“I didn’t say that,” replied Carmichael, with a curious look. “I mean that we have to look for a murderer, someone whom we have not hitherto suspected. If Davenant murdered Brotherhood, that was certainly suicide; for Davenant was Brotherhood. But that seems to me impossible. The evidence all goes to show that there was a very careful plot in contemplation, which was cut short by a quite unforeseen counterplot.”
“But look here,” said Reeves, “if the original plan had come off, did he mean to come back here and live on here as Davenant?”
“You mustn’t expect me to know everything; I can only go by the indications. But I should say that he really would have come back here as Davenant, perhaps about three weeks later, and settled down permanently at the Hatcheries; or perhaps even—he was a very remarkable man—he would have bought up Brotherhood’s bungalow. You see, he liked the place; he liked the company; the only thing he disliked was having to play golf badly, and that necessity disappeared, once he settled down as Davenant. A wig is a nuisance, but so is baldness. The last place where anybody would look for Mr. Brotherhood, last heard of on the way to Glasgow, would be Paston Whitchurch, where Mr. Brotherhood had lived.”
“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” said Gordon, “one of Nature’s Watsons, as I said yesterday. But what about all the silly little indications I found at the Hatcheries an hour ago? Do they back up your theory, or are they wide of the mark?”
“It’s all according to schedule,” explained Carmichael, “but for a reason quite different from any you imagined. You must consider that the things we really find it hard to change are not the important things of life, our moral or religious or political standpoint, but our common, daily habits of living. Brotherhood might be an atheist, and Davenant a Catholic; Brotherhood a violent Radical, Davenant a Diehard Tory. But every man has his own preference in razors and in shaving-soap and in tooth-powder; and if you looked into the thing, you would find that if Davenant used A’s shaving-soap, so did Brotherhood; if Brotherhood used B’s tooth-powder, so did Davenant. There lay the real danger of detection. There was just the danger that somebody—shall we say, an interfering old don?—might hit upon the truth of the secret, and make investigations. Accordingly, those little traces must be obliterated. And they have been, for Davenant was careful to take them away with him. And so has the photograph, a photograph which, I suspect, had a duplicate in Brotherhood’s house—you see, neither Brotherhood nor Davenant could live without it.”
“But the collars and the socks? Surely nobody is so intimately wedded to one particular type of collar—”
“A blind. Davenant was to look as if he were packing up to go away, so he must take some clothes with him, not merely the shaving things.”
“But the towel and the soap? Surely they were not necessary to complete the illusion?”
“No, they are even more significant. Davenant—don’t you remember?—had rather darker eyebrows than Brotherhood. Quite easily done, of course, with paint. But you want something to wash it off with; and there are no corridors on the slow trains.”
“Yes, but look here,” objected Reeves, “why did he want to take all these things away with him on Monday?—it was on Tuesday he was timed to disappear—or rather, actually on Wednesday: his sleeper was for Wednesday.”
“I don’t think he meant to sleep the Tuesday night at the Hatcheries. He had transferred his base somewhere else—to London, I suppose—and his visit to Paston Whitchurch, on the pretext of picking up something he had left behind, was merely meant to establish, in our eyes, the fact that he was a different man from Brotherhood.”
“There’s one more thing, though,” said Marryatt; “I’m afraid it’s a kind of professional objection. Is it possible that a man who was really an atheist would be at the pains to go over every Sunday to Mass at Paston Bridge? Davenant, you see, was very regular about that. Or, granted that he was really a Catholic, could he bring himself to get up and preach atheist doctrines on the village green?”
Carmichael pulled a wry face. “I’m afraid, Marryatt, you are altogether too confiding. Don’t you see that he was a Catholic, and was doing the work of his own Church by turning the villagers against you and your doctrines? Don’t you see that if he managed to make atheists of your people, it would be all the easier for the priest at Paston Bridge to make Romans of them?”
“In fact,” said Gordon, “what it comes to is this: we have got to look for a criminal still; but it’s no use looking for Davenant?”
“You would be chasing a phantom,” said Carmichael.
VIII
The Inquest, and a Fresh Clue
The inquest was held on the following afternoon (that is, the afternoon of Thursday) in the village school at Paston Whitchurch. As he sat waiting to give his evidence, Reeves found his mind dominated, as the mind is dominated at such moments, almost entirely by irrelevant sense-impressions. There was the curious smell of the schoolroom, which always suggests (it is hard to know why) ink and chalk. There was the irritating pant and hoot of motors and motor-bicycles outside the open windows. There was the inevitable series of animals represented round the walls, looking like the religious emblems of some strange, totemistic worship. The one opposite Reeves had a caption underneath it in very large letters, the pig is a mammal, as if to clear up any possible doubts which might be felt by the youth of the parish as to what a pig was. There were the names cut and inked on the desks; especially intriguing was the signature of “H. Precious”—how did people in the country get such odd names? And why were there so few names like that
