“We took him to Lowgill with us,” explained Angela, “and when he got there he insisted on taking the late train back to Pullford. He said he had something to talk over with the Bishop. He has left some pyjamas and a toothbrush here as hostages, and says he will look in on us in the course of the day to reclaim them. So you’ll see him again.”
“A remarkable man. A shrewd judge of character. He recognized me at once as a man of reflection. God bless my soul! Do I understand that Mrs. Davis has provided us with sausages?”
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” said Angela. “She must have felt that the occasion had to be marked out somehow. And she was so pleased at having her bill paid. I don’t think Brinky can have been such an unpleasant man, after all.”
“Believe me,” said Leyland earnestly, “there is no greater mistake than to suppose your criminal is a man lost to all human feelings. It is perfectly possible for Brinkman to have murdered his master, and have been prepared to run off with a car and a thousand pounds which didn’t belong to him, and yet to have shrunk from the prospect of leaving an honest woman like Mrs. Davis the poorer for his visit. We are men, you see, and we are not made all in one piece.”
“But how odd of him to pop off into the gorge like that! I mean, it’s a very jolly place, they tell me; and we know Brinky admired the scenery of it, because he told my husband so. But isn’t it rather odd of him to have wanted to take a long, last lingering look at it before he bolted for South America?”
“It is perfectly possible that it may have had a fascination for him,” assented Leyland. “But I think his conduct was more reasonable than you suppose. After all, by coming up at the farther end of the gorge he managed to make it look quite natural when the motor found him walking in the direction of Chilthorpe. And, more than that, I have little doubt that he knew he was followed. Eames is a most capable fellow, but he must, I think, have followed his man a little carelessly, and so given himself away. Brinkman probably thought that it was Bredon who was following him.”
“Because he did it so badly, you mean?” suggested Angela. “Miles, you shouldn’t throw bread at breakfast, it’s rude.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that he had reason to believe Mr. Eames was at the cinema, whereas he knew Bredon was in the house, and saw him sitting in a window that looks down over the street. Almost inevitably he must have supposed that it was the watcher in the front of the house who had followed in his tracks.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Bredon. “I’m afraid, you see, when my wife went out of the room, she opened the door in that careless way she has, and three of my cards fell into the street below. Well, I thought Brinkman had disappeared; there was no sign of him. So I went downstairs and retrieved the cards, thinking it couldn’t do any harm. But I’ve been wondering since whether Brinkman wasn’t still watching, and whether my disappearance from the window didn’t give him the first hint that he was being followed. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Well, I don’t expect it made any difference. He was a cool hand, you see. I suppose he thought your sitting in the window must be a trap, and that the house was really watched at the back. He wasn’t far wrong there, of course.”
“Indeed he was not,” assented Mr. Pulteney. “You seem to me to have posted a singularly lynx-eyed gentleman in the stables.”
“And so, you see, he thought he’d brazen it out. He reckoned on being followed, but that didn’t matter to him as long as the man behind was a good distance off, and as long as he himself made sure of picking up his car at the right moment. The whole thing was monstrously mismanaged on my part. But, you see, I made absolutely certain that he was going for Mottram’s car, in which he’d obviously made all the necessary preparations. Even now I can’t understand how he consented so calmly to leave the car behind him. Unless, of course, he spotted that we were watching the garage, and knew that it would be unsafe. But he must be crippled for money without his thousand.”
“My husband,” said Angela mischievously, “seemed to know beforehand that he wouldn’t go off in Mottram’s car.”
“Yes, by the way,” asked Leyland, “how was that?”
“I’m sorry, it ought to have occurred to me earlier. It never dawned on me till the moment when I mentioned it, and of course then it was too late. But it was merely the result of a reasoning process which had been going on in my own mind. I had been trying to work things out, and it seemed to me that I had arrived at an explanation which would cover all the facts. And that explanation, though it didn’t exclude the possibility that Brinkman intended to skip with the thousand and the car, didn’t make it absolutely necessary that he should mean to.”
“I suppose you’re still hankering after suicide?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But, hang it all, though there’s little enough that’s clear, it’s surely clear by now that Brinkman was a wrong ’un. And if he was a wrong ’un, what can his motive have been throughout unless he was Mottram’s murderer? I don’t associate innocence with a
