“Why the Boots? Why not the maid?”
“Angela, don’t be so painfully modern! Maid servants at country hotels don’t. They leave some tepid water on the mat, make a gentle rustling noise at the door, and tiptoe away. No, I’m sure he locked the door for fear Brinkman should come in in the middle—or Pulteney, of course, might have come to the wrong door by mistake. He wanted to be left undisturbed.”
“But not necessarily in order to commit suicide.”
“You mean he might have fallen asleep over something else he was doing? Writing a letter for example, to the Pullford Examiner? But in that case he wouldn’t have been in bed. You can’t gas yourself by accident except in your sleep. Then there’s another thing—the Bertillon mark on the gas-tap. Leyland is smart enough to know the difference between the mark you leave when you turn it on and the mark you leave when you turn it off. But he won’t follow out his own conclusions. If Mottram had gone to bed in the ordinary way, as he must have in the event of foul play or accident, we should have seen where he turned it off as well as where he turned it on. The point is, Mottram didn’t turn the light on at all. He went to bed in the half-darkness, took his sleeping draught, and turned on the gas.”
“But, angel pet, how could he write a long letter to the Pullford paper in the half-darkness? And how did he read his shocker in the half-darkness? Let’s be just to poor Mr. Leyland, though he is in the force.”
“I was coming on to that. Meanwhile, I say he didn’t light the gas. Because if you want to light the gas you have to do it in two places, and the match he used, the only match we found in the room, had hardly burned for a second.”
“Then why did he strike a match at all?”
“I’m coming to that too. Finally, there’s the question of the taps. A murderer would want to make certain of doing his work quickly, therefore he would make sure that the gas was pouring out of both jets, the one on the bracket on the wall and the one on the standard lamp by the window. The suicide, if he means to die in his sleep, isn’t in a hurry to go off. On the contrary, he wants to make sure that his sleeping draught takes effect before the gas fumes become objectionable. So he turns on only one of the two jets, and that is the one farthest away from him. Isn’t that all right?”
“You are ingenious, you know, Miles, occasionally. I’m always so afraid that one day you’ll find me out. Now let’s hear about all the things you were just coming to.”
“Well, you see, it isn’t a simple case of suicide. Why should it be? People who have taken out a Euthanasia policy don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry to know—more particularly, they don’t want Miles Bredon to know—that they have committed suicide. They have the habit, as I know from experience, of trying to put up a little problem in detection for me, the brutes!”
“You shouldn’t be angry with them, Miles. After all, if they didn’t the Indescribable might sack you, and then where would Francis’s new tam-o’-shanter come from?”
“Don’t interrupt, woman! This is a case of suicide with complications, and dashed ingenious ones. In the first place, we noticed that entry in the visitors’ book. That’s an attempt to make it look as if he expected a long stay here, before he went to bed. Actually, through not studying the habits of the Wilkinsons, he overshot himself there—a little too ingenious. We know that when he did that he was simply trying to lead us up the garden; but we were too clever for him.”
“Let me merely mention the fact that it was I who spotted that entry. But pray proceed.”
“Then he did two quite irreconcilable things: he took a sleeping draught and he asked to be called early. Now, a man who’s on a holiday, and is afraid he won’t sleep, doesn’t make arrangements to be called early in the morning. We know that he took the sleeping draught so as to die painlessly; and as for being called early in the morning it was probably so as to give the impression that his death was quite unpremeditated. He took several other precautions for the same reason.”
“Such as?”
“He wound up his watch. Leyland noticed that, but he didn’t notice that it was an eight-day watch. A methodical person winds up his eight-day watch on Sunday; once more, Mottram was a tiny bit too ingenious. Then he put the studs out ready in his shirt. Very few people when they’re on holiday take the trouble to do that. Mottram did because he wanted us to think that he meant to get up the next morning in the ordinary way.”
“And the next article?”
“The window. A murderer, not taking any risks, would shut the window, or see that it was shut, before he turned the gas on. A man going to bed in the ordinary way would either shut it completely or else open it to its full extent, where the hasp catches, so that in either case it shouldn’t bang during the night. Mottram left his window ajar, not enough open to let the gas escape much. But he knew that in the morning the door would have to be knocked in, and with that sudden rush of air the window would swing open. Which is exactly what happened.”
“I believe he wrote and told you about all this beforehand.”
“Silence, woman! He left a shocker by his bedside, to make us think that he went to bed at peace with all the world. In real life,
