“Journalism,” explained Carmichael, “makes havoc of all our detective stories. What is journalism? It is the effort to make all the facts of life correspond, whether they will or no, to about two hundred ready-made phrases. Headlines are especially destructive—you will have noticed for yourselves how the modern headline aspires to be a series of nouns, with no other parts of speech in attendance. I mean, the phrase, ‘She went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple pie’ becomes ‘Apple-pie fraud cabbage-leaf hunt,’ and ‘What; no soap! So he died’ becomes ‘Soap-shortage fatality sequel.’ Under this treatment, all the nuances of atmosphere and of motive disappear; we figure the truth by trying to make it fit into a formula.”
“I agree with you about inference,” said Marryatt, disregarding Carmichael’s last remark—one always did disregard Carmichael’s last remark. “But think how much of one’s knowledge of other people is really inference. What do we really know about one another down here? Fellow-passengers on the stream of life, that’s all we are. Take old Brotherhood, whom you were mentioning just now. We know that he has some sort of business in London, but we’ve no idea what. We know that he comes down here every night in the week from Monday onwards, and then from Saturday to Monday he disappears—how do you know what he does with himself during the weekends? Or take young Davenant down at the Hatcheries; he turns up there every Saturday evening, and does his two rounds on the Sunday, and then on Monday he’s off again into the Ewigkeit. What do we really know about him?”
“I should have thought you knew all you wanted to about Brotherhood,” chuckled Reeves. “Hasn’t he taken to disproving the existence of God on Wednesday evenings on the village green?”
Marryatt flushed slightly. “After all,” he said, “what does that amount to? You might as well say I know Davenant’s a Roman Catholic. But all I know is that once in a way he goes over on a Sunday to Paston Bridge—the priest there knows something about him, I suppose, but he wouldn’t tell you.”
“I had a very extraordinary experience once,” said Carmichael, “in Albania. I had to translate the confession of a dying man into French for the sake of a priest who didn’t know the local language. The priest told me afterwards I was bound not to disclose to anybody what I’d heard.”
“He didn’t know you, anyhow, Carmichael,” suggested Reeves.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve never mentioned what he said to anybody, though it was sufficiently curious.”
“It’s impossible,” resumed Reeves, “not to make inferences; the mistake is to depend on them. In ordinary life, you have to take risks; you have to sit down in the barber’s chair, although you know it is just as easy for him to cut your throat as to shave you. But in detection one should take no chances, give no one the benefit of the doubt. Half of the undetected crimes in the world are due to our reluctance to suspect anybody.”
“But surely,” urged Marryatt, “you would allow character to go for something? I was a schoolmaster once, and while one knew the little beasts were capable of almost anything, one did clear some people of suspicion on mere character.”
“But there again,” argued Gordon, “you knew them very well.”
“Not really,” said Marryatt. “A perpetual war of mutual deception is kept up between schoolmasters and schoolboys. One trusted, I think, one’s unconscious impressions most.”
“If I were a detective,” persisted Reeves, “I would suspect my own father or mother as soon as anybody else. I would follow up every clue, blinding myself deliberately to the thought, where does this point to?”
“Then you would be unreasonable,” said Gordon. “In the old days, when the answers of sums used always to come out to an integral number—I believe it’s all different now—one was wiser than that. If you could see that the answer was going to involve two-thirds of a policeman, you argued at once that you were on the wrong track; you started again, and suspected your working.”
“But real life,” retorted Reeves, “doesn’t always work out to a simple answer. And if the policeman who’s in charge of a case argues as you’re arguing, he’s only himself to blame for it if he gets trisected by the criminal before he’s finished.”
“At least you must respect the principle of Cui bono?”
“It’s extraordinary,” began Carmichael, “how many people make the old mistake about the meaning of—”
“Cui bono is the worst offender of the lot,” said Mordaunt Reeves cheerfully. “Look at those two boys in America who murdered another boy just to find out what it felt like.”
“But that was pathological.”
“And how many crimes aren’t pathological, if it comes to that?”
“I was on Holy Island once for a month,” said Carmichael, “and would you believe it, there was a man there that was sick if he ever caught sight of a dog? Sick, positively.”
“What do you think it really feels like,” asked Marryatt, “to have murdered a man? I mean, murderers in general always seem to lose their heads when the thing is actually done, and give themselves away somehow. But one would have thought, if the thing is planned with proper deliberation, one’s feeling would be that things were working out according to plan, and the next thing was to get clear—above all things, to see plenty of
