The Three Taps

A Detective Story without a Moral

by

Ronald A. Knox

Contents

Dedicated to

Susan and Francis Baker

(only he mustn’t sit up too late over it)

Chapter I.
The Euthanasia Policy

The principles of insurance, they tell us, were not hidden from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. How anybody had the enterprise in those rough-and-tumble days to guarantee a client against “fire, water, robbery or other calamity” remains a problem for the historian; the more so as it appears that mathematical calculations were first applied to the business by the eminent John de Witt. In our own time, at any rate, the insurance companies have woven a golden net under the tight-rope walk of existence; if life is a lottery, the prudent citizen faces it with the consciousness that he is backed both ways. Had the idea been thoroughly grasped in those remoter periods, no doubt but Alfred’s hostess would have been easily consoled for the damage done to her cakes and King John handsomely compensated for all that he lost in The Wash. Let us thank the soaring genius of the human mind which has thus found a means to canalize for us the waters of affliction; and let us always be scrupulous in paying up our premiums before the date indicated on the printed card, lest calamity should come upon us and find us unprepared.

In a sense, though, insurance was but an empirical science until the Indescribable Company made its appearance. The man who is insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof; those contrary accidents and mortifications which are a source of spiritual profit to the saint are a source of material advantage to him. No east wind but flatters him with the prospect of a lucrative cold; no dropped banana skin but may suddenly hurl him into affluence. The chicken-farmer whose hen-houses are fitted with the company’s patent automatic egg-register can never make a failure of his business. The egg is no sooner laid than it falls gently through a slot which marks its passage on a kind of taximeter; and if the total of eggs at the end of the month is below the average the company pays—I had almost said, the company lays—an exact monetary equivalent for the shortage. The company which thus takes upon itself the office of a hen is equally ready when occasion arises to masquerade as a bee: if your hives are opened in the presence of its representative you can distend every empty cell with sweet nectar at the company’s expense. Doctors can guarantee themselves against an excess of panel patients, barristers against an absence of briefs. You can insure every step you take on this side of the grave, but no one of them on such handsome terms as the step which takes you into the grave; and it is confidently believed that if certain practical difficulties could be got over the Indescribable would somehow contrive to frank your passage into the world beyond. Wags have made merry at the company’s expense, alleging that a burglar can insure himself against a haul of sham jewels, and a clergyman against insufficient attendance at even-song. They tell stories of a client who murmured “Thank God!” as he fell down a lift-shaft, and a shipwrecked passenger who manifested the liveliest annoyance at the promptness of his rescuers when he was being paid for floating on a life-belt at the rate of ten pounds a minute. So thoroughly has the Indescribable reversed our scale of values here below.

But of all the company’s enterprises none can rival in importance or in popularity the so-called Euthanasia policy. One of the giant brains that organized the undertaking observed with compassion the doubtful lot of human kind, the lot which makes the business man sweat and labour and agonize, uncertain whether he himself will reap the fruits of his industry or whether they will pass to an heir in whom, on the whole, he is less interested. It follows, of course, from the actuarial point of view, that he needs a policy which covers both possibilities, immature death or unexpected longevity, but the former on a more princely scale than the latter. If you take out a Euthanasia policy you will pay very heavy premiums; that goes without saying. But you pay them with a sense of absolute security. If you should die before the age of sixty-five a fortune is immediately distributed to your heirs and assigns. If you outlive that crucial age you become thenceforward, until the decree of nature takes its tardy effect, the pensioner of the company; every faltering breath you draw in the last stages of senility is money to you; your heirs and assigns, instead of looking forward heartlessly to the moment of your release, conspire to keep your body and soul together with every known artifice of modern medicine—it is in their interest to do so. There is but one way in which you can forfeit the manifest advantages of the scheme, and that is self-murder. So complex is our human fashioning that men even may be tempted to enrich their surviving relatives by such means; and you will find, accordingly, at the bottom of your Euthanasia policy, an ominous black hand directing attention to the fact that in the event of suicide no benefits are legally recoverable.

It goes without saying that the Indescribable Building is among the finest in London. It appears to be an axiom with those who conduct business in the modern, or American, manner that efficiency is impossible unless all your transactions are conducted in an edifice not much smaller and not much less elaborate than the Taj Mahal. Why this should be so it is difficult to explain. In a less credulous age we might have been tempted to wonder where all the money came from; whether (to put it brutally) our premiums might not have worked out a little lower if the company’s premises had not been quite so high. After all, our solicitor lives in horrid, dingy little chambers, with worn-out carpets and immemorial cobwebs on the wall—does he never feel that this squalor will fail to inspire confidence? Apparently not; yet the modern insurance company must impress us all through the palatial splendour of its offices with the idea that there is a vast reserve of capital behind it. The wildest voluptuousness of an Eastern tyrant is less magnificent in its architectural scheme than the hard-headed efficiency of the American business man. Chatting in the waiting-room of some such edifice, Sardanapalus might have protested that it stumped him how they did it, and Kublai Khan might have registered the complaint that it was all very well but the place didn’t feel homey.

Indescribable House is an enormously high building with long, narrow windows that make it look like an Egyptian tomb. It is of white stone, of course, so time-defying in its appearance that it seems almost blasphemous to remember the days when it was simply a gigantic shell composed of iron girders. Over the front door there is a group of figures in relief, more than life-size; the subject is intended, I believe, to be Munificence wiping away the tears of Widowhood, though the profane have identified it before now as Uncle Sam picking Britannia’s pocket. This is continued all round the four sides by a frieze, ingeniously calculated to remind the spectator of the numerous risks which mortality has to run: here a motor accident, with an ambulance carrying off the injured parties; here an unmistakable shipwreck; there a big-game hunter being gored by a determined-looking buffalo, while a lion prowls thoughtfully in the background. Of the interior I cannot speak so positively, for even those who are favoured enough to be the company’s clients never seem to go up beyond the first storey. But rumour insists that there is a billiard-room for the convenience of the directors (who never go there); and that from an aeroplane, in hot weather, you can see the clerks playing tennis on the roof. What they do when they are not playing tennis and what possible use there can be in all those multitudinous rooms on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors are thoughts that paralyze the imagination.

In one of the waiting-rooms on the ground floor, sitting under a large palm-tree and reading a closely reasoned article in the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette, sat a client to whom the reader will do well to direct attention, for our story is concerned with him. His look, his dress, his manner betrayed the rich man only to those who have frequented the smaller provincial towns and know how little in those centres money has to do with education. He had a short black coat with very broad and long lapels, a starched collar that hesitated between the Shakespeare and the all-the-way-and-back-again patterns, a double-breasted waistcoat from which hung a variety of seals, lockets and charms—in London, in fact, you would have put him down for an old-fashioned bank cashier with a moderate income. Actually, he could have bought you out of your present job at double the salary and hardly felt it. In Pullford, a large Midland town which you probably will never visit, men nudged one another and pointed to him as one of the wealthiest residents. In the anteroom of the Indescribable offices he looked, and perhaps felt, like a schoolboy waiting his turn for pocket-money. Yet even here he was a figure recognizable to the attendant who stood there smoothing out back numbers of the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette. For this man, called Mottram by accident of birth and Jephthah through the bad taste of his parents, was the holder of a Euthanasia policy.

Another attendant approached him, summoning him to his appointed interview. There was none of that “Mr. Mottram, please!” which reverberates so grimly through the dentist’s waiting-room. At the Indescribable the attendants come close to you and beckon you away with confidential whispers; it is part of the tradition. Mr. Mottram rose, and was gently sucked up by the lift to the first storey, where fresh attendants ushered him on into one of the few rooms that really mattered. Here he was met by a pleasant, rather languid young man, delicately dressed, university-bred, whose position in the complicated hierarchy of the Indescribable it is no business of ours to determine.

“How do you do, Mr. Mottram? Keeping well, I hope?”

Mr. Mottram had the blunt manner of his fellow townsmen, and did not appreciate the finesse of metropolitan conversational openings. “Ah, that’s right,” he said; “best for you I should keep well, eh? You and I won’t quarrel there. Well, it may surprise you, but it’s my health I’ve come to talk about. I don’t look ill, do I?”

“You look fit for anything. I’d sooner be your insurance agent than your family doctor, Mr. Mottram.” The young man was beginning to pick up the Pullford idea of light small talk.

“Fit for anything, that’s right. And, mind you, I feel fit for anything. Never felt better. Two years!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Two years, that’s what he says. What’s the good of being able to know about these things if they can’t do anything for ’em, that’s what I want to know? And, mind you, he says there isn’t anything for it, not in the long run. He tells me to take this and that, you know, and give up this and that”——

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mottram, but I don’t quite understand. Is this your doctor you’re talking about?”

“No doctor of mine. My doctor down in Pullford, he couldn’t tell what was the matter. Sent me on to this big man in London I’ve been seeing this morning. Two years, he says. Seems hard, doesn’t it?”

“Oh! . . . You’ve been to a specialist. I say, I’m most awfully sorry.” The young man was quite serious in his condolences, though he was even more embarrassed than actually grieved. It seemed horrible to him that this red-faced man who looked so well and obviously enjoyed his meals should be going where Numa and Ancus went before him: he did not fit into the picture. No taint of professionalism entered into this immediate reaction. But Mr. Mottram still took the business line.

“Ah! ‘sorry’—you may say that. It may mean half a million to you, mayn’t it?”

“Yes; but, look here, these specialists are often wrong. Famous case of one who went potty and told all his patients they were in for it. Look here, what about seeing our man? He’d vet you, gladly.”

It need hardly be said that the Indescribable keeps its own private physician, whose verdict must be obtained before any important insurance is effected. He is considered to be one of the three best doctors in England, and fantastic stories are told about the retaining fee which induced him to give up his practice in Harley Street. Once more the young man was entirely disinterested; once more Mr. Mottram saw ground for suspicion. It looked to him as if the company were determined to get stable information about the exact state of his health, and he did not like the idea.

“It’s of no consequence, thank you all the same. It isn’t as if my case were a doubtful one; I can give you the doctor’s certificate if needed. But I didn’t come here to talk about that; I came on business. You know how I stand?”

The young man had just been looking up Mr. Mottram’s docket and knew all about him well enough. But the Indescribable cultivates the family touch; it likes to treat its clients as man to man, not as so many lives. “Let’s see”—the young man appeared to be dragging the depths of memory—“you should be sixty-three now, eh? And in two years’ time—why, it looks as if it were just touch and go whether your policy covered a case of—h’m!—premature decease or not, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. My birthday’s in a fortnight’s time, more or less. If that doctor was dead accurate, it’ll stand you in five hundred thousand; if he put the date a bit too soon, then I get nothing, and you pay nothing; that’s how it is, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it, I’m afraid. Of course, you’ll understand, Mr. Mottram, the company has to work by rule of thumb in these cases.”

“I see that. But look at it this way. When I took out that policy I wasn’t thinking much of the insurance part; I’ve no kith nor kin except one nephew, and he’s seen fit to quarrel with me, so nothing goes to him, anyhow. If that half-million falls in, it will just go to charity. But what I’d set my heart on was the annuity; we’re a long-lived family, mostly, and I’d looked forward to spending my last days in comfort, d’you see? Well, there’s no chance of that after what the doctor’s been telling me. So I don’t value that Youth-in-Asia policy as much as I did, see? And I’ve come here to make you a fair offer.”

“The company”—— began the young man.

“Let me have my say, and you shall have yours afterward. They call me rich, and I suppose I am rich; but my stuff is tied up more than you’d think; with money as tight as it is, you can’t just sell out of a thing when you feel inclined. What I want is ready money—doctors’ bills, you know, and foreign travel, and treatment, and that. So this is my offer: you pay back half the premiums from the time I started insuring with you, half the premiums, mind you; and if I die before I reach sixty-five, then we call it off; you pay no insurance: if I live beyond sixty-five we call it off, and you pay no annuity. Come now, there’s a business offer. What do you people say to it?”

“I’m sorry; I’m frightfully sorry. But, you know, we’ve had this kind of offer before, and the company has always taken the line that it can’t go back on the original contract. If we lose, we lose; if the client loses, he must shoulder the responsibility. If we once went in for cancelling our insurances like that, our whole credit would suffer. I know you mean well by us, Mr. Mottram, and we’re grateful to you for the generosity of the offer; but it can’t be done; really it can’t.”

There was a heavy silence for nearly a minute. Then Mr. Mottram, pathetic in his disappointment, tried his last card.

“You could put it to the directors, couldn’t you? Stands to reason you couldn’t accept an offer of that kind without referring it to them. But you could put it to them at their next meeting, eh?”

“I could put it to the directors; indeed, I will. But I’m sorry to say I can’t hold out any hopes. The premium of the Euthanasia policy is so stiff that we’re always having people wanting to back out of it half-way, but the directors have never consented. If you take my advice, Mr. Mottram, you’ll take a second opinion about your health, go carefully this next year or two, and live to enjoy that annuity—for many years, I hope.” The young man, after all, was a paid official; he did not stand to lose.

Mr. Mottram rose; he declined all offers of refreshment. A little wearily, yet holding his head high, he let the confidential attendants usher him out. The young man made some notes, and the grim business of the Indescribable Company went on. In distant places ships were foundering, factories were being struck by lightning, crops were being spoiled by blight, savages were raiding the peaceful country-side; men were lying on air-cushions, fighting for breath in the last struggle of all. And to the Indescribable Company all these things meant business; most of them meant loss. But the loss never threatened its solvency for a moment; the law of averages saw to that.

Chapter II.
The Detective Malgré Lui

I have already mentioned that the Indescribable kept its own tame doctor, a man at the very head of his profession. He was not in the least necessary to it; that is to say, a far cheaper man would have done the work equally well. But it suited the style of the Indescribable to have the very best man, and to advertise the fact that he had given up his practice in order to work exclusively for the company; it was all of a piece with the huge white building, and the frieze, and the palms in the waiting-room. It looked well. For a quite different reason the Indescribable retained its own private detective. This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the official communications of the company except as “our representative.” He carried neither a lens nor a forceps—not even a revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend; but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will not call him, for the company paid him, and as you would expect, quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland Yard, where the umbrellas go to.

He was not an ornament to the company; he fulfilled a quite practical purpose. There are, even outside the humorous stories, business men in a small way who find it more lucrative to burn down their premises than to sell their stock. There are ladies—ladies whose names the Indescribable would never dream of giving away—who pawn their jewels, buy sham ones, and then try to make the original insurance policy cover them in the event of theft. There are small companies (believe it or not) which declare an annual loss by selling their stuff below cost price to themselves under another name. Such people flocked to the Indescribable. It was so vast a concern that you felt no human pity about robbing it—it was like cheating the income tax, and we all know how some people feel about that. The Indescribable never prosecuted for fraud; instead, it allowed a substantial margin for these depredations, which it allowed to continue. But where shady work was suspected “our representative” would drop in in the most natural way in the world and by dint of some searching inquiries made while the delinquent’s back was turned would occasionally succeed in showing up a fraud and saving the company a few hundreds of thousands by doing so.

The company’s “representative,” and our hero, was Miles Bredon, a big, good-humoured, slightly lethargic creature still in the early thirties. His father had been a lawyer of moderate eminence and success. When Miles went to school it was quite clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, and very obscure how he was going to do it. He was not exactly lazy, but he was the victim of hobbies which perpetually diverted his attention. He was a really good mathematician, for example; but as he never left a sum unfinished and “went on to the next” his marks never did him justice. He was a good cross-country runner, but in the middle of a run he would usually catch sight of some distraction which made him wander three miles out of his course and come in last. It was his nature to be in love with the next thing he had to do, to shrink in loathing from the mere thought of the next but one. The war came in time to solve the problem of his career; and more fortunate than some he managed to hit on a métier in the course of it. He became an intelligence officer; did well, then did brilliantly; was mentioned in despatches, though not decorated. What was more to the point, his Colonel happened to be a friend of some minor director of the Indescribable, and, hearing that a discreet man was needed to undertake the duties outlined, recommended Bredon. The offer fell at his feet just when he was demobilized; he hated the idea of it, but was sensible enough to realize, even then, that ex-officers cannot be choosers. He was accepted on his own terms, namely, that he should not have to sit in an office kicking his heels; he would always be at home, and the company might call him in when he was wanted.

In a few years he had made himself indispensable to his employer; that is to say, they thought they could not get on without him, though in fact his application to his duties was uncertain and desultory. Four out of five inquiries meant nothing to him; he made nothing of them; and Whitechapel thanked the God of its fathers for his incompetence. The fifth case would appeal to his capricious imagination; he would be prodigal of time and of pains; and he would bring off some coup which was hymned for weeks behind closed doors in the Indescribable Building. There was that young fellow at Croydon, for example, who had his motor-bicycle insured, but not his mother-in-law. Her body was found at the foot of an embankment beside a lonely road in Kent, and there was no doubt that it had been shot out of the side-car; only (as Bredon managed to prove) the lady’s death had occurred on the previous day from natural causes. There was the well-known bootlegger—well known, at least, to the United States police—who insured all his cargoes with the Indescribable and then laid secret information against himself whereby vigilant officials sank hundreds of dummy cases in the sea, all the bottles containing sea-water. And there was the lady of fashion who burgled her own jewels in the most plausible manner you could imagine and had them sold in Paris. These crooked ways too the fitful intuitions of Miles Bredon made plain in the proper quarters.

He was well thought of, in fact, by every one except himself. For himself, he bitterly regretted the necessity that had made him become a spy—he would use no other word for it—and constantly alarmed his friends by announcing his intention of going into the publishing trade, or doing something relatively honest. The influence which saved him on these occasions was that of—how shall I say it?—his wife. I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter, but it is not my fault. It is the fault of two mocking eyes and two very capable hands that were employed in driving brass-hats to and fro in London at the end of the war. Bredon surrendered to these, and made a hasty but singularly fortunate marriage. Angela Bredon was under no illusions about the splendid figure in khaki that stood beside her at the altar. Wiser than her generation, she realized that marriages were not “for the duration”; that she would have to spend the rest of her life with a large, untidy, absent-minded man who would frequently forget that she was in the room. She saw that he needed above all things a nurse and a chauffeur, and she knew that she could supply both these deficiencies admirably. She took him as a husband, with all a husband’s failings, and the Indescribable itself could not have guaranteed her more surely against the future.

There is a story of some Bishop, or important person, who got his way at Rome rather unexpectedly over an appeal, and, when asked by his friends how he did it, replied, “Fallendo infallibilem.” It might have been the motto of Angela’s mastery over her husband; the detective, always awake to the possibilities of fraudulent dealing in every other human creature, did not realize that his wife was a tiny bit cleverer than he was and was always conspiring for his happiness behind his back. For instance, it was his custom of an evening to play a very long and complicated game of patience, which he had invented for himself; you had to use four packs, and the possible permutations of it were almost unlimited. It was an understood thing in the household that Angela, although she had grasped the rules of the game, did not really know how to play it. But when, as often happened, the unfinished game had to be left undisturbed all night, she was quite capable of stealing down early in the morning and altering the positions of one or two cards, so that he should get the game “out” in time to cope with his ordinary work. These pious deceits of hers were never, I am glad to say, unmasked.

About a fortnight after Mr. Mottram’s interview with the young man at Indescribable House these two fortunate people were alone together after dinner, she alternately darning socks and scratching the back of a sentimental-looking fox-terrier, he playing his interminable patience. The bulk of the pack lay on a wide table in front of him, but there were outlying sections of the design dotted here and there on the floor within reach of his hand. The telephone bell rang, and he looked up at her appealingly—obviously, he was tied hand and foot by his occupation—which to her only meant putting her darning away, lifting the fox-terrier off her feet, and going out into the hall. She understood the signal, and obeyed it. There was a fixed law of the household that if she answered a call which was meant for him he must try to guess what it was about before she told him. This was good for him, she said; it developed the sleuth instinct.

“Hullo! Mrs. Bredon speaking—who is it, please? . . . Oh, it’s you. . . . Yes, he’s in, but he’s not answering the telephone. . . . No, only drunk. . . . Just rather drunk. . . . Business? Good; that’s just what he wants. . . . A man called what? . . . M-o-t-t-r-a-m, Mottram, yes. . . . Never heard of it. . . . St. William’s? Oh, the Midlands, that are sodden and unkind, that sort of Midlands, yes? . . . Oh! . . . Is it—what? . . . Is it supposed to have been an accident? . . . Oh, that generally means suicide, doesn’t it? . . . Staying where? . . . Where’s that? . . . All right, doesn’t matter; I’ll look it up. . . . At an inn? Oh, then it was in somebody else’s bed really! What name? . . . What a jolly name! Well, where’s Miles to go? To Chilthorpe? . . . Yes, rather, we can start bright and early. Is it an important case? Is it an important case? . . . Oo! I say! I wish I could get Miles to die and leave me half a million! Righto, he’ll wire you to-morrow. . . . Yes, quite; thanks. . . . Good-night.”

“Interpret, please,” said Angela, returning to the drawing-room. “Why, you’ve been going on with your patience the whole time! I suppose you didn’t listen to a word I was saying?”

“How often am I to tell you that the memory and the attention function inversely? I remember all you said, precisely because I wasn’t paying attention to it. First of all, it was Sholto, because he was ringing you up on business, but it was somebody you know quite well—at least I hope you don’t talk like that to the tradesmen.”

“Sholto, yes, ringing up from the office. He wanted to talk to you.”

“So I gathered. Was it quite necessary to tell him I was drunk?”

“Well, I couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment. I couldn’t tell him you were playing patience, or he might have thought we were unhappily married. Go on, Sherlock.”

“Mottram, living at some place in the Midlands you’ve never heard of, but staying at a place called ‘Chilthorpe’—he’s died, and his death wants investigating; that’s obvious.”

“How did you know he was dead?”

“From the way you said ‘Oh’—besides, you said he’d died in his bed, or implied it. And there’s some question of half a million insurance—Euthanasia, I suppose? Really, the Euthanasia’s been responsible for more crimes than psychoanalysis.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’ve got it all right. What did he die of?”

“Something that generally means suicide—or rather, you think it does. The old sleeping draught business? Veronal?”

“No stupid, gas. The gas left turned on. And where’s Chilthorpe, please?”

“It’s on the railway. If my memory serves me right, it is Chilthorpe and Gorrington, between Bull’s Cross and Lowgill Junction. But the man, you say, belongs somewhere else?”

“Pullford; at least it sounded like that. In the Midlands somewhere, he said.”

“Pullford, good Lord, yes. One of these frightful holes. They make perambulators or something there, don’t they? A day’s run, I should think, in the car. But of course it’s this Chilthorpe place we want to get to. You wouldn’t like to look it up in the gazetteer while I just get this row finished, would you?”

“I shan’t get your sock finished, then. On your own foot be it! Let’s see, here’s Pullford all right. . . . It isn’t perambulators they make, it’s drain-pipes. There’s a grammar school there, and an asylum; and the parish church is a fine specimen of early Perp., extensively restored in 1842; they always are. Has been the seat of a Roman Catholic Bishopric since 1850. The Baptist Chapel”——

“I did mention, didn’t I, that it was Chilthorpe I wanted to know about?”

“All in good time. Let’s see, Chilthorpe—it isn’t a village really, it’s a ship town. It has 2,500 inhabitants. There’s a lot here about the glebe. It stands on the River Busk, and there is trout fishing.”

“Ah, that sounds better.”

“Meaning exactly?”

“Well, it sounds as if the fellow had done himself in by accident all right. He went there to fish—you don’t go to a strange village to commit suicide.”

“Unless you’ve got electric light in your house and want to commit suicide with gas.”

“That’s true. What was the name of the inn, by the way?”

“The Load of Mischief. Such a jolly dedication, I think.”

“Now let’s try the map.”

“I was coming to that. Here’s the Busk all right. I say, how funny, there’s a place on the Busk called ‘Mottram.’ ”

“Anywhere near Chilthorpe?”

“I haven’t found it yet. Oh, yes, here it is, about four miles away. Incidentally, it’s only twenty miles or so from Pullford. Well, what about it? Are we going by car?”

“Why not? The Rolls is in excellent condition. Two or three days ought to see us through; we can stay, with any luck, at the Load of Mischief, and the youthful Francis will be all the better for being left to his nurse for a day or two. You’ve been feeding him corn, and he is becoming obstreperous.”

“You don’t deserve to have a son. However, I think you’re right. I don’t want to trust you alone in a ship town of 2,500 inhabitants, some of them female. Miles, dear, this is going to be one of your big successes, isn’t it?”

“On the contrary, I shall lose no time in reporting to the directors that the deceased gentleman had an unfortunate accident with the gas, and they had better pay up like sportsmen. I shall further point out that it is a great waste of their money keeping a private spy at all.”

“Good, then I’ll divorce you! I’m going to bed now. Not beyond the end of that second row, mind; we shall have to make an early start to-morrow.”

Chapter III.
At the Load of Mischief

By next morning Bredon’s spirits had risen. He had received by the early post a confidential letter from the company describing Mr. Mottram’s curious offer, and suggesting (naturally) that the state of his health made suicide a plausible conjecture. The morning was fine, the car running well, the road they had selected in admirable condition. It was still before tea time when they turned off from its excellent surface onto indifferent by-roads, through which they had to thread their way with difficulty. The signposts, as is the wont of English signposts, now blazoned “Chilthorpe,” “Chilthorpe,” “Chilthorpe,” as if it were the lodestone of the neighbourhood, now passed it over in severe silence, preferring to call attention to the fact that you were within five furlongs of Little Stubley. They had fallen, besides, upon hill country, with unexpected turns and precipitous gradients; they followed with enforced windings the bleak valley of the Busk, which swirled beneath them over smooth boulders between desolate banks. It was just after they had refused the fifth invitation to Little Stubley that the County Council’s arrangements played them false; there was a clear issue between two rival roads, with no trace of a signpost to direct their preference. It was here that they saw, and hailed, an old gentleman who was making casts into a promising pool about twenty yards away.

“Chilthorpe?” said the old gentleman. “All the world seems to be coming to Chilthorpe. The County Council does not appear to have allowed for the possibility of its becoming such a centre of fashion. If you are fond of scenery, you should take the road to the left; it goes over the hill. If you like your tea weak, you had better take the valley road to the right. Five o’clock is tea time at the Load of Mischief, and there is no second brew.”

Something in the old gentleman’s tone seemed to invite confidences. “Thank you very much,” said Bredon. “I suppose the Load of Mischief is the only inn that one can stop at?”

“There was never much to be said for the Swan. But to-day the Load of Mischief has added to its attractions; it is not everywhere you can sleep with the corpse of a suicide in the next room. And the police are in the house, to satisfy the most morbid imagination.”

“The police? When did they come?”

“About luncheon time. They are understood to have a clue. I am only afraid, myself, that they will want to drag the river. The police always drag the river if they can think of nothing else to do.”

“You’re staying at the inn, I gather?”

“I am the surviving guest. When you have tasted the coffee in the morning you will understand the temptation to suicide; but so far I have resisted it. You are not relatives, I hope, of the deceased?”

“No; I’m from the Indescribable. We insured him, you know.”

“It must be a privilege to die under such auspices. But I am afraid I have gone beyond my book: when I say poor Mottram committed suicide I am giving you theory not fact.”

“The police theory?”

“Hardly. I left before they arrived. It is the landlady’s theory, and when you know her better you will know that it is as well not to disagree with her; it provokes discussion.”

“I am afraid she must be very much worried by all this.”

“She is in the seventh heaven of lamentation. You could knock her down, she tells me, with a feather. She insists that her custom is ruined for ever; actually, you are the second party to stay at the inn as the result of this affair, and the jug and bottle business at mid-day was something incredible. The Band of Hope was there en masse, swilling beer in the hope of picking up some gossip.”

“The other party, were they relations?”

“Oh no, it’s a policeman; a real policeman from London. The secretary, I suppose, must have lost his head, and insisted on making a cause célèbre of the thing. I forgot him, by the way, a little chap called Brinkman; he’s at the Load too. A thousand pardons, but I see a fish rising. It is so rare an event here that I must go and attend to it.” And, nodding pleasantly, the old gentleman made his way to the bank again.

Chilthorpe is a long, straggling village with the business part (such as it is) at the lower end. The church is here, and the Load of Mischief, and a few shops; here, too, the Busk flows under a wide stone bridge—a performance which at most times of the day attracts a fair crowd of local spectators. The houses are of grey stone, the roofs of blue slate. The rest of the village climbs up along the valley all in one street; the houses stand perched on the edge of a steep slope, too steep almost for the cultivation of gardens, though a few currant and gooseberry bushes retain a precarious foothold. The view has its charms; when mists hang over it in autumn, or when the smoke of the chimneys lingers idly on a still summer evening, it has a mysterious and strangely un-English aspect.

The hostess, presumably to be identified with “J. Davis, licensed to sell wines, spirits and tobacco,” met them on the threshold, voluble and apparently discouraging. Her idea seemed to be that she could not have any more guests coming and committing suicide in her house. Bredon, afraid that his patience or his gravity would break down, put Angela in charge of the conversation, and so delicate was her tact, so well-placed her sympathy, that within ten minutes their arrival was being hailed as a godsend, and Mrs. Davis, ordering the barmaid to bring tea as soon as it could be procured, ushered them into a private room, assuring them of accommodation upstairs when she could put things to rights. It had been one thing after another, she complained, all day, she didn’t really hardly know which way to turn, and her house always a respectable one. There was not much custom, it seemed, at Chilthorpe, lying so far away from the main road and that—you would have supposed that in a R.A.C. Listed Hotel suicides were a matter of daily occurrence, and the management knew how to deal with them. Whereas Mrs. Davis hadn’t anybody but the girl and the Boots, and him only with one arm. And those boys coming and looking in through the front window; “disgraceful,” she called it; and what were the police for if they couldn’t put a stop to it? And the reporters—six of them she’d turned away that very day—coming and prying into what didn’t concern them. They didn’t get a word out of her, that was one thing.

Though, mark you, if Mrs. Davis didn’t know poor Mr. Mottram, who did? Coming there regular year after year for the fishing, poor gentleman; such a quiet gentleman too, and never any goings-on. And how was she to know what would come of it? It wasn’t that the gas leaked; time and again she’d had those pipes seen to, and no complaints made. If there had have been anything wrong, Mr. Pulteney, he’d have let her hear about it, he was one for having everything just as he liked, and no mistake. . . . Yes, that would be him, he was a great one for the fishing. Such a queer gentleman too, and always taking you up short. Why, yesterday morning, when she went to tell him about what had happened in the night he was as cool as anything; all he said was, “In that case, Mrs. Davis, I will fish the Long Pool this morning,” like that he said. Whereas Mr. Brinkman, that was the secretary, he was in a great taking about it, didn’t hardly know what he said or did, Mr. Brinkman didn’t. And to think of all the gas that was wasted; on all night it was, and who was to pay for it was more than she knew. Summing up, Mrs. Davis was understood to observe that it was a world for sorrow, and man was cut down like a flower, as the sparks fly upward. However, there was them above as knew, and what would be would be.

Of all this diatribe Bredon was a somewhat languid auditor. He recognized the type too well to suppose that any end was to be gained by cross-examination. Angela cooed and sighed, and dabbed her eyes now and again at appropriate moments, and in so doing won golden opinions from the tyrannous conversationalist. It was a strong contrast when the maid came in with the tea things; she plumped them down in silence, tossing her head defiantly, as who should imply that somebody had recently found fault with her behind the scenes, but she was not going to take any notice of it. She was a strapping girl, of undeniable good looks, spoilt (improved, the Latins would have said) by a slight cast in one eye. In the absence of any very formidable competition it was easy to imagine her the belle of the village. So resolute did her taciturnity appear that even Angela, who could draw confidences from a stone, instinctively decided that it would be best to question her later on. Instead, she whiled away the interminable interval which separates the arrival of the milk jug from that of the teapot by idly turning over the leaves of the old-fashioned visitors’ book. The Misses Harrison, it appeared, had received “every attention” from their kind and considerate hostess. The Pullford Cycling Club had met for its annual outing, and the members pronounced themselves “full to bursting, and coming back next year.” An obviously newly married couple had found the neighbourhood “very quiet”; a subsequent annotator had added the words “I don’t think!!!” with the three marks of exclamation. The Wotherspoon family, a large one, testified to having had a “rattling good time” at this old-world hostelry. The Reverend Arthur and Mrs. Stump would carry away “many pleasant memories” of Chilthorpe and its neighbourhood.

Miles was wandering aimlessly about the room inspecting those art treasures which stamp, invariably and unmistakably, the best room of a small country inn. There was the piano, badly out of tune, with a promiscuous heap of dissenting hymn-books and forgotten dance tunes reposing on it. There were the two pictures which represent a lovers’ quarrel and a lovers’ reconciliation, the hero and heroine being portrayed in riding costume. There was a small bookshelf, full of Sunday-school prizes, interspersed with one or two advanced novels in cheap editions, clearly left behind by earlier visitors. There was a picture of Bournemouth in a frame of repulsive shells. There was a photograph of some local squire or other on horseback. There were several portraits which were intended to perpetuate the memory of the late Mr. Davis, a man of full bodily habit, whose clothes, especially his collar, seemed too tight for him. There were a couple of young gentlemen in khaki on the mantelpiece; there was a sailor, probably the one who had collected the strange assortment of picture post-cards in the album under the occasional table; there were three wedding groups, all apparently in the family—in a few words, a detective interested in such problems might have read there, a picture, the incredibly long and complicated annals of the poor.

To Bredon it was all a matter of intense irritation. When he visited the scene of some crime or some problem, he was fond of poking his way round the furniture, trying to pick up hints from the books and the knickknacks about the character of the people he was dealing with. At least, he would say, if you cannot pick up evidence about them you can always catch something of their atmosphere. Mottram had hardly played the game when he died in a country inn where he had not been able to impress his surroundings with any touch of his own quality; this inn parlour was like any other inn parlour, and the dead body upstairs would be a problem in isolation, torn away as it was from its proper context. The bedroom doubtless would have a text over the washing-stand, a large wardrobe stuffed with family clothes and mothballs, a cheap print of the “Soul’s Awakening”; it would just be an inn bedroom, there would be no Mottram about it.

“I say,” Angela interrupted suddenly, “Mottram seems to have visited this place pretty regularly, and always for the fishing season. There are some fine specimens of his signature; the last only written two days ago.”

“Eh? What’s that?” said Bredon. “Written his signature in already, had he? Any date to it?”

“Yes, here it is, ‘J. W. Mottram, June 13th to’—and then a blank. He didn’t know quite how long he would be staying, I suppose.”

“Let’s see. . . . Look here, that’s all wrong, you know. This isn’t a hotel register; it’s just a visitors’ book. And people who write in a visitors’ book don’t write till the day they leave.”

“Necessarily?”

“Invariably. Look here: look at Arthur Stump. You can see from his style and his handwriting what a meticulous fellow he is. Well, he came here on May twenty-first, and stayed till May twenty-six. The Wilkinsons came here a day later, on the twenty-second, and left on the twenty-fourth. But the Wilkinson entry comes first, and that’s because they left first, don’t you see? And here is Violet Harris doing the same; she puts her name before the Sandeman party. Look at Mottram’s entry last year. He didn’t leave a blank then, and fill in his date of departure afterward; you can always tell when a thing is filled in afterward because the spacing is never quite exact. No; Mottram did something quite foreign to his habit when he wrote June thirteenth to blank, and quite foreign to the habits of every one I know.”

“You get these little ideas sometimes. No; you can’t have tea till you come and sit at the table. I don’t want you sloshing it about all over the place. Now, what can have been the idea of writing that entry? Nobody wanted proof that he’d been there. Could it be a forgery, done from last year’s entry? That would mean that it isn’t Mottram upstairs at all, really.”

“We shall know that soon enough. . . . No; there’s only one idea that seems to me to make sense. He came to this place knowing that he was never going to leave it alive. And consequently he wanted to put an entry in the book which would make it look as if he had been paying just an ordinary visit, and was expecting to leave it alive. People will never see that they’re overreaching themselves when they do that kind of thing. It’s absurd to go on such slight indications, but so far as I can see the presumption is this: Mottram meant to commit suicide, and meant to make it look as if he hadn’t.”

“The date’s all right, I suppose?”

“Bound to be. No sense in falsifying it when it could always be verified from the bill. Landladies have a habit of knowing what night guests arrived.”

“Let’s see, then. He arrived on the thirteenth; and he was found dead in the morning, that’s yesterday morning, Tuesday. The thirteenth was Monday—he’d only been here one night.”

“Well, we’ll hope we can find all that part out from the secretary. I don’t much want another hour of Mrs. Davis. Meanwhile, let’s see if you can knock any more out of that teapot; I’m as thirsty as a fish.”

Chapter IV.
The Bedroom

They did not escape another dose of Mrs. Davis, who appeared soon afterward to announce that the big room upstairs was ready for them, and would they step up and mind their heads please, the stairs were that low. It was indeed a rambling sort of house, on three or four different levels, as country inns are wont to be; it did not seem possible to reach any one room from any other without going down and up again or up and down again. At the head of the stairs Mrs. Davis turned dramatically and pointed to a door marked “5”. “In there!” she said, the complicated emotion in her voice plainly indicating what was in there. To her obvious confusion the door opened as she spoke, and a little, dark man, whom they guessed then and knew afterward to be the secretary, came out into the passage. He was followed by a policeman—no ingenuity could have doubted the fact—in plain clothes. Bredon’s investigations were ordinarily made independently of, and for the most part unknown to, the official champions of justice. But on this occasion Fate had played into his hands. “By Gad!” he cried, “it’s Leyland!”

It was, and I will not weary the reader by detailing the exclamations of surprise, the questionings, the reminiscences, the explanations which followed. Leyland had been an officer in the same battalion with Bredon for more than two years of the war. It was at a time when the authorities had perceived that there were not enough well-dressed young men in England to go round, and a Police Inspector who had already made a name for efficiency easily obtained commissioned rank; with equal ease he returned to the position of an Inspector when demobilized. Their memories of old comradeship promised to be so exhaustive and, to the lay mind, so exhausting, that Brinkman had gone downstairs and Angela Bredon to their room long before it was over; nay, Mrs. Davis herself, outtalked for once, retired to her kitchen.

“Well, this is Al,” said Leyland at last. “Sure to be left down here for a few days until I can clear things up a bit. And if you’re working on the same lay, there’s no reason why we should quarrel. Though I don’t quite see what your people sent you down for to start with.”

“Well, the man was very heavily insured, you know; and, for one reason or another, the company is inclined to suspect suicide. Of course if it’s suicide it doesn’t pay up.”

“Well, you’d better lie low about it and stay on for a few days. Good for you and Mrs. Bredon to get a bit of a holiday. But of course suicide is right off the map.”

“People do commit suicide, don’t they, by leaving the gas on?”

“Yes, but they don’t get up and turn the gas off and then go back to bed to die. They don’t open the window, and leave it open”——

“The gas turned off? The window opened? You don’t mean”——

“I mean that if it was suicide it was a very rum kind of suicide, and if it was accident it was a very rum kind of accident. Mark you, I’m saying that to you; but don’t you go putting it about the place. Some of these people in the inn may know more about it than they ought to. Mum’s the word.”

“Yes, I can see that. Let’s see, who were there in the house? This secretary fellow, and the old gentleman I saw down by the river, I suppose, and Mrs. Davis and the barmaid and the Boots—that’s all I’ve heard of up to now. That’s right, keep ’em all under suspicion. But I wish you’d let me see the room; it seems to me there must be points of interest about it.”

“Best see it now, I think. They’re going to fix up the corpse properly to-night; so far they’ve left things more or less untouched. There’s just light enough left to have a look round.”

The inn must at some time have known better days, for this room was generously proportioned, and could clearly be used as a bed-sitting room. But the wall-paper had seen long service; the decorations were mean, the furniture shabby; it was not the sort of accommodation that would attract a rich man from Pullford but for the reputation the place had for fishing and, perhaps, the want of any rival establishment. Chilthorpe, in spite of its possibilities of water-power, had no electric light; but the inn, with one or two neighbouring houses, was lighted by acetylene gas from a plant which served the vicarage and the parish hall. These unpleasant fumes, still hanging in the air after two days, were responsible, it seemed, for the tragic loading of the bed which stood beside them.

To this last, Bredon paid little attention. He had no expert medical knowledge, and the cause of death was unquestioned; both the local man and a doctor whom the police had called in were positive that the symptoms were those of gas poisoning and that no other symptoms were present; that there were no marks of violence, no indications even of a struggle; the man had died, it seemed, in his sleep as if from an overdose of anæsthetic. Beside his bed stood a glass slightly encrusted with some whitish mixture; Bredon turned toward Leyland with an inquiring look as his eye met it.

“No good,” said Leyland. “We had it analysed, and it’s quite a mild sort of sleeping draught. He sometimes took them, it seems, because he slept badly, especially in a strange bed. But there’s no vice in the thing; it wouldn’t kill a man however heavily he doped himself with it, the doctor says.”

“Of course it explains why he slept so soundly and didn’t notice the gas leaking.”

“It does that; and, if it comes to that, it sets me wondering a little. I mean, supposing it was murder, it looks as if it was done by somebody who knew Mottram’s habits.”

“If it was murder, yes. But if it was suicide, it’s easy to understand the man doping himself, so that he should die off more painlessly. The only thing it doesn’t look like is accident, because it would be rather a coincidence that he should happen to be laid out by a sleeping draught just on the very night when the gas was left on. I’d like to have a look at this gas.”

There was a bracket on the wall, not far from the door, which originally had been the only light in the room. But for bed-sitting room purposes a special fitting had been added to this giving a second vent for the gas; and this new vent was connected by a long piece of rubber tubing with a standard lamp that stood on the writing-table near the window. There were thus three taps in all, and all of these close together on the bracket. One opened the jet on the bracket itself, one led to the rubber tubing and the standard lamp and the third was the oldest and closest to the wall, serving to cut off the supply of gas from both passages at once. This third main tap was turned off now; of the other two, the one on the bracket was closed, the one which led to the standard lamp stood open.

“Is this how the taps were when the body was first found?” asked Bredon.

“Exactly. Of course we’ve turned them on and off since to make certain that the jets were both in working order. They were, both of them. And we tried the taps for finger-prints—with powder, you know.”

“Any results?”

“Only on the main tap. We could just trace where it had been turned on, with the thumb pressing on the right-hand side. But there were no marks of fingers turning it off.”

“That’s damned queer.”

“Gloves?”

“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it should have been the murderer who turned it on and off. Why did he conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it was Mottram who turned the gas on. At the main, that is. The tap of the standard seems to have been on all the time, at least there were no marks on it. That’s queer too.”

“Yes, if he wanted it to be known that he committed suicide. But if he didn’t, you see, the whole business may have been bluff.”

“I see, you want it to be suicide masquerading as accident. I want it to be murder masquerading as suicide. Your difficulty, it seems to me, is explaining how the tap came to be turned off.”

“And yours?”

“I won’t conceal it. The door was locked, with the key on the inside.”

“How did anybody get in, then, to find the corpus?”

“Broke down the door. It was rotten, like everything else in this house, and the hinges pulled the screws out. You can see, there, where we’ve put fresh screws in since.”

“Door locked on the inside. And the window?” Bredon crossed to the other side of the room. “Barred, eh?” It was an old-fashioned lattice window with iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized approach. The window itself opened outward, its movement free until it reached an angle of forty-five degrees; at that point it passed over a spring catch which made it fast. It was so made fast now that Bredon examined it.

“This too?” he asked. “Was the window just like this?”

“Just like that. Wide open, so that it’s hard to see why the gas didn’t blow out of doors almost as soon as it escaped; and there was a high wind on Monday night, Pulteney tells me. And yet, with those bars, it seems impossible that any one should have come in through it.”

“I think you’re going to have difficulties over your murder theory.”

“So are you, Bredon, over your suicide theory. Look at that shirt over there; the studs carefully put in overnight; and it’s a clean shirt, mark you; the outside buttonholes haven’t been pierced. Do you mean to tell me that a man who is going to commit suicide is going to let himself in for all that tiresome process of putting studs in before he goes to bed?”

“And do you mean to tell me that a man goes out fishing in a boiled shirt?”

“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class theory. I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey, merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.”

“Well, grant the point; why shouldn’t a man who wants to commit suicide put studs in his shirt to make it look as if it wasn’t suicide? Remember, it was a matter of half a million to his heirs. Is that too heavy a price for the bother of it?”

“I see you’re convinced; it’s no good arguing with you. Otherwise, I’d have pointed out that he wound up his watch.”

“One does. To a man of methodical habit it’s an effort to leave a watch unwound. Was he a smoker?”

“Brinkman says not. And there are no signs of it anywhere.”

“The law ought to compel people to smoke. In bed, especially—we should have got some very nice indications of what he was really up to if he had smoked in bed. But I see he wasn’t a bedroom smoker in any case; here’s a solitary match which has only been used to light the gas—he hasn’t burnt a quarter of an inch of it.”

“That match worries me too. There’s a box on the mantelpiece, but those are ordinary safeties. This is a smaller kind altogether, and I can’t find any of them in his pockets.”

“The maid might have been in before him and lighted the gas.”

“They never do. At least, Mrs. Davis says they never do.”

“It was dark when he went to bed?”

“About ten o’clock, Brinkman says. You would be able to see your way then, but not much more. And he must have lit the gas, to put the studs in his shirt—besides, he’s left some writing, which was probably done late that night, though we can’t prove it.”

“Writing! Anything important?”

“Only a letter to some local rag at Pullford. Here it is, if you want to read it.” And Leyland handed Bredon a letter from the blotting-pad on the table. It ran:

To the Editor of the Pullford Examiner:

Dear Sir:

Your correspondent, “Brutus,” in complaining of the closing of the Mottram Recreation Grounds at the hour of seven p.m., describes these grounds as having been “presented to the town with money wrung from the pockets of the poor.” Now, Sir, I have nothing to do with the action of the Town Council in opening the Recreation Grounds or closing same. I write only as a private citizen who has done my best to make life amenable for the citizens of Pullford, to know why my name should be dragged into this controversy, and in the very injurious terms he has done. Such recreation grounds were presented by me twelve years ago to the townspeople of Pullford, not as “blood-money” at all, but because I wanted them, and especially the kiddies, to get a breath of God’s open air now and again. If “Brutus” will be kind enough to supply chapter and verse, showing where or how operatives in my pay have received less pay than what they ought to have done——

At this point the letter closed abruptly.

“He wasn’t very handy with his pen,” observed Bredon. “I suppose friend Brinkman would have had to get onto this in the morning and put it into English. Yes, I know what you’re going to say: if the man had foreseen his end he either wouldn’t have taken the trouble to start the letter or else he’d have taken the trouble to finish it. But I tell you, I don’t like this letter—I say, we must be getting down to dinner; attract suspicion, what, if we’re found nosing round up here too long? All right, Leyland, I won’t spoil your sport. What about having a fiver on it—suicide or murder?”

“I don’t mind if I do. What about telling one another how we get on?”

“Let’s be quite free about that. But each side shall keep notes of the case from day to day, putting down his suspicions and his reasons for them, and we’ll compare notes afterward. Ah, is that Mrs. Davis? All right, we’re just coming.”

Chapter V.
Supper, and Mr. Brinkman

Mrs. Davis’s cuisine, if it did not quite justify all the ironic comments of the old gentleman, lent some colour to them. With the adjectival trick of her class she always underestimated quantity, referring to a large tureen as “a drop of soup,” and overestimated quality, daily suggesting for her guests’ supper “a nice chop.” The chop always appeared; the nice chop (as the old gentleman pointed out) would have been a pleasant change. As surely as you had eggs and bacon for breakfast, so surely you had a chop for supper; “and some nice fruit to follow” heralded the entrance of a depressed blanc-mange (which Mrs. Davis called “shape,” after its principal attribute) and some cold green-gages. These must have come from Alcinous’s garden, for at no time of the year were they out of season. If Angela had stayed in the house for a fortnight, it is possible that she would have taken Mrs. Davis in hand and inspired her with larger ideas, As it was, she submitted, feeling that a suicide in the house was sufficiently unsettling for Mrs. Davis without further upheavals.

The coffee room at the Load of Mischief was not large enough to let the company distribute itself at different tables, each party conversing in low tones and eyeing its neighbours with suspicion. A single long table accommodated them all, an arrangement which called for a constant exercise of forced geniality. Bredon and Leyland were both in a mood of contemplation, puzzling out the secret of the room upstairs; Brinkman was plainly nervous, and eager to avoid discussing the tragedy; Angela knew, from experience in such situations, the value of silence. Only the old gentleman seemed quite at his ease, dragging in the subject of Mottram with complete sang-froid and in a tone of irony which seemed inseparable from his personality. Brinkman parried these topical references with considerable adroitness, showing himself as he did so a travelled man and a man of intelligence, though without much gift of humour.

Thus, in reply to a conventional question about his day’s sport, the old gentleman returned, “No, I cannot say that I caught any. I think, however, that I may claim without boasting to have frightened a few of them. It is an extraordinary thing to me that Mottram, who was one of your grotesquely rich men, should have come down for his fishing to an impossible place like this, where every rise deserves a paragraph in the local paper. If I were odiously rich, I would go to one of these places in Scotland, or Norway, even, though I confess that I loathe the Scandinavians. I have never met them, but the extravagant praise bestowed upon them by my childhood’s geography books makes them detestable to me.”

“I think,” said Brinkman, “that you would find some redeeming vices among the Swedes. But poor Mottram’s reason was a simple one; he belonged to these parts; Chilthorpe was his home town.”

“Indeed,” said the old gentleman, wincing slightly at the Americanism.

“Oo, yes,” said Angela, “we saw Mottram on the map. Was he a sort of local squire, then?”

“Nothing of that sort,” replied Brinkman. “His people took their name from the place, not the other way round. He started here with a big shop, which he turned over to some relations of his when he made good at Pullford. He quarrelled with them afterward, but he always had a sentimental feeling for the place. It’s astonishing what a number of group names there are still left in England. There is no clan system to explain it. Yet I suppose every tenth family in this place is called ‘Pillock.’ ”

“It suggests the accident of birth,” admitted the old gentleman, “rather than choice. And poor Mottram’s family, you say, came from the district?”

“They had been here, I believe, for generations. But this habit of naming the man from the place is curiously English. Most nations have the patronymic instinct; the Welsh, for example, or the Russians. But with us, apparently, if a stranger moved into a new district, he became John of Chilthorpe, and his descendants were Chilthorpes for ever.”

“A strange taste,” pursued the old gentleman, harping on the unwelcome subject, “to want to come and lay your bones among your ancestors. It causes so much fuss and even scandal. For myself, if I ever decided to put a term to my own existence, I should go to some abominable place—Margate, for example—and try to give it a bad name by being washed up just underneath the pier.”

“You would fail, sir,” objected Brinkman; “I mean, as far as giving it a bad name was concerned. You do not give things a good name or a bad name nowadays; you only give them an advertisement. I honestly believe that if a firm advertised its own cigarettes as beastly it would draw money from an inquisitive public.”

“Mrs. Davis has had an inquisitive public to-day. I assure you, when I went out this morning I was followed for a considerable distance by a crowd of small boys who probably thought that I intended to drag the river. By the way, if they do drag the river, it will be interesting to find out whether there were, after all, any fish in it. You will let me be present, sir?” turning to Leyland, who was plainly annoyed by the appeal. Angela had to strike in and ask who was the character in Happy Thoughts who was always asking his friends to come down and drag the pond. So the uneasy conversation zigzagged on, Mr. Pulteney always returning to the subject which occupied their thoughts, the rest heading him off. Bredon was deliberately silent. He meant to have an interview with Brinkman afterward, and he was determined that Brinkman should have no chance of sizing him up beforehand.

The opportunity was found without difficulty after supper; Brinkman succumbed at once to the offer of a cigar and a walk in the clear air of the summer evening. Bredon had suggested sitting on the bridge, but it was found that at that hour of the evening all the seating accommodation was already booked. Brinkman then proposed a visit to the Long Pool, but Bredon excused himself on the ground of distance. They climbed a little way up the hill road, and found one of those benches, seldom occupied, which seem to issue their invitation to travellers who are short of breath. Here they could rest in solitude, watching cloud after cloud as it turned to purple in the dying sunlight and the shadows gathering darker over the hill crests.

“I’m from the Indescribable, you know. Expect Mrs. Davis has told you. I’d better show you my cardcase so that you can see it’s correct. They send me to fool round, you know, when this sort of thing happens. Have to be careful, I suppose.” (“This Brinkman,” he had said to Angela, “must take me for a bit of a chump; if possible, worse than I am.”)

“I don’t quite see”—— began Brinkman.

“Oh, the old thing, suicide, you know. Mark you, they don’t absolutely bar it. I’ve known ’em pay up when a fellow was obviously potty. But their rules are against it. What I say is, If a man has the pluck to do himself in he ought to get away with the stakes, Well, all this must be a great nuisance to you, Mr. Brickman”——

“Brinkman.”

“Sorry, always was a fool about names. Well, what I mean is, it can’t be very pleasant for you to have so many people nosing round; but it’s got to be done somehow, and you seem to be the right man to come to. D’you think there was anything wrong in the upper story?”

“The man was as sane as you or I. I never knew a man with such a level head.”

“Well, that’s important. You don’t mind if I scribble a note or two? I’ve got such a wretched memory. Then, here’s another thing: was the old fellow worried about anything? His health, for example?”

There was an infinitesimal pause; just for that fraction of a second which is fatal, because it shews that a man is making up his mind what to say. Then Brinkman said: “Oh, there can be no doubt of that. I thought he’d been and told your people about it. He went to a doctor in London and was told that he’d only two more years to live.”

“Meaning, I suppose”——

“He never told me. He was always a peculiar man about his health; he got worried even if he had a boil on his neck. No, I don’t think he was a hypochondriac; he was a man who’d had no experience of ill-health, and the least thing scared him. When he told me about his interview with the specialist he seemed all broken up, and I hadn’t the heart to question him about it. Besides, it wasn’t my place. I expect you’ll find that he never told any one.”

“One could ask the medico, I suppose. But they’re devilish close, ain’t they, those fellows.”

“You’ve got to find out his name first. Mottram was very secret about it; if he wrote to make an appointment, the letter wasn’t sent through me. It’s a difficult job, circularizing Harley Street.”

“All the same the doctor in Pullford might know. He probably recommended somebody.”

“What doctor in Pullford? I don’t believe Mottram’s been to a doctor any time these last five years. I was always asking him to these last few months because he told me he was worried about his health, though he never told me what the symptoms were. It’s difficult to explain his secretiveness to anybody who didn’t know him. But, look here, if you’re inclined to think that his story about going to a specialist was all a lie, you’re on the wrong track.”

“You feel certain of that?”

“Absolutely certain. Look at his position. In two years’ time he was due to get a whacking annuity from your company if he lived. He was prepared to drop his claim if the company would pay back half his premiums. You’ve heard that, I expect? Well, where was the sense of that, unless he really thought he was going to die?”

“You can’t think of any other reason for his wanting to do himself in? Just bored with life, don’t you know, or what not?”

“Talk sense, Mr. Bredon. You know as well as I do that all the suicides one hears of come from money troubles, or disappointment in love, or sheer melancholia, There’s no question of money troubles; his lawyers will tell you that. He was not at the time of life when men fall badly in love, bachelors anyhow; and his name was never coupled with a woman’s. And as for melancholia, nobody who knew him could suspect him of it.”

“I see you’re quite convinced that it was suicide. No question of accident, you think, or of dirty work at the crossroads? These rich men have enemies, don’t they?”

“In story-books. But I doubt if any living soul would have laid hands on Mottram. And as for accident, how would you connect it with all this yarn about the specialist? And why was the door of his room locked when he died? You can ask the servants at Pullford; they’ll tell you that his room was never locked when he was at home; and the Boots here will tell you that he had orders to bring in shaving-water first thing.”

“Oh, his door was locked, was it? Fact is, I’ve heard very little about how the thing was discovered. I suppose you were one of the party when the body was found?”

“I was. I’m not likely to forget it. Not that I’ve any objection to suicide; mark you, I think it’s a fine thing, very often; and the Christian condemnation of it merely echoes a private quarrel between St. Augustine and some heretics of his day. But it breaks you up rather when you find a man you said ‘Good-night’ to the night before lying there all gassed. . . . However, you want to know the details. The Boots tried to get in with the shaving-water, and found the door locked; tried to look through the keyhole and couldn’t; came round to me and told me about it. I was afraid something must be wrong, and I didn’t quite like breaking down the door with only the Boots to help me. Then I looked out of the window, and saw the doctor here, a man called Ferrers, going down to take his morning bath. The Boots went and fetched him, and he agreed the only thing was to break down the door. Well, that was easier than we thought. There was a beastly smell of gas about, of course, even in the passage. The doctor went up to the gas, you know, and found it turned off. I don’t know how that happened; the tap’s very loose, anyhow, and I fancy he may have turned it off himself without knowing it. Then he went to the bed, and it didn’t take him a couple of minutes to find out that poor old Mottram was dead, and what he’d died of. The key was found on the inside of the door, turned so that the lock was fastened. Between you and me, I have a feeling that Leyland is wondering about that tap. But it’s obvious that nobody got into the room, and dead men don’t turn off taps. I can’t piece it together except as suicide myself. I’m afraid your company will be able to call me as a witness.”

“Well, of course it’s all jam to them. Not that they mind coughing up much; but it’s the principle of the thing, you see. They don’t like to encourage suicide. By the way, can you tell me who the heirs are? What I mean is, I suppose a man doesn’t insure his life and then take it unless he makes certain who comes in for the bullion?”

“The heirs, as I was saying at supper, are local people. Actually a nephew, I believe—I didn’t want to say more at the time, because I think between ourselves that Mr. Pulteney shows rather too much curiosity. But Mottram quarrelled with this young fellow for some reason—he owns the big shop here; and I’m pretty certain he won’t be mentioned in the will.”

“Then you don’t know who the lucky fellow is?”

“Charities, I suppose. Mottram never discussed it with me. But I imagine you could find out from the solicitors, because it’s bound to be common property before long in any case.”

Bredon consulted, or affected to consult, a list of entries in his pocketbook. “Well, that’s awfully kind of you. I think that’s all I wanted to ask. Must think me a beastly interfering sort of fellow. Oh, one other thing—is your room anywhere near the one Mr. Mottram had? Would you have heard any sounds in the night, I mean, if there’d been anything going on in his room above the ordinary?”

“My room’s exactly above, and my window must have been open. If there were any suspicion of murder, I should be quite prepared to give evidence that there was nothing in the nature of a violent struggle. You see, I sleep pretty light, and that night I didn’t get to sleep till after twelve. It was seven o’clock in the morning when we found him, and the doctor seemed to think he’d been dead some hours. I heard nothing at all from downstairs.”

“Well, I’m tremendously obliged to you. Perhaps we’d better be wandering back, eh? You’re unmarried, of course, so you don’t have people fussing about you when you sit out of an evening.” In this happy vein of rather foolish good fellowship Bredon conducted his fellow guest back to the inn; and it is to be presumed that Brinkman did not feel that he had spent the evening in the company of a Napoleonic brain.

Chapter VI.
An Ear at the Keyhole

On their return to their coffee room they found Mr. Pulteney in sole possession, He was solemnly filling in a cross-word puzzle in a daily newspaper about three weeks old. Leyland had gone off to the bar parlour, intent on picking up the gossip of the village. Bredon excused himself and went upstairs to find that Angela was not yet thinking of bed, she had only got tired of a cross-word puzzle. “Well,” she asked, “and what do you make of Mr. Brinkman?”

“I think he’s a bit deep. I think he knows just a little more about all this than he says. However, I let him talk, and did my best to make him think I was a fool.”

“That’s just what I’ve been doing with Mr. Pulteney. At least, I’ve been playing the ingénue. I thought I was going to get him to call me ‘My dear young lady’—I love that; he very nearly did once or twice.”

“Did you find him deep?”

“Not in that way. Miles, I forbid you to suspect Mr. Pulteney; he’s my favourite man. He told me that suicide generally followed, instead of preceding, the arrival of young ladies. I giggled.”

“I wish he’d drown himself. He’s one too many in this darned place. And it’s all confusing enough without him.”

“Want me to put in some Watson work?”

“If you aren’t wanting to go to bed.” Watson work meant that Angela tried to suggest new ideas to her husband under a mask of carefully assumed stupidity. “You see, I’m all for suicide. My instincts tell me that it’s suicide. I can smell it in the air.”

“I only smelt acetylene. Why suicide particularly?”

“Well, there’s the locked door. I’ve still got to see the Boots and verify Brinkman’s facts; but a door locked on the inside, with barred windows, makes nonsense of Leyland’s idea.”

“But a murderer might want to lock the door, so as to give himself time to escape.”

“Exactly; but he’d lock it on the outside. On the other hand, a locked door looks like suicide, because, unless Brinkman is lying, Mottram didn’t lock his door as a rule; and the Boots had orders to go into the room with shaving-water that morning.”

“Why the Boots? Why not the maid?”

“Angela, don’t be so painfully modern! Maid servants at country hotels don’t. They leave some tepid water on the mat, make a gentle rustling noise at the door, and tiptoe away. No, I’m sure he locked the door for fear Brinkman should come in in the middle—or Pulteney, of course, might have come to the wrong door by mistake. He wanted to be left undisturbed.”

“But not necessarily in order to commit suicide.”

“You mean he might have fallen asleep over something else he was doing? Writing a letter for example, to the Pullford Examiner? But in that case he wouldn’t have been in bed. You can’t gas yourself by accident except in your sleep. Then there’s another thing—the Bertillon mark on the gas-tap. Leyland is smart enough to know the difference between the mark you leave when you turn it on and the mark you leave when you turn it off. But he won’t follow out his own conclusions. If Mottram had gone to bed in the ordinary way, as he must have in the event of foul play or accident, we should have seen where he turned it off as well as where he turned it on. The point is, Mottram didn’t turn the light on at all. He went to bed in the half-darkness, took his sleeping draught, and turned on the gas.”

“But, angel pet, how could he write a long letter to the Pullford paper in the half-darkness? And how did he read his shocker in the half-darkness? Let’s be just to poor Mr. Leyland, though he is in the force.”

“I was coming on to that. Meanwhile, I say he didn’t light the gas. Because if you want to light the gas you have to do it in two places, and the match he used, the only match we found in the room, had hardly burned for a second.”

“Then why did he strike a match at all?”

“I’m coming to that too. Finally, there’s the question of the taps. A murderer would want to make certain of doing his work quickly, therefore he would make sure that the gas was pouring out of both jets, the one on the bracket on the wall and the one on the standard lamp by the window. The suicide, if he means to die in his sleep, isn’t in a hurry to go off. On the contrary, he wants to make sure that his sleeping draught takes effect before the gas fumes become objectionable. So he turns on only one of the two jets, and that is the one farthest away from him. Isn’t that all right?”

“You are ingenious, you know, Miles, occasionally. I’m always so afraid that one day you’ll find me out. Now let’s hear about all the things you were just coming to.”

“Well, you see, it isn’t a simple case of suicide. Why should it be? People who have taken out a Euthanasia policy don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry to know—more particularly, they don’t want Miles Bredon to know—that they have committed suicide. They have the habit, as I know from experience, of trying to put up a little problem in detection for me, the brutes!”

“You shouldn’t be angry with them, Miles. After all, if they didn’t the Indescribable might sack you, and then where would Francis’s new tam-o’-shanter come from?”

“Don’t interrupt, woman! This is a case of suicide with complications, and dashed ingenious ones. In the first place, we noticed that entry in the visitors’ book. That’s an attempt to make it look as if he expected a long stay here, before he went to bed. Actually, through not studying the habits of the Wilkinsons, he overshot himself there—a little too ingenious. We know that when he did that he was simply trying to lead us up the garden; but we were too clever for him.”

“Let me merely mention the fact that it was I who spotted that entry. But pray proceed.”

“Then he did two quite irreconcilable things: he took a sleeping draught and he asked to be called early. Now, a man who’s on a holiday, and is afraid he won’t sleep, doesn’t make arrangements to be called early in the morning. We know that he took the sleeping draught so as to die painlessly; and as for being called early in the morning it was probably so as to give the impression that his death was quite unpremeditated. He took several other precautions for the same reason.”

“Such as?”

“He wound up his watch. Leyland noticed that, but he didn’t notice that it was an eight-day watch. A methodical person winds up his eight-day watch on Sunday; once more, Mottram was a tiny bit too ingenious. Then he put the studs out ready in his shirt. Very few people when they’re on holiday take the trouble to do that. Mottram did because he wanted us to think that he meant to get up the next morning in the ordinary way.”

“And the next article?”

“The window. A murderer, not taking any risks, would shut the window, or see that it was shut, before he turned the gas on. A man going to bed in the ordinary way would either shut it completely or else open it to its full extent, where the hasp catches, so that in either case it shouldn’t bang during the night. Mottram left his window ajar, not enough open to let the gas escape much. But he knew that in the morning the door would have to be knocked in, and with that sudden rush of air the window would swing open. Which is exactly what happened.”

“I believe he wrote and told you about all this beforehand.”

“Silence, woman! He left a shocker by his bedside, to make us think that he went to bed at peace with all the world. In real life, if you take a dose you don’t read yourself to sleep as well. Besides, if he had been wanting to read in bed he would have brought the standard lamp over to his bedside so as to put it out last thing. Further, he had a letter ready written, or rather half-written, which he left on the blotting-pad. But he hadn’t written it there—he wrote it downstairs. I found the place where he had blotted it on the pad in the dining-room. Another deliberate effort to suggest that he had gone to sleep peacefully, leaving a job half-finished. And then, of course, there was the match.”

“You mean he only struck it to give the impression that he’d lit the gas, but didn’t really light it? I’m getting the hang of the thing, aren’t I? By the way, he couldn’t have lit another match and thrown it out of the window?”

“Very unlikely. Only smokers, and tidy ones at that, throw matches out of the window. He either had one match left in his pocket or borrowed one from Brinkman. But he didn’t use it; suicides like the dark. There’s one other tiny point—you see that?” He took up a large, cheap Bible which stood at the bedside of their own room. “There’s a society which provides those, and of course there’s one for each room. Mottram had taken his away from the bedside and put it in a drawer. It’s funny how superstitious we men are, when all’s said and done.”

“That’s a tiny bit grooly, isn’t it? Well, when are you going to dig the grave at the crossroads and borrow a stake from the local carpenter?”

“Well, you see, there’s just that trifling difficulty about the tap being turned off. Leyland is right in saying that dead men don’t do that sort of thing.”

“What’s Brinky’s explanation?”

“Mr. Brinkman, to whom you were only introduced three hours ago, thinks the doctor turned it off accidentally in the morning. That’s nonsense, of course. His idea was that the tap was very loose, but it wasn’t, really—Leyland had it loosened on purpose, so as to be able to turn it without obliterating the finger-marks. If it hadn’t been stiff, of course, there’d have been no marks left at all. So there’s a three-pipe problem for you, my dear Mrs. Hudson.”

Angela’s forehead wrinkled becomingly. “Two problems, my poor old Lestrade. How did the tap get turned off, and why does Brinky want us to think it got turned off accidental? I always like you to have plenty of theories, because it keeps your mind active; but with my well-known womanly intuition I should say it was a plain issue between the locked door, which means suicide, and the turned-off tap, which means murder. Did I hear you putting a fiver on it with Leyland?”

“You did. There’s dashed little you don’t hear.”

“Well, if you’ve got a fiver on it, of course it’s got to be suicide. That’s a good, wifely point of view, isn’t it? I wish it were the other way round; I believe I could account for that door if I were put to it. But I won’t; I wonder how Leyland’s getting on?”

“Well, he’s worse off than we are, because he’s got to get over the door trouble, and he’s got to find a motive for the murder and a criminal to convict of it. We score there; if it’s suicide, there can be no two theories about the criminal! And we know the motive—partly, anyhow. Mottram did it in order to make certain of that half-million for his legatees. And we shall soon know who they are. The only motive that worries me is Brinkman’s: Why’s he so keen on its being suicide? Perhaps the will would make that clear too. . . . I can’t work it out at present.” He began to stride up and down the room. “I’m perfectly certain about that door. It’s impossible that it should be a spring-lock, in an old-fashioned hotel like this.” He went up to the door of their room, and bent down to examine it. Then, with startling suddenness, he turned the handle and threw it open. “Angela, come here. . . . You see that picture in the passage? There’s no wind to make it swing like that, is there?”

“You mean you think somebody’s been”——

“Just as I bent down to the door, I could have sworn I heard footsteps going softly away. It must have been somebody actually at the keyhole.”

“Why didn’t you run out?”

“Well, it makes it so dashed awkward to find somebody listening and catch them at it. In some ways it’s much better to know that somebody has been listening and for them not to know whether you know or not. It’s confoundedly awkward, all the same.”

“Idiotic of us not to have remembered that we were in a country pub, and that servants in country pubs still do listen at keyholes.”

“Servants? Well, ye-es. But Pulteney’s room is only just round that corner.”

“Miles, I will not have you talking of poor old Edward like that.”

“Who told you his name was Edward?”

“It must be; you’ve only to look at him. Anyhow, he will always be Edward to me. But he simply couldn’t listen at a keyhole. He would regard it as a somewhat unconventional proceeding” (this with a fair imitation of Mr. Pulteney’s voice). “Besides, he can’t nearly have finished that cross-word yet. He’s very stupid without me to help him; he will always put down ‘EMU’ when there’s a bird of three letters.”

“Well, anyhow, Brinkman’s room is only up one flight of stairs. As you say, it may be the servants, or even Mrs. Davis herself; but I’d like to feel sure of that. I wonder how much of what we said was overheard.”

“Well, Miles dear, you ought to know. Don’t you remember how you listened at the kitchen door in old Solomon’s house, and thought you heard a man’s voice and found out afterward it was only the loud-speaker?”

“Good God, why does one marry? Look here, I’m just going to have a look around for old Leyland, and warn him that there’s dirty work at the crossroads.”

“Yes, he must be careful not to soliloquize too much.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s time you went to bed; I won’t be more than half an hour or so.”

“Not beyond closing time, in other words? Gosh, what a man! Well, walk quietly, and don’t wake Edward.”

Bredon found Leyland still in the bar parlour, listening patiently to the interminable theorizings of the oldest inhabitant. “That’s how it was, you see. Tried to turn off the gars, and didn’t turn it off proper, that’s what he did. He didn’t think to lay hands on himself, stands to reason he didn’t. What for should he, and him so rich and all? Mark you, I’ve known Mottram when he wasn’t no higher than that chair yonder, not so much he wasn’t; and I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen suicides put away too, I have; I recollect poor Johnny Pillock up at the toll-house; went mad he did, and hung himself off of a tree the same as if it might be from the ceiling yonder. Ah! There wasn’t no gars in them days. Good-night, Mr. Warren, and pleasant dreams to you; you mind them stairs in your front garden. Yes, powerful rich Mottram he was,” and so on without cessation or remorse. It was nearly closing time before Bredon managed to drag the policeman away and warn him that there were others (it appeared) besides themselves who were interested in the secret of the upstairs room.

Chapter VII.
From Leyland’s Note-Book

“Now that I have put that fiver on with Bredon, I begin to doubt my own conclusions. That is the extraordinary effect of having a ‘will to believe.’ As long as you have no prejudices in the case, no brief to maintain, you can form a theory and feel that it is a mathematical certainty. Directly you have a reason for wanting to believe the thing true that same theory begins to look as if it had all sorts of holes in it. Or rather, the whole theory seems fantastic—you have been basing too much on insufficient evidence. Yesterday I was as certain that the case was one of murder as I am certain of my own existence. To-day I am developing scruples. Let me get it all down on paper, anyhow; and I shall be able to shew my working to Bredon afterward, however the case turns out.

“There is one indication which is absolutely vital, absolutely essential: that is the turning off of the tap. That is the pinpoint of truth upon which any theory must rest. I don’t say it’s easy to explain the action; but it is an action, and the action demands an agent. The fact that the gas was tampered with would convince me of foul play, even if there were no other direct indications. There are such indications.

“In the first place, the window: If the window had stood all night as it was found in the morning, wide open and held by its clasp, there could have been no death. Pulteney tells me that there was a strong east wind blowing most of the night, and you can trust a fisherman to be accurate in these matters. The window, then, like the gas, had been deliberately arranged in an artificial position between Mottram’s death and the arrival of the rescue party. If the death had been accidental, the window would have been shut and remained shut all night. You do not leave a window half open, with nothing to fix it, on a windy night. If it had been a case of suicide, it is equally clear that the window would have remained shut all night. If you are proposing to gas yourself you do not take risks of the window blowing open and leaving you half-asphyxiated. There is only one explanation of the open window, as there is of the gas-tap: and that explanation involves the interference of a person or persons unknown.

“Another direct indication is the match found in the grate. Bredon’s suggestion that this match was used by the maid earlier in the evening is quite impossible; there was a box on the mantelpiece, which would be plainly visible in daylight, and it was not one of those matches that was used. It was a smaller match, of a painfully ordinary kind; Brinkman uses such matches, and Pulteney, and probably every smoker within miles around. Now, the match was not used to light the gas. It would have been necessary to light the gas in two places, and the match would have burned some little way down the stem, whereas this one was put out almost as soon as it was lit. It must have been used, I think, to light the gas in the passage outside, but of this I cannot be sure. It was thrown carelessly into the grate because, no doubt, the nocturnal visitor assumed as a matter of course that others like it would already have been thrown into the grate. As a matter of fact, Mottram must have thrown the match he lit the gas with out of the window: I have not found it.

“From various indications, it is fairly clear that Mottram did not foresee his end. Chief among these is the order which he gave that he was to be woken early in the morning. This might of course be bluff; but if so it was a very heartless kind of bluff, for it involved the disturbing of the whole household with the tragic news in the small hours, instead of leaving it to transpire after breakfast. And this leads us on to another point, which Bredon appears to have overlooked: A man who wants to be woken up early in the morning does not take a sleeping draught overnight. It follows that Mottram did not really take the sleeping draught. And that means that the glass containing it was deliberately put by his bed to act as a blind. The medical evidence is not positive as to whether he actually took the stuff or not. My conjecture is, then, that the man who came in during the night—twice during the night—put a glass with the remains of a sleeping draught by the bed in order to create the impression that Mottram had committed suicide.

“When I struck upon this idea, it threw a flood of light on various other details of the case. We have to deal with a murderer who is anxious to create the impression that the victim has died by his own hand. It was for this reason that he left a half-finished letter of Mottram’s on the table—a letter which Mottram had actually written downstairs; this would look like the regular suicide’s dodge of trying to cover up his tracks by leaving a half-finished document about. It would make a mind like Bredon’s suspect suicide at once. The same may be said of the ridiculous care with which the dead man was supposed to have wound up an eight-day watch before retiring; it was a piece of bluff which in itself would deceive nobody; but here it was double bluff, and I expect it has deceived Bredon. He will see everywhere the marks of a suicide covering up his tracks, which is exactly what the murderer meant him to see.

“The thing begins to take shape in my mind, then, as follows: When he feels confident that his victim is asleep the murderer tiptoes into the room, puts down the glass by the bedside and the letter on the table; winds up the watch (a very silent one); then goes over to the gas, wipes off with a rag the mark of Mottram’s hand turning it off, and then, with the same rag, gently turns it on once more. The window is already shut. He tiptoes through the doorway, and waits for an hour or two till the gas has done its deadly work. Then, for some reason, he returns; for what reason, I cannot at present determine. Once he had taken all these precautions, it must have looked to him as if a verdict of suicide was a foregone conclusion. But it is a trick of the murderer—due, some think, to the workings of a guilty conscience—to revisit the scene of his crime and spoil the whole effect of it. It is this reason, of course, that I must find out before I am certain of my case; leaving aside all further questions as to the murderer’s identity and his motives.

“In fact, there are two problems: a problem of why and a problem of how. Why did the murderer turn the gas off? And how did he leave the door locked behind him? I suspect that the answer to the first question is, as I have said, merely psychological; it was some momentary instinct of bravado, or remorse, or sheer lunacy. The answer to the second question must be something more complicated. In the abstract it is, I suppose, possible to turn a key in a lock from the wrong side by using a piece of wire or some instrument. But it is almost inconceivable that a man could do this without leaving scratches on the key; I have examined the key very carefully and there are no scratches. Bredon, I can see, hopes to arrive at some different conclusion about the evidence; somebody, he thinks, is lying. But Brinkman, and Ferrers the doctor, and the Boots, all rushed into the room at the same moment. Ferrers is an honest man, and I am sure he is telling the truth when he says he found the gas turned off; and he went to it at once, before either of the others had time to interfere. It was the Boots who found the key on the inside of the door, and the Boots will not do for the murderer; a man with one hand cannot have done conjuring tricks with a lock. Brinkman’s own evidence is perfectly straightforward and consistent with that of the others. He seems secretive, but that, I think, is the fellow’s manner. I cannot at present see any motive which could have made him want to do away with Mottram; the two seem to have been on intimate terms, and there is no evidence of a quarrel.

“I am inclined to exonerate Pulteney of all knowledge, even of all interest in the affair. He was a complete stranger to Mottram, so far as I can discover. But suspicion may equally well fall on people outside the house; for, although the doors of the inn were locked, there is a practicable window on the ground floor which is not always shut at night. Mottram was known in Chilthorpe, and had lived there when he was young; there is the chance, then, of a local vendetta. Pullford is only twenty miles or so distant; and in Pullford he may easily have had enemies; the letter from ‘Brutus’ shews that. But, since the salient fact about Mottram was his wealth, it seems obvious that the first question to be settled is that of his testamentary dispositions. I must telegraph to London to-morrow for full information about these, and pursue my local inquiries in the mean time. The only person on the spot who has any close tie of blood with the deceased is the young fellow who owns the big shop here. He is Mottram’s nephew; Mottram himself started it long ago, and afterward made it over to his sister and her husband, both of whom are now dead. Unfortunately for himself, the young man seems to have been something of a radical, and he made an injudicious speech at a time when Mottram was proposing to run himself as an independent Parliamentary candidate for the constituency. There was a quarrel; and Mrs. Davis thinks that the two never met again.

“These are only my first impressions. They may have to be revised drastically as the case proceeds. But of one thing I am confident—there has been foul play, and the effort to represent it as a case of suicide is necessarily doomed to failure.”

Chapter VIII.
The Bishop at Home

Angela and her husband breakfasted late next morning. Leyland came in as they were finishing, his manner full of excitement. “Mrs. Davis,” he explained, “has been talking to me.”

“Don’t be led on too much by that,” said Angela. “It has happened to others.”

“No, but I mean, Mrs. Davis has been saying something.”

“That is far more unusual,” assented Bredon. “Let’s hear all about it. Angela”——

“Mrs. Bredon,” said Angela firmly, “has been associated with me in many of my cases, and you may speak freely in her presence. Cough it up, Mr. Leyland; nothing is going to separate me from this piece of toast.”

“Oh, there’s nothing private about it particularly. But I thought perhaps you might help. You see, Mrs. Davis says that Mottram was expecting a visitor to turn up in the morning and go out fishing with him.”

“A mysterious stranger?” suggested Angela. “Carrying a blunt instrument?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact it was the Bishop of Pullford. Do you know Pullford at all?”

“Nothing is hidden from us, Mr. Leyland. They make drain-pipes there, not perambulators, as some have supposed. The parish church is a fine specimen of early Perp. It has been the seat of a Roman Catholic Bishopric—oh! I suppose that’s the man?”

“So Mrs. Davis explained. A very genial man. Not one of your standoffish ones. He was expected, it seems, by the first train, which gets in about ten. Mottram left word that he was to be called early, because he wanted to get at the fishing, and the Bishop, when he arrived, was to be asked to join Mr. Mottram on the river; he would be at the Long Pool. He’d been down here before, apparently, as Mottram’s guest. Now, it’s obvious that we had better find out what the Bishop has to say about all this. I’d go myself only for one thing: I don’t quite like leaving Chilthorpe while my suspicions” (he dropped his voice) “are so undefined; and for another thing, I’ve telegraphed up to London for details about the will and I want to be certain that the answer comes straight to my own hands. And the inquest is at four this afternoon; I can’t risk being late for that. I was wondering whether you and Mrs. Bredon would care to run over there? It would take you less than an hour in the car, and if you went as representing the Indescribable it would make it all rather less—well, official. Then I thought perhaps at the end of the day we might swap information.”

“What about it, Angy?”

“I don’t think I shall come and see the Bishop. It doesn’t sound quite proper, somehow. But I’ll drive you into Pullford, and sit at the hotel for a bit and have luncheon there, and you can pick me up.”

“All right. I say, though,” he added piteously, “shall I have to go and change my suit?”