It was not only on the Upper River, or in the neighbourhood of Oxford, that the search went on. Photography has made it possible for us all, wherever we are, to join in the criminal-hunt; and that peculiarly blurred impression which reproduction in a daily paper superinduces on a photograph has added zest to the sport—there is scarcely any stranger whom you cannot, by a stretch of imagination, identify with the wanted man. So far as Nigel was concerned, the police were in a difficulty. Nigel, though he affected the camera himself, could never be induced to sit for it. No portrait of him was forthcoming except a photograph taken when he was seven, and a Futurist sketch by a friend in Chelsea which might equally well have represented any other man, woman, or ant-heap. But Derek’s portrait was forthcoming, and was printed in thousands of papers, with the most encouraging results. Imaginary Dereks were held up at Aberdeen, at Enniskillen, and at Bucharest; all three had to be released with profuse apologies. A well-known medium published the fact that Derek was dead; but happy, very happy. Unfortunately, on the same day a rival medium announced that Derek was alive and well, but had lost his memory. Which put revelations, for the moment, at a discount.
But this worldwide publicity hardly affected the persons genuinely concerned. What was more serious was that one or two gentlemen of leisure had apparently set their hearts on solving the mystery; and these showed every sign of infesting the district permanently. One of them, a Mr. Erasmus Quirk, took rooms at the Gudgeon itself on the Thursday, a short time before Leyland’s arrival, and it looked as if the Bredons would have to live at close quarters with him. That Mr. Erasmus Quirk was an American, his pronunciation of our common speech gave ample evidence. His personal aspect hardly lived up to his speech, apart from the ritual horn spectacles. One’s impression of our male visitors from the United States is that they are all very fine and large, with square shoulders and a certain attitude of domination. Mr. Quirk seemed to be a little weed of a man, who stooped so that you almost put him down for a hunchback; his face was very pale, and disfigured by a yellow blotch on the left cheek; his hair closely cropped, so that it revealed to the full a little tonsure of apparently premature baldness. Every movement of his was unobtrusive; his hands were glued in his coat pockets; and—a rare gift among his compatriots—he seemed altogether disinclined for company.
He was not allowed, however, to indulge whatever disinclination he may have felt. Angela had an inexhaustible capacity for acquaintance with strangers; it did not matter if they were boring strangers—she collected bores. She had that useful habit of enjoying an interview in retrospect which makes it possible to sit through hours of conversational tedium. Mr. Quirk had got to be brought out of his shell, and he came out obediently after dinner. Angela sat knitting, with that air of pleased attention which only knitting can give, in the intolerably chaste drawing-room of the Gudgeon, while Mr. Quirk poured out his artless confidences. He was, it seemed, a member of the Detective Club of America; and it was his duty to write up a detective mystery of some kind before the fall, as a condition of his membership. He had been vegetating at Burford, not far off, when the newspapers put him wise to the Burtell mystification; and it was a matter of little difficulty to pack his traps and proceed to the scene of action. He invited Angela to say whether it wasn’t just an extraordinary piece of luck. It was his conjecture that he might have gone round Europe on all fours with a magnifying glass without managing to strike oil like this. In the States they had a very great admiration for the methods of detection used over here; he could assure Mrs. Bredon that every development in the Burtell case was being followed with the very greatest interest by every paper on the other side. He didn’t suppose Mrs. Bredon quite understood the way he felt about it; but it seemed to him just extraordinary the way the police in England allowed every fool of an amateur to get busy over a case like this; why, in Chicago it was to be surmised that the civilian population would be being held up with revolvers at a barrier. It was just another instance of the remarkable hospitality you always got from the British nation.
To all this monologue Angela paid a demure attention, and it was not until Mr. Quirk began speculating whether he owed the presence of such delightful companions as Mr. and Mrs. Bredon to the tragedy recently reported in the locality that she was suddenly faced with the necessity of disclosures on her own part. It would be absurd to deny that Miles was interested in the case; his daily proceedings would have given a ready lie to the statement. She fell back, therefore—I am afraid it was her custom—on a misleading series of half-truths; her husband had been remotely acquainted with the young man who had disappeared, and certain business friends had urged him, since he was at leisure, to apply what diligence he could to the solution of the mystery. His was not in any sense an official errand. And so the difficulty was tided over, with a minimum of prevarication and a minimum of enlightenment.
Mr. Quirk assured her that he would be the last person to jump another man’s claim in any way, but he would esteem it a very great privilege if Mrs. Bredon could inform him, without any breach of confidence, what was generally thought to have been the exact scene of the tragedy.
