Scotland Yard did very much what they had done, only with a splendidly irrelevant thoroughness. Not only the destination, class, and date of the ticket had to be registered in the notebook, but its price—there even seemed to be a moment’s hesitation about the Company’s regulations on the back. Nor did the names of the cigarette-importer and the collar-maker go unrecorded; both watchmakers, the postmarks on the correspondence, the date on the florins—nothing escaped this man. Tired of waiting for the doctor and the inevitable ambulance, Gordon and Reeves abandoned the truant ball, and made their way thoughtfully to the dormy-house.
Wilson, the club gossip, met them at the entrance. “Heard about old Brotherhood?” he asked, and went on, before they had time to gasp: “He’s gone bankrupt; heard it today in the City.”
“Really?” said Reeves. “Come and have a drink.” But if he thought that he too had the telling of a story, he was mistaken; the door opened on a well-known voice:
“Yes, sliced his drive badly, did Reeves. A curious thing, that—you ‘slice’ a ball in golf and you ‘cut’ a ball at cricket, and it’s the same action in either case, and yet it’s nothing whatever to do with the motion of cutting a cake. What was I saying? Oh yes. Right against the viaduct—did you ever see the big viaduct they’ve got at Welwyn? A finer one than ours, even—he found …”
Which made it evident that Mr. Carmichael was telling, in his own way, the story of the day’s adventure.
III
Piecing It Together
If the general accommodation at the Paston Oatvile dormy-house cannot be described as cloistral, it must be admitted that the rooms in it where you can claim privacy are not much better than cells. Mordaunt Reeves, however, had done something to turn his apartments into a civilized dwelling-place; there were pictures which did not illustrate wings, and books devoted to other subjects than the multitudinous possibilities of error in playing golf. Gordon and he had each a comfortable armchair, each a corner of the fireplace to flick his cigarette-ash into, when they met that evening to talk over the possibilities of the situation as it had hitherto developed.
“Everybody,” said Reeves, “if you notice, has already started treating an assumption as if it were a fact. They all say it was Brotherhood we found lying there; they all say he committed suicide because he had just gone bankrupt. Now, as a matter of fact, we don’t know that it was Brotherhood at all. He has not been heard of, but there hasn’t been much time to hear of him; and nothing is more probable than that a man who has gone bankrupt should skip without leaving any traces.”
“Yes, but somebody’s dead; you’ve got to find a gap somewhere in the ranks of Society to match our corpus.”
“Still, that’s mere negative arguing. And there are several points that tell against its being Brotherhood. In the first place, that ticket. Brotherhood goes up and down every day; do you mean to tell me he hasn’t got a season? Second point, if it was Brotherhood there’s an odd coincidence—he died within ten minutes’ walk of his own bungalow; why there, any more than anywhere else on the line?”
“It’s a coincidence that Brotherhood should be killed so near his own bungalow. But the murder, whether we like it or not, has been committed just there, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be him as much as anybody else. However, go on.”
“Third point, the handkerchief. Why should Brotherhood be carrying somebody else’s handkerchief?”
“If it comes to that, why should somebody else be carrying Brotherhood’s correspondence?”
“Oh, Brotherhood is mixed up in it somehow right enough. We shall see. Next point to be considered, was it accident, suicide, or murder?”
“You can cut out accident, surely. That would be a coincidence—somebody carrying Brotherhood’s letter to fall out of the train by mere accident just where Brotherhood lives.”
“Very well, for the present we’ll ask Murder or Suicide? Now, I’ve several arguments against suicide. First, as I told you, the hat. He wasn’t alone when he fell out of the carriage, or who threw the hat after him?”
“There was no mark in the hat, was there?”
“Only the maker’s; that’s the irritating thing about this business. Hats, collars, shirts, people buy them at a moment’s notice and pay cash for them, so there’s no record in the books. And watches—of course you don’t have a watch sent, you take it with you, to save the danger of carriage by post. I’ll try all those tradesmen if the worst comes to the worst; probably the police have already; but I bet nothing comes of it.”
“What’s your next argument against suicide?”
“The ticket. That extra four bob would have got him a first instead of a third. Now, a man who means to commit suicide doesn’t want four bob, but he does want to be alone.”
“But the suicide might have been an impulse at the last moment.”
“I don’t believe it. The place where he fell was just the one place about here where he was bound to kill himself, not merely maim himself. That looks like preparation.”
“All right. Any more?”
“No, but I think that’s enough to go on with. The probability I’m going to bet on is murder.”
“You’re up against coincidence again, though, there. Why should somebody happen to murder Brotherhood on the very day he went bankrupt?”
“You will go on assuming that it is Brotherhood. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Brotherhood has saved a nest-egg for himself, and is skipping to avoid his creditors—what better way of throwing people off the scent than by a pretended suicide?”
“That is, by pitching a total stranger down the viaduct.”
“I didn’t say a total stranger.
