The Footsteps at the Lock

was with an unpleasant sense of being “for it” that he entered the loathed portals of Indescribable House. I will not attempt to give any word-picture of the upstairs room into which he was shown, for that would be to suggest that I was familiar with it, whereas neither you, reader, nor I are ever likely to be shown up beyond the second floor, even if either of us is lucky enough to be insured with this admirable Company. Somewhere in the vast labyrinth of the third floor Bredon disappeared from sight; we may listen at the keyhole, if you will, but profane eyes must not peep through it. I picture gold ashtrays lying about on the tables, real oak panelling, and one or two Rubenses on the walls; but perhaps I exaggerate. Anyhow, here it was that he was closeted with Sholto, an important cog in the business and a personal friend; with Dr. Tremayne, too, that eminent practitioner who had been so highly paid to leave off saving life, and devote his talents to prophesying the probabilities of death.

Bredon was given something to smoke. I suppose a two-and-sixpenny cigar. “It’s about this Burtell business,” said Sholto.

“Oh Lord, not that! I read about it in the paper as I came up. I was really delighted to notice how mysterious the circumstances were. I assure you, there is nothing more refreshing to my mind than not solving mysteries. Do you mean to tell me that the Company was involved?”

“It was. It’s a matter of fifty thousand.”

“Fifty thousand be hanged! Let ’em sack the under-porter and call it quits. How did this Burtell manage to pay his premiums, anyhow? I know people who know him, and I always understood that he was never supposed to pay for anything.”

“It wasn’t he who paid the premiums; it was his creditors. They sent a deputation round here about it; I tell you, it was like the Flight from Egypt. You see, he’d been raising heavy loans, and he couldn’t touch his money till he was twenty-five. That’s where we came in.”

“And how old is he, or was he?”

“Policy’s only got two months to run.”

“Good Lord! Sounds like old Mottram again. What was all this about weak health, doctor? You vetted him, I suppose?”

“Weak health, my dear Bredon, isn’t in it. The man was a wreck. I’ve never seen anybody who’d gone the pace so thoroughly.”

“Punch? Or Judy?⁠—as Father Healy used to say.”

“Oh, anything you like. But this last year or two he’d been drugging. When I saw him, he’d obviously more or less reached the line of perpetual snow. And his heart was all to pieces. I wouldn’t have given him two years; but then, we only insured him up to twenty-five. Simmonds said the same. He did his best for him, and tried to pull him round a bit.”

“Was it Simmonds who suggested this canoe-trip?”

“Yes, it’s a fad of his. I think Simmonds must get a commission from the Thames Conservancy; they’d never keep their locks in repair without him.”

“Well, he’d better recommend bath-chairs in future. What does he say about this heart-failure business?”

“Oh, it’s all right; it’s perfectly possible. If Burtell had been slacking for a bit, say, and had suddenly tried to put on speed, he might quite easily have had a seizure, fallen over sideways, capsized the boat, and there he is at the bottom, with the Company responsible for fifty thousand.”

“Seems to me my job is to save Simmonds’ character. What about hocus-pocus, Sholto⁠—you know, the disappearing trick?”

“It’s possible. I’ve fished on the Thames before now, and it’s possible to go miles, sometimes, without meeting a soul. But how was the fellow going to do it? You see, the money would go to the cousin; and it’s quite certain that there wasn’t any love lost between them. Why should Mr. Derek Burtell obligingly disappear, to let Mr. Nigel Burtell come in for a nice legacy?”

“What sort of fellow is this Nigel? He wasn’t inset.”

“We’ve made inquiries, and he seems to be a pretty poisonous sort of worm. Fifty percent aesthete and the rest devil, I should say. But there are no convictions against him for murder so far, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, we seem to be in with a gaudy crowd. Seems to me the Company ought to engage a parson to inspect people’s morals before we insure them. What exactly am I expected to do?”

“Oh, go down to the Upper Thames and look about for cigarette-ends. Not such a bad place either, at this time of year. If they fish out a corpse, it’s all up. If they don’t we shall have to presume death after a time, unless you can produce the man alive, or evidence that he was alive on September the third. It doesn’t do for the Indescribable to keep people waiting. If I were you, I’d go down at once, because the papers have given the thing big headlines, and there’s the hell of a lot of trippers will be coming up the Thames before long. It’s good for you, you know; it’ll take down your fat. I wish I could be there, to see you diving in the mud on the spot marked with an X. Well, go to it. Them’s orders.”

Bredon sent his wife an urgent request to pack and picked her up at the cottage. It was she who drove (while he, as he said, did the thinking) on the motor-infested journey to Oxford. “I don’t like it, Angela,” he said, as he sat beside her. “I feel as if it was going to be the beast of a complicated business.”

“It may be your idea of a complicated business, it’s not mine. All you and I have got to do is to lounge about the Upper River in a canoe until the watermen dig out the body. It’s a long time, you know, Miles, since you took me out in a canoe. I shouldn’t wonder if my service arm