“Why?”
“Because the first pipe of the day is seldom foul; it has dried in the night. This was thoroughly foul. Of course, if the person who used this pipe-cleaner was the person who took the book, it’s obvious he did not come in with any felonious intentions, or he would hardly have made himself so much at home.”
“But that might have been a sudden idea.”
“Of course. But I should be careful how you accuse people of theft merely because their pipes are newly cleaned. Let us just see if he emptied out his pipe first; if it was a plain tobacco, it will have left a dottle. … Yes, here it is—as I feared, the inevitable Worker’s Army Cut; half the Club smokes that. No, I’m afraid we can’t put the handcuffs on anybody just yet. But, of course, you might find an excuse for going round your friends’ rooms and looking for the lost book.”
“During evening church,” suggested Gordon, cynically, it is to be feared, for the function did not noticeably attract the Club members.
“Well, it all wants thinking out. You and Gordon had better go and play your round, while I see if I can make anything of it.”
XIX
Mordaunt Reeves Talks to Himself
For some time after they had left, Mordaunt Reeves sat in his armchair hunting that most difficult of quarries, an intellectual inspiration. Merely artistic inspiration greets us when it wills, at the sight of a flower or of two lovers in a lane—we cannot chase it or make it come to our call. A merely intellectual problem can be solved by willpower, by sitting down to it with a wet towel round your head. But there are moments in an intellectual inquiry when inspiration can only come to us from dogged envisaging of the facts. Such was the point at which Reeves found himself; his clues were sufficient to exonerate, in his own mind at least, the arrested Davenant; they were not yet positive enough to mark out any victim who could be substituted. “A golf-ball,” he kept saying to himself, “a golf-ball by the side of the railway line, a few yards behind the spot from which the murdered man fell. It must have something to do with it, but where, where does it fit in?” At last, weary of cudgelling his brains over the unlighted grate, he seized his cap and strode out into the air. Half of set purpose, half under the fascination of his thoughts, he found himself climbing once more the steep path that led up the railway embankment and on to the forbidden precincts of the line.
St. Luke’s summer still held; the comparative silence of man’s Sabbath conspired with the autumn stillness of nature—the sunshine quiet that is disturbed no longer by clicking grasshoppers, nor yet by cawing rooks—to hush the countryside. Far below him he could see the golfers at their orisons, fulfilling, between hope and fear, the daily cycle of their existence. Gordon and Carmichael were at the third tee now; he could have waved to them. Carmichael always made too much business about addressing the ball. Over there was the neglected house, itself radiating the silence of a forgotten past. All else was drowsing; he alone, Mordaunt Reeves, strode on relentlessly in pursuit of crime.
He threw himself down at full length on the bank, just beneath the line. “Now,” he said, talking to himself out loud, “you are in the fast train from London to Binver, Mordaunt Reeves. It has stopped only once at a station, Weighford; probably oftener outside stations, because it is a foggy day and the trains get through slowly, with little fog-signals going off at intervals. If you fired a pistol at a fellow-passenger, it would probably be mistaken for a fog-signal by the people in the next carriage. Is that worth thinking of, I wonder? No, there must have been traces of a wound if a wound had been made, and it would have come out at the inquest. So you can’t get much further that way, my dear.
“There is somebody in the train you badly want to murder. You want to murder him today, because his bankruptcy has just been declared, and if he is found dead people will think it is suicide. You have warned him to look out for himself—I wonder why you did that? But of course you must have done it on Monday so as to give him a chance to save himself. … No, that won’t do, because you didn’t know anything about his bankruptcy before Tuesday. … But the message reached him on Tuesday morning. That is to say, you have a motive for killing him which is probably quite unconnected with his bankruptcy, which is not known about at present—certainly kind Mr. Davenant does not know about it. He is not coming by this train, he is waiting till the 3:47. You sent this man a message on Monday, containing a cipher which depended on a book which was in his possession, which you knew was in his possession—did you, perhaps, give him that book? It will be a nuisance to you later on, when it is found, and you will want to steal it.
“Meanwhile, the train is steaming on, and you must do something; you must get on with the murder. Is he in the same carriage, or in a different one? And if it’s a different one, is there a corridor between? Let’s see, there’s a corridor on the three o’clock train, but it doesn’t connect with the slip that comes off at
