He now found himself in urgent need of plans. He did not know whether his victim was dead: yet it would be risky to go right down into the valley, and perhaps find that a corpse had already been discovered. He determined to go and hide until he got more news about this. Meanwhile, the fog prevented him from seeing whether he had made a clean job of it. He searched a little, and found Brotherhood’s hat a little way down the slope; that meant that he had not fallen sheer—he might have left his stick behind too as he fell. This, however, Davenant could not see in the fog. He took the hat to the point at which the viaduct railing began, and a little further, secure that this, at any rate, would fall clear. He then measured a few yards back, and dropped a golf-ball to mark the spot. He thought, you see, that he might want to go back there in better weather and look for the stick. Then he turned back along the line and took the path down to the dormy-house. The fog was beginning to lift, but he met nobody. He knew the secret passage from his boyhood, and thanked his stars that he had never mentioned its existence to anyone in the Club. He had a confederate, of course, among the Club servants—Miss Rendall-Smith says she thinks it was an old servant of his family’s; and this man, whose name has never appeared, helped him to hide in the passage and brought him, by arrangement with Sullivan, the necessities of living.
It was from our own conversation—a singular thought!—that he got most of his news. His confinement, by the way, was not very irksome, since he knew the habits of the members so well. He used to shave in the Club washing-room, for example; and got pickings from the food that went down to the kitchen. More than once, when he knew there was no danger of interruption, he came out into the billiard-room and played a game, right against left. He could keep in touch with all that went on, and it was his intention, I gather, to come out of his hiding-place in any case on the Saturday afternoon, play a round in the evening, and go back to the Hatcheries that night as if nothing had happened. That was, of course, when the verdict of suicide at the inquest made it seem as if he was free from all suspicion.
But our proceedings bothered him badly. Especially the photograph; he guessed from our talk that it must be Miss Rendall-Smith’s, and knew that it was likely to direct attention to her. He did not hope to steal it, because the loss would be too obvious, but he could not resist putting his arm through the sliding panel while we were playing Bridge and just taking a look at it. He had himself a photograph of Miss Rendall-Smith in his pocket, taken at the same sitting: when he first heard us talking about photographs, he pulled this out to make sure he had not lost it; and when he had the second photograph in his hands he switched on his electric torch for an instant (a risky thing to do) and compared them. Then, in the dark, he put back the wrong one by mistake.
Why he was so anxious to get back the copy of the cipher, he did not explain. I fancy when he first contemplated the idea he imagined that we had the original; and to that, as we shall see, he did attach importance. But he did not think he took much risk when he purloined the cipher and put it back again on finding it useless, or when he came out at night to see what souvenirs of Brotherhood Reeves had got. I think he was afraid of some fresh clue which might inculpate Miss Rendall-Smith; and he imagined, of course, that the watch at the door was the only thing he had to be frightened of.
It was only next morning that he found some of my chewing gum on his trousers, and guessed that a trap had been laid for him. As soon as he heard our movements upstairs he stepped out into the billiard-room, and got his confederate to hide him somewhere in the servants’ quarters. It was when news was brought to him that the police were investigating the cellar entrance that he really took alarm, and decided to bolt for it. Even then he kept his head, and if Reeves had been a little less close on his trail he would have come back quietly to Paston Whitchurch on that slow train, and it would have been very difficult to incriminate him. As it was, it was only a stiff door-handle that gave him away.
It was Miss Rendall-Smith who explained to me the mysterious writing on the back of the cipher. The words were, of course, explained by what was written on the other half-sheet before the sheet was torn in two. Miss Rendall-Smith showed me the full text of the thing, and I confess that at first it meant nothing to me; you, no doubt, would have taken the point with more readiness. Here it is, anyhow.
| S | O | ||
| C | R | ||
| H | a | S | socks |
| I | n t | E | rest |
| S | he | C | hem |
| M | a | T | tins. |
It appears that this forms an acrostic, and is connected with some kind of competition in the weekly papers. The two first words have not been successfully identified, the four last have. All we saw on our half-sheet was the nonsignificant termination of the last four words. I took it to Lees-Jones—you remember Lees-Jones, our Acrostic expert?—and he said it would have been very difficult to reconstruct the original acrostic
