“I had no moral scruples about the suggestion, but I hesitated a little at the idea of breaking the law in order to enrich a fellow like Derek. But it appealed to my pocket, and it appealed to my sense of adventure. We struck the bargain, and then he began to talk to me about the details. This canoe trip, he said, was providential; it was quite easy to disappear when you went out on the river, and the police would drag it for a fortnight, and then say you were dead. I said I thought most bodies of people drowned in the Thames were recovered, but he assured me there would be no difficulty so far as that was concerned. And I must say he had worked out the plan very ingeniously. That was the extraordinary thing, because Derek, you know, was always a bit of a chump. I think it was that dope he used to take which had given him the idea; while its effect lasted, it really made Derek quite lively, and his brain worked like a two-year-old.
“The great trouble about disappearing, he said, was that you couldn’t actually hide in a haystack; you must still go about and meet people, but of course under an alias. And the difficulty of an alias was that it began just where your old self left off—Derek Burtell disappeared, if you see what I mean, and immediately Mr. X came into existence. A clever detective would spot that; would connect the facts and put two and two together. To avoid that difficulty, you must make your alias overlap with your real self. Mr. X must come into existence at least a day before Derek Burtell disappeared. You see the idea? And he had a sound way of working the scheme. When we reached our last stage, at Millington Bridge, I was to go up to the inn twice in succession, pretending to be two different people; I was to sleep in two beds, wash in two basins, get through two breakfasts, and pay two bills. So that everybody would take it for granted we had both slept at Millington Bridge. Meanwhile, he would totter off to White Bracton, a mile or two away, and establish himself there as a Mr. H. Anderton, a commercial traveller, or something of that sort. (He wasn’t sure, he said, whether we shouldn’t finish up on a Sunday, and if we did, of course it wouldn’t look well to be a commercial.) The point of the plan was that Mr. Anderton would come into existence on (say) Sunday night, and Derek Burtell wouldn’t disappear till Monday. Who would be likely to connect the two, when everybody assumed that Derek Burtell spent the night at Millington Bridge, and we could prove that Mr. Anderton spent it at White Bracton?
“All that we carried out. I left him at Millington Bridge, and did the two-headed man trick, while he sloped off. Next morning he met me a little way down below the bridge, and asked me if it had all gone off all right. White Bracton, he said, was a pretty putrid hole, but he got a shakedown at the inn; still, he felt awfully sleepy. So we went on down to Shipcote Lock; it was still quite early in the morning, and there was nobody about much, though we passed one man in a punt.”
“Excuse me one moment,” Bredon interrupted, “but did you really take a photograph of Burgess, the lock-keeper?”
“Of course I did. You showed it me, didn’t you? The last one that came out on that spool; the other two were fogged.”
“Did you never expose the last two, then?”
“I didn’t, but Derek may have. You see, while we were in the lock, just when I was going off to the station, Derek shouted up that I might as well leave him the camera, and then he could finish up the spool if he saw anything worth taking. So I gave it him.”
“You’re contradicting, aren’t you, what you told me at Oxford—that you must have dropped the films near the station?”
“Yes. I thought it best to say that, because I couldn’t imagine how the films got there, and I thought it might lead to awkward inquiries.”
“One more question before you go on. Did you throw the camera down, or did you go down the steps and hand it to your cousin?”
“Went down and handed it to him. Derek couldn’t catch for nuts. Then he pushed off from the bottom of the steps, and I crossed the weir bridge and took the path for the station. We had agreed that I must have a perfect alibi, so that I should know nothing about his disappearance. I got the exact time from the lock-keeper. I looked round to see somebody on the way to the station, so that he could swear to me. But there was nobody; and so—it was a suggestion Derek had made—I cut through the hedge on my left, and went through a sort of farm place that was quite out of my way, really—there were certain to be people about there, Derek said. I only saw one old lady in a top window, but I took off my hat to her, so that she’d remember my passing through.
“I had dawdled purposely, so as to be able to catch the train at the last moment; that was another of Derek’s ideas. If I travelled without a ticket, he said, I could own up to the man at the barrier in Oxford station, and he’d have to sell me a ticket, so he’d remember about it afterwards, and cover my alibi. That worked out all right. Then, of course, my Viva was going to cover the next stage of
