“Yes, one, and a very bad one. In lifting the body out of the canoe, he allowed that purse to slip out of the pocket. That—with the photograph of the footprints on the bridge—put us on to the idea that there had been dirty work at the island. They meant us to think that the whole business had happened much lower down.”
“That’s true enough. And yet they dropped the films just opposite the middle of the island. Surely that must have been done on purpose?”
“Yes, but did they mean those films to mark the spot? I think they were meant to look as if they’d been dropped accidentally just anywhere, by a man making his way along the towpath.”
“Yes, that’s better. Wallace, then, joins the canoe, paddles it down, scuttles it, and makes off. He must have walked pretty hard to get back to his punt. Then he fools about asking questions till the hue and cry starts. That is his signal: late at night, when the hue and cry makes the river full of traffic to cover his movements, he gets a second canoe, paddles up to the island, on the weir-stream side of it, embarks the body, with or without Nigel, on the canoe, ferries it up to the weir, drags over the weir, and finally deposits the body somewhere above Shipcote. Two points remain obscure—what did he do with his punt? And where or how did he get hold of the second canoe? The answer to Number One may be found by searching the river bed. The answer to Number Two isn’t really difficult—there are lots of canoes here, and most of them were out that night, when the body was missing. It would be easy for Nigel to get one of them, and hand it over to his accomplice. That’s one of the things which makes me pretty certain that Nigel was in it all.”
“I should go steady over that, though. Old Quirk has got a quite different story about it.” And Bredon detailed the American’s speculations of the previous morning. “We haven’t yet found anything that makes it quite certain Nigel was in it. We can’t prove that Derek Burtell was already helpless when he passed through Shipcote Lock, though it looks very much as if he was. We can’t prove that there was a prearranged rendezvous with Wallace at the lock; he might, as Quirk suggests, have seen Nigel get off at that point, and seen that it would be an excellent opportunity for carrying off his design. We still don’t know why he took the photograph; it’s difficult to see what Wallace, or any stranger, could have gained by its existence. But we haven’t got the noose round Nigel yet, even if we succeed in finding him. Meanwhile, at the risk of being wearisome, I must insist that there are two things we haven’t accounted for.”
“I know one, sir,” broke in Angela, waving her hand over her head after the manner of an impetuous schoolboy in class. “The second notecase—how did it come to exist, and how did it come to fall into the river just there?”
“Second part doesn’t matter,” replied her husband. “If he had a second notecase, it might have been lying in the canoe, and fallen out when the canoe swamped. Or it might have been thrown in there as a blind. But we still don’t know why he had two.”
“And the other difficulty?” asked Leyland.
“We still don’t know who passed through Spinnaker Farm a little before a quarter-past nine that morning. Not Nigel, for it was out of his way. Not Derek, for he was dead. Not Wallace, for he couldn’t have got there in the time. That still worries me a good deal.”
“You’d better ask Mr. Quirk about it,” suggested Angela.
XV
A New Legacy
On the Saturday before the interview recorded in the last chapter, Mrs. Coolman, sister of the late Sir John Burtell, died quietly in her sleep.
I am sorry that so many characters in this story should appear only to disappear; but in this case, at least, no mystery hung over the circumstances. Mrs. Coolman was seventy-two years of age; she had been, for some time, in failing health; she died, unquestionably, of heart failure, and the medical certificate was signed accordingly. Her acquaintance with her great-nephews had been, as I have already indicated, of the slightest. Her atmosphere, her world, were not theirs; she had grown up, she had been wooed and won, in the great days of English respectability; her marriage with a Lancashire manufacturer had precipitated that respectability in an acute form; and if her brother, Sir John, irritated his grandsons by his fin de siècle point of view, it must be supposed that the sister’s attitude towards life would have been even less congenial. Derek and Nigel, therefore, never visited her after they reached the age of protest; and it might easily have been anticipated that they would pass out of her life altogether, in view of the company they kept and the uniform dissoluteness of their character.
Moreover, though a widow and childless, Mrs. Coolman was a mother by adoption. Her young protégé, Edward Farris, had been orphaned in infancy; it was she who had given him a home and provided for his education; she who had secured him an excellent commercial post; she who, soon afterwards, had insisted upon his resigning that post in order to live at Brimley House as her secretary and dance attendance upon her declining years. It was assumed as a matter of course by her friends, and perhaps by Farris himself, that
