“Well, look here, Gordon, I’ve been seeing Miss Rendall-Smith, and she’s been giving me a whole lot of information. Come and sit in my room for a bit, and let me get it clear; then we can think the case out all over again.”
Gordon was not impressed by the recital of Miss Rendall-Smith’s disclosures. “It seems to me,” he said, “that every word of that makes the case against Davenant stronger instead of weaker. The one thing we had still to look for was a motive, and here’s a motive ready-made. Davenant had every temptation to want Brotherhood out of the way; it would rid the world of a worm, and leave the course clear for him to marry the widow. I hope she won’t go and tell all that story to the counsel for the defence.”
“But what impressed me,” objected Reeves, “was this—nobody knew more clearly than Miss Rendall-Smith what temptation Davenant had had to commit the murder, and yet nobody could have been more positive about Davenant’s innocence. What I mean is this: isn’t the strength of the prima facie evidence for his guilt the strongest possible test of her belief in Davenant’s innocence?”
“Credo quia impossibile, you mean? Well, personally, I don’t attach very much importance to the lady’s feelings.”
“I think that’s very inconsistent of you, Gordon. Only the other day you were saying you would rather trust the evidence of people than the evidence of things.”
“But her feelings aren’t evidence. I’m willing enough to trust in what she knows about Davenant; but I’m not willing to trust in what she says she thinks she has persuaded herself to think she knows about Davenant. And that is about the correct description, I should say, for a woman’s intuition.”
“Oh, come! You must have a little more imagination than that.”
“Well, look here, she says she trusts her intuitions, and wants you to trust them. She says she always does trust them and they never fail her. Now, this is the woman who, with her eyes open, went and married a dirty little sharper like Brotherhood. If women’s intuitions were worth anything, wouldn’t she have had an intuition which told her she was throwing herself away on a nasty little worm?”
“Well, let’s leave her intuitions alone. I want to start out with an absolutely unbiased mind, with no presumption for Davenant or against him. And I want you to help me to go through all the evidence we collected, and see if we can’t make sense out of it somehow. Because we haven’t done that yet, Davenant or no Davenant.”
“You mean you want to do some thinking aloud, while I sit opposite you and say ‘My dear Reeves! How on earth …’ from time to time? All right; start away.”
“Well, look here, what was the most incongruous thing we found, when we examined Brotherhood’s body?”
“You mean me to say the two watches. To my mind it’s the fact of his having a ticket. Because he surely had a season?”
“He did. I went and asked specially at the booking-office. But of course he might have left his at home by mistake.”
“Yes, but that won’t really do. Because on a line like this, surely, the porters know most of the season-ticket holders by heart? And the odds are that if he’d said, ‘I’ve left my season at home,’ the porter would have touched his cap and said, ‘Right you are, sir.’ Now, knowing that possibility, that all-but-certainty, was Brotherhood fool enough to go and book before he left London? As far as I remember, the tickets on this line aren’t examined till you change or till you go out of the station.”
“You’re right. There’s something that looks devilish wrong about that. Well, how did the ticket get there, then?”
“It looks, surely, as if it was put there after the man was dead.”
“And if it was put there, it was put there to create a false impression, obviously. Now, let’s see; what false impression could you create by putting a ticket in a dead man’s pocket? That he was travelling on a different day—of course, that’s possible.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t it: I mean, it wasn’t on Monday that he was killed. Because he was seen going up on Tuesday morning; they said that at the inquest.”
“Good, then that’s excluded. Or you might create the impression that he was travelling third when he was really travelling first. But that would be useless, wouldn’t it, because lots of people on this line travel first on a third-class ticket when the trains are crowded, and this train was. Or you might create the impression that he was travelling, when he wasn’t really travelling at all. But Brotherhood clearly was, because he came up from London all right. The only other false impression would be that his destination was different from what it really was. But dash it all, his ticket was for Paston Whitchurch, and he was killed—Oh, good Lord!”
“What’s the matter?”
“What fools we’ve been! Don’t you see that if the man was really pitched out of the three o’clock from London, which doesn’t stop between Weighford and Binver, a ticket for Paston Whitchurch would disguise the fact that he came by that train, and make everybody think he came in the later one—the 4:50 from Paston Oatvile?”
“By Gad, that sounds more promising. Then the murderer could prove an alibi by showing that he travelled on the three o’clock, eh?”
“That would be about the size of it. Let’s see, had we any other reason for assuming the 4:50 train?”
“The watch—the wristwatch, that is. It had stopped at 4:54.”
“You mean that it stopped at a moment when its hands were pointing to 4:54. But obviously it would be the simplest thing in the world to fake a watch. And—I
