“And that,” suggested the Bishop, “explains his intense eagerness that I should come down?”
“Precisely. He made certain, as best he could, that you would arrive here on the morning after him; that you would be told he had gone out to fish the Long Pool, and that you would be asked to follow him. This would ensure that you would be the first witness of his disappearance.”
“His what?”
“His disappearance. He meant to disappear. Not only for the sake of the test, I imagine; he wanted to disappear for the fun of the thing; to see what happened. He wanted to be a celebrity in the newspapers. He wanted to read his own obituaries. That was why he wrote, or rather got Brinkman to write, a letter to the Pullford Examiner, calling him all sorts of names—the letter was signed, of course, with a pseudonym. You found that out, didn’t you, Leyland?”
“Yes, confound it all, I heard only this morning that ‘Brutus’ was really Brinkman. But I never saw the point.”
“Then he sat down and wrote an unfinished letter in answer to these charges. That letter, of course, was to be found after his disappearance, and would be published in thick type by the Pullford Examiner. That would set everybody talking about him, and his obituary notices would be lively reading. He wanted to read them himself. But in order to do that he must disappear.
“The Chilthorpe gorge is a good place to disappear from. Leave your hat on the edge of it, and go and hide somewhere—you will be reported the next morning as a tragic accident. Mottram had made all arrangements for hiding. He was going to spend his holiday incognito somewhere; I think in Ireland, but it may have been on the Continent. He was going to take Brinkman with him. He would disappear, of course, in his car. He had victualled it before he left Pullford. On his arrival at Chilthorpe his first act was to paint out its numberplate. He hid some notes in the cushions of the car—that, I think, was a mere instinct of secretiveness; there was no need to do so.
“The plan, then, was this. On Tuesday morning, early, Mottram was to set out for the gorge. Almost immediately afterward, Brinkman was to take out the motor, as if to go to Pullford. He was to pick up Mottram, who would hide under the seat or disguise himself or smuggle himself away somehow, and drive like mad for the coast. Later, you, My Lord, would come to the Load of Mischief, and would get the message about going out to join Mottram at the Long Pool. In passing through the gorge, you would (I fancy) have found some traces there—Mottram’s hat, for example, or his fishing-rod; and your first thought would have been that the poor fellow had slipped in. Then, looking round, you would find this letter half-concealed on a high ledge. You would read it, and you would think that Mottram had committed suicide.
“And then—then you would either make the contents of this letter public or you wouldn’t. If Brinkman was right in his estimate, you would keep the letter dark; the death, before long, would be presumed. The Indescribable Company would have been on the point of paying out the half-million when—Mottram would have reappeared, and Your Lordship would have been in a delicate position. If Mottram was right in his view of your character, then you would produce the letter; Mottram’s death would be regarded as suicide, and the Indescribable would refuse all claims. Then Mottram would have reappeared, and would have seen to it that, in one way or another, the Pullford Diocese should be rewarded for the honesty of its Bishop.
“He was not really a very complete conspirator, poor Mottram. He made three bad mistakes, as it proved. Though indeed they would not have mattered, or two of them would not have mattered, if events had proceeded according to plan.
“In the first place, he went and wrote his name in the visitors’ book immediately on arrival. He wanted to leave no doubt that it was Jephthah Mottram in person who arrived at the Load of Mischief on Monday night. He wanted journalists to come down here and look reverently at the great man’s signature. Of course, in reality, it is a thing nobody ever does on the night of arrival. It has made me suspicious from the very first, as my wife will tell you.
“In the second place, when he took the precaution of drawing up a new will he neglected to sign it overnight. Brinkman, I suppose, pointed out to him that if any fatal accident occurred—say a motor accident—the codicil leaving the half-million to the Bishop would be perfectly valid. To avoid this danger they must have drawn up a new will, and if Mottram had signed this overnight his death would have made it valid. As it was, for some reason—probably because Brinkman himself was drawing it up (I think the writing is Brinkman’s) late on Monday night—the will was never signed and was useless.
“In the third place, he did something overnight which he ought to have left till the next morning. He not only wrote his confidential letter to the Bishop but he went out with Brinkman to the gorge and posted it—put it on the ledge ready for the Bishop to find next morning. He did not mean to go into the gorge at all the next morning. He would start out on the way to it, say, at eight, and at ten minutes past eight Brinkman, driving the car, would pick him up on the road. From the side of the road they could throw over Mottram’s hat, possibly, and they could slide his rod down the rocks, so as to make it appear that he had been there. (Brinkman, in this way, would establish an alibi; he could not be supposed to have murdered Mottram in the gorge.)
