“I’ll shut my eyes, but play fair,” suggested Bredon. The idiocy of men!
“No, you won’t, you’ll do what you’re told. Anybody got a clean hanky? Thank you so much, Mr. Leyland. … There, that’s right. Now, open your mouth, but not too wide, or you’ll choke. … Which was that?”
“Cider, I thought.”
“It was vinegar, really, with a little water in it.”
“Oh, shut up, that’s not fair.” Miles tore away the handkerchief from his eyes. “Hang it all, I won’t strut; I’m a married man!”
“Then Mr. Brinkman shall try instead; you will, won’t you, Mr. Brinkman?” It is to be feared that Angela favoured him with an appealing look; at any rate, he succumbed. With the instinct of the blindfolded man, he put his cigarette down on the edge of his plate. It was easy work for Angela to drop the spoon, and set Mr. Pulteney grovelling for it. Meanwhile, she hastily picked up Brinkman’s cigarette, and read the word “Callipoli.”
XII
The Makings of a Trap
It was Bredon and Leyland, this time, who took their evening walk together. To Bredon, events seemed to be closing in like a nightmare. Here was he pledged to uphold the theory of suicide; and he had depended largely for his success on Leyland’s inability to produce a suitable candidate for the position of murderer. But now there seemed to be a perfect embarras of murderers. Macbeth wasn’t in it.
“Well,” he said, “at least we have something positive to go upon now. Brinkman’s part in this business may be what you will, but he certainly takes an unhealthy interest in it, to the extent of hanging about round corners where he’s no business to be. At least we can confront him with his behaviour, and encourage him to make a clean breast of the whole thing. I imagine you will have no objection to that, since it’s not Brinkman you suspect of the murder?”
“I’m afraid,” said Leyland, “that’s not the way we go to work. The force, I mean. It’s quite true Brinkman is not the man I have under suspicion at the moment, but I’m only working on a theory, and that theory may prove to be a false one. I’m not certain of it yet, and I should have to be certain of it before I acquitted Brinkman.”
“But, hang it all, look at the question of motive. Simmonds, I grant you, had a reasonable motive for wanting to make away with his uncle. He had grounds for thinking that his uncle’s death would mean a clear half-million to him. He had quarrelled with his uncle, and thought he had been treated badly. He disapproved of his uncle, and regarded him as a bloodsucker. The fact that Mottram was down at Chilthorpe was an excellent opportunity, and a rare opportunity, for young Simmonds to get at him. Seldom the time and the place and the hated one all together. But your Brinkman, as far as we can see, was only affected by the death in the sense that he has lost a good job and has now to look out for another one, with no late employer to supply him with testimonials. Personally, I believe Brinkman did know about the alteration in the will; at least he knew about the uncertainty of Mottram’s health. Can you suppose that, even if Simmonds offered to go halves with him, he would consent to be an accomplice in what might prove a wholly unnecessary crime?”
“You’re assuming too much. We don’t know yet that Brinkman has no financial interest in the affair. Look here—this is farfetched, I grant you, but it’s not impossible: Everybody says Mottram had no family; whose word have they for that except his own? Where did he pick up Brinkman? No one knows. Why did he want a secretary? There was some talk of writing a history of Pullford, but nothing ever came of it. Why, then, this curious interest which Mottram takes in Brinkman? I don’t say it’s likely, but I say it’s possible that Brinkman is Mottram’s son by a clandestine marriage. If that’s so, and if Brinkman didn’t know about the codicil, he may himself be the next of kin who is preparing to step into the half-million. And a clever man—Brinkman is a clever man—might find it convenient to get Mottram out of the way, and get someone else to do it for him. He is afraid that Mottram will live to be sixty-five, and the policy will leave no benefits behind it. Or he is afraid that Mottram is going to make a new will. What does he do? Why, he goes to Simmonds, and points out to him that as the next of kin he would score by putting Mottram through it. Simmonds does so, all unsuspecting; and here’s Brinkman, only waiting to step in and claim the half-million on the strength of his mother’s marriage-lines!”
“You’re too confoundedly ingenious. Things don’t happen like that.”
“Things have happened like that before now, and with less than half a million to give grounds for them. No, I’m not going to leave Brinkman out of my calculations, and therefore I’m not going to take him into my confidence. But this eavesdropping of his does give us a very important chance, and we’re going to use it.”
“I don’t quite see how.”
“That’s because you’re not a professional, and you don’t know the way things are done in the force. The outside public doesn’t, and we don’t mean it to. We don’t show our workings. But half, or say a third at least, of the big businesses we clear up are cleared up by bluff, by leading the suspected man on and encouraging him to give himself away. Sometimes it isn’t a very pretty business, of course; we have to use agents who are none too scrupulous. But here we’ve got a ready-made chance of bluffing our man, and bluffing him into betraying himself.”
“How,
