“A discovery this morning? You never told me about that.”
“I was saving it up. Yes, Mr. Burgess, it seems, is neglecting his garden nowadays, and spends his odd time poking about in the lock-stream with one of those long hayfork things (you must have seen them) which watermen always have. Well, this morning he was prodding about off the island, just below the bridge, and, more by accident than by design, his hayfork came up with something that looked like a pouch on the end of it. It fell in again, but Burgess fished round and got it out again. Here it is.”
Leyland took out a green leather wallet, much faded and disfigured by water, which was clearly meant to contain Treasury notes. From its inner pocket he produced two five-pound notes—it was these that Mr. Quirk mistook for photographs. There was nothing else in the wallet.
“You know, that’s confoundedly interesting,” said Bredon. “I must say it looks as if that wallet had dropped off a genuine corpse. Imagine that there was no corpse—that Derek was simply doing the disappearing trick; it would surely have been possible to find a less expensive souvenir to leave lying about—a shoe, for example. And even if he had to jettison a purse, one note would have been quite enough to leave in it. Whereas wallets do fall out of pockets. But of course, we’ve no evidence that it was Derek’s at all.”
“Excuse me, we have. I telegraphed to his bank for the numbers of any notes he’d drawn out in the last three weeks, and these numbers were among them.”
“Come, that’s better. … The actual notes—and two of them. It certainly looks like an involuntary jettison. And that would presumably mean, either that he met somebody just below the bridge, and the wallet fell out, perhaps in the course of a struggle; or else that that was the exact spot at which the canoe toppled over and the body fell out. I can’t see any other way to it, unless it were sheer insane accident.”
“That’s about my own feeling. It’s not far, mark you, from the place where the tobacco-pouch was found, with the films in it.”
“There’s a little lad to see you, sir,” announced the landlady without warning.
Bredon had not been slow to cultivate the acquaintance of the boy scouts, and he had little doubt that it was one of these unofficial allies who was looking for him. It must surely mean a discovery. Excusing himself to Leyland, he hurried to the front door, and found his expectations justified. The matted hair proclaimed that his visitor had not been long out of the water; and the disorder of his clothes seemed to suggest that their resumption was only a reluctant sacrifice to the convenances. On his face was a broad smile, and in his hand a small, dark object.
“Found the gentleman’s money-purse, sir,” he said.
XI
Mr. Erasmus Quirk
“It’s no good,” said Leyland; “it doesn’t make the least little bit of sense. Don’t say that the second wallet didn’t really belong to Derek Burtell; that his card was put inside it for a ruse. That note is numbered continuously with the ones we found in the other wallet; all three were among the notes he took out of his bank about a fortnight ago. Two purses, one opposite the end of the island, one opposite the disused boathouse; two notes in one, Derek Burtell’s notes, one note in the other, Derek Burtell’s note, and a card, Derek Burtell’s card—what on earth has he or anybody else been up to?”
“No, you can search me. I’ve known men wear two handkerchiefs, or two watches, or two pipes; but never two purses. Besides, even if he did, what’s the good? Unless, indeed, one fell out in the course of a struggle or in some moment of excitement, while he was alive, and the other slipped from his pocket as his body rolled over into the river. That’s the nearest I can get, but it seems pretty fantastic.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” admitted Leyland. “Fantastic, but not impossible.”
“Yes, but you don’t realize the worst of it,” Bredon pointed out. “The place at which Burgess found the first wallet, just below the bridge of the island, wasn’t the place at which the canoe was scuttled.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Don’t I keep on telling you that a canoe with a hole that size in it could only float a few hundred yards before it got waterlogged? And that, once it’s waterlogged, it makes practically no headway at all, because it’s only got the stream to drift it, not the wind? The stream couldn’t possibly have floated the canoe down all that distance between (say) half-past nine and half-past one. So that you have to make two separate episodes in this mad canoe journey—one at the bridge, where the pouch was dropped, one lower down, where the boat was scuttled. It’s all too dashed untidy for words.”
“I’ll tell you what; I’m coming to feel that the only thing is to get on to Nigel Burtell’s tracks. Derek Burtell may be alive or dead; to go chasing round for him is possibly to make fools of ourselves. But Nigel Burtell is presumably alive; he’s done a clear bolt, which shows he’s got a guilty conscience—he must be able to tell us something. I believe we ought to devote ourselves to tracing him.”
“That’s all very well for you; but it’s not what I’m paid to do. If there’s been a murder, the Indescribable doesn’t care a tinker’s curse who did it; my job is to find Derek. But incidentally, there is surely one other
