Clouds of Witness - Dorothy L Sayers - Part 1

While Lord Peter Wimsey is on holiday in the wilds of Corsica, his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, is charged with the murder of their sister Mary's fiance. According to newspaper reports, on October 13th the shooting party at the Duke's Lodge had retired for the night when, at 3 a.m. of a bitterly cold and wet morning, his sister found him just outside the conservatory door, leaning over the dead body of her betrothed, Dennis Cathcart. Learning of his brother’s indictment for murder, Lord Peter and Bunter - his invaluable man servant qua assistant sleuth - fly to the scene. Scotland Yard is already at work, in the person of Detective Inspector Charles Parker, with whom Lord Peter had recently solved the Battersea Mystery. (See Dorothy Sayers’ first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, “Whose Body?”) What were the Duke of Denver, Lady Mary and Dennis Cathcart doing there on such a night, at such a time? True, Cathcart had angrily left the house hours earlier. But why, in that weather, had he stayed out? If the Duke, as he claimed, came on the body while returning from a stroll, why such nocturnal wanderings in the fiercest of weather? What led Lady Mary to come down from her bedroom in the middle of the night in order to go to, of all places, the conservatory? The mystery's apparently independent but closely intertwined threads are disentangled by the joint efforts of Lord Peter Wimsey, his friend Chief Inspector Parker, and the inestimable Bunter. - Summary by Kirsten Wever