It was Davenant.
XV
Gordon Takes the Opportunity to Philosophize
“It seems,” said Carmichael, blinking through his spectacles, “that I have been mistaken. My old tutor always used to say to me—that was Benger: I suppose he’d be before your time, Gordon? Of course he was—Benger always used to say to me, ‘Mr. Carmichael, always follow your nose. You’ve got a straight nose, Mr. Carmichael, but a crooked brain.’ Very witty old chap he was, Benger, always saying things like that.”
“It was a dashed funny mistake, too,” mused Reeves. “Do you realize that, quite possibly, Davenant may have stood behind that hole in the wall and heard us coming solemnly to the conclusion that he didn’t exist? That he never had existed, except as a sort of spiritual projection of old Brotherhood, and now, consequently, he had ceased to exist?”
“And what is still more singular,” said Carmichael, “is that so far from helping the cause of justice, we seem to have actually hindered it. For I take it there can be little doubt that it was our tapping and measuring upstairs which put Davenant on his guard and made him bolt.”
“Tapping? Measuring?” protested Gordon. “Don’t you believe it; it was Reeves singing. I always said the man would beat it if we let Reeves go on like that. I’d have done the same myself.”
“I’m not at all sure,” said Reeves, “that he may not have found the chewing-gum on his trousers, and formed his own conclusions that way. However, there isn’t very much harm done. The police have got their man, with no great inconvenience to anybody except that poor old collie at Weighford. Rather a fine dog it was, and the owner wasn’t a bit nice about it when I saw him.”
“I suppose,” Carmichael asked, “that the police can actually prove Davenant was the murderer?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Reeves confidently, “unless they’ve got more up their sleeve than I think they have.”
“But surely,” urged Gordon, “if he went to all the trouble of hiding himself like a rat in the wainscoting—”
“That’s all very well, but they haven’t even proved Davenant was the man in the passage. You see, Davenant was travelling on that train, but it’s the train he always does come up by every Saturday. He might say that he hadn’t had time to get his ticket; that he had come all the way from London; that the real murderer must have slipped out on to the six-foot way and lost himself on the opposite platform. I don’t know that he will say that; of course, he is reserving his defence. But even if they can bring people to prove—people who saw him boarding the train at Weighford—that he was the man we were pursuing, it still doesn’t follow that he was the murderer. It’s extraordinary, the shifts men have resorted to before now when they thought they were going to be accused of murder, although they were as innocent as you or me. Put it this way—suppose Davenant had actually come up by that train on Tuesday, for reasons best known to himself. He gets to Paston Whitchurch, and then hears of what we found at the third tee. He cannot give any plausible explanation of his coming back here on Tuesday at all. He has some grudge against Brotherhood which we know nothing about. Now, if he can conceal the fact that he came back here at all that day, he escapes suspicion. He knows, somehow, about this secret passage; knows that, as a member of the club, he can wander about here pretty safely without attracting attention. He decides to lie low in the priests’ hiding-place till Saturday, and then turn up bright and smiling, knowing nothing about the murder. I say, innocent men have done stranger things before now.”
“It sounds pretty thin to me,” said Gordon.
“Once more I tell you, it is a fatal habit to proceed from observation to inference, and give inference the name of fact. You say Davenant is the murderer; I say, we don’t know that; we only know that Davenant was a man who for some reason expected to be accused of the murder, and consequently behaved in a very peculiar way.”
“I still don’t quite see,” said Carmichael, “what exactly happened while I was waiting outside the billiard-room door.”
“Nothing happened while you were waiting outside the billiard-room door; it had all happened already. Quite early on, while we were worrying about up here, Davenant saw that the place was unhealthy for him. He wandered out into the billiard-room, arranging the balls, I think, as a kind of message for us, and then strolled off somewhere—into the servants’ quarters, I suppose. It’s obvious that he must have had a confederate in the house. Then the police came—I imagine they must have watched somebody bringing him things from outside.”
“Sullivan,” said Gordon. “That was what he was doing, obviously, the day I was over in Davenant’s cottage, he was taking him collars and things.”
“Anyhow, the police came and climbed in at the cellar, making a great song and dance about it as the police always do. Davenant saw that things were getting pretty serious, so he made for the nearest motorbike he could find—I don’t know whether he knew it belonged to the police or not. Having once started to run away, of course he couldn’t very well stop at Weighford and tell us it was all a silly mistake: having started to bolt, he had to go on
