Bredon began to regret his role of pouch-loser; it would hardly be decent to show too much interest in the stranger. “I expect that was the gentleman I passed myself yesterday morning. About nine o’clock it would be; a young, dark-haired gentleman, with no hat on. I’m glad to know he caught the train, for he looked to me as if he were going to miss it.”
“That would be the one, sir.” Bredon did not venture on any closer examination. He hurried back down the path, unrolling the package as he went. It proved to be a spool of camera-films—one that had been used and rolled up by unskilful hands. “That,” he said to himself, “might be much worse. That might be very much worse.” And he thrust it away into an inner pocket.
“Well,” he asked, as he executed a kind of back somersault into the canoe, “how’s that for a day’s outing? You obviously are the complete river-girl; your disguise takes in everybody. I suppose, after all that, we shall hear at Eaton Bridge that they’ve fished up the corpse, and it’s no business of ours how it got there.”
“They’ll fish up at least two corpses if you try to get into the boat like that again. Well, what did you think of the Burgess theory? I thought him rather splendid. Of course, I may have been just carried away by his eloquence. But it seemed to me he was the complete detective. I was wondering whether you and he couldn’t swap jobs; I could do the gardening part, and I suppose you could manage to sit backwards on to a lock-gate till it opened. I’m sure the Indescribable would find Mr. Burgess a goldmine.”
“Oh, of course Burgess is all wrong. Anybody could see he’s talking through his hat. No, don’t ask me why just now; ask me after dinner. I want to try and work the thing out myself a bit. I wonder if the Gudgeon has such a thing as a darkroom?”
VI
The Archimedes Touch
The Gudgeon Inn is the sort of institution that only exists for the sake of people who see life in inverted commas. Externally it is just like a thousand other inns; the creaking signboard, the modest lintel-announcement of the licence, the perspective of doors and passages that greets you as you enter, show no promise of disillusionment. But once you are really inside, you know the difference. The dining-room has no muslin curtains, there is no bamboo firescreen; the tables are not covered with ashtrays and saltcellars advertising beer and mineral waters; there is no vast, unwieldy sideboard heaped with unnecessary coffeepots. The tables are of fumed oak, and the flower-vases on them are of modern crockery in a daring orange; the sideboard is real Elizabethan, and serves no purpose whatever, any more than the three large pewter plates which rest upon it, obviously straight from an old curiosity shop. There are no stuffed animals in glass cases, no sentimental pictures with explicit legends in the manner of the later nineteenth century; no strange seashells on the mantelpieces, no horsehair sofas, no superannuated musical-boxes. The walls are very bare and beautifully whitewashed; a few warming-pans and some mezzotints are all their ornament; there are open fireplaces with brightly polished dogs, tiled floors, rush mats, wooden coal-scuttles with archaic mottoes carved on them. In a word, the inn has been recently “done up.”
“It isn’t an inn,” Bredon was complaining to his wife over their evening meal; “it’s an old-world hostelry, and it irritates me. I believe they expected us to dress for dinner; there isn’t any commercial room, only a place they call the Ingle Nook; I can’t find a dartboard anywhere, or an antimacassar. Their idea of a beer-mug is a thing you stick up on a shelf and look at.”
“It’s such a pity you’ve no taste,” suggested Angela.
“Taste? Who wants taste in a country pub? You can get taste in your own drawing-room. A country pub ought to grow up anyhow; with grandfather clocks that really belonged to grandfathers, and a spotty piano all out of tune, and sham flowers and things. Don’t you see that this kind of thing isn’t natural?”
“Well, switch off the art-criticism and do a little brain work. Tell me why poor old Burgess is all wrong about the drowning mystery.”
“Oh, that? Well, in the first place, as I said this morning, what’s the use of the hole in the canoe? If the man isn’t really drowned, but wants us to think he is, why doesn’t he pretend the canoe just tipped over on one side and swamped? They often do.”
“It only surprises me that they don’t do it oftener. But go on.”
“Here’s another improbability—Burtell’s got a weak heart. Tremayne’s vetted him, and Simmonds has vetted him, and they both know what they’re talking about. Now, Burgess wants us to believe that that man pulled himself up by the arms from a canoe on to the top of a bridge, and then, probably, swam the stream. If he did do either of those things, it was suicide all right for a man with a heart like Burtell’s. And that brings up a further point—why should he want to leave the boat just there, such a short way down the lock stream? If he’d only held on another half-mile or so, he’d have got past the junction where the weir stream flows in, and then he could land and make tracks for the station without crossing any branch of the river at all. Again, Burgess found the prints of a naked foot. What on earth did Burtell want to go and take off his shoes and socks for? He’d want them when he got
