“Badly. Look here, one of us, either Leyland or I, is beginning to feel the strain a bit. Everything that crops up makes him more and more determined to have Simmonds’s blood, and me more and more inclined to stick to my old solution.”
“You haven’t been doubling that bet again, have you?”
“That’s a detail. Look here, I must tell you all about his find this morning.” And he proceeded to explain the whole business of the piece of paper, and Leyland’s inferences from it. “Now,” he finished up, “what d’you make of all that?”
“Well, he has got a case, hasn’t he? I mean, his explanation would explain things.”
“Yes, but look at the difficulties.”
“Let’s have them. No, wait a minute, I believe I can do the difficulties. Let’s try a little womanly intuish. First, you’d have noticed the piece of paper if it had been there when you went in.”
“Not necessarily. It’s wonderful what one can overlook if one isn’t thinking about it.”
“Well, then, Simmonds wouldn’t have been such a chump as to burn the thing on the spot. Especially with a foul smell of gas in the room, not to mention the corpse. He’d have shoved it into his pocket and taken it home.”
“There’s a good deal in that. But Leyland would say that Simmonds was afraid to do that for fear he should be stopped and searched.”
“Pretty thin. And, then, of course, if it was really important for him to get the document out of the way, he wouldn’t have left a bit lying about. He’d have seen that it was all burnt.”
“Leyland says that was because he was in a hurry.”
“Well, let’s have some others. I’m used up.”
“Well, don’t you see that a man who is burning an important document, holding it in his hand all the time, takes it up by the least important corner, probably a blank space at the top? This is the work of a man who wasn’t particularly keen on destroying all traces of the document, and he held it by the bottom right-hand corner, as one naturally would.”
“Why not the left hand, and the match in one’s right? Ha! The left-handed criminal. We are in luck.”
“Don’t you believe it. You start holding it at the left-hand corner, and then transfer it to your right hand when you’ve thrown the match away. You try, next time you’re burning your dressmaker’s bill. And here’s another point: Simmonds would have been bound to stand with his head right in the window, to keep clear of the gas fumes. Almost certainly he would have put the paper down on the windowsill and let it burn, leaving one of those curious damp marks. He didn’t, because I should have been bound to notice that; I was looking for marks on the windowsill. If he held it in his hand, he would be holding it outside the window, and he wouldn’t be such a chump as to throw away the odd corner in the room when he could pitch it out of the window. Another thing: he wouldn’t have dared to burn a light at the window like that for fear of attracting attention.”
“Well, I still think my objections were more important. But go on.”
“Well, since that piece of paper wasn’t dropped in the room before Leyland and I went into it—probably not, anyhow—it looks as if it had been dropped in the room since Leyland and I went into it. Or, at any rate, since the first police search. Because the room has been kept locked, one way and another, since then.”
“There was no deceiving this man.”
“Which makes it very improbable that the piece of paper was dropped there by accident at all. Anybody who went in there had no business to go in there, and would be jolly careful not to leave any traces. We are therefore irresistibly compelled, my dear Angela, to the conclusion that somebody dropped it there on purpose.”
“That firm grasp of the obvious. Yes?”
“He put it there deliberately to create an impression. Now, it might be to create the impression that Simmonds was the murderer. To whose advantage would that be?”
“Mr. Leyland’s.”
“Angela, don’t be flippant. Is there anybody?”
“Well, Mr. Simmonds hasn’t any enemies that we know of. Unless it was somebody who was disappointed in the quality of his handkerchiefs. What you want me to say is, that it must be somebody who has murdered Mottram himself, and wants to save his skin by pretending it was Simmonds that did it.”
“I’m dashed if I want you to say that. In fact, it’s just what I didn’t want you to say. Of course if you assume that Mottram was murdered by Brinkman, it does all work out, most unpleasantly well. You see, when Leyland and I were sitting here, talking at Brinkman, who was hiding behind the wall, Leyland did say that the only thing which prevented him from arresting Simmonds was the fact that he’d no evidence to connect him with the actual room. I could see what he was up to—he wanted Brinkman to take the hint (assuming, of course, that he was the real murderer) and start manufacturing clues to incriminate Simmonds. Well, it looks very much as if Brinkman had taken the hint, and were doing identically what Leyland suggested. Curse it all.”
“Still, it was clever of Brinky to get in when the door was locked.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. I wouldn’t put it beyond Brinkman to have a duplicate key of that door. … No, I’ve nothing to fall back on really except the absence of motive. What earthly reason had Brinkman for wanting to do Mottram in? Or rather, I have one other thing to fall back on. But it’s not evidence; it’s instinct.”
“As how?”
“Why, don’t you see that the whole thing works out too beastly well? Isn’t it rather too obviously a ruse? I mean, that idea of dropping a piece of paper with only half a dozen words on it,
