Without pausing in the task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces Mr. Cupples replied: “The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson’s which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration of Mabel’s feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite erroneous, which other people entertain about us. I remember, for instance, discovering quite by accident some years ago that a number of people of my acquaintance believed me to have been secretly received into the Church of Rome. This absurd fiction was based upon the fact, which in the eyes of many appeared conclusive, that I had expressed myself in talk as favouring the plan of a weekly abstinence from meat. Manderson’s belief in regard to his secretary probably rested upon a much slighter ground. It was Mr. Bunner, I think you said, who told you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper of suspicious jealousy. … With regard to Marlowe’s story, it appeared to me entirely straightforward, and not, in its essential features, especially remarkable, once we have admitted, as we surely must, that in the case of Manderson we have to deal with a more or less disordered mind.”
Trent laughed loudly. “I confess,” he said, “that the affair struck me as a little unusual.”
“Only in the development of the details,” argued Mr. Cupples. “What is there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn now to Marlowe’s proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him. Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen every day, and probably does so.” He attacked his now unrecognizable mutton.
“I should like to know,” said Trent, after an alimentary pause in the conversation, “whether there is anything that ever happened on the face of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and commonplace by such a line of argument as that.”
A gentle smile illuminated Mr. Cupples’s face. “You must not suspect me of empty paradox,” he said. “My meaning will become clearer, perhaps, if I mention some things which do appear to me essentially remarkable. Let me see. … Well, I would call the life history of the liver-fluke, which we owe to the researches of Poulton, an essentially remarkable thing.”
“I am unable to argue the point,” replied Trent. “Fair science may have smiled upon the liver-fluke’s humble birth, but I never even heard it mentioned.”
“It is not, perhaps, an appetizing subject,” said Mr. Cupples thoughtfully, “and I will not pursue it. All I mean is, my dear Trent, that there are really remarkable things going on all round us if we will only see them; and we do our perceptions no credit in regarding as remarkable only those affairs which are surrounded with an accumulation of sensational detail.”
Trent applauded heartily with his knife-handle on the table, as Mr. Cupples ceased and refreshed himself with milk and soda water. “I have not heard you go on like this for years,” he said. “I believe you must be almost as much above yourself as I am. It is a bad case of the unrest which men miscall delight. But much as I enjoy it, I am not going to sit still and hear the Manderson affair dismissed as commonplace. You may say what you like, but the idea of impersonating Manderson in those circumstances was an extraordinarily ingenious idea.”
“Ingenious—certainly!” replied Mr. Cupples. “Extraordinarily so—no! In those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that it should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson’s voice; he had a talent for acting; he had a chess-player’s mind; he knew the ways of the establishment intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but everything favoured it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It developed a high degree of complexity.”
“Did it really strike you in that way?” enquired Trent with desperate sarcasm.
“The affair became complicated,” went on Mr. Cupples unmoved, “because after Marlowe’s suspicions were awakened, a second subtle mind came in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel often happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine, in the world of crime.”
“I should say never,” Trent replied; “and the reason is, that even the cleverest criminals seldom run to strategic subtlety. When they do, they don’t get caught, since clever policemen have if possible less strategic subtlety than the ordinary clever criminal. But that rather deep quality seems very rarely to go with the criminal makeup. Look at Crippen. He was a very clever criminal as they go. He solved the central problem of every clandestine murder, the disposal of the body, with extreme neatness. But how far did he see through the game? The criminal and the policeman are often swift and bold tacticians, but neither of them is good for more than a quite simple plan.
