Slack Your Rope, Hangman

[sonetka]

In The Beginning is now posted on AO3, for the benefit of castiron and, of course, all the Harriet/Philip shippers out there! I've cleaned it up a bit, mostly smoothing out some of the dialogue and historical references, and making sure it's as much in line with the book as possible (I'd forgotten that the Dyers lived above them, not below, and that Sylvia

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

Belatedly commenting (you shouldn't post on Sayers while I'm on holiday!), the plot in Strong Poison never strikes me as the best constructed. The incidents in it are good - Miss Murchison's and Miss Climpson's investigations in particular - but while the "how did Urquhart do it" puzzle is good, the "did Urquhart do it" isn't. It really needs a stronger counterweight to fill up that time. It really ought to be and investigation into Vaughan, but since his obvious motive is sexual jealousy of Philip, perhaps Sayers felt that a second socially-unacceptable but innocent person wouldn't fly with the public/publishers. But you could do something interesting, even have Peter thinking that Vaughan is probably innocent but can't prove it, and to save Harriet he could use Vaughan to muddy the prosecution case, since there isn't enough to convict him, but there's enough to say "you can't prove Harriet did it, but Vaughan had the opportunity, too, he also had access to poison, and he had a motive". Except of course Peter can't do that because he wants to find the truth, and he wouldn't exploit someone like that.

[sonetka]

If it's any consolation, you ended up replying while I was on vacation myself, so there was a delay on this end as well :). Vaughan is a perfect counterweight and it really sounds, in the beginning, like she's setting him up to be the Unappealing But Innocent suspect -- the fact that he and Philip ate together on the day he was poisoned, his purchase of poisons -- which he admits to having discussed with Philip -- his extreme denunciations of Harriet, which could be a blind, and last but not least the fact that he's collecting the royalties on Philip's books, which are now best-sellers because of a murder which Vaughan's insistence on an inquiry helped to uncover! Of course, you could shoot it full of holes -- there's no way Vaughan could make arsenic take so long to go into effect, for one thing -- but a sufficiently talented prosecutor could make him look really bad, especially if he dropped a few artful hints about Vaughan's likely proclivities as a motive. It's strange how Peter talks to him once and then ends up agreeing with Sylvia that "No, he's really upset, he didn't do it." He's a good judge of character, but nobody's *that* good. It's not as if real murderers haven't pretended to be grief-stricken before when it was required.

I agree that it would be very unlikely for Peter to deliberately smear someone he thinks is innocent in service to the Greater Good. But if push came to shove, well ... he talks a good game about how it would be better to be hanged than escape with a vague "not proven", but I think if she had been condemned and he was looking at a strict deadline, he might become desperate enough to use any tool which came to hand (and of course hate himself afterwards for it). It's not as if he'd have to stop investigating, after all, merely delay things long enough to keep her alive. And eventually, of course, Mrs. Wrayburn will die and since she was pretty famous in her day, the terms of her will are probably going to become known. After that, vindicating both Vaughan and Harriet would probably just be a matter of time.

[nineveh_uk]

I think I read somewhere-or-other that the timetable could just about work with Vaughan, if the arsenic were late, and not with alcohol etc. Whereas it is actually too soon for Harriet. So a prosecutor would have something to work with. I can accept Peter thinking that Vaughan almost certainly didn't do it, because he is genuinely devastated, but surely he'd at least investigate? After all, he might be devastated that it worked!

The inevitable public availability of Mrs Wrayburn's will is why I tend to think that Urquhart is planning death by natural causes, and that the coinciding with seeing Harriet is sheer accident (and she's see Boyes other times), so intended to reflect stress that has contributed to pre-existing illness. Because if Boyes is simply dead, how tragic, then there's no problem with the original will being read, and ending up on public record (it doesn't even need publicity, Wimsey just needs to keep an eye on Somerset House). It's only with the death being dodgy that it becomes vulnerable, but then it's very vulnerable - not least in that there's some reason that Urquhart can't fake it (like the witnesses being around), or he'd have done that in the first place, much simpler. Though I suspect that a Harriet who had spent the last 5 years in Holloway might not feel very inclined to marry Lord Peter.