A Visitor from Pullford
When they came into the coffee room, Bredon had the instantaneous
impression we all get occasionally that the room was too full. Then,
on disentangling his sensations, he was delighted to find that the
newcomer was Mr. Eames, who was exchanging a word or two with
Brinkman, though he seemed not to have been introduced to the others.
“Good man!” said Bredon. “I don’t think you met my wife, did you? This
is Mr. Pulteney . . . it was very good of you to keep your promise.”
“As it turned out, I should have had to come in any case. The Bishop
had to go off to a confirmation, so, when he heard the funeral was
down here, he sent me to represent him. You see, we heard from the
solicitors about our windfall—I suspect you were keeping that dark,
Mr. Bredon—and he was very much touched by Mr. Mottram’s kindness. He
wished he could have come, Mr. Brinkman, but of course a confirmation
is a difficult engagement to get out of.”
“I really knew nothing about the will when I came over to Pullford,”
protested Bredon. “I’ve heard about it since, of course. Can I offer
my congratulations to the diocese, or would it look too much like
gifts from the Greeks?”
“Nonsense; you serve your company, Mr. Bredon, and none of us bears
you any ill-will for it. I hope, by the way, I have not been
indiscreet in mentioning the subject?” he glanced for a moment at the
old gentleman. “The Bishop, of course, has not mentioned the matter
except to me, because he quite realizes there may be legal
difficulties.”
“I can keep a secret as well as most men,” explained Pulteney. “That
is to say, I have the common human vanity which makes every man like
to be in possession of a secret; and perhaps less than my share of the
vulgar itch for imparting information. But you know Chilthorpe little,
sir, if you speak of discretion in the same four walls with Mrs.
Davis. I assure you that the testamentary dispositions of the late Mr.
Mottram are seldom off her lips.”
There was a fractional pause, while everybody tried to think how Mrs.
Davis knew. Then they remembered that the matter had been mentioned,
though only incidentally, at the inquest.
“To be sure,” said Eames. “I have met Mrs. Davis before. If it is true
that confession lightens our burdens, the _Load of Mischief_ must sit
easily on her.”
“I’m so glad they haven’t changed the name of the inn,” observed
Angela. “These old-fashioned names are getting so rare. And the _Load
of Mischief_ is hardly an encouraging title.”
“There used,” said Eames, “to be an inn in my old—in the parish where
I lived—which was called ‘_The Labour in Vain_.’ I sometimes thought
of it as an omen.”
“Are you of the funeral party, Mr. Pulteney?” asked Leyland, seeing
the old gentleman dressed in deep black.
“There is no hiding anything from you detectives. Yes, I have promised
myself the rustic treat of a funeral. In the scholastic profession
such thrills are rare; they make us retire at sixty nowadays. My lot
is cast amidst the young; I see ever fresh generations succeeding to
the old, filling up the gaps in the ranks of humanity; and I confess
that when one sees the specimens one sometimes doubts whether the
process is worth while. But do not let me cast a gloom over our
convivialities. Let us eat and drink, Mrs. Davis’s ‘shape’ seems to
say to us, for to-morrow we die.”
“I hope I oughtn’t to have gone,” said Angela. “I’d have brought my
blacks if I’d thought of it.”
“Without them, you would be a glaring offence against village
etiquette. No, Mrs. Bredon, your presence would not be expected. The
company needs no representatives at the funeral; more practical, it
sheds golden tears over the coffin. For the rest of us it is
different. Mr. Eames pays a last tribute to his diocesan benefactor.
Mr. Brinkman, like a good secretary, must despatch the material
envelope to its permanent address. For myself, what am I? A fellow
wayfarer in an inn; and yet what more is any of us in this brief
world? No, Mrs. Bredon, you are exempt.”
“Oh, do stop him,” said Angela. “How did you come down, Mr. Eames?”
“By the midday train, a funeral pageant in itself. Was Mr. Mottram
much known in the neighbourhood?”
“He is now,” replied Mr. Pulteney, with irrepressible ghoulishness.
“The victim of sudden death is like a diver; no instinct of decency
withholds us from watching his taking-off.”
“I don’t think he had any near relations living,” said Brinkman,
“except young Simmonds. He’ll be there, I suppose; but there wasn’t
much love lost between them. He will hardly be interested, anyhow, in
the reading of the will.”
“By the way, Mr. Brinkman, His Lordship asked me to say that you will
be very welcome at the Cathedral house, if you are detained in
Pullford at all.”
“It is extremely kind of him. But I had wound up all Mr. Mottram’s
outstanding affairs before he came away for his holiday, and I don’t
suppose I shall be needed. I was thinking of going up to London in a
day or two. I have to shift for myself, you see.”
“Have some coffee, Eames,” suggested Bredon; “you must need it after a
tiring journey like that.”
“Thanks, I think I will. Not that I’m tired, really. It makes so much
difference on the railway if you are occupied.”
“You don’t mean to say you are one of those fortunate creatures who
can _work_ in railway trains?”
“No, not work. I played patience all the way.”
“Patience? Did I hear you say patience? Ah, but you only brought one
pack, of course.”
“No, I always travel with two.”
“Two? And Mr. Pulteney has two! Angela, that settles it! This
afternoon I shall have a game.”
“Miles, dear, not _the_ game? You know you can’t play that and think
of anything else at the same time. Mr. Eames, would you mind dropping
your packs in the river? You see, it’s so bad for my husband; he sits
down to an interminable game of patience, and forgets all about his
work and everything.”
“You don’t understand, Angela; it clears the brain. When you’ve been
puzzled over a thing, as I have been over this question of suicide,
your brains get all stale and used up, and you must give them a fresh
start. A game of patience will just do the trick. No, no milk, thanks.
Would you tell Mrs. Davis”—this was to the barmaid—“that I shall be
very busy all the latter part of this afternoon, and mustn’t be
disturbed on any account? It’s all right, Angela; I’ll give you half
an hour now to remonstrate with me, but it won’t be any use.”
It was not, as a matter of fact, till after the funeral party had
left, and the coffin been removed, that Miles and Angela foregathered.
They went to the old mill-house, feeling that it would be a safe place
for confidences now that Brinkman was otherwise engaged. “Well,” said
Angela, “I suppose you’re wanting some Watson work?”
“Badly. Look here, one of us, either Leyland or I, is beginning to
feel the strain a bit. Everything that crops up makes him more and
more determined to have Simmonds’s blood, and me more and more
inclined to stick to my old solution.”
“You haven’t been doubling that bet again, have you?”
“That’s a detail. Look here, I must tell you all about his find this
morning.” And he proceeded to explain the whole business of the piece
of paper, and Leyland’s inferences from it. “Now,” he finished up,
“what d’you make of all that?”
“Well, he has got a case, hasn’t he? I mean, his explanation would
explain things.”
“Yes, but look at the difficulties.”
“Let’s have them. No, wait a minute, I believe I can do the
difficulties. Let’s try a little womanly intuish. First, you’d have
noticed the piece of paper if it had been there when you went in.”
“Not necessarily. It’s wonderful what one can overlook if one isn’t
thinking about it.”
“Well, then, Simmonds wouldn’t have been such a chump as to burn the
thing on the spot. Especially with a foul smell of gas in the room,
not to mention the corpse. He’d have shoved it into his pocket and
taken it home.”
“There’s a good deal in that. But Leyland would say that Simmonds was
afraid to do that for fear he should be stopped and searched.”
“Pretty thin. And, then, of course, if it was really important for him
to get the document out of the way, he wouldn’t have left a bit lying
about. He’d have seen that it was _all_ burnt.”
“Leyland says that was because he was in a hurry.”
“Well, let’s have some others. I’m used up.”
“Well, don’t you see that a man who is burning an important document,
holding it in his hand all the time, takes it up by the least
important corner, probably a blank space at the top? This is the work
of a man who wasn’t particularly keen on destroying all traces of the
document, and he held it by the bottom right-hand corner, as one
naturally would.”
“Why not the left hand, and the match in one’s right? Ha! The
left-handed criminal. We _are_ in luck.”
“Don’t you believe it. You start holding it at the left-hand corner,
and then transfer it to your right hand when you’ve thrown the match
away. You try, next time you’re burning your dressmaker’s bill. And
here’s another point: Simmonds would have been bound to stand with his
head right in the window, to keep clear of the gas fumes. Almost
certainly he would have put the paper down on the window-sill and let
it burn, leaving one of those curious damp marks. He didn’t, because I
should have been bound to notice that; I was looking for marks on the
window-sill. If he held it in his hand, he would be holding it outside
the window, and he wouldn’t be such a chump as to throw away the odd
corner in the room when he could pitch it out of the window. Another
thing: he wouldn’t have dared to burn a light at the window like that
for fear of attracting attention.”
“Well, I still think my objections were more important. But go on.”
“Well, since that piece of paper wasn’t dropped in the room before
Leyland and I went into it—probably not, anyhow—it looks as if it had
been dropped in the room since Leyland and I went into it. Or, at any
rate, since the first police search. Because the room has been kept
locked, one way and another, since then.”
“There was no deceiving this man.”
“Which makes it very improbable that the piece of paper was dropped
there by accident at all. Anybody who went in there had no business to
go in there, and would be jolly careful not to leave any traces. We
are therefore irresistibly compelled, my dear Angela, to the
conclusion that somebody dropped it there on purpose.”
“That firm grasp of the obvious. Yes?”
“He put it there deliberately to create an impression. Now, it might
be to create the impression that Simmonds was the murderer. To whose
advantage would that be?”
“Mr. Leyland’s.”
“Angela, don’t be flippant. Is there anybody?”
“Well, Mr. Simmonds hasn’t any enemies that we know of. Unless it was
somebody who was disappointed in the quality of his handkerchiefs.
What you _want_ me to say is, that it must be somebody who has
murdered Mottram himself, and wants to save his skin by pretending it
was Simmonds that did it.”
“I’m dashed if I want you to say that. In fact, it’s just what I
didn’t want you to say. Of course if you assume that Mottram was
murdered by Brinkman, it does all work out, most unpleasantly well.
You see, when Leyland and I were sitting here, talking at Brinkman,
who was hiding behind the wall, Leyland did say that the only thing
which prevented him from arresting Simmonds was the fact that he’d no
evidence to connect him with the actual room. I could see what he was
up to—he wanted Brinkman to take the hint (assuming, of course, that
he was the real murderer) and start manufacturing clues to incriminate
Simmonds. Well, it looks very much as if Brinkman had taken the hint,
and were doing identically what Leyland suggested. Curse it all.”
“Still, it was clever of Brinky to get in when the door was locked.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. I wouldn’t put it beyond Brinkman to have a
duplicate key of that door. . . . No, I’ve nothing to fall back on
really except the absence of motive. What earthly reason had Brinkman
for wanting to do Mottram in? Or rather, I have one other thing to
fall back on. But it’s not evidence; it’s instinct.”
“As how?”
“Why, don’t you see that the whole thing works out too beastly well?
Isn’t it rather too obviously a ruse? I mean, that idea of dropping a
piece of paper with only half a dozen words on it, and yet those
half-dozen words shewing exactly what the document was? Isn’t it
rather too obviously a plant?”
“But it was a plant, if Brinky put it there.”
“Yes, but isn’t it _too_ obviously a plant? So obviously, I mean, that
you couldn’t expect anybody, even Leyland, to think for a moment that
it was genuine? Can Brinkman really have thought that Leyland wouldn’t
see through it?”
“But if he didn’t think so”——
“Double bluff, my good woman, double bluff. I can tell you, crime is
becoming quite a specialized profession nowadays. Don’t you see that
Brinkman argued to himself like this: ‘If I leave an obviously faked
clue lying about like this, Leyland will immediately think that it is
a faked clue, used by one criminal to shove off the blame on another.
Who the criminals are, or which is which, doesn’t matter. It will
convince him that there has, after all, been a murder. And it will
disguise from him the fact that it was suicide.’ Of course all that’s
making Brinkman out to be a pretty smart lad. But I fancy he is a
pretty smart lad. And I read that piece of paper as a bit of double
bluff, meant to harden the ingenious Leyland in his belief that the
suicide was a murder.”
“Ye-es. It’ll look pretty thin before a jury, won’t it?”
“Don’t I know that it’ll look thin before a jury? Especially as, on my
shewing, Brinkman was prepared to let suspicion of murder rest on
himself rather than admit it was suicide. But it does give us a
motive. There’s no doubt that Brinkman is a fanatical anti-clerical,
and would do anything to prevent Mottram’s money going to a Catholic
diocese. . . . I say, what’s that?”
A sudden sneeze, an unmistakable sneeze, had come from somewhere
immediately behind them. In a twinkling Bredon had rushed round to the
other side of the wall. But there was nobody there.