English grass. Gerald sent it up from Denver specially. You can’t buy it. Come along. Ye olde English fare, don’t you know, and a bottle of what Pepys calls Ho Bryon. Do you good.”

Parker accepted. But he noticed that, even when speaking on his beloved subject of food, Wimsey was vague and abstracted. Something seemed to be worrying at the back of his mind, and even when Mr. Murbles appeared, full of mild legal humour, Wimsey listened to him with extreme courtesy indeed, but with only half his attention.

They were partly through dinner when, apropos of nothing, Wimsey suddenly brought his fist down on the mahogany with a crash that startled even Bunter, causing him to jerk a great crimson splash of the Haut Brion over the edge of the glass upon the tablecloth.

“Got it!” said Lord Peter.

Bunter in a low shocked voice begged his lordship’s pardon.

“Murbles,” said Wimsey, without heeding him, “isn’t there a new Property Act?”

“Why yes,” said Mr. Murbles, in some surprise. He had been in the middle of a story about a young barrister and a Jewish pawnbroker when the interruption occurred, and was a little put out.

“I knew I’d read that sentence somewhere- you know, Charles- doing away with the long-lost claimant from overseas. It was in some paper or other about a couple of years ago, and it had to do with the new Act. Of course it said what a blow it would be to romantic novelists. Doesn’t the Act wash out claims of distant relatives, Murbles?”

“In a sense, it does,” replied the solicitor. “Not, of course, in the entailed property, which has its own rules. But I understand you to refer to ordinary personal property or real estate not entailed.”

“Yes- what happens to that, now, if the owner of the property dies without a will?”

“It is rather a complicated matter,” began Mr. Murbles.

“Well, look here, first of all-before the jolly old Act was passed, the next of kin got it all, didn’t he- no matter if he was only a seventh cousin fifteen times removed?”

“In a general way, that is correct. If there was husband or wife- ”

“Wash out the husband and wife. Suppose the person is unmarried and has no near relations living. It would have gone-”

“To the next-of-kin, whoever that was, if he or she could be traced.”

“Even if you had to burrow back to William the Conqueror to get at the relationship?”

“Always supposing you could get a clear record back to so very early a date,” replied Murbles. “It is, of course, in the highest degree improbable-”

“Yes, yes, I know, sir. But what happens now in such a case?”

“The new Act makes inheritance on intestacy very much simpler,” said Mr. Murbles, setting his knife and fork together, placing both elbows on the table and laying the index-finger of his right hand against his left thumb in a gesture of tabulation.

“I bet it does,” interpolated Wimsey. “I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don’t understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it. But do go on.”

“Under the new Act,” pursued! Murbles, “one half of the property goes to the husband and wife, if living, and subject to his or her life-interest, then all to the children equally. But if there be no spouse and no children, then it goes to the father or mother of the deceased. If father and mother are both dead, then everything goes to the brothers and sisters of the whole blood who are at the time, but if any brother or dies before the intestate, then to his or her issue. In case there are no brothers or sisters of the- ”

“Stop, stop! you needn’t go any further. You’re absolutely sure of that? It goes to the brothers’ or sisters’ issue?”

“Yes. That is to say, if it were you that died intestate and your brother Gerald and your sister Mary were already dead, your money would be equally divided among your nieces and nephews.”

“Yes, but suppose they were all dead too- suppose I’d gone tediously on living on till I’d nothing left but great-nephews and great-nieces- would they inherit?”

“Why-why, yes, I suppose they would,” said Mr. Murbles, with less certainty, however. “Oh, yes, I think they they would,”

“Clearly they would,” said Parker, a little impatiently, “if it says to the issue of the deceased’s brothers and sisters.”

“Ah! but we must not be precipitate,” said Mr. Murbles, rounding upon him. “To the lay mind, doubtless, the word ‘issue’ appears a simple one. But in law”- (Mr. Murbles, who up till this point had held the index-finger of the right-hand poised against the ring-finger of the left, in recognition of the claims of the brothers and sisters of the half-blood, now placed his left palm upon the table and wagged his right index-finger admonishingly in Parker’s direction)- “in law the word may bear one of two, or indeed several interpretations, according to the nature of the document in which it occurs and the date of the document.”

“But in the new Act-” urged Lord Peter.

“I am not, particularly,” said Mr. Murbles, “a specialist in the law concerning property, and I should not like to give a decided opinion as to its interpretation, all the more as, up to the present, no case has come before the Courts bearing on the present issue- no pun intended, ha, ha, ha! But my immediate and entirely tentative opinion- which, however, I should advise you not to accept without the support of some weightier authority- would be, I think, that issue in this case means issue ad infinitum, and that therefore the great-nephews and great-nieces would be entitled to inherit.”

“But there might be another opinion?”

“Yes- the question is a complicated one- ”

“What did I tell you?” groaned Peter. “I knew this simplifying Act would cause a shockin’ lot of muddle.”

“May I ask,” said Murbles, why you want to know all this?”

“Why, sir,” said Wimsey, taking from his pocket-book the genealogy of the Dawson family which he had received from the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson, “here is the point. We have always talked about Mary Whittaker as Agatha Dawson’s niece; she was always called so and she speaks of the old lady as her aunt. But if you look at this, you will see that actually she is no nearer to her than great-niece: she was the grand-daughter of Agatha’s sister Harriet.”

“Quite true,” said Mr. Murbles, “but still, she was apparently the nearest surviving relative, and since Agatha Dawson died in 1925, the money passed without any question to Mary Whittaker under the old Property Act. There’s no ambiguity there.”