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 archaeology; 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.
