“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 weekend, 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.”
“It’s very extraordinary to me,” said Carmichael, “that you should say all that, and yet not have arrived at the obvious fact about this mystery. The root fact, I mean, which you have to take into account before you start investigating the circumstances at all. You simply haven’t seen that fact, although it’s right under your nose. And that’s a very curious thing, the way you can look at a complex of facts ninety-nine times, and only notice the point of them the hundredth time. The phenomenon of attention—”
“Oh, cut it out,” said Gordon; “what is the fact we haven’t noticed?”
“Oh, that,” said Carmichael lightly, “merely that Brotherhood is Davenant, and Davenant is Brotherhood.”
VII
Carmichael’s Account of It
“Good Lord,” said Reeves, when the first shock of astonishment was over, “tell us some more about it. How did you know?”
Carmichael joined the tips of his fingers and beamed at them, secure of an audience at last. “Well, you’ve just admitted that all you can remember about Davenant is hair and spectacles. That is, his disguise. Of course the man wore a wig. He was a fictitious personality from start to finish.”
“Except for his golf,” suggested Gordon.
“Yes, that was real enough; but Brotherhood’s wasn’t. Don’t you see that the two characters are complementary, suspiciously complementary? Brotherhood is here all the week, but never during the weekends; Davenant is only seen from Saturday to Monday. Davenant is Catholic, so as to be violently distinguished from the atheist Brotherhood. Davenant is good at golf; so Brotherhood has to be distinguished by being very bad at golf, and that, to me, is the mystery of the whole concern. How a scratch player could have the iron self-control to play that rotten game all the week, merely to prevent our suspecting his identity, beats me entirely. And yet you could find parallel instances; old Lord Mersingham, for example—”
“Do you mean,” said Gordon in a shocked voice, “that Brotherhood pulled his drives like that on purpose?”
“Precisely. After all, don’t you remember that day, let me see, I think it was last February, when Brotherhood played for fifty pounds, and went round in eighty-nine? Of course, there are flukes even in golf. I remember myself—”
“Well,” said Gordon, “I think the Committee ought to do something about it. Dash it all, I was his partner in the foursomes.”
“De mortuis,” suggested Reeves. “But I still don’t see why he wanted to do it, I’m afraid. Why, the thing’s been going on for years.”
“Well, none of us know much about Brotherhood’s business; but I gather from what people are saying about the bankruptcy that it was a pretty shady one. They haven’t traced any hole in the accounts; but if there ever was a man you would expect to go bankrupt and then skip (I believe it is called) with what is described in such circumstance as the boodle, that man was Brotherhood. He foresaw the probability of this for years, and made very careful and subtle preparations for meeting the situation. The important thing on such occasions is to have an alter ego. The difficulty is to establish an alter ego on the spur of the moment. Brotherhood knew better. He had been working up his alter ego for years.”
“Right under our
