“Still, you’ve got to give some account of those footmarks.”
“Oh, I’m not denying there’s been some hanky-panky at the bridge. Assuming, of course, that Mr. Burgess is telling the truth, and he doesn’t seem to me to have much imagination. I’m only here to establish a death, or if possible the absence of a death. So I’m only concerned with what Mr. Derek Burtell has been up to. But if I were the police, and if I hadn’t the singular fondness of the police for trying to find the body before you do anything else, I should be beginning to wonder what Mr. Nigel Burtell has been up to.”
“But his alibi is surely pretty sound.”
“It’s too sound, that’s the trouble. It looks so confoundedly like an alibi, if you see what I mean. He leaves the canoe with just twenty minutes to catch his train. He engages the lock-keeper in conversation about the exact time, so that the lock-keeper can swear not only to him but to the precise hour at which he left. Then he reappears here an hour or two later, and starts talking to the barmaid about the time—I found out that from her. Then he conceives some anxiety about his cousin—and why was he so anxious? Why did he set out almost expecting to find him drowned?—and he marches off up the river, not alone, mark you, but with an independent witness who can swear to his actions. I dare say it’s all right. I only get the impression that Mr. Nigel Burtell’s behaviour is a little too like an alibi to be true.”
“Do you always suspect a man if he’s got a good alibi?”
“No, but hang it all, there’s the motive here as plain as a pikestaff. I gather he wasn’t particularly fond of his cousin in any case. And he was the residuary legatee; he walks into the fifty thousand if his cousin is proved dead. On the other hand, it was necessary to do something pretty quick; because by September Derek is due to be twenty-five, and then the money all goes to the Jews. On the principle that motive is the first thing to go for, Mr. Nigel Burtell is the first man to come under suspicion. And his alibi has got to be pretty good wearing material. Though, as I say, it’s no business of mine.”
“What you mean is, you think Nigel Burtell slipped round to the wooded part of the island, waylaid his cousin, and murdered him just at the bridge; then he scuttled the canoe—why? Perhaps he thought it would sink, and so hide the traces. Then he ran back to the station and got there just in time for the train.”
“If so, the young gentleman is probably suffering from a cold. Half an hour’s journey in a railway carriage, when you are dripping wet in all your clothes, is trying to the strongest constitution. You seem to forget that he’s got to swim the weir stream.”
“But he could take off his clothes to do that.”
“And travel as a third-class faun? No, don’t say that men have swum rivers with their clothes balanced on their heads. I don’t deny that men have done it, but I’m quite sure Nigel Burtell never did. It’s a matter of practice. No, let us amend your proposition by suggesting that he crossed the weir by the bridge, ran up along the further bank of the weir-stream, stripped, swam across, ran through the wood, and so caught and murdered his cousin as he came past. That would explain why the marks on the bridge were the marks of naked feet.”
“That isn’t giving him very much time to do it in.”
“Exactly. It isn’t the running that is so apt to take up time; it’s the killing. A really tidy murder can seldom be arranged in the fraction of a second. Besides, what made him want to hop up on to a bridge? The sides are open, so he wasn’t hidden. Of course, if there were a body forthcoming, we might know more about the cause of death, and we might be able to see the point of the bridge. At present I can’t. But the time! It meant cutting the thing beastly close. It would be all right, perhaps, either to kill your man or to scuttle your boat, but could there be time for both?”
“Miles, I expect you’ll think me a most appalling fool, but I’ve got an idea.”
“I know what it is.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“Then you’d say you knew it was that. You tell me.”
“Then you’d say that was your idea.”
“Write it down, then.”
“We both will.” Miles scribbled a sentence on the back of an envelope, and Angela on a tiny memorandum sheet. Then the documents were exchanged.
“Yes,” said Miles, “I don’t think you’d better take to crime. I can read you like a book, can’t I? You know, your idea’s quite an ingenious one, and I dare say I didn’t think of it more than half an hour before you did. But it won’t do—you see that, don’t you?”
Angela seemed a little hurt. “You mean, who pushed off from the lock?”
“No, that might just be managed. But the distance—how is a wind, short of a hurricane, going to blow a canoe a hundred yards downstream in ten minutes? That’s where it doesn’t work.”
“I suppose not. Blow, it was rather a clever idea. Still, you’d got it too. I suppose you’re not going to release any theories, then? I know that mulish face of yours when you want to look sphinx-like.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had any expression of the kind.”
“Oh, but you have, dearest, it’s quite notorious. Only this afternoon, when you were paying for the tea, Mr. Burgess said to me, ‘Why does he look so sphinx-like,
