“Of course, if you really think it important.”
“I do. I think it’s damned important. Look here, Charles, you don’t seem very enthusiastic about this case.”
“Well, you know, I’m not so certain it is a case at all. What makes you so fearfully keen about it? You seem dead set on making it a murder, with practically nothing to go upon. Why?”
Lord Peter got up and paced the room. The light from the solitary reading-lamp threw his lean shadow, diffused and monstrously elongated, up to the ceiling. He walked over to a book-shelf, and the shadow shrank, blackened, settled down. He stretched his hand, and the hand’s shadow flew with it, hovering over the gilded titles of the books and blotting them out one by one.
“Why?” repeated Wimsey. “Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue. The norm. All these”—he swept his extended hand across the book-shelf, and the shadow outlined a vaster and more menacing gesture—“all these books on this side of the room are books about crimes. But they only deal with the abnormal crimes.”
“What do you mean by abnormal crimes?”
“The failures. The crimes that have been found out. What proportion do you suppose they bear to the successful crimes—the ones we hear nothing about?”
“In this country,” said Parker, rather stiffly, “we manage to trace and convict the majority of criminals—”
“My good man, I know that where a crime is known to have been committed, you people manage to catch the perpetrator in at least sixty per cent of the cases. But the moment a crime is even suspected, it falls, ipso facto, into the category of failures. After that, the thing is merely a question of greater or less efficiency on the part of the police. But how about the crimes which are never even suspected?”
Parker shrugged his shoulders.