“Oh, yes, my lord, certainly.”
“And the latch-key, I imagine, belongs to the girl’s lodgings.”
“No doubt it does. We have asked her landlady to come and identify the body. Not that there’s any doubt about it, but just as a matter of routine. She may give us some help. Ah!”—the Superintendent peered out of the mortuary door—“I think this must be the lady.”
The stout and motherly woman who emerged from a taxi in charge of a youthful policeman identified the body without difficulty, and amid many sobs, as that of Bertha Gotobed. “Such a nice young lady,” she mourned. “What a terrible thing, oh, dear! who would go to do a thing like that? I’ve been in such a state of worriment ever since she didn’t come home last Wednesday. I’m sure many’s the time I’ve said to myself I wished I’d had my tongue cut out before I ever showed her that wicked advertisement. Ah, I see you’ve got it there, sir. A dreadful thing it is that people should be luring young girls away with stories about something to their advantage. A sinful old devil—calling himself a lawyer, too! When she didn’t come back and didn’t come back I wrote to the wretch, telling him I was on his track and was coming round to have the law on him as sure as my name’s Dorcas Gulliver. He wouldn’t have got round me—not that I’d be the bird he was looking for, being sixty-one come Mid-Summer Day—and so I told him.”
Lord Peter’s gravity was somewhat upset by this diatribe against the highly respectable Mr. Murbles of Staple Inn, whose own version of Mrs. Gulliver’s communication had been decently expurgated. “How shocked the old boy must have been,” he murmured to Parker. “I’m for it next time I see him.”
Mrs. Gulliver’s voice moaned on and on.
“Such respectable girls, both of them, and Miss Evelyn married to that nice young man from Canada. Deary me, it will be a terrible upset for her. And there’s poor John Ironsides, was to have married Miss Bertha, the poor lamb, this very Whitsuntide as ever is. A very steady, respectable man—a clurk on the Southern, which he always used to say, joking like, ‘Slow but safe, like the Southern—that’s me, Mrs. G.’ T’ch, t’ch—who’d a’ believed it? And it’s not as if she was one of the flighty sort. I give her a latch-key gladly, for she’d sometimes be on late duty, but never any staying out after her time. That’s why it worried me so, her not coming back. There’s many nowadays as would wash one’s hands and glad to be rid of them, knowing what they might be up to. No. When the time passed and she didn’t come back, I said, Mark my words, I said, she’s bin kidnapped, I said, by that Murbles.”
“Had she been long with you, Mrs. Gulliver?” asked Parker.
“Not above a fifteen month or so, she hadn’t, but bless you, I don’t have to know a young lady fifteen days to know if she’s a good girl or not. You gets to know by the look of ’em almost, when you’ve ’ad my experience.”
“Did she and her sister come to you together?”