#Lord Peter Wimsey Plush

[e--q]

A Whimsical Christmas - Lord Peter Wimsey 

(Handmade Soft Toy inspired by the character of Dorothy L. Sayers)

[tinydooms]

1 for Rick Evelyn and Jonathan please

Coffee on the Orient Express

The Simplon-Orient Express, just outside of Paris, late 1929

“There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you lot.”

Rick looked up as Jonathan dropped into the seat across the table and leaned back against the soft red plush. Alex, seated on a velvet cushion beside his father, bawled, “Hallo,  Uncle Jon!” As a just-turned-four year old, he was going through a shouting phase. A countess, a marquis, and someone who was probably an exiled Russian prince or something looked around disapprovingly. 

“Hullo, Alex,” Jonathan replied. “How d’you like the train?”

“I like it a lot!” Alex shouted. “Dad and me goed to see the driver!”

“That’s excellent,” Jonathan said, even as Rick murmured, “Not so loud, kiddo.”

He cast a glance around the dining car; everywhere eyes dropped back to plates or newspapers. Rick sighed. He doubted that he was ever going to get used to traveling first class, even on trains that weren’t as swanky as the Orient Express. Even Evie and Jonathan were a little cowed by it; though they had been raised posh, their mixed-race status had oftentimes barred them to “polite” society. Rick, a working-class boy from Chicago, was still oftentimes wrong-footed.

“This place is giving me the creeps,” Rick said in an undertone. “Look at this.”

He raised a finger, hand still resting on the table, and a waiter materialized out of nowhere like some kind of liveried djinn. Even though he had expected him, Rick started. 

“How can I help monsieur?”

“Could we please have a hot chocolate for the little one, and two coffees? Thanks, awfully.”

The waiter bowed and dematerialized. Rick gave Jonathan a wide-eyed look. 

“Spooky.”

“Well-trained,” Jonathan corrected, grinning. “Keep saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and you’ll probably get special treatment.”

Rick snorted. He caught a crayon that Alex was rolling along the table and sent it sliding back towards his son. 

“Half these people must be royalty,” he said. 

“Nobility,” Jonathan replied. “Royalty usually have their own trains. Not all of them: don’t look now, but that’s Agatha Christie having tea in the corner.”

Under the pretext of picking up a crayon, Rick glanced over at the lady in the corner. She looked perfectly ordinary in an expensive suit and a red fox fur stole, jotting notes down in a small notebook while she drank tea from a porcelain teapot. 

“Think she’s plotting a murder?”

Jonathan considered. “It’d be an interesting setting for it. Different from the isolated country house, but not so isolated that the killer couldn’t get away if he wanted.”

“Who would kill someone on a train?” Rick mused. 

“Someone who thought they could pin it on someone else, especially if there were stops in the night and the body wasn’t found ‘til morning.”

“Hmm,” Rick murmured. “There’d have to be a twist of some kind, of course, to make it stand out.”

“What kind of a twist?”

“I dunno, I’m not a writer.”

Both men chuckled. The waiter reappeared at their table, handing around coffee and hot chocolate and a cookie for Alex. 

“That’s very kind of you,” Rick said, nodding to him. “Alex, what do you say?”

“That lady’s gonna murder someone!” Alex whisper-shouted, pointing his crayon. 

The waiter followed the line of the crayon to Mrs. Christie, still scribbling in her notebook, and smiled. “Eh, bien, little monsieur, the lady kills people in her books.”

“It’s not nice to kill people,” Alex said solemnly. “Even in stories. Thank you for my cookie.”

“You don’t think she heard that?” Rick murmured, embarrassed. 

“No, monsieur, the lady is absorbed,” the waiter said, smiling at him. 

“Five pounds says she writes a novel about the Orient Express,” Jonathan said as the waiter walked away. 

“I’m not betting you five pounds to guess the setting of Agatha Christie’s next book!” 

“Doesn’t have to be the next one,” Jonathan replied. “Five pounds, the murder is set on the Orient Express and the detective is Poirot, not Marple.”

Rick scoffed. “Honestly, I’d rather see how Miss Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey handle it.”

“It’ll be Mrs. Christie and Poirot; she sends him abroad more than Sayers does Wimsey. Five pounds. Deal?”

Rick made a face. “Deal.”

They shook on it. 

“And don’t you let him forget it, Alex,” Jonathan said, picking up his demitasse of fine coffee. 

Alex, chewing his cookie, nodded. “Mrs. Christie is going to murder someone on a train for five pounds. Got it.”

Not quite five years later

The letter arrived at Jonathan’s London flat on a bitterly cold January morning, post-marked Cairo, containing newsy letters from Evie and Alex, and a note from Rick. Inside the paper were a newspaper clipping of an ad for Agatha Christie’s latest Poirot adventure, Murder on the Orient Express, and a cheque for five pounds. All the note said was, “Damn it, Jonathan”. 

(Author’s Note: Agatha Christie first rode the Orient Express in late 1929, hence this story’s date; Murder on the Orient Express was published on New Year’s Day 1934. Five pounds at the time is roughly $350 in today’s money.)