“I say,” Angela interrupted suddenly, “Mottram seems to have visited this place pretty regularly, and always for the fishing season. There are some fine specimens of his signature; the last only written two days ago.”
“Eh? What’s that?” said Bredon. “Written his signature in already, had he? Any date to it?”
“Yes, here it is, ‘J. W. Mottram, June 13th to’—and then a blank. He didn’t know quite how long he would be staying, I suppose.”
“Let’s see. … Look here, that’s all wrong, you know. This isn’t a hotel register; it’s just a visitors’ book. And people who write in a visitors’ book don’t write till the day they leave.”
“Necessarily?”
“Invariably. Look here: look at Arthur Stump. You can see from his style and his handwriting what a meticulous fellow he is. Well, he came here on May twenty-first, and stayed till May twenty-six. The Wilkinsons came here a day later, on the twenty-second, and left on the twenty-fourth. But the Wilkinson entry comes first, and that’s because they left first, don’t you see? And here is Violet Harris doing the same; she puts her name before the Sandeman party. Look at Mottram’s entry last year. He didn’t leave a blank then, and fill in his date of departure afterward; you can always tell when a thing is filled in afterward because the spacing is never quite exact. No; Mottram did something quite foreign to his habit when he wrote June thirteenth to blank, and quite foreign to the habits of everyone I know.”
“You get these little ideas sometimes. No; you can’t have tea till you come and sit at the table. I don’t want you sloshing it about all over the place. Now, what can have been the idea of writing that entry? Nobody wanted proof that he’d been there. Could it be a forgery, done from last year’s entry? That would mean that it isn’t Mottram upstairs at all, really.”
“We shall know that soon enough. … No; there’s only one idea that seems to me to make sense. He came to this place knowing that he was never going to leave it alive. And consequently he wanted to put an entry in the book which would make it look as if he had been paying just an ordinary visit, and was expecting to leave it alive. People will never see that they’re overreaching themselves when they do that kind of thing. It’s absurd to go on such slight indications, but so far as I can see the presumption is this: Mottram meant to commit suicide, and meant to make it look as if he hadn’t.”
“The date’s all right, I suppose?”
“Bound to be. No sense in falsifying it when it could always be verified from the bill. Landladies have a habit of knowing what night guests arrived.”
“Let’s see, then. He arrived on the thirteenth; and he was found dead in the morning, that’s yesterday morning, Tuesday. The thirteenth was Monday—he’d only been here one night.”
“Well, we’ll hope we can find all that part out from the secretary. I don’t much want another hour of Mrs. Davis. Meanwhile, let’s see if you can knock any more out of that teapot; I’m as thirsty as a fish.”
IV
The Bedroom
They did not escape another dose of Mrs. Davis, who appeared soon afterward to announce that the big room upstairs was ready for them, and would they step up and mind their heads please, the stairs were that low. It was indeed a rambling sort of house, on three or four different levels, as country inns are wont to be; it did not seem possible to reach any one room from any other without going down and up again or up and down again. At the head of the stairs Mrs. Davis turned dramatically and pointed to a door marked “5.” “In there!” she said, the complicated emotion in her voice plainly indicating what was in there. To her obvious confusion the door opened as she spoke, and a little, dark man, whom they guessed then and knew afterward to be the secretary, came out into the passage. He was followed by a policeman—no ingenuity could have doubted the fact—in plain clothes. Bredon’s investigations were ordinarily made independently of, and for the most part unknown to, the official champions of justice. But on this occasion Fate had played into his hands. “By Gad!” he cried, “it’s Leyland!”
It was, and I will not weary the reader by detailing the exclamations of surprise, the questionings, the reminiscences, the explanations which followed. Leyland had been an officer in the same battalion with Bredon for more than two years of the war. It was at a time when the authorities had perceived that there were not enough well-dressed young men in England to go round, and a Police Inspector who had already made a name for efficiency easily obtained commissioned rank; with equal ease he returned to the position of an Inspector when demobilized. Their memories of old comradeship promised to be so exhaustive and, to the lay mind, so exhausting, that Brinkman had gone downstairs and Angela Bredon to their room long before it was over; nay, Mrs. Davis herself, outtalked for once, retired to her kitchen.
“Well, this is A1,” said Leyland at last. “Sure to be left down here for a few days until I can clear things up a bit. And if you’re working on the same lay, there’s no reason why we should quarrel. Though I don’t quite see what your people sent you down for to start with.”
“Well, the man was very heavily insured, you know; and, for one reason or another, the company is inclined to suspect suicide. Of course if it’s suicide it doesn’t pay up.”
“Well, you’d better lie low about it and stay on for a few days. Good for you and Mrs. Bredon to get a bit of
