“Yes, but the whole business hangs together, I can’t tell him how I formed my suspicions without telling him the whole of the evidence I’ve got; and that means putting it to him straight out. I must see that he manages to exculpate Davenant; as long as he does that, I don’t mind if he goes abroad—I don’t mind giving him time to get away. But I must show him where he stands, and I must get a confession out of him.”
“But the thing’s impossible!”
“Look here, I’ve got it—the telephone! That lets you talk to a man without seeing his face, without letting him answer if you don’t want him to; you can treat him as if he wasn’t there. I know it sounds a silly dodge, but you see my idea, don’t you?”
“I should have thought it would be rather public. Can’t the people at the exchange overhear everything if they want to?”
“Yes; I’d forgotten that. I know—the speaking-tube in the steward’s office! I can get the steward to let me have the use of the room for ten minutes in the slack time tomorrow morning. Then I’ll call up to Marryatt and tell him all I want to.”
“The trouble about that speaking tube is, it isn’t really made for dialogue. I mean, you have to speak and listen alternately through the same tube.”
“All the better. I don’t want any interruptions from him. Now, a game of bezique for Heaven’s sake: my nerves are all anyhow.”
XXII
In the Fog
“Hullo, Marryatt, is that you?”
“Yes; who’s speaking?”
“It’s about Brotherhood. You’ll guess before I’ve finished who it is speaking, so I’d better tell you at once; it’s Reeves. I am going to talk to you for about ten minutes through this tube, and you’ll see for yourself as I go along that it’s to your own interest to hear me out to the end. I’ve chosen this way of speaking to you purposely, so as to save you the embarrassment of an interview. But, of course, it’s no good your trying to interrupt, because I shouldn’t hear if you did.
“I have managed to trace your movements during this last week pretty exactly, and I’m going to describe them to you, so that you can see how much I know, and how little use it is for you to try and put up any denial. Of course, I may make little mistakes about the details, but I think you’ll find that there is not much wrong.
“I can understand you not liking Brotherhood; few of us did. But while the rest of us simply disliked him, you hated him. Whether you hated him before he began giving his atheist lectures I don’t know. I dare say there was a quarrel beforehand and that was what made him give the lectures. Anyhow, when he started trying to undermine the beliefs of your parishioners, your hatred reached such a pitch that you determined to do away with him. I am not going to moralize about all that; I suppose you felt at the time that you were doing God’s work, and you fortified yourself with precedents from the Bible. To you, perhaps, it was like crushing some noxious insect. I’m not going to argue morality.
“One characteristic scruple detained you. You did not shrink from undoing God’s work by destroying the material body of the man you hated, but you trembled for the prospects of his soul if his life was thus suddenly brought to an end. You decided that you must warn him of the danger he ran, but how were you to warn him without risk of discovery? You sent him a present of a book about immortality; that seemed natural enough, as it was the subject he had been lecturing about. Then, anonymously, you sent him a message which consisted only of figures, yet so arranged that a clever man like Brotherhood could see that the figures were a cipher, and that this book was the key to the cipher. The message you sent ran, ‘You will perish if you go back upon your faith.’ Then you felt you had warned him sufficiently. As a matter of fact, he left the book in the train on Monday, and therefore your warning, which reached him on Tuesday, was in any case too late.
“Your alibi was brilliantly thought out beforehand. You went up to London, being careful to tell us all that you were going. You took with you no weapon except a heavy stick. But you had a powerful ally in the grey fog which hung over the railway line that day; the fog which made the movements of the trains slow, their timing uncertain, their carriages almost invisible from each other. You had chosen your day well. You knew, I take it, beforehand that Brotherhood’s bankruptcy would soon be public property; you took good care, anyhow, to inform yourself of the fact when you got up to Town. That meant that the way was clear for you; the murder would be interpreted as suicide.
“You went up by the same train as Brotherhood; you took care to come back by the same train. You shadowed him, I suppose—easy work for you to do that unseen in the grey fog. You saw him enter a carriage which was (I think) the last of a coach. That was probably a disappointment to you, because you could not take the one immediately behind. No matter, you took the one immediately in front instead. Each travelled first, and each was alone in his carriage; it was not difficult to secure that in such weather, on such an unfrequented train. The whistle blew, and you went out into the fog.
“You could do nothing on the first stage of your journey; it was necessary for you to reach ground that you knew; you could not be certain, in the fog, that the blow would
