“Oh, I’ve no theories about it, but even from what the papers print you can see it isn’t a straightforward case. It’s a frame-up of some kind, that’s the trouble. It wears all the air of a frame-up, and that means that somebody’s been covering his traces, and we’ve got to find out who, where, and why.”
“But why a frame-up?”
“Why, don’t you see, the whole thing’s a little too good to be true. The canoe-trip’s all right; Simmonds is always recommending it. But why should Mr. Derek Burtell take his cousin, whom apparently he loathed, on a tour of that kind? Nothing puts two people at closer quarters than a week on the river. It doesn’t look right, their going together.”
“But they weren’t together when the accident happened.”
“I know, and why weren’t they? That’s all wrong, too. All the week, while they’re together, Derek Burtell is at liberty to throw as many fits as he pleases. But he doesn’t—he waits till his cousin is out of the way, and then conks out. Meanwhile, the cousin isn’t permanently out of the way; he comes back again just in time to be in at the death.”
“Sure you’re not being fanciful?”
“Woman, I’m never fanciful. I have no instincts, no premonitions, no unaccountable intuitions. I just see the logic of the thing, nothing else. And I say that all this is just a little too good to be coincidence. Remember, too, that it happens on one of the loneliest parts of the river; that it happens in the morning, the one time when there wouldn’t be any fishermen about. These young men, you see, had been up the river and were coming down again; they had had full opportunity to explore the ground beforehand. No, somehow, somewhere, it’s a put-up job.”
“But what kind of a job? Suicide? I know how fond you are of the suicide theory.”
“Suicide doesn’t work. A canoe’s a perfectly sensible kind of boat to go out in if you want to commit suicide, more particularly if you want to let on that it’s an accident. Nobody can say, ‘How could he have managed to fall out?’ if you’re in a canoe. But, just for that reason, we’ve no sort of use for a canoe with a hole in the bottom. If you want to drown, the simplest way is to drop into the water and have done with it, not to lie in a scuttled canoe feeling the water gradually come up and soak your bags. I don’t believe there’s anybody who could commit suicide in such a cold-blooded way as that. On the other hand, if he did just jump into the water and drown, leaving the canoe to mark the spot, why didn’t he leave the canoe afloat properly—or waterlogged if you like, but at least without a hole in the bottom? Assuming that he wants to make the thing look like accident, that’s the very way to advertise the fact that he did it on purpose.”
“Holmes, I seem to see what you are hinting at. We’re on the tracks of a murder, after all.”
“No, confound it, the murder idea is wrong too. The Upper River is the last place where you’re likely to meet an old acquaintance with a grievance and a shotgun. If it was to be murder, it would have to be this Nigel who’s responsible, and that doesn’t do. For it must have been the other one, Derek, who proposed the canoe trip. It’s asking too much of coincidence to suppose that the murderee deliberately put himself, for a whole week, at the disposal of the murderer. Of course, we’ve got to take the possibility into account. But I don’t like the possibility.”
“Disappearance, then? The Mottram touch? It might have been worth his while.”
“Yes, but if you want to disappear, you want to disappear in an orderly and unobtrusive sort of way; you want to get clear before anybody notices a gap in the ranks of Society. You don’t want people scouring round after you; you don’t want the papers making a stunt of it next morning; you don’t want to have the bows of your canoe stove in, so that the police might think you were murdered. That idea fits in with bits of the story—the deliberate way, for example, in which the cousin appears to leave him for two or three hours unaccompanied. But the bottom of the canoe seems to knock the bottom out of it. No, it’s no use worrying, we must have a good look round before we try to go any further. I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a good thing to buy half a dozen canoes in Oxford, just to try experiments with.”
“We’re not going to stay in Oxford, then? You know, you haven’t been very communicative.”
“Not if we can get a room at this inn by Eaton Bridge. The nearer the spot the better. It must be about twenty-four hours now since the thing happened, and I don’t want the scent to get cold if I can help it. Besides, I want to get the atmosphere of the place. Oxford’s all wrong.”
“I just thought you might be going to interview this cousin person. He must be about in Oxford still.”
“I doubt if the young gentleman shares your admiration for me, Angela. What right have I got to go and interview him? I can’t send up a card with ‘Indescribable Company’ marked on it, as if I’d come to see about the electric light. The Company prefers to remain anonymous in these cases. Unless I can scrape an acquaintance with him by accident, the cousin will have
