Lord Peter Wimsey [01] Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers Page A

reference to your advertisement to-day in the personal column of The Times , I am disposed to believe that the eyeglasses and chain in question may be those I lost on the L. B. & S. C. Electric Railway while visiting London last Monday. I left Victoria by the 5:45 train, and did not notice my loss till I arrived at Balham. This indication and the optician's specification of the glasses, which I enclose, should suffice at once as an identification and a guarantee of my bona fides. If the glasses should prove to be mine, I should be greatly obliged to you if you would kindly forward them to me by registered post, as the chain was a present from my daughter, and is one of my dearest possessions.
     
    Thanking you in advance for this kindness, and regretting the trouble to which I shall be putting you, I am
     
    Yours very truly,
     
    THOS. CRIMPLESHAM
     
    Lord Peter Wimsey, 110, Piccadilly, W. (Encl.)
     
    "Dear me," said Parker, "this is what you might call unexpected."
     
    "Either it is some extraordinary misunderstanding," said Lord Peter, "or Mr. Crimplesham is a very bold and cunning villain. Or possibly, of course, they are the wrong glasses. We may as well get a ruling on that point at once. I suppose the glasses are at the Yard. I wish you'd just ring 'em up and ask 'em to send round an optician's description of them at once–and you might ask at the same time whether it's a very common prescription."
     
    "Right you are," said Parker, and took the receiver off its hook.
     
    "And now," said his friend, when the message was delivered, "just come into the library for a minute."
     
    On the library table, Lord Peter had spread out a series of bromide prints, some dry, some damp, and some but half-washed.
     
    "These little ones are the originals of the photos we've been taking," said Lord Peter, "and these big ones are enlargements all made to precisely the same scale. This one here is the footmark on the linoleum; we'll put that by itself at present. Now these finger-prints can be divided into five lots. I've numbered 'em on the prints–see?–and made a list:
     
    "A. The finger-prints of Levy himself, off his little bedside book and his hairbrush–this and this–you can't mistake the little scar on the thumb.
     
    "B. The smudges made by the gloved fingers of the man who slept in Levy's room on Monday night. They show clearly on the water-bottle and on the boots–superimposed on Levy's. They are very distinct on the boots–surprisingly so for gloved hands, and I deduce that the gloves were rubber ones and had recently been in water.
     
    "Here's another interestin' point. Levy walked in the rain on Monday night, as we know, and these dark marks are mud-splashes. You see they lie over Levy's finger-prints in every case. Now see: on this left boot we find the stranger's thumb-mark over the mud on the leather above the heel. That's a funny place to find a thumb-mark on a boot, isn't it? That is, if Levy took off his own boots. But it's the place where you'd expect to see it if somebody forcibly removed his boots for him. Again, most of the stranger's finger-marks come over the mud-marks, but here is one splash of mud which comes on top of them again. Which makes me infer that the stranger came back to Park Lane, wearing Levy's boots, in a cab, carriage or car, but that at some point or other he walked a little way–just enough to tread in a puddle and get a splash on the boots. What do you say?"
     
    "Very pretty," said Parker. "A bit intricate, though, and the marks are not all that I could wish a finger-print to be."
     
    "Well, I won't lay too much stress on it. But it fits in with our previous ideas. Now let's turn to:
     
    "C. The prints obligingly left by my own particular villain on the further edge of Thipps's bath, where you spotted them, and I ought to be scourged for not having spotted them. The left hand, you notice, the base of the palm and the fingers, but not the tips, looking as though he had