“Must have been. But I rather gather his sister thought he was contemplating matrimony.”

Parker laughed.

“After all,” said Lady Mary, “he probably didn’t tell his sister everything.”

“Damned little, I should imagine. She was quite honestly upset by last night’s show. Apparently the party Dean took her to wasn’t quite so hot. Why did he take her? That’s another problem. He said he wanted her to meet Dian, and no doubt the kid imagined she was being introduced to a future-in-law. But Dean-you’d think he’d want to keep his sister out of it. He couldn’t, surely, really have wanted to corrupt her, as Willis said.”

“Who is Willis?”

“Willis is a young man who foams at the mouth if you mention Victor Dean, who was once Victor Dean’s dearest friend, who is in love with Victor Dean’s sister, is furiously jealous of me, thinks I’m tarred with the same brush as Victor Dean, and dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons. He writes copy about face-cream and corsets, is the son of a provincial draper, was educated at a grammar school and wears, I deeply regret to say, a double-breasted waistcoat. That is the most sinister thing about him-except that he admits to having been in the lavatory when Victor Dean fell downstairs, and the lavatory, as I said before, is the next step to the roof.”

“Who else was in the lavatory?”

“I haven’t asked him yet. How can I? It’s horribly hampering to one’s detective work when one isn’t supposed to be detecting, because one daren’t ask any questions, much. But if whoever it was knew I was detecting, then whatsoever questions I asked, I shouldn’t get any answers. It wouldn’t matter if only I had the foggiest notion whom or what I was detecting, but looking among about a hundred people for the perpetrator of an unidentified crime is rather difficult.”

“I thought you were looking for a murderer.”

“So I am-but I don’t think I shall ever get the murderer till I know why the murder was done. Besides, what Pym engaged me to do was to look for the irregularity in the office. Of course, murder is an irregularity, but it’s not the one I’m commissioned to hunt for. And the only person I can fix a motive for the murder on to is Willis-and it’s not the sort of motive I’m looking for.”

“What was Willis’s row with Dean?”

“Damn silliest thing in the world. Willis used to go home with Dean at week-ends. Dean lived in a flat with his sister, by the way-no parents or anything. Willis fell in love with sister. Sister wasn’t sure about him. Dean took sister to one of Dian’s hot parties. Willis found out. Willis, being a boob, talked to sister like a Dutch uncle. Sister called Willis a disgusting, stuck-up, idiotic, officious prig. Willis rebuked Dean. Dean told Willis to go to hell. Loud row. Sister joined in. Dean family united in telling Willis to go and bury himself. Willis told Dean that if he (Dean) persisted in corrupting his (Dean’s) sister he (Willis) would shoot him like a dog. His very words, or so I am told.”

“Willis,” said Mary, “appears to think in clichés.”

“Of course he does-that’s why he writes such good corset-copy. Anyhow, there it was. Dean and Willis at daggers drawn for three months. Then Dean fell downstairs. Now Willis has started on me. I told off Pamela Dean to take him home last night, but I don’t know what came of it. I’ve explained to her that those hot-stuff parties are genuinely dangerous, and that Willis has some method in his madness, though a prize juggins as regards tact and knowledge of the sex. It was frightfully comic to see old Willis sneaking in after us in a sort of Ku Klux Klan outfit-incredibly stealthy, and wearing the same shoes he wears in the office and a seal-ring on his little finger that one could identify from here to the Monument.”

“Poor lad! I suppose it wasn’t Willis who tipped friend Dean down the stairs?”

“I don’t think so, Polly-but you never know. He’s such a melodramatic ass. He might consider it a splendid sin. But I don’t think he’d have had the brains to work out the details. And if he had done it, I fancy he’d have gone straight round to the police-station, smitten the double-breasted waistcoat a resounding blow and proclaimed ‘I did it, in the cause of purity.’ But against that, there’s the undoubted fact that Dean’s connection with Dian and Co. definitely came to an end in April-so why should he wait till the end of May to strike the blow? The row with Dean took place in March.”

“Possibly, Peter, the sister has been leading you up the garden. The connection may not have stopped when she said it did. She may have kept it up on her own. She may even be a drug-taker or something herself. You never know.”

“No; but generally one can make a shrewd guess. No; I don’t think there’s anything like that wrong with Pamela Dean. I’ll swear her disgust last night was genuine. It was pretty foul, I must say. By the way, Charles, where the devil do these people get their stuff from? There was enough dope floating about that house to poison a city.”

“If I knew that,” said Mr. Parker, sourly, “I should be on velvet. All I can tell you is, that it’s coming in by the boatload from somewhere or other, and is being distributed broadcast from somewhere or other. The question is, where? Of course, we could lay hands tomorrow on half a hundred of the small distributors, but where would be the good of that? They don’t know themselves where it comes from, or who handles it. They all tell the same tale. It’s handed to them in the street by men they’ve never seen before and couldn’t identify again. Or it’s put in their pockets in omnibuses. It isn’t always that they won’t tell; they honestly don’t know. And if you did catch the man immediately above them in the scale, he would know nothing either. It’s heartbreaking. Somebody must be making millions out of it.”

“Yes. Well, to go back to Victor Dean. Here’s another problem. He was pulling down six pounds a week at Pym’s. How does one manage to run with the de Momerie crowd on £300 a year? Even if he wasn’t much of a sport, it couldn’t possibly be done for nothing.”

“Probably he lived on Dian.”

“Possibly he did, the little tick. On the other hand, I’ve got an idea. Suppose he really did think he had a chance of marrying into the aristocracy-or what he imagines to be the aristocracy. After all, Dian is a de Momerie, though her people have shown her the door, and you can’t blame them. Put it that he was spending far more than he could afford in trying to keep up the running. Put it that it took longer than he thought and that he had got heavily dipped. And then see what that half-finished letter to Pym looks like in the light of that theory.”

“Well,” began Parker.

“Oh, do step on the gas!” broke in Mary. “How you two darlings do love going round and round a subject, don’t you? Blackmail, of course. It’s perfectly obvious. I’ve seen it coming for the last hour. This Dean creature is looking round for a spot of extra income and he discovers somebody at Pym’s doing something he shouldn’t-the head-cashier cooking the accounts, or the office-boy pilfering from the petty cash, or something. So he says, ‘If you don’t square me, I’ll tell Pym,’ and starts to write a letter. Probably, you know, he never meant that letter to get to Mr. Pym, at all; it was just a threat. The other man stops him for the moment by paying up something on account. Then he thinks: This is hopeless, I’d better slug the little beast.’ So he slugs him. And there you are.”

“Just as simple as that,” said Wimsey.

“Of course it’s simple, only men love to make mysteries.”

“And women love to jump to conclusions.”

“Never mind the generalizations,” said Parker, “they always lead to bad reasoning. Where do I come into all this?”

“You give me your advice, and stand by ready to rally round with your myrmidons in case there’s any roughhousing. By the way, I can give you the address of that house we went to last night. Dope and gambling to be had for the asking, to say nothing of nameless orgies.”