A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer

Author:Georgette Heyer [Heyer, Georgette]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780755108923
Goodreads: 1309039
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2010-03-15T16:42:13+00:00

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Chapter Nine

Sergeant Hemingway left Greystones in a thoughtful mood. An exhaustive search had failed to discover the hiding-place of any weapon, but one fact had emerged with which he seemed to be rather pleased.

"Though why I should be I can't tell you," he said to Glass. "It makes the whole business look more screwy than ever. But in my experience that's very often the way. You start on a case which looks as though it's going to be child's play, and you don't seem to get any further with it. By the time you've been at work on it a couple of days you've collected enough evidence to prove that there couldn't have been a murder at all. Then something breaks, and there you are."

"Do you say that the more difficult a case becomes the easier it is to solve?" asked Glass painstakingly.

"That's about the size of it," admitted the Sergeant. "When it's got so gummed up that each new fact you pick up contradicts the last I begin to feel cheerful."

"I do not understand. I see around me only folly and sin and vanity. Shall these things make a righteous man glad?"

"Not being a righteous man, I can't say. Speaking as a humble flatfoot, if it weren't for folly and sin and vanity I wouldn't be where I am now, and nor would you, my lad. And if you'd stop wasting your time learning bits of the Bible to fire off at me - which in itself is highly insubordinate conduct, let me tell you - and take a bit of wholesome interest in this problem, you'd probably do yourself a lot of good. You might even get promoted."

"I set no store by worldly honours," said Glass gloomily. "Man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish."

"What you do want," declared the Sergeant with asperity, "is a course of Bile Beans! I've met some killjoys in my time, but you fairly take the cake. What did you get out of your friend the butler?"

"He knows nothing."

"Don't you believe it! Butlers always know something."

"It is not so. He knows only that harsh words passed between the dead man and his nephew on the evening of the murder."

"Young Neville explained that," said the Sergeant musingly. "Not that I set much store by what he says. Pack of lies, I daresay."

"A lying tongue is but for the moment," observed Glass, with melancholy satisfaction.

"You can't have been about the world much if that's what you think. Do you still hold to it that the man you saw on the night of the murder wasn't carrying anything?"

"You would have me change my evidence," said Glass, fixing him with an accusing glare, "but I tell you that a man that beareth false witness is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow!"

"No one wants you to bear false witness," said the Sergeant irritably. "And as far as I'm concerned, you're a sharp arrow already, and probably a maul as well, if a maul means what I think it does.

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