“Do you know,” said Angela, “I believe I prefer Nigel to Derek.”
“Well, it was Derek doped; so perhaps we oughtn’t to be too hard on him. At the lock, Nigel acted precisely as he told us the other day; and, on Derek’s suggestion throughout, he acted precisely like a man who is interested in establishing an alibi. He went out of his way by Spinnaker Farm; he asked questions about the time, and so on. Meanwhile, Derek had given the canoe one shove to get it out of the lock, and lay doggo until he heard Burgess walk away. Now was his time to finish his preparations.
“Film Number Five on the spool had not been exposed. Something must be done with it, and it was an opportunity for doing something ingenious. Nigel was quite truthful when he told me that his cousin was fond of trick photography. He took, on Number Five, what appeared to be an accidental exposure, but was really a deliberate snapshot of his own footprints on the bridge—footprints which he had deliberately made, in order to suggest that somebody had been standing on the bridge with bare feet to photograph the corpse. What precise inference he meant us to draw from the footprints I don’t know. He certainly didn’t expect that Burgess would come along and see the footprints themselves. But there was one thing he had to be careful about. Derek Burtell had hammertoes; Nigel hadn’t. And, oddly enough, it was in looking to see whether Nigel had that I found out about Derek. Their foot-statistics were close together at Wickstead’s, on opposite sides of the same page. That was when I really cottoned on to its being Derek who worked the whole plant. So Derek only left the marks of his heels and insteps.
“He paddled down a short way, and then left, on the bank, those traces which you and I, Leyland, investigated so credulously. He wormed himself along on his back through the bracken, careful to make dragging marks with his boots. He lay flat on the clay bank, taking good care that one button should leave its impress. He paddled round the end of the island into the weir-stream, driving his canoe hard into the bank so as to make a start. He made a single track, walking, between the weir-stream and the clay bank. He crossed the weir-stream, and left the film lying about for somebody to find. I forgot to say that he had already dropped his notecase in the lock-stream, so as to look as if it had fallen out when his corpse was lugged ashore. In fact, I think he meant to create the exact impression which the various clues did create, Leyland, on you and me.”
“Yes. I’m going to meet Mr. Derek Burtell, if I have to search every dosshouse on the Continent of Europe.”
“Then he paddled across the main stream to the Byworth bank. Before he turned the canoe adrift he managed, probably with one of those composite penknives, to dig a tiny hole in the bottom of the canoe. That, of course, was perfectly inconsistent with his main plan; in the given circumstances, the supposed murderer would have been a fool to do anything of the kind. What he calculated on, I suppose, was that the hole in the canoe would immediately produce in everybody’s mind the impression of foul play—as indeed it would have, if Nigel hadn’t doctored the hole when he found it. Derek himself went off in the Byworth direction, leaving the impression that he had been murdered by Nigel at Millington Bridge or above it, ferried down next morning to Shipcote, photographed from the bridge and lugged ashore at the island, retrieved somehow and smuggled away later in the day. It was a fantastic impression; but then, as I say, this wasn’t a deep plot laid by a cunning schemer; it was an opium-dream.
“I dare say he had actually left some luggage at Oxford, but that won’t help us, for we don’t know under what name it was left. In any case he must have taken train at Oxford, I suspect for Southampton. That meant crawling across country by Didcot and Newbury, instead of risking the possibility of a recognition in London. And there, I suppose, he would take ship to Havre.”
“And his passport?” asked Leyland. “You mean that he—”
“Yes, he’d provided himself with a passport, rather ingeniously. When he went up to make plans with Nigel, Nigel was just getting a passport, and he wanted an amateur photograph of himself. He asked Derek to do it, and Derek, foreseeing his own need of a passport, took three photographs of Nigel, and got Nigel to take three of himself, in exactly the same pose, on the same plates. (Nigel, of course, didn’t realize this.) It was only one chance in a thousand, but one of the films did come out, as you can see, a perfect composite photograph. The photograph was sufficiently like Nigel to deceive the College chaplain. It was sufficiently like Derek to deceive the passport authorities at Havre. It was with that passport, then, that he got away. Of course, this was long before any hue and cry had been made over either cousin. What he’s done since I don’t know, but as the passport is visa’d for France and Belgium, I suppose he’s in one or the other. Perhaps, if you circulate the news
