Mr. Derek Burtell is the son of the late Captain John Burtell, killed on active service in France. Educated at Simon Magus College, Oxford, he has recently been living in London, where the mystery of his fate will be felt with keen sympathy by a large circle of friends.
An insurance policy against accident free with every copy of this paper.
So far the ephemeral chronicler; and if anybody thinks it is easy to write that kind of English, he does less than justice to the men who make their living by it. A few details may be added to complete the picture. The spot at which the canoe was found was perhaps some three miles down from Shipcote Lock, close to a disused boathouse on the western bank. The hole in the bottom of the canoe had jagged, splintered edges, as if it had been freshly made—there was no question of an old piece of caulking having come loose. The difficulty, unanimously expressed by a solemn crowd of watermen who inspected it, was how so deep a cut could be made by mere impact against a piece of shingle. It was difficult to imagine how it could be done even if the canoe was being paddled at full speed; here it was probable that the pace was quite leisurely, even if the boat itself was not drifting at the time of the catastrophe. The owner of the canoe insisted that he had no reason to think it faulty; and indeed its appearance showed that it was almost new. The two paddles were floating near the hat. Derek’s luggage was found waterlogged in the canoe.
Eager bands of amateur detectives searched along either bank, and far back into the woods, to find any trace of the missing man, but with no success. If he had landed on the left bank, he would naturally have made for the village of Byworth, which was only half a mile from the spot; but none of the villagers, none of the labourers in the fields, had seen any trace of him. The further bank was more lonely (it was too early in the day for fishermen to be out), but there was an encampment of boy scouts a little lower down, and it was unlikely that they would have let a dripping stranger go past unnoticed. Before the end of the day the most optimistic of the bystanders admitted that they were out to find a corpse.
Nigel went back to Oxford by the last train. He had, of course, communicated with the police; there were no parents to communicate with—indeed, it was the melancholy fact, in spite of the journalist’s polite reference, that there was not a soul in the world who mourned for Derek dead, or cared whether Derek lived. He had made innumerable acquaintances, but no friends. There was nothing to be done, then, except to wait for news; and from this point of view Oxford was as good a place for Nigel as any; there was his viva, too, on the morrow; and he had in any case to spend a day or two packing up before he left the beautiful city, “breathing out,” as he said to himself, “from her gasworks all the disenchantment of middle age.” Reporters, no doubt, would be a nuisance, and even the police might want to ask questions—if Derek’s body were found, there would be all the fuss and discomfort of an inquest. He must make up his mind to go through with it. “It’ll be experience for you,” said one of the dons, vaguely enough; but this was poor consolation. Nigel held that nothing distorts one’s vision in life like experience.
IV
The Indescribable Has Its Doubts
When I said that no human soul mourned Derek dead or cared whether Derek lived I spoke too hastily; I should have excepted the Indescribable. To a Company with such vast assets, the sum needed to cover Derek’s policy was of course a mere drop in the ocean. But (it has been finely said) business is business; just as a prudent housewife will waste hours tracing a missing sixpence in the accounts sooner than pay in sixpence from her own purse, so the Indescribable would set agencies to work sooner than lose the paltry sum of fifty thousand pounds. It was a matter of principle.
In this illiterate age, it is perhaps too much to expect that my reader is familiar with the name of Miles Bredon. I must, therefore, at the risk of being tedious to the better-informed, remind the public that Miles Bredon was the agency which the Indescribable always set to work on such occasions; he was their very own private detective, paid handsomely to do their work for them, and paid still more handsomely to do nobody else’s. The employment, naturally, was an intermittent one, which exactly suited the indolence of the man’s taste—his round of golf, an evening spent over his favourite and unintelligible form of patience, his country cottage, and the unstated companionship of his really admirable wife, this was all Bredon asked, and this, for some months at a stretch, would be all that he got. Then there would be a loss of fashionable jewels, a fire in an East End warehouse, and Bredon, greatly protesting, would be launched out anew upon that career of detection for which he had so remarkable an instinct, and so profound a distaste.
He had been summoned up to London for an emergency interview, and it
