The Viaduct Murder

by

Ronald A. Knox

Dedicated by command

to

Tony Wilson

“In the matter of information, above all regard with suspicion that which seems probable. Begin always by believing what seems incredible.”

Gaboriau, Monsieur Lecoq.

Contents

Chapter I.
The Paston Oatvile Dormy-house

Nothing is ever wasted. The death of the animal fertilizes the vegetable world: bees swarm in the disused pillar-box; sooner or later, somebody will find a use for the munition-factories. And the old country-seats of feudal England, that bask among their figured terraces, frowning at the ignoble tourist down secular avenues and thrusting back the high-road he travels by into respectful detours—these too, although the family have long since decided that it is too expensive to live there, and the agents smile at the idea of letting them like one humouring a child, have their place in the hero-tenanted England of to-day. The house itself may be condemned to the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park. Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. Ghosts of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play through them.

Paston Oatvile (distrust the author whose second paragraph does not come to ground in the particular) seemed to have been specially adapted by an inscrutable Providence for such a niche in the scheme of things. The huge Italianate building which the fifteenth Lord Oatvile raised as a monument to his greatness (he sold judiciously early out of the South Sea Company) took fire in the nineties of last century and burned for a whole night; the help given by the local fire brigade was energetic rather than considerate, and Achelous completed the havoc which Vulcan had begun. It stands even now, an indecent skeleton, papered rooms and carved mantelpieces confronting you shamefacedly, like the inside of a doll’s house whose curtain-wall has swung back on the hinge. What secrets that ball-room, those powder-closets must have witnessed in the days of an earlier gallantry, when the stuccoed façade still performed its discreet office! Poor rooms, they will never know any more secrets now. The garden, too, became involved in the contagion of decay: weeds have overgrown its paved walks, and neglected balustrades have crumbled; a few of the hardier flowers still spring there, but half-smothered in rank grass, shabby-genteel survivors of an ancien régime. For the family never attempted to rebuild; they prudently retired to the old Manor at the other end of the park, a little brick and timber paradise which had served the family for a century and a half as dower-house. In time, even this reduced splendour was judged too expensive, and the family sold.

No need, then, to mourn for Paston Oatvile; the sanctities of its manorial soil will be as interminable as golf. An enterprising club, seconded by an accommodating railway, has invested its rural solitude with an air of suburbanity; it is only an hour’s journey from London, and the distance could be covered in three-quarters of the time if the club were less exclusive. Bungalows, each fitted with its own garage, and cottages that contain billiard-rooms have sprung up in the neighbourhood; thirty or forty of these, all rough-cast and red tiles, conceal by a series of ingenious dissimilarities their indebtedness to the brain of a single architect. In the middle of these—the cathedral, the town hall, the market-place around which all their activities centre—stands the dower-house of the Oatviles, the dormy-house of to-day. The committee have built on to it largely in what is understood to be the same style, and indeed, the new part is undeniably brick and timber, though in wet weather the timber is apt to warp and fall off. It is not only a club-house, of course, it is also an expensive hotel—if we may call it an hotel, and not rather a monastic settlement; for the inhabitants of these pleasant rooms all live for one end—golf: twice daily they go round the course, with all the leisurely solemnity of Benedictines reciting their office, and every night they meet in corona to discuss the mysteries of their religion.

Which reminds me that I have forgotten to mention the village Church. There is still a village, that straggles mysteriously, like so many English villages, in the form of a hollow square. In the old days, the Church interposed itself between the village and the Great House, a kind of mercy-seat through which the squire could be appeased upon occasion. Though much older than the Park or the fortunes of the Oatvile family, it had acquired, from its enclosed position, the air of a parasitical institution, an undergrowth of Protestant feudalism. To-day, it somehow strikes the eye as a by-product of the golfing industry; people who ask the way to it (and they are rare) are directed to the fifteenth green; the service on Sunday is at half-past nine, so as to allow for the improbable chance of anybody wanting to fortify himself for the morning round by divine worship; the sexton will caddy for you except on the afternoon of a funeral. Conformably with this, the incumbent of the parish, who is to figure in this story, was a golfing parson presented by an absentee squire to a living which offered few material attractions. He had managed to let the parsonage, which was more than twenty minutes’ walk from the first tee, and lived in the dormy-house permanently; arguing, not without reason, that it was the centre of all the life there was in the parish. If you are disposed to take a look at him, you have only to open the smoking-room door; there he sits, this October afternoon of rain and fog, with three equally weatherbound companions, a foursome in potentia.

He was a man now approaching middle age, a bachelor and unambitious. You would say that he had a clerical face—is that clerical face a mark of predestination, or does it develop by natural mimicry?—but the enthusiasm which it registered was, it is to be feared, principally directed towards one object, and that object a game. He was mild-mannered, and had been known to keep his temper successfully in the most trying circumstances, even at the ninth; no oath was ever heard to escape his lips, though his invariable phrase, “What tam I doing?” was held by some to have a relish of perdition in it. The other three were acquaintances of his, as acquaintance goes at Paston Oatvile, where you know everybody’s handicap, nobody’s politics or religion. One of them, indeed, Alexander Gordon in nature and in name, could hardly be known otherwise than by his handicap, for in politics, in religion, in every subject that could form a digression from the normal conversation of the dormy-house, his point of view was entirely undistinguished and British to the last degree. He was not, like the others, a permanent inmate, but was on a holiday visit to his more interesting friend, Mordaunt Reeves.

Reeves was a permanent inmate, more by force of circumstances than from any natural indolence. He had left school at the beginning of the War, and had been incapacitated for active service by an extreme short-sightedness which gave his face a penetrating, not to say a peering, look. Work had been found for him easily enough in an outlying department of the War Office, and he was perhaps a little too fond of beginning his sentences with, “When I was in the Military Intelligence.” The picture which the words conjured up to the uninitiated was that of Mordaunt Reeves concealed behind the arras with a revolver at half-cock, overhearing the confidential discussions of German super-spies. Actually, his business had been to stroll into a very uncomfortable office at half-past nine in the morning, where a docket of newspaper cuttings, forwarded from another department, awaited him. Singling out some particularly fire-eating utterance of a Glasgow shop-steward, he would have it typed out and put in a jacket; then he would scrawl across it: “Can something be done about this? Please initial”—and so the document would be caught up in that vast maelstrom of unregarded jackets that circulated aimlessly through the sub-departments of Whitehall. An orphan, with a comfortable income, he had found himself unable to settle down to ordinary employment on the outbreak of peace. He had put several romantic advertisements into the daily papers, indicating his readiness to undertake any mysterious commissions that might call for the services of an “active, intelligent young man, with a turn for the adventurous”: but the supply of amateur adventurers was at the time well ahead of the demand, and there was no response. In despair, he had betaken himself to Paston Oatvile, and even his ill-wishers admitted that his game was improving.

That Mr. Carmichael, the fourth member of the party, had been a don you knew as soon as he opened his mouth. There was that precision in his utterances, that benignity in his eye, that spontaneity in his willingness to impart information, that no other profession breeds. A perpetual fountain of interesting small-talk, he unnerved his audience with a sense of intellectual repletion which was worse than boredom. Not that he talked the “shop” of the learned: his subject had been Greek archæology; his talk was of county families, of travels in the Near East, of the processes by which fountain-pens are manufactured, of county families again. He was over sixty—he, alone of the party, was married, and lived in one of the bungalows with a colourless wife, who seemed to have been withered by long exposure to the sirocco of his conversation: at the moment she was absent, and he was lodging in the dormy-house like the rest. It must be confessed that his fellow-members shunned him, but he was useful upon occasion as a last court of appeal on any matter of fact; it was he who could remember what year it was the bull got loose on the links, and what ball the Open Championship was won with three years back.

Marryatt (that was the clergyman, yes; I see you are a proper reader for a detective-story) rose once more and took a good look at the weather. The fog was lifting, but the rain still fell pitilessly. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we had some showers before nightfall.”

“It’s a curious thing,” said Carmichael, “that the early Basque poets always speak of the night not as falling but as rising. I suppose they had a right to look at it that way. Now, for myself———”

Marryatt, fortunately, knew him well enough to interrupt him. “It’s the sort of afternoon,” he said darkly, “on which one wants to murder somebody, just to relieve one’s feelings.”

“You would be wrong,” said Reeves. “Think of the footmarks you’d be bound to leave behind you in mud like this. You would be caught in no time.”

“Ah, you’ve been reading The Mystery of the Green Thumb. But tell me, how many murderers have really been discovered by their footprints? The bootmakers have conspired to make the human race believe that there are only about half a dozen different sizes of feet, and we all have to cram ourselves into horrible boots of one uniform pattern, imported by the gross from America. What does Holmes do next?”

“Well, you see,” put in Gordon, “the detectives in the book always have the luck. The murderer generally has a wooden leg, and that doesn’t take much tracing. The trouble in real life is the way murderers go about unamputated. And then there’s the left-handed men, how conveniently they come in! I tried detection once on an old pipe, and I could show you from the way the side of it was charred that the owner of it was right-handed. But there are so many right-handed people.”

“In most cases,” said Carmichael, “it’s only nerves that make people think they’re left-handed. A more extraordinary thing is the matter of parting the hair. Everybody is predestined from birth to part his hair on one particular side; but most of the people who ought to part their hair on the right do it on the left instead, because that’s easier when you’re right-handed.”

“I think you’re wrong in principle, Gordon,” said Reeves. “Everybody in the world has his little peculiarities, which would give him away to the eye of a trained detective. You, for example, are the most normal specimen, if I may say so, of the human race. Yet I know which of those whisky glasses on the mantelpiece is yours, though they’re empty.”

“Well, which?” asked Gordon, interested.

“The one in the middle,” said Reeves. “It’s pushed farther away from the edge: you, like the careful soul you are, instinctively took more precaution against its being brushed off. Aren’t I right?”

“To tell the truth, I can’t for the life of me remember. But there, you see, you’re talking of somebody you know. None of us are murderers, at least, I hope not. If you were trying to detect a murderer you’d never been introduced to, you wouldn’t know what to look out for.”

“Try it on,” suggested Marryatt. “You know, the Holmes stunt, deducing things from the bowler hat, and from Watson’s brother’s watch. Try that umbrella over there, whatever it’s doing here; what will you deduce from it?”

“I should deduce that it had been raining recently,” put in Gordon with great seriousness.

“As a matter of fact,” said Reeves, turning the umbrella this way and that, “an umbrella’s a very difficult thing to get any clues out of.”

“I’m glad of that,” said Carmichael, “because——”

“—only this one,” continued Reeves, ignoring him, “happens to be rather interesting. Anybody could see that it’s pretty new, yet the ferrule at the end of it is nearly worn through, which shows it’s been used a lot. Inference; that it’s used by somebody who doesn’t keep his umbrella for days like this, but uses it as a walking-stick. Therefore it belongs to old Brotherhood; he’s the only man I know in this club who always carries one.”

“You see,” said Carmichael, “that’s the sort of thing that happens in real life. As I was just going to say, I brought in that umbrella myself. I took it by mistake from a complete stranger in the Tube.”

Mordaunt Reeves laughed a little sourly. “Well,” he said, “the principle holds, anyhow. Everything tells a story, if you are careful not to theorize beyond your data.”

“I’m afraid,” said Gordon, “I must be one of Nature’s Watsons. I prefer to leave things where they lie, and let people tell me the story.”

“There you are wrong,” protested Reeves. “People can never tell you a story without putting their own colour upon it—that is the difficulty of getting evidence in real life. There, I grant you, the detective stories are unreal: they always represent witnesses as giving the facts with complete accuracy, and in language of the author’s own choosing. Somebody bursts into the room, and says, ‘The body of a well-dressed man in middle-life has been found four yards away from the north end of the shrubbery. There are marks of violence about the person of the deceased’—just like a reporter’s account of an inquest. But in real life he would say, ‘Good God! A man’s shot himself on the lawn’—leaping at once, you see, from observation to inference.”

“Journalism,” explained Carmichael, “makes havoc of all our detective stories. What is journalism? It is the effort to make all the facts of life correspond, whether they will or no, to about two hundred ready-made phrases. Head-lines are especially destructive—you will have noticed for yourselves how the modern head-line aspires to be a series of nouns, with no other parts of speech in attendance. I mean, the phrase, ‘She went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple pie’ becomes ‘Apple-pie fraud cabbage-leaf hunt,’ and ‘What; no soap! So he died’ becomes ‘Soap-shortage fatality sequel.’ Under this treatment, all the nuances of atmosphere and of motive disappear; we figure the truth by trying to make it fit into a formula.”

“I agree with you about inference,” said Marryatt, disregarding Carmichael’s last remark—one always did disregard Carmichael’s last remark. “But think how much of one’s knowledge of other people is really inference. What do we really know about one another down here? Fellow-passengers on the stream of life, that’s all we are. Take old Brotherhood, whom you were mentioning just now. We know that he has some sort of business in London, but we’ve no idea what. We know that he comes down here every night in the week from Monday onwards, and then from Saturday to Monday he disappears—how do you know what he does with himself during the week-ends? Or take young Davenant down at the Hatcheries; he turns up there every Saturday evening, and does his two rounds on the Sunday, and then on Monday he’s off again into the Ewigkeit. What do we really know about him?”

“I should have thought you knew all you wanted to about Brotherhood,” chuckled Reeves. “Hasn’t he taken to disproving the existence of God on Wednesday evenings on the village green?”

Marryatt flushed slightly. “After all,” he said, “what does that amount to? You might as well say I know Davenant’s a Roman Catholic. But all I know is that once in a way he goes over on a Sunday to Paston Bridge—the priest there knows something about him, I suppose, but he wouldn’t tell you.”

“I had a very extraordinary experience once,” said Carmichael, “in Albania. I had to translate the confession of a dying man into French for the sake of a priest who didn’t know the local language. The priest told me afterwards I was bound not to disclose to anybody what I’d heard.”

“He didn’t know you, anyhow, Carmichael,” suggested Reeves.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve never mentioned what he said to anybody, though it was sufficiently curious.”

“It’s impossible,” resumed Reeves, “not to make inferences; the mistake is to depend on them. In ordinary life, you have to take risks; you have to sit down in the barber’s chair, although you know it is just as easy for him to cut your throat as to shave you. But in detection one should take no chances, give no one the benefit of the doubt. Half of the undetected crimes in the world are due to our reluctance to suspect anybody.”

“But surely,” urged Marryatt, “you would allow character to go for something? I was a schoolmaster once, and while one knew the little beasts were capable of almost anything, one did clear some people of suspicion on mere character.”

“But there again,” argued Gordon, “you knew them very well.”

“Not really,” said Marryatt. “A perpetual war of mutual deception is kept up between schoolmasters and schoolboys. One trusted, I think, one’s unconscious impressions most.”

“If I were a detective,” persisted Reeves, “I would suspect my own father or mother as soon as anybody else. I would follow up every clue, blinding myself deliberately to the thought, where does this point to?”

“Then you would be unreasonable,” said Gordon. “In the old days, when the answers of sums used always to come out to an integral number—I believe it’s all different now—one was wiser than that. If you could see that the answer was going to involve two-thirds of a policeman, you argued at once that you were on the wrong track; you started again, and suspected your working.”

“But real life,” retorted Reeves, “doesn’t always work out to a simple answer. And if the policeman who’s in charge of a case argues as you’re arguing, he’s only himself to blame for it if he gets trisected by the criminal before he’s finished.”

“At least you must respect the principle of Cui bono?”

“It’s extraordinary,” began Carmichael, “how many people make the old mistake about the meaning of——”

“Cui bono is the worst offender of the lot,” said Mordaunt Reeves cheerfully. “Look at those two boys in America who murdered another boy just to find out what it felt like.”

“But that was pathological.”

“And how many crimes aren’t pathological, if it comes to that?”

“I was on Holy Island once for a month,” said Carmichael, “and would you believe it, there was a man there that was sick if he ever caught sight of a dog? Sick, positively.”

“What do you think it really feels like,” asked Marryatt, “to have murdered a man? I mean, murderers in general always seem to lose their heads when the thing is actually done, and give themselves away somehow. But one would have thought, if the thing is planned with proper deliberation, one’s feeling would be that things were working out according to plan, and the next thing was to get clear—above all things, to see plenty of people, and to behave quite naturally in company.”

“Why that?” asked Gordon.

“To establish your alibi. People are often careless about that.”

“By the way,” asked Carmichael, “did you bring a paper with you down from London? I’m interested to see the verdict in that Stanesby case. The young fellow is connected, I hear, with the Stanesbys of Martington.”

“Afraid I left London at three, and that’s too early for anything but betting tips. I say, you fellows, it’s stopped raining.”

Chapter II.
In the Rough

The view from the third tee was one which even a golfer might pause to admire. Let the Wordsworthian say what he will, railways ennoble our landscape; they give to our unassuming valleys a hint of motive and destination. More especially, a main line with four tracks pillowed on a sweep of tall embankment, that cannot cross a meandering country stream without a stilt-walk upon vast columns of enduring granite, captivates, if not the eye, at least the imagination. Such was the railway that stretched far into the distance, paralleling the course of your drive on the right: such was the great viaduct, some hundred feet ahead of you, that spanned laboriously, over four giant arches, the little river Gudgeon, most insignificant of streams. Shallow and narrow it ran, fringed by willow-herb and meadow-sweet, a paddling-place for cows and for unoccupied caddies. Here and there it threw out a patch of osiers—one in particular, that nestled at the foot of the railway-arches, was especially dreaded by golfers. In front, just visible above the railway where it receded northwards, were the thatched and tiled roofs of Paston Whitchurch, the next station down the line. To the right lay the old house, in its melancholy grandeur, behind it the village and church of Paston Oatvile. A superb avenue of elms connected the old house with the road between the two villages. The sun had newly come out, showing grass the greener and earth the browner for the late rain; elemental scents of turf and furrow greeted its restoration.

It may be doubted whether Mordaunt Reeves was particularly sensitive to such influences; if he was, it may have been this distraction which made him slice his drive. The ball dwindled down the gradual slope towards the river; cleared in a couple of bounds the tussocks of thick grass that dotted the little valley, and buried itself at last in the osier bed at the foot of the arches. Gordon and he—they were partners—set out at once to retrieve it, distrusting the efforts of an inefficient caddie, who was nearer the spot. It was only a closer view that showed how well-chosen a lair was this for a golf-ball hard pressed in the chase. The ground was all tussocks of rank grass, with hidden runlets that made islands of them; stubborn little shoots of willow arrested the searching club. They might have spent a full half-hour in vain scrutiny, had not Reeves’s eye lighted suddenly on something he never looked to find there, a darker patch among the surrounding green, close to the foot of the first arch. It showed the outlines of a man.

A dog sleeps on the alert, with the visible threat of waking at any moment. A man’s sleep is like the sleep of the horse; it imitates death. Reeves’s first idea was that this man who lay so still must be a tramp who had strayed off the London high-road, and was taking his siesta in the lee of the viaduct. Then a gleam of more than military intelligence assured him that on such an afternoon of downpour a man composing himself to sleep would have been under the arch, not by the side of it. “Hello!” he shouted uneasily to Gordon, “looks as if there was something wrong here.” Together they approached the prostrate body; it lay face downwards, and there was no movement of life. The thrill of distaste with which healthy nature shrinks from the sight of dissolution seized both of them. Gordon had served three years in the army, and had seen death; yet it was always death tricked out in the sacrificial garb of khaki; there was something different about death in a town-coat and striped grey trousers—it was a discord in the clear weather. The sun seemed to lose a shade of its brightness. Together they bent, and turned the body over, only to relinquish it again by a common instinct. Not only did the lolling head tell them that here the architecture of the human frame had been unknit; the face had disappeared, battered unrecognizably by some terrible and prolonged friction. They looked upwards, and knew at once that the sloping buttress of the arch, all of rough granite, must have intercepted a fatal fall, and added to its horror. Little about the head could be distinguished except closely-cut grey hair.

“Poor devil,” said Gordon huskily. “Down from the line, I suppose.”

“I say,” said Reeves, “we mustn’t let the caddie see this. Send him across to fetch the other two.” Marryatt and Carmichael were now close behind them, and came up almost immediately.

“Is there somebody dead?” asked Marryatt. “I say, how awful.” He kept on walking up and down as if thoroughly unnerved, repeating to himself, “How awful.” Carmichael, for once, was dumb. It was a new voice that summed up the situation, in the words, “ ’E’s got ’is properly, ain’t ’e?” and they turned round to find the caddie obviously enjoying a new sensation.

“Look here, we must move this somehow,” suggested Gordon. “What about the tool-house under that arch?”

“I’m not quite sure I could lift it,” said Reeves.

“That’s all right, sir,” said the caddie, “I’ll whistle across to Ginger; in the scouts ’e was; they teach ’em what to do with bodies and that. ’Ere, Ginger!” and as his fellow-caddie approached, “Bloke fell off of the railway-line and smashed hisself up something cruel.” Ginger whistled: “Dead, is ’e?” “Not half ’e ain’t; shamming, that’s what ’e is; go and ’ave a look at ’im.”

Ginger satisfied his curiosity on the point; and these two cold-blooded young persons proceeded to hoist the body on to an ingenious arrangement of sticks, and so carried it off, under Gordon’s directions, to the tool-house.

As the spell of the uncanny presence was removed, Reeves’s horrified embarrassment ebbed from him a little, and left him with the sense that he ought to take command of the proceedings.

“Where’s Beazly likely to be?” he asked—Beazly was the doctor.

“He went out in the rain,” said Marryatt; “I should say he’d be about the tenth or eleventh by now. Look here, I’ll nip across and get him,” and in a moment he was running across the fairway.

“Seemed glad to get away,” said Reeves; “well, it’s too late for visiting the sick, and too soon for burying the dead. Carmichael, you’re looking a bit on edge, too; would you mind going across to Paston Whitchurch station and ’phoning up the police? Binver, I suppose, is the nearest place to get a bobby from. You will? Good.” And as Carmichael too made off, “Look here, Gordon, what are we going to do about it? I’ve got the feeling that there’s something wrong here. What do you say to doing a bit of detective work on our own—or are you feeling rotten?”

“Oh, I’m feeling all right,” said Gordon, “only what about the police? Won’t they want to look through the man’s things first? It would be awkward if we put ourselves on the wrong side of the law. Funny thing, I’ve no idea whether there’s any law against searching a dead body; yet, if there isn’t, how do the police ever get their clues?”

“Oh, rot, the police can’t be here for a good half-hour, and Beazly won’t mind if he comes along. Let’s take a bit of a look round, anyhow. He fell off the arch, and smashed up his face against the buttress, that looks pretty clear. Now, did he fall off the line, or off a train?”

“If you ask me, I should say he fell off the parapet. I’ve noticed, sometimes, what a long way it really is from the door of one’s carriage to the parapet—a man falling from a carriage would never reach the edge.”

“Ah,” said Reeves, looking up, “but you’re imagining the train stationary. He would be hurled forward some way by the impetus, if he jumped off a moving train. And I should say he could have started falling down that bank to the right, just before the parapet begins. He’d roll forwards and sideways, if you see what I mean, till he got to where the stonework begins, up there, and then, plop.”

“I dare say you’re right. Anyhow, we’d better be quick and look at the body.”

As they went towards the tool-house, Reeves gave a sudden exclamation. “By Jove, his hat! And it’s—let’s see—I should say fifteen yards to the north of the body. Now why?”

“How do you mean?”

“There was no wind this afternoon. If his hat fell with him, it would lie with him. If it lies a dozen yards away, that looks as if—as if it was thrown after him. The considerate fellow-passenger hardly does that, does he?”

“You mean there’s been dirty work?”

“I mean it looks as if there’d been dirty work. Now for the tool-shed.”

To search a dead body is not an easy performance, unless you are in a hurry and have got to do it. Gordon did most of the work, and Reeves checked his results for him. The pockets contained a handkerchief, marked with the name “Masterman,” a cigarette-case, of a common pattern, containing a cigarette of a brand smoked by every second man in the neighbourhood, a half-empty box of matches, a pipe and an empty pouch, two florins, a letter and a business communication both addressed to S. Brotherhood, Esq., and a watch and chain. They also found, written on the back of the letter, a pencilled list of goods, as if to remind a man of his shopping needs.

“It’s a queer thing,” said Reeves, “that watch; because he’s got one on his wrist too. How many people, I wonder, carry a stomach-watch as well as a wrist-watch? It’s stopped, I suppose?”

“Blessed if it isn’t going! An hour fast, apparently, but going. Good advertisement for the makers, what?”

“But the wrist-watch?”

“That’s stopped.”

“When?”

“Six minutes to five.”

“What did I say about trains? The 4.50 from Paston Oatvile would be just passing here at six minutes to five. How’s that for deduction?”

“Looks all right, anyhow. And, by Gad, here’s a third single from town to Paston Whitchurch. Is to-day the sixteenth? Yes, then that’s quite on the square. Now, stand by while I see if his clothes are marked.”

But neither coat nor shirt, neither collar nor trousers bore any mark of ownership. The suit was from Messrs. Watkins in New Oxford Street, the shirt and collar were of a brand which it would be mere advertisement to mention. During all this time, Reeves was making a transcript of the three documents, not without a certain sense of intrusion upon a dead man’s confidence. As Gordon began to look into one of the boots, Reeves gave a whisper of warning, and a policeman (for they have motorcycles even in the police force) came into distant view. Panic seized the forces of Baker Street, and (forgetting that they had a perfect right to be in charge of the dead man’s body) they resumed, very shamefacedly, their search for the lost ball. It seemed incongruous somehow, to be worrying about a golf-ball—ought there to be a local rule about what happened if you found a corpse on the links? Certainly the game had been abandoned, and the caddies, to their great regret, sent back with the clubs.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the policeman, eyeing them narrowly. It was not that he suspected them or anybody of anything; he merely sized them up by force of habit to see whether they were the kind of people you touched your hat to or the kind of people you told to move on. The scrutiny being favourable, he allowed them to slash about in the undergrowth and watch, with ill-concealed curiosity, the official proceedings of Scotland Yard.

Scotland Yard did very much what they had done, only with a splendidly irrelevant thoroughness. Not only the destination, class, and date of the ticket had to be registered in the notebook, but its price—there even seemed to be a moment’s hesitation about the Company’s regulations on the back. Nor did the names of the cigarette-importer and the collar-maker go unrecorded; both watchmakers, the post-marks on the correspondence, the date on the florins—nothing escaped this man. Tired of waiting for the doctor and the inevitable ambulance, Gordon and Reeves abandoned the truant ball, and made their way thoughtfully to the dormy-house.

Wilson, the club gossip, met them at the entrance. “Heard about old Brotherhood?” he asked, and went on, before they had time to gasp: “He’s gone bankrupt; heard it to-day in the City.”

“Really?” said Reeves. “Come and have a drink.” But if he thought that he too had the telling of a story, he was mistaken; the door opened on a well-known voice:

“Yes, sliced his drive badly, did Reeves. A curious thing, that,—you ‘slice’ a ball in golf and you ‘cut’ a ball at cricket, and it’s the same action in either case, and yet it’s nothing whatever to do with the motion of cutting a cake. What was I saying? Oh yes. Right against the viaduct—did you ever see the big viaduct they’ve got at Welwyn? A finer one than ours, even—he found . . .”

Which made it evident that Mr. Carmichael was telling, in his own way, the story of the day’s adventure.

Chapter III.
Piecing it Together

If the general accommodation at the Paston Oatvile dormy-house cannot be described as cloistral, it must be admitted that the rooms in it where you can claim privacy are not much better than cells. Mordaunt Reeves, however, had done something to turn his apartments into a civilized dwelling-place; there were pictures which did not illustrate wings, and books devoted to other subjects than the multitudinous possibilities of error in playing golf. Gordon and he had each a comfortable arm-chair, each a corner of the fire-place to flick his cigarette-ash into, when they met that evening to talk over the possibilities of the situation as it had hitherto developed.

“Everybody,” said Reeves, “if you notice, has already started treating an assumption as if it were a fact. They all say it was Brotherhood we found lying there; they all say he committed suicide because he had just gone bankrupt. Now, as a matter of fact, we don’t know that it was Brotherhood at all. He has not been heard of, but there hasn’t been much time to hear of him; and nothing is more probable than that a man who has gone bankrupt should skip without leaving any traces.”

“Yes, but somebody’s dead; you’ve got to find a gap somewhere in the ranks of Society to match our corpus.”

“Still, that’s mere negative arguing. And there are several points that tell against its being Brotherhood. In the first place, that ticket. Brotherhood goes up and down every day; do you mean to tell me he hasn’t got a season? Second point, if it was Brotherhood there’s an odd coincidence—he died within ten minutes’ walk of his own bungalow; why there, any more than anywhere else on the line?”

“It’s a coincidence that Brotherhood should be killed so near his own bungalow. But the murder, whether we like it or not, has been committed just there, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be him as much as anybody else. However, go on.”

“Third point, the handkerchief. Why should Brotherhood be carrying somebody else’s handkerchief?”

“If it comes to that, why should somebody else be carrying Brotherhood’s correspondence?”

“Oh, Brotherhood is mixed up in it somehow right enough. We shall see. Next point to be considered, was it accident, suicide, or murder?”

“You can cut out accident, surely. That would be a coincidence—somebody carrying Brotherhood’s letter to fall out of the train by mere accident just where Brotherhood lives.”

“Very well, for the present we’ll ask Murder or Suicide? Now, I’ve several arguments against suicide. First, as I told you, the hat. He wasn’t alone when he fell out of the carriage, or who threw the hat after him?”

“There was no mark in the hat, was there?”

“Only the maker’s; that’s the irritating thing about this business. Hats, collars, shirts, people buy them at a moment’s notice and pay cash for them, so there’s no record in the books. And watches—of course you don’t have a watch sent, you take it with you, to save the danger of carriage by post. I’ll try all those tradesmen if the worst comes to the worst; probably the police have already; but I bet nothing comes of it.”

“What’s your next argument against suicide?”

“The ticket. That extra four bob would have got him a first instead of a third. Now, a man who means to commit suicide doesn’t want four bob, but he does want to be alone.”

“But the suicide might have been an impulse at the last moment.”

“I don’t believe it. The place where he fell was just the one place about here where he was bound to kill himself, not merely maim himself. That looks like preparation.”

“All right. Any more?”

“No, but I think that’s enough to go on with. The probability I’m going to bet on is murder.”

“You’re up against coincidence again, though, there. Why should somebody happen to murder Brotherhood on the very day he went bankrupt?”

“You will go on assuming that it is Brotherhood. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Brotherhood has saved a nest-egg for himself, and is skipping to avoid his creditors—what better way of throwing people off the scent than by a pretended suicide?”

“That is, by pitching a total stranger down the viaduct.”

“I didn’t say a total stranger. Suppose it were somebody in pursuit of him, or somebody he suspected of pursuing him?”

“But he couldn’t be sure that the face would get mangled like that. It was only one chance in a thousand that the body should scrape down all along that buttress on its face.”

“He may simply have wanted to kill the man, without hoping that the corpse would be mistaken for him. After all, we’ve got to explain the ticket; a man who takes a single ticket down here is almost certainly not a resident here—the half-fare is so cheap. A spy, tracking him, or somebody he takes to be a spy tracking him. He stuns the man while he’s not looking, and then pitches him out. He’s desperate, remember.”

“Well, it seems to hang together that way.”

“But I’m not at all sure that’s the right way. I’m not at all sure that Brotherhood isn’t the murderee, and the murderer somebody unknown—such a murder might be connected with a bankruptcy, a ruined creditor, for example.”

“And how are you going to look for the murderer if that’s so?”

“You’re going to help me. We’re going to have a little detective holiday, and leave the game alone for a bit. Of course we must find out all about Brotherhood first—it’s extraordinary how little people seem to know about him. I asked four men in the Club whether he wore a wrist-watch or not: two couldn’t remember, one said he did, and one swore he didn’t. But there must be some servant who looks after his bungalow for him; so I’m going there to-morrow to pump them.”

“Introducing yourself as Mr. S. Holmes of Baker Street, or how?”

“No, I shall be the Daily Mail reporter—unless I run into the real article on the mat. Now, would you mind following up the Masterman clue?”

“What Masterman clue?”

“There are only two Mastermans in the Telephone Directory. A man dressed like that would be sure to have a telephone.”

“But I thought you’d made up your mind it wasn’t a local person at all, because of the ticket?”

“I know, it’s probably a wild-goose chase, but it’s the best we can do on that tack. Both are at Binver; one’s a solicitor and one a doctor. I’ll give you the addresses.”

“And I’m to go to them and ask them what kind of handkerchiefs they use? Or should I meet them accidentally and say, Excuse me, sir, could you lend me a handkerchief, I’ve left mine at home?”

“Well, you can find out whether they’re dead, anyhow.”

“And if they’re still alive?”

“Well, scout around somehow. Do anything that occurs to you. This business ought to be rather fun, if we exercise a little ingenuity.”

“Meanwhile, let’s have another look at those documents. We don’t seem to have made much out of them, and that’s a fact.”

They sat for several minutes in silence, re-reading the copy Reeves had made of the anonymous letter. It was undated; the address was in printed capitals; it had been post-marked in London at starting, and at Paston Whitchurch on arrival. The content of the message was a mere series of numbers, as follows:

“Unless they’re sums of money,” said Gordon, “I can’t make head or tail of it all. And if they were sums of money, it would be a queer way to arrange the spacing.”

“Wait one moment,” said Reeves, “I believe I’ve got the idea of it.” He put his hand to his forehead. “Yes, that does it. It’s a cipher, of course, otherwise there’d be something to explain what it’s all about. It will be a book cipher; the first figure gives you the page, the second the line, and the third the word in the line. How’s that?”

“That’s devilish ingenious,” admitted Gordon, “but you can hardly prove it.”

“I can practically prove it,” said Reeves. “Look here, the man wanted to spell out a message in ten words. There was a book, arranged upon somehow beforehand. The first few words were ordinary words, that you could find anywhere on any page: and naturally, to save himself and the other man trouble in counting, he took them from the top of the page, so you get lines 7, 4, 2, 6, and 4 of pages 8, 18, 21, 25 and 31. The sixth word he wanted was an obscure sort of word, perhaps even a proper name. He had to go right on to page 74, and even then he could only find his word on the 13th line of it. Then the next two words came easy, comparatively, but the ninth word was a brute, he couldn’t find it till page 113, and on the 17th line at that. And by that time he’d got nearly to the end of the book—a book, then, of only 120 pages or so probably; a paper edition, I suspect—so he had to go back to the beginning again, which he hadn’t meant to do.”

“Bravo!” said Gordon. “Have another injection of cocaine.”

“The curse of the thing is,” said Mordaunt Reeves, “that with a book cipher you can’t possibly guess the message unless you’ve got the book. I think we shall have to establish the identity before we get any further on that tack. Let’s have a look at the letter now.”

The letter was a curt official communication from the Railway Company, only the details being filled in in ink, the rest a mere printed form:

London Midland and Scottish Railway.

10. 10. 19XY.

Dear Sir,

I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of 9th instant and have given orders for a berth to be reserved in the sleeping car attached to the 7.30 train on Thursday (corrected to Wednesday) the 18th (corrected to 17th) of October to Glasgow. I note that you will join the train at Crewe.

S. Brotherhood Esq.

“These corrections are rummy,” said Reeves. “I wonder if perhaps Brotherhood’s letter corrected itself in a postscript? You see, assuming that Brotherhood was skipping, it’s all right for him to go to Glasgow—rather ingenious, in fact—but why shouldn’t he travel to-night, the sixteenth, instead of to-morrow night?”

“He couldn’t get away early enough. Or could he? Got a Bradshaw?” Gordon proceeded to look up the trains with an irritating thoroughness, while Reeves danced with impatience—there is no impatience like that engendered by watching another man look up Bradshaw. “That’s all right,” said Gordon at last. “In order to catch the Scottish train at Crewe he’d have had to take that earlier train, the one Marryatt came up by, and get out at Binver. He took the 3.47, I suppose, because he couldn’t get away sooner. Perhaps, if we’re right in thinking he wanted to skip, he was going to go across country by car to-morrow and confuse his tracks a bit.”

“The thing doesn’t look like skipping quite as much as it did. For Heaven’s sake let’s beware of prejudicing the case. Anyhow, he meant to make for Glasgow on the Wednesday night—that’s to-morrow night, isn’t it? Now let’s have one more look at that silly list that was on the back of the anonymous letter.”

The list had been copied almost in facsimile, for it was very short. It ran

at least, that was the general impression it gave, but the writing was so spidery as to make it very doubtful which precise letter each of the strokes represented.

“I suppose it must be a shopping-list of some sort. If one could make that last word ‘ties’ it would read better,” said Gordon.

“But even so you wouldn’t have hems in a shopping-list.”

“It might be ham.”

“But one doesn’t buy ham at the hosier’s.”

“And why did he write at the edge of the paper like that?”

“If it comes to that, who was the he? It’s not Brotherhood’s writing—I’ve verified that from the club book. I fancy this goes pretty deep. Look here, here’s a bit of detection for you. That sheet has been torn off at the left-hand side, hasn’t it? Now, was it torn off before or after the writing was put on it?”

“Before, surely. Otherwise the initial letters wouldn’t be so complete; he’d have been certain to tear across them.”

“I’m not so sure. Who writes so close to the edge of a piece of paper as that? Remember, I copied the thing down exactly, and each word was close up against the tear.”

“I don’t quite see what difference it makes, anyhow,” objected Gordon.

“More than you think, perhaps. I shouldn’t wonder if this bit of paper turned up trumps, when we’ve thought it over a bit more. But there’s one thing that fairly beats me.”

“What’s that?”

“Those two watches. It doesn’t seem to me to make any sense. Well, we’d better get to bed and sleep over it.”

Chapter IV.
Endless Clues

There is no surer soporific than sleeping over a problem, no more fallacious method of attempting a solution. After murmuring to himself three times, “Let’s see; there was something about watches,” Mordaunt Reeves fell into a sleep which anybody but a psychoanalyst would have called dreamless. He woke in the morning with a strong resolution to do the ninth in four, which melted through lazy stages of half-awareness into the feeling that there was something else to do first. The adventures of yesterday, the duties of to-day, returned to him. He was already nearly dressed when he remembered that he had decided on the rôle of a Daily Mail reporter for his morning’s investigation, and grimly set himself to remove again the bulging knickerbockers and the hypocritical garters of his kind. Dressy they might be, but they were not Fleet Street. His memories of the reporter’s wardrobe were, it must be confessed, somewhat disordered, and he was greeted in the breakfast-room with flippant inquiries whether he had gone into mourning for the Unknown Passenger.

He found Gordon already at table with Marryatt—Marryatt in the high clerical collar which was irreverently known to his intimates as “New every morning.”

“Well, how are you feeling?” he asked. “You looked rather chippy yesterday. However, I suppose it brings a job of work your way.”

“Confound it,” said Marryatt, “that’s the trouble. The jury at the inquest are bound to bring in suicide; and then I can’t bury the man in the churchyard, and all the villagers will say I refused out of spite, because the poor old chap used to give these atheist lectures on the village green.”

“Rot!” said Gordon; “if they do find suicide, they’ll certainly say he was of unsound mind.”

“Yes,” echoed Reeves, “if they do bring in suicide.”

“But surely you can’t doubt it,” urged Marryatt energetically. “The man’s just gone bankrupt, and it was an ugly case, from what I hear; several innocent people who’d been fools enough to believe in him left in the cart. At the same time, the smash came very suddenly, and that makes it unlikely that anybody could want to murder the man so soon. Oh, you’ll find it’s suicide right enough.”

“Well,” said Reeves a little stiffly, “we’re going to do our best to find out between us. I’ve the greatest respect for the police as a body, but I don’t think they’re very good at following up clues. When I was in the Military Intelligence one was constantly putting material at the disposal of the police which they were too supine or too stupid to use.”

“Well, good luck to your sleuthing; but mark my words, you’ll find it was suicide. I’m going to play a round now to try and take my mind off the thing, but I don’t believe I shall be able to drive at the third after—after what we saw yesterday.”

Left to themselves, Mordaunt Reeves and Gordon arranged that they would meet again at luncheon and report on the morning’s investigations.

“And look here,” said Reeves, “it’s a belief of mine that one wants to cover the ground oneself if one’s to visualize the setting of a crime properly. So I vote that after lunch we stroll down to the railway and take a look at the top of that viaduct, and then take the 4.50 from Paston Oatvile to Paston Whitchurch so as to picture the whole thing exactly as it happened.” And so they parted, Reeves walking to Brotherhood’s bungalow, close to Paston Whitchurch station, while Gordon mounted a motor-bicycle and set out for Binver, a sleepy market town of some importance as a railway junction, about twelve miles off.

Mr. Brotherhood’s housekeeper, Mrs. Bramston, had something of the airs of a landlady. She spoke painfully correct English, far more terrible than the native cockney which it half revealed and half concealed. She commenced where others began, closed doors where others shut them, and recollected instead of remembering. Her final consonants were all sibilant, and seemed to form part of the succeeding word. She was a merciless and largely irrelevant talker, and the opportunity of a stranger’s visit delighted her, self-importance easily triumphing over any regret she may have felt for the apparently deceased. She had no doubt that Reeves was a reporter, but it is probable that she would have opened out quite as readily if he had announced himself as the piano-tuner.

“From the Daily Mail? To be sure, sir. I’m always fond of looking at a paper myself, and as for the Daily Telegraph, I simply revel in it. Called about poor Mr. Brotherood, I suppose; well, there isn’t much doubt what’s come to him, poor soul. . . . Not Mr. Brotherood at all? Don’t you delude yourself, young man; that’s him, sure enough. The police, they wanted me to go and look at the corpse; but I didn’t hardly like to; battered they say it was, something shocking. His clothes? Of course they were his clothes; you don’t think he’d want to be putting somebody else’s clothes on to commit suicide in, do you? That’s the same as he always wore; plain black coat and grey striped trousers, just the same as it was in the papers. . . . What tailor he went to? No, I couldn’t rightly say that; though I’ve had the folding of them many a time; very neat man he was, Mr. Brotherood, in his personal habits. Oh, I dare say there’s others as have clothes like his, only you see the way I look at it is, if the clothes were on Mr. Brotherood, then it’s Mr. Brotherood’s clothes they’ll be, that’s the way I look at it.

“A single gentleman? Yes, a single gentleman he was, single and singular, if you’ll pardon the jeu de mots. Very singular in his habits. Every Saturday off he’d go, just the same as it was in the papers, and where he went to is more than I can say, though I’ve been looking after him the best part of a year now. Every afternoon from Monday to Saturday he’d come home by the five o’clock train, and then he’d go for his round of golf, and I’d have a bit of cold supper ready for him when he came home. . . .

“No, I can’t say that I’ve noticed anything strange about him of late. You see, he was always a very reserved gentleman, Mr. Brotherood was; very silent, if you understand what I mean, in conversation.” (Reeves felt that this was probably a characteristic common to most of Mrs. Bramston’s interlocutors.) “Time and again he’s said to me would I mind leaving him now because he’d got a great deal to do. I recollect about a fortnight ago he did seem rather put out about not being able to find his overcoat when he went out to deliver his address to the villagers; but I found it for him. . . . No, it isn’t much more than two months ago since he commenced exhorting. I never could see what he did it for; not that I go to church myself, but you see the way I look at it is if people want to go to church why not let them go to church? Live and let live, that’s what I say. I shouldn’t call myself a religious woman, mind you, but I like to see everyone go their own way, and not leave tracts. Miss Frobisher she used to come here with tracts, but I said to her, ‘Miss Frobisher,’ I said, ‘you’re wasting your time leaving tracts here,’ and so she was. . . .

“Mad, sir? Oh dear no, not what you could call mad. Of course we all have our own little ways, haven’t we, sir? and as I was telling you, Mr. Brotherood was singular, but not demented; I should never have stopped with Mr. Brotherood had he been demented. . . . Suicide? Of course it was suicide; and there’s some say Mr. Marryatt won’t bury him in holy ground, don’t they? Well, you take my word for it, Mr. Brotherood wouldn’t mind about a little thing like that. Some people seem not to mind what happens to them once they’re gone: Mr. Bramston was like that, while he was spared to me; never seemed to mind if we were to take a spade and bury him in the back garden, that’s the way he looked at it. But of course, I wouldn’t have that, and he was buried properly in holy ground, Mr. Bramston was, and the minister recited the service over him beautiful. . . . What, must you be going already, sir? Well, I’m sure it’s been a great privilege to me to afford you information. Good morning, sir.”

This is an abridged account of the interview, but it contains all the material disclosures made by Mrs. Bramston. Reeves found himself pitying the coroner who would have to face and to stem that seething torrent of conversation. He came back to the dormy-house to find that it was already nearly time for luncheon, and Gordon was waiting for him, returned from his errand at Binver.

“Well, have you found out anything?” asked Gordon.

“Yes,” said Reeves, “I’ve found a wife for Carmichael. I’ve found a woman who could give him a stroke a hole at back-chat.” And he launched into a description of Mrs. Bramston’s voluminous utterance and her insignificant contribution to the solving of the mystery.

“Had you any better luck?” he went on.

“Acting upon instructions received, I proceeded first of all to the offices of Messrs. Masterman, Formby and Jarrold, Solicitors. It’s one of those jolly old Queen Anne houses facing on the High Street; with a flagged walk up to the front door and blue gates that need painting—or rather, it would spoil them if you did. It’s been turned into an office, and the inside is all musty and smells of decaying paper. The mustiest thing there was the old clerk I went up to and asked if I could see Mr. Masterman. And he said, ‘I’m afraid not, sir; Mr. Masterman is dead.’ ”

“Dead? How? When?”

“My very words. And the old gentleman said, ‘About twenty-three years ago. Would you like to see Mr. Jarrold?’ Well, that did me in rather, because even if old Masterman did bequeath his handkerchiefs to Jarrold, it isn’t likely that old Jarrold would be still using them, though they would about match his furniture if he did.”

“How did you get out of it? You were rather badly placed.”

“I was, and I cursed you pretty freely. However, I extricated myself without any heart-to-heart talks with Mr. Jarrold. I just said, ‘I’m so sorry, I must have made some mistake; this is Doctor Masterman’s house, isn’t it?’ That killed two birds with one stone, I eluded suspicion and also got directed to the other Masterman house, a big house, the man said, at the other end of the water-meadow behind the church.”

“So you went on there?”

“No; it occurred to me that a man who lived in a house that size probably kept a man-servant or two, and it was up to me to personate one of them. So I went round to the Binver Steam Laundry, where I’m not known personally; and said I was from Dr. Masterman’s, and could they be kind enough to inform Dr. Masterman as to what action they intended taking about the twelve last handkerchiefs that hadn’t come back from the wash. That sounds risky, but it wasn’t really, because all men think they’ve more clothes at the wash than they really have. The lady in charge was quite patient and kind, obviously well accustomed to that sort of complaint; she said all Dr. Masterman’s handkerchiefs had been sent back. Fortunately I bluffed, and insisted upon a search; after a bit she came and put into my hands a pile of handkerchiefs, which I took away with me. There were five of them, four Mastermans and a Brotherhood.”

“Oh! That rather looks as if——”

“Exactly; it looks as if we ought to have recognized the touch of the Binver Steam Laundry. In fact, it would be very suspicious in these parts if you found a dead man wearing one of his own handkerchiefs. Well, there seemed no point in keeping any of them, so I dropped the lot into Masterman’s letter-box. Unusual, perhaps, but I felt it would save explanations.”

“Well, I’m sure we’re all very grateful to Mr. Gordon for his splendid work among the Mastermen. But it begins to look as if we were left very much where we were. We still don’t even know who the corpse was.”

There was a knock at the door, and the unwelcome figure of Carmichael obtruded itself. “Sorry if I interrupt,” he said, “but I thought you might be interested in this poor fellow we found yesterday. My caddie this morning was giving me the latest news. It’s extraordinary how these caddies pick up everything except one’s ball.”

“What news?” gasped Reeves.

“Well, it seems that Brotherhood was insured at one of these American offices. And they’re a great deal more particular than our own Insurance people. And after all they’re right to be: one’s so apt to think of the Insurance Company as a set of sharks, when in reality they are only protecting the interests of their policy-holders.”

“Granted,” said Gordon. “Proceed.”

“Well, as soon as they heard of the bankruptcy and then saw the news in the morning paper about the Links Tragedy, the Insurance Company pricked up its ears. Apparently, in the actuarial world, bankruptcy followed by alleged suicide is a matter of daily occurrence, and they have their suspicions. That is why I say they are quite within their rights when they insist upon registering a man by his birth-marks before they insure him. It’s an extraordinary thing about birth-marks; we really know nothing about them——”

“Nor want to,” said Reeves, “for the time being. What happened?”

“I was just telling you. A man came down from the Insurance Company to identify the corpse; and my caddie heard about it from——”

“Heard what?”

“Why, that it is Brotherhood. They recognized him from the birth-mark.”

“So that’s that,” said Mordaunt Reeves, a little bitterly. “Trust the Insurance people not to make a mistake. I confess that, after the handkerchief clue failed, I had begun to think it must be Brotherhood who was dead. I suppose your caddie didn’t happen to mention whether it was suicide or murder?”

“He assumed it to be suicide; but not, I think, with any inside information. Of course, it was a foggy day. Did you know that, as a matter of statistics, there are more suicides in November than in any other month?”

“I will make a note of the fact,” said Mordaunt Reeves.

Chapter V.
On the Railway

The afternoon seemed a compensation for yesterday; October sun glowed temperately over the links, with the air of a kind old gentleman producing sweetmeats unexpectedly. The rich but transient gold of summer evenings seemed hoarded in this summer of St. Luke; the air not over-charged with uneasy heat, but lucid and caressing; the leaves no longer in the shock of their summer finery, but dignified in the decayed gentility of their autumn gold. A perfect day for golf, such was the immediate impression of the Paston Oatvile mind; but to Reeves a second thought occurred—it was a bad day for following up the clues of a murder.

“It’s all very well,” he said to Gordon, “the visibility’s good, and we shan’t be interrupted by rain; but we can’t get the atmosphere; the spiritual atmosphere, I mean, of yesterday’s fog and drizzle. We shall see where a man fell down the embankment, but we shan’t feel the impulse of that weeping depression which made him throw himself over, or made somebody else save him the trouble. We haven’t got the mise-en-scène of a tragedy.”

They climbed together, Gordon and he; a zigzag path up the side of the huge embankment, close to the club-house. When it reached the level of the line, it kept close to the trim hedge that marked the boundary of the railway’s property, and so lasted till the very beginning of the viaduct, where it dived under the first arch at a precarious angle and came up the other side. It was a matter of common knowledge to the good-humoured porters of Paston Oatvile that the shortest way from that station to the neighbouring station of Paston Whitchurch was along the railway line itself—the shortest, because it avoided the steep dip into the valley. Accordingly, it was the habit of residents, if pressed for time, to follow this path up to the viaduct, then to break over the sacred hedge and walk over the railway bridge till a similar path was available on the Paston Whitchurch side. This local habit Reeves and Gordon now naturally followed, for it gave them access to the very spot from which, twenty-four hours before, a human body had been hurled down on to the granite buttress and the osier-bed that lay beneath.

“You see what I mean,” said Reeves. “We can’t, of course, tell what pace the train was going; they vary so much in the fog. But if, for the sake of argument, you take the force with which I throw this stone as the impetus of the train, you see how the curve of the slope edges it out to the right—there—and it falls either exactly on the buttress or next door to it. That’s how I picture yesterday afternoon—the man takes a good jump—or gets a good shove, and falls just over the edge; there’s nothing for him to catch on to; and between his own motion and the slope of the embankment he gets pitched on to the buttress. I don’t know any place along this line where the drop comes so close. The coroner will call attention to that—it’s extraordinary the way coroners do draw attention to all the least important aspects of the case. I read a newspaper account once of a man who was killed by a motor-car just as he came out of church, and I’m blessed if the coroner didn’t draw attention to the dangerous habit of standing about outside churches.”

“I must say, the place seems made for something like this happening. Do you see how the line curves away from this side?”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“What I mean is, it would be very hard for anybody to see Brotherhood fall out of the train unless he was travelling in the same coach: the other coaches would be out of view (unless a man were leaning right out of the window), simply owing to the curve—and of course a fog would make the job all the easier.”

“By Jove, that’s true. I must say, I stick to my murder theory, whatever the jury make of it. In fact, I hope they will bring in suicide, because then the police won’t be fussing round all over the place. It looks to me like a murder, and a carefully planned one.”

“I’d just like to try your stone-throwing trick once more. Look here, I’ll lean over the edge and watch it fall. Only we shall want a bigger stone, if you can find one.”

“All right. Only they’re all little ones between the sleepers. I’ll look along the bank a bit. I say, what the devil’s this?”

It was a sight that on most days would have given little surprise to the pair; a common enough sight, indeed, down in the valley, but up here a portent. Caught in a clump of grass, some twenty yards down the line in the Paston Oatvile direction, was a golf-ball.

“That beats everything,” declared Gordon. “I don’t believe Carmichael on his worst day could slice a ball a hundred feet up in the air and lodge it in that clump.”

Reeves was examining the trove intently. “I don’t like this a bit,” he said. “This is practically a new ball, not the sort of ball a man would throw away casually as he walked down the line. A Buffalo, I see—dash it all, there are at least a dozen of us use those. Who’ll tell us whether Brotherhood used them?”

“I say, steady on! You’ve got this murder business on the brain. How can you tell the ball hasn’t been there weeks and weeks?”

“Very simply, because it happens to have snapped the stalk of this flower—scabious, don’t they call ’em—which isn’t dead yet. The ball was right on top when I found it. I’m hanged if that ball fell there more than twenty-four hours ago.”

“I say, we ought to be getting back to Oatvile if we’re going to catch that train,” said Gordon. “It’s half-past four already, and we’ve got to take to the path before we come in sight of the signal-box. The signalman doesn’t really mind, but he has to pretend to.”

Gordon was one of those men who are always too early for trains. As a matter of fact they got into Paston Oatvile station before the 3.47 from London was signalled. The 4.50 from Paston Oatvile had to connect with it for the sake of passengers going on to Paston Whitchurch or Binver, and was still wandering up and down in a siding, flirting with a couple of milk-vans and apparently enjoying itself. The platform was nearly bare of passengers, a fact on which Reeves artfully commented to an apathetic porter.

“Not many travelling? You wait till the London train comes in, sir; there’s always plenty in that as change here.”

“I suppose it’s the first train people can get away from business by, eh?”

“That’s right, sir; there ain’t nothing else stops here after the midday train. Of course there’s the fast train to Binver, but that passes through ’ere. You travellin’, sir?”

“Just to Binver. Hullo, there’s the booking-office opening at last. D’you mind getting two firsts for Binver, Gordon? Very sad thing that, about Mr. Brotherhood,” he went on to the porter.

“That’s right, sir; very melancholy thing, sir.”

“I suppose you didn’t see him get on to the train?”

“There’s such a lot of ’em, sir, you don’t notice ’em, not the ones that travel every day. And Mr. Brotherhood, ’e was a man as ’adn’t many words for anybody. Though of course there’s some as is different; d’you know Mr. Davenant, sir, up at the Hatcheries? He’s a nice gentleman, that is, has a word for everybody. I seed ’im getting off of the London train, and ’e asked me after my bit of garden—nothing stuck-up about ’im. Excuse me, sir.” And, as the London train swung into view, he proceeded up and down the platform making a noise something like Paston Oatvile, for the information of anybody who could not read notice-boards.

The London train was undeniably full to overflowing, and even when the Paston Oatvile residents had diminished the number, there were enough waiting for the Paston Whitchurch and Binver train to leave no compartment unoccupied. Even in their first-class carriage, it was only by luck that Reeves and Gordon managed to travel by themselves.

“I say,” began Gordon, “why Binver? We don’t want to go beyond Whitchurch, do we?”

“Oh, it’s just an idea of mine. We can get a train back in time for dinner. Don’t you come unless you’d like to. Steady, here we are.” And they swept slowly past the scene they had just been viewing from the solid ground. Reeves opened the door a little as they passed, and threw out a fresh stone; he had the satisfaction of seeing it disappear exactly according to schedule. “Now,” he said, “we’ve got a quiet quarter of an hour to spend before we get to Binver. And I’d be dashed glad if you’d tell me two things. First, how can anyone have planned and executed a murder in a third-class carriage on a train so infernally crowded as this one is?”

“They may have been travelling first. No one examines the tickets.”

“But even so, look at the risks. We should have had that fat old party in here if I hadn’t puffed smoke in her face, and there are very few firsts on the train. Our man took big chances, that’s certain.”

“And the other point?”

“Why did Davenant come up by this train yesterday? Of course you don’t know the place as I do, but Davenant’s a scratch player, and a bit of a local celebrity. Every child in the place knows that Davenant only comes down here for week-ends, and it’s impossible to get a game with him except on Sunday. Why does he suddenly turn up on a Tuesday afternoon?”

“Well, I suppose he’s a right to, hasn’t he? I thought you were saying he has a cottage here?”

“Yes, but one’s bound to notice every deviation from the normal when one’s trying to trace causes. Look here, here’s Whitchurch. Do you mind getting out and calling at the Hatcheries—that house, there—and finding out, on some excuse, when Davenant got there, and whether he’s there now? You’re not known, you see—but be devilish tactful; we don’t want to put anybody on his guard.”

“Right-o! more lying necessary, I foresee. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. So long, Sherlock, meet you at dinner.”

Reeves’ errand, it appeared when he got to Binver, was once more with the railway staff. He went up to a porter, and said, “Excuse me, does this train get cleared out here? I mean, if one leaves a thing in the carriage, would it be taken out here?”

“That’s right, sir. Left Luggage Office is what you want.”

“Well, this was only a paper book. I thought perhaps you people cleared them away for yourselves, like the newspapers.”

“Ah, if it was a paper book, we ’aven’t any orders to take that on to the Left Luggage Office. We takes those away, mostly; what might the name of your book be, sir?”

This was not at all the question Reeves wanted, but he was prepared for it. “It was The Sorrows of Satan, by Miss Corelli,” he said. “I left it in one of these carriages yesterday.”

“Well, sir, I cleaned out this train yesterday myself, and there wasn’t no book of that name. A passenger must have taken it out with them most likely. There wasn’t not but one book I found in those carriages, and you’re welcome to that, sir; I’ve got it on the seat there.” And he produced a repellent-looking volume entitled Formation of Character, by J. B. S. Watson.

Reeves was trembling with excitement, but it was clearly not a case for showing any enthusiasm. “Well, give you sixpence for it,” he said, and the porter willingly agreed—he had guessed rightly that the sixpence would prove to be half-a-crown.

It was an agony dawdling back by a slow train to Paston Oatvile, knowing that he could not get at the cipher-document till he regained his rooms. Merely as a book, the thing seemed to lack thrill. It seemed hours before he reached the dormy-house, and yet Gordon had not returned. So much the better; he would be able to work out the fateful message by himself. It could not be a coincidence, though it had been a long shot to start with. A book of that length (so he had argued to himself) would have been the sort of book one reads in the train. Brotherhood would arrange to have a cipher-message sent him out of the book which he had constantly in his hands at the moment. He would be travelling with it; it was not on the body or by the side of the line; the murderer might not have thought of removing it. This, then, must be the book itself.

As he worked out the message he became less confident. It appeared to run as follows: “Hold and it thoughts with the I highest and to.”

“Damn,” said Mordaunt Reeves.

Chapter VI.
The Movements of Mr. Davenant

Gordon felt that he was in a favourable position for inquiring into the whereabouts of the mysterious Mr. Davenant. He was himself little known at Paston Whitchurch, since he had only been a month at the dormy-house, and his walks abroad had not carried him much farther than the links. On the other hand, he knew a good deal, from club gossip, about the habits of Mr. Davenant. The Hatcheries was not one of the red-tile-and-rough-cast monuments with which a modern architect had improved the scenery in the neighbourhood of the links; it was a substantial cottage where, in grander days, the home fisherman of Paston Oatvile Park used to live, and look after all that was liquid in the property. It was now occupied permanently by a morose gentleman called Sullivan, who acted as green-keeper to the Club and did a little market gardening at home, and occasionally (that is, during the week-ends) by the scratch player and mystery man, Mr. Davenant. Legally speaking, the cottage was Davenant’s property and Sullivan was the caretaker; actually, it would be a clearer account of the position to say that Sullivan rented the cottage from Davenant, and Davenant, every week-end, became the lodger of his own tenant.

It was, then, as a member of the Club that Gordon must approach his interview with Mr. Sullivan, and he was not left much choice of disguises or of excuses. He decided that on the whole bluff would pay best. Accordingly, as soon as Sullivan opened the door in answer to his ring, he began:

“Did Mr. Davenant leave any message for me this morning before he left?”

“What’s that?”

“I met Mr. Davenant yesterday on the platform, and tried to make some arrangements with him about having a game next Sunday, and he said he’d leave a note for me at the dormy-house, but it isn’t there, so I thought perhaps he’d left it here instead. Did he say anything to you about it?”

“He did not. It’s not since Monday morning I’ve set eyes on Mr. Davenant.”

“But he was here yesterday, surely?”

“He was not.”

“That’s very extraordinary, because I met him on the train, and I certainly understood him to say he was coming here. Could he possibly have been staying at the Club-house?”

“He might.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have troubled you. Good evening.”

Gordon had the definite impression that when Sullivan came to the door he was not simply answering the bell; there had been no time for him to hear the bell—he had been going out anyhow. There was a thick hedge at the end of the path which led to the Hatcheries; and behind this hedge, I am sorry to say, Gordon concealed himself. He was the most placid and regular of men, but the ardour of the hunt was beginning to lay hold of him. It was only about a minute and a half later that Sullivan came out, carrying a small bag, and took the path that led to the links. For a moment the watcher thought of shadowing him, then decided that it would be silly. If he went over the golf-links, the open ground would make it quite impossible to follow without being noticed; besides, the links would be full of people whom he knew, and he might easily get delayed. He resolved suddenly on a still more heroic course. Nobody else lived in the cottage—why not try to force an entrance while Sullivan was out, and satisfy himself on circumstantial evidence whether Davenant had really been in the cottage or not?

Breaking into a house is, as a rule, a difficult proceeding, even if it is your own and you know the ropes. To break into a stranger’s house, when you are not even certain whether a dog is kept; is a still more heroic affair. The door had locked itself; the ground-floor windows were shut and snibbed. The only chance seemed to be crawling up the roof of a little outhouse and through an open window on the first floor; a bathroom window, to judge by the ample sponge which was drying on the sill. With rubber on his shoes, Gordon made a fairly good job of the outhouse roof. The window was a more serious proposition; it was very narrow, and encumbered on the inside by an array of little bottles. It is easy to put your head and shoulders through such a window, but that means a nose-dive on to the floor. To put your legs through first is to court the possibility of promiscuous breakage. Very carefully Gordon removed all fragile objects out of range, and then with extreme discomfort squeezed his legs through the opening. Even so, there was a moment at which he felt his back must necessarily break, when he was just half-way through. Landing at last without misfortune, he set out quickly on a tour of the silent cottage.

It was only Davenant’s part of the house that interested him—the bathroom, a bedroom, a small dining-room, and a study. They all bore the marks of recent inhabitation; but was this anything to go by? Davenant, in any case, would not be expected back for a week, and Sullivan did not strike Gordon as the kind of man who would be inclined to tidy up on Monday when Friday would do just as well. The bed, indeed, was made; but the grate in the study had not been cleared of cigarette-ends; the dining-room table was bare, but Monday’s paper was still lying across a chair, as if thrown down at random. On the whole the evidence pointed to Monday as the day of departure; Monday, not Tuesday, appeared on a tear-off calendar; a letter which had arrived on Monday evening was still waiting in the hall; and there were no clothes left in the dirty-clothes basket. Such an authority did Gordon feel himself to be on the subject of washing since his experiences at Binver that he investigated equally the clothes which had come back from the wash, and the list which accompanied them. And here was a curious phenomenon; the list referred to two collars, two handkerchiefs, and a pair of socks as having been disgorged by the Binver authorities, but none of these seemed to have crystallized in real life. “Binver is doing itself proud,” murmured Gordon to himself, “or could it possibly be——” He went and looked in the bathroom again: there was the sponge all right, which seemed to insist that Davenant kept a duplicate series of what the shops call toilet accessories; but where was the razor, the shaving soap, the tooth-brush? It seemed, after all, as if Davenant had packed for the week instead of leaving a duplicate week-end set behind him. But—Good Lord! This was still more curious. There was no soap in the bathroom, although there were traces of its presence still discernible. Surely no one packing after a week-end in the country took the soap with him? The face-towel, too, was gone; yet the face-towel was distinctly mentioned in the washing-list. No, decidedly there was something wrong about Davenant’s exit.

Another curious thing—there was every evidence that Davenant was a smoker, and yet not a cigarette, not a pipe, not an ounce of tobacco left in the study. Of course, it was possible that Sullivan was very tidy and put them away somewhere, or that he was dishonest, and treated them as perquisites. But once more Gordon had the impression that Davenant had packed like a man who is leaving his base, not like a man who has just week-ended at a Saturday-to-Monday cottage. Like a man going abroad, even, or why did he take the soap with him? One piece of supplementary evidence was to be found in the study. A large and highly ornamented photograph frame stood on the writing-table there; but it had no photograph in it, and the back was unfastened, as if the portrait had been recently and suddenly removed. If circumstantial evidence went for anything, it seemed clear that when Davenant left the house last—apparently on Monday—he left it in the spirit of a man who does not expect to return immediately, and carries all his immediate needs with him.

So far the investigation had proceeded, when Gordon happened to look out of a front window, and was discomposed by observing that Sullivan was coming back already down the lane. There was no time to be lost; he hastily ran downstairs and out at the front door. It would be taking a considerable risk to trust to the mazes of the back garden, and he decided to make for the hedge. But before he could reach it, Sullivan turned the corner into the garden-path and confronted him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, on the inspiration of the moment, “but could you tell me what Mr. Davenant’s address is? I shall have to write to him, and this is the only address they’ve got up at the Club.”

“Mr. Davenant left no address,” said Sullivan, and, try as he would, Gordon could not determine whether there was suspicion in his tone. However, the awkward corner was turned, and it was with some feeling of self-congratulation that he made his way back to the dormy-house.

He came back to find Reeves closeted with Marryatt and Carmichael, to whom he was explaining the whole story of their adventures. “I hope you won’t think it a breach of confidence,” was his explanation, “but the last disappointment I’ve had has made me feel that we must be on the wrong tack somewhere; and it’s no good for us two to try and correct each other. It’s like correcting the proofs of a book; you must get an outsider in to do it. So I thought, as Marryatt and Carmichael were with us at the start, it would be best to take them fully into our confidence, and make a foursome of it.”

“Delighted,” said Gordon. “I’ve been prospecting a bit, but I can’t say I’ve got much forrarder.”

“Did you ask whether Davenant was there yesterday?”

“Yes, I interviewed Sullivan on the subject, and he said ‘No.’ ”

“That I can’t believe,” said Carmichael.

“Why, what about it?” asked Gordon, a little ruffled.

“I’m sure Sullivan didn’t say ‘No.’ Have you never observed that an Irishman is incapable of saying yes or no to a plain question? If you say, Has the rain stopped, he won’t say Yes, or No; he’ll say, It has, or It hasn’t. The explanation of that is a perfectly simple one: there is no native word for either in Irish, any more than there is in Latin. And that in its turn throws a very important light on the Irish character——”

“Oh, go and throw an important light on your grandmother’s ducks,” said Reeves. “I want to hear about this interview. Was he telling the truth, d’you think?”

“From his manner, I thought not. So, when his back was turned, I made bold to enter the house and take a look round for myself.” And he described the evening’s entertainment in detail.

“By Jove, you are warming to the part,” said Marryatt. “I should like to see you get run in by the police, Gordon.”

“You say,” Reeves interrupted, “that you don’t think he was there yesterday, on the Tuesday, that is, because he hadn’t taken the letter away. He went off, then, on Monday, but when he went off he took with him all that a man normally takes with him if he’s going to sleep in a different house that night, plus a piece of soap and a towel, which are not things one usually carries about in one’s luggage?”

“That’s the best I can make of it,” said Gordon. “And the photograph—it might be an accident, of course, but I feel convinced that he put that in his luggage at the last moment.”

“And that’s frightfully important,” said Reeves, “because it obviously means that on Monday, before anything happened to Brotherhood, Davenant was reckoning on leaving home for some little time; and not returning immediately to wherever it is he lives ordinarily, because he must keep collars and things there. But he also thought he might be away for some longish time, or he wouldn’t have worried to take the photograph with him. What was the frame like?”

“Quite modern; no maker’s name on it.”

“I’m afraid that means the murder must have been a premeditated one,” put in Marryatt. “I hope it’s not uncharitable to say so, but I never did like Davenant. I don’t think I’m ordinarily a person of very narrow religious views, and I’ve known Romans that were quite easy to get on with. But Davenant was a person of quite ungovernable temper, you must remember that.”

“His ungovernable temper would be much more important,” objected Gordon, “if the murder were not a premeditated one.”

“But it’s not only that,” persisted Marryatt. “To me, there was always something sinister about him; he had fits of melancholy, and would rail at the people and the politicians he didn’t like in a way that was almost frightening. Surely I’m not alone in that impression?”

“What did Davenant look like?” asked Carmichael suddenly.

“Good Lord,” said Reeves, “you ought to remember that well enough. You must have met him down here pretty well every week-end, and he was quite well known.”

“Oh yes,” explained Carmichael. “I know what he looked like. I’m only asking you to see if you remember. If you were asked in a witness-box, what would you say Davenant looked like?”

“Well,” said Reeves, rather taken aback, “I suppose one would certainly say he was very dark. Very dark hair, I mean, and a great deal of it, so that it made the rest of his face rather unnoticeable. What I generally notice about a man is his eyes, and I never got much impression of Davenant’s, because he nearly always wore those heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. And then of course he was a rattling good player. If he murdered Brotherhood, as Marryatt seems positive he did, I can tell you one motive that I can’t accept for his doing it. He wasn’t jealous of Brotherhood’s golf. Poor old Brotherhood was about as rotten as Davenant is good.”