“Surely you don’t believe that both cousins slept at Millington Bridge that night?”
“Well, we’ve no positive evidence about it except the fingermarks on the decanters. And those, of course, Nigel himself had just made, while we were looking at the window-frames.”
“Good Lord! My opinion of Mr. Quirk as a detective is going down; but I am beginning to think highly of him as a criminal.”
“It was a bad mistake he made, though. Of course, I never believed that those marks had been on the decanter the best part of a week. Grease! Why, he would have had to use plaster of Paris. I wonder that took you in, Leyland.”
“It all depends on whether you’re expecting a thing like that or not. I was perfectly taken in by Mr. Quirk, and I never dreamt that he could have made the fingermarks.”
“Anyhow, as I say, he made a mistake. Because, as you know, I had got the print of Nigel Burtell’s finger and thumb, and that told me exactly who Mr. Quirk was. All Saturday and Sunday, while you were away, I kept a keen eye on his movements. What worried me was the man’s audacity in coming to the very inn where I was staying. Then I found the book he’d been reading. Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year. If you’ve ever been old-fashioned enough to read that story, you will remember that the solicitors in it are Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap. That showed me where he’d taken the name from. And that showed me that he’d come to the Gudgeon quite carelessly, without even going to the trouble of inventing an alias before his arrival. In a word, he didn’t know I was at the Gudgeon at all—he had simply come there to watch proceedings. He wasn’t expecting the hotel people to ask him his name.”
“Yes, that’s pretty smart work. But why didn’t you let on to me, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Well, on the Saturday and Sunday you weren’t there, anyhow. And I’m afraid I must confess that I thought you might want to arrest him straight away, and spoil the little game I was playing with him. Have you ever noticed what happens if you catch sight of a rabbit before it catches sight of you, even at close quarters? If you stand absolutely still, the rabbit goes on feeding quite happily, and you can watch it for a long time. I enjoy doing that; I enjoyed doing the same thing with Mr. Quirk. I loved watching the skill with which Nigel Burtell posed as Mr. Quirk, and remembering the equal skill with which Mr. Quirk used to pose as Nigel Burtell. As long as you and I made no move, he wouldn’t run away; he was too vain for that. But the next day, yesterday, I confess that I did take liberties with you. I let Mr. Quirk go up to London.”
“To London?”
“Yes, by the three-twelve, and back by the four forty-five. That’s what he did when he went over to Oxford. I had misgivings about the whole thing; it seemed as if he might be doing a bolt. But somehow I felt convinced that he wouldn’t bolt now, because his game wasn’t fully played yet. He now had to create evidence, you see, that Derek didn’t die before Aunt Alma. So I risked letting him go away and manufacture his evidence. You’d have looked a pretty good fool if he had got away, because he was travelling on your train.”
“Confound you, I wish you wouldn’t take these risks.”
“Loyalty to employers, you see. You want to find a murderer. I want to find out whether there’s a corpse. For that purpose, it was worth while giving Nigel his head. If I hadn’t, we should never have known anything about White Bracton.”
“What do we know about White Bracton?”
“Why, that on Monday night Nigel addressed a letter to Derek at the inn there. In fact, we know for certain that Nigel, on Monday night, still believed his cousin to be alive, and believed he knew his address. That shows there was some hanky-panky about Nigel’s actions, and also about Derek’s intentions. When Angela has finished soothing the fevered brow, I hope to find out what.”
“It will be queer to hear Mr. Quirk not talking American.”
“It will be queer to think of him as not being an American. What an excellent disguise it was, after all! If we meet one of our own fellow-countrymen, a stranger, at an inn or in a railway-carriage, it is our instinct to want to know everything about him—what part of the country he comes from, what is his business, and so on. But an American we take for granted. We don’t want to hear what part of his country he comes from, because we know that we couldn’t place it on the map within a thousand miles. We are terrified of hearing all about his business. He is so ready to impart information that we never ask him questions.”
“Bredon, we’re beating about the bush. What each of us really wants to ask the other is whether he thinks Nigel Burtell is a murderer—or at least, a murderer’s accomplice. You say Nigel didn’t know where Derek was on Monday night, or he wouldn’t have written a letter to him at White Bracton. But you see as clearly as I do that it might all be part of his alibi; that he may have deliberately written that letter, and then deliberately led us on to find it, in the hopes of persuading us that he was entirely ignorant of his cousin’s death. Nigel Burtell is going to tell us his story—at least, if he doesn’t want to we shall find means to make him. But what we both want to know is whether the story he means to tell us is a
