“That was the cleverness of it,” said Carmichael. “If there was a Mr. Brotherhood at Paston Oatvile, and a Mr. Davenant every weekend at Brighton, nobody would be deceived; it’s a stale old dodge to keep up a double establishment in two different places. The genius of Brotherhood’s invention was that he kept up two establishments within a stone’s throw of each other. Nobody here could actually say that he’d seen Brotherhood and Davenant together, that goes without saying. But the two personalities were real personalities in the same world; and there were hosts of witnesses who would declare that they knew both. If Brotherhood suddenly ceased to exist, the last place where anybody would thing of looking for him would be the house next door.”
“Good God, what a fool I’ve been!” said Mordaunt Reeves.
“The separate banking-account would be particularly useful to such a man,” Carmichael went on. “If we could find out where Davenant banked, I have no doubt that we should discover a substantial balance. But of course, he wouldn’t bank here.”
“Why not?” asked Gordon.
“Because Brotherhood would want to deal with the local bank, and it’s a very unsafe business making your signature in a forged writing. So Davenant will have banked in London. By the way, that’s another point, did you notice that Davenant always used a typewriter? He couldn’t risk the use of a false handwriting.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” murmured Gordon to himself.
“Well, he knew when the crash was coming; it was all carefully prearranged. He had even the impudence to book a sleeping car to Glasgow.”
“But that’s a difficulty, surely,” put in Reeves. “Because he ordered the sleeper not as Davenant but as Brotherhood. Now, you make out that Brotherhood was to have disappeared, as from yesterday, and Davenant was to have become a permanency. Why didn’t he order a sleeper in the name of Davenant?”
“How often am I to tell you, my dear Reeves, that you are dealing with a genius? If Davenant had ordered a sleeper just at that moment, attention might have been directed to him. But ordering a sleeper for Brotherhood would merely strengthen the impression that Brotherhood had disappeared. If that was all—personally I believe the scheme was even more audacious. I believe Davenant did mean to go away, for a time at any rate, and by that very train. He would join it at Crewe, travelling in an ordinary first-class carriage. Then at Wigan—bless my soul!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Gordon.
“I find myself unaccountably unable to recollect whether the 7:30 from Euston stops at Wigan. However, it will do for the sake of argument.
“At Wigan an anonymous passenger, Davenant, of course, would ask the sleeping-car attendant whether he had a vacant berth. And the man was bound to have a vacant berth—Brotherhood’s. There was one person in the world whom nobody would suspect of being Brotherhood—the stranger who had been accommodated, quite accidentally, with Brotherhood’s berth.”
“It’s wonderful!” said Marryatt.
“But of course, all that is only speculation. Now we come to something of which we can give a more accurate account—the plans which this Brotherhood-Davenant made for the act of metamorphosis. I take it this was his difficulty—Brotherhood and Davenant (naturally enough) do not know one another. If Davenant walks out of Brotherhood’s office in London, it will create suspicion—the change, then, must not happen in London. If Davenant is suddenly seen walking out of Brotherhood’s bungalow, that again will create suspicion; the change, then, must not take place at Paston Whitchurch. The thing must be managed actually on the journey between the two places. That is why Brotherhood-Davenant wears such very noncommittal clothes—hosiery by which, in case of accident, he cannot be traced; the very handkerchief he takes with him is one belonging to a stranger, which has come into his possession by accident. He even has two watches, one to suit either character. Thus, you see, he can be Brotherhood or Davenant at will, by slipping on a wig and a pair of spectacles.
“He did not do anything so crude as to change once for all, suddenly, from Brotherhood to Davenant at a given point on his journey. He alternated between the two roles all along the line—I have always wondered what is the origin of that curious phrase ‘all along the line’; here I use it, you will understand, in a quite literal sense. Davenant got out at Paston Oatvile—the porter saw him. But, as we now know, it must have been Brotherhood who was travelling in the 4:50 from Paston Oatvile on. Yet it was as Davenant that he would have got out at Paston Whitchurch.”
“How do you know that?” asked Reeves.
“The ticket, of course. Brotherhood had a season, naturally, for he went up and down every day. At Paston Whitchurch, therefore, Brotherhood would have produced a season. It was Davenant who needed an ordinary single. The effect of all this was to create the simultaneous impression that both Brotherhood and Davenant came back to Paston Whitchurch that afternoon, and came by the same train. There was only one hitch in the plan, which could hardly have been foreseen. If Brotherhood happened to be murdered on the way, it would look very much as if Davenant had murdered him. And unfortunately he was murdered.”
“Then you don’t think it was suicide?” asked Marryatt, with a catch in his voice.
“If it was suicide, it was the result of a momentary insanity, almost incredibly sudden in its incidence. Suicide was certainly not part of the plan. A bogus suicide was, of course, a conceivable expedient; it would have been one way of getting rid of the undesirable Brotherhood’s existence. But consider what that means. It means getting hold of a substitute who looked exactly like Brotherhood—he could not foresee the excoriation of the features—and murdering him at unawares. It meant, further, that Davenant would be suspected of the murder. No plan could have been more difficult or more clumsy.”
“Then you mean,” said Marryatt, “that we have to look
