Carmichael’s Account of it
“Good Lord,” said Reeves, when the first shock of astonishment was
over, “tell us some more about it. How did you know?”
Carmichael joined the tips of his fingers and beamed at them, secure
of an audience at last. “Well, you’ve just admitted that all you can
remember about Davenant is hair and spectacles. That is, his disguise.
Of course the man wore a wig. He was a fictitious personality from
start to finish.”
“Except for his golf,” suggested Gordon.
“Yes, that was real enough; but Brotherhood’s wasn’t. Don’t you see
that the two characters are complementary, suspiciously complementary?
Brotherhood is here all the week, but never during the week-ends;
Davenant is only seen from Saturday to Monday. Davenant is Catholic,
so as to be violently distinguished from the atheist Brotherhood.
Davenant is good at golf; so Brotherhood has to be distinguished by
being very bad at golf, and that, to me, is the mystery of the whole
concern. How a scratch player could have the iron self-control to play
that rotten game all the week, merely to prevent our suspecting his
identity, beats me entirely. And yet you could find parallel
instances; old Lord Mersingham, for example——”
“Do you mean,” said Gordon in a shocked voice, “that Brotherhood
pulled his drives like that on purpose?”
“Precisely. After all, don’t you remember that day, let me see, I
think it was last February, when Brotherhood played for fifty pounds,
and went round in eighty-nine? Of course, there are flukes even in
golf. I remember myself——”
“Well,” said Gordon, “I think the Committee ought to do something
about it. Dash it all, I was his partner in the foursomes.”
“_De mortuis_,” suggested Reeves. “But I still don’t see why he wanted
to do it, I’m afraid. Why, the thing’s been going on for years.”
“Well, none of us know much about Brotherhood’s business; but I gather
from what people are saying about the bankruptcy that it was a pretty
shady one. They haven’t traced any hole in the accounts; but if there
ever was a man you would expect to go bankrupt and then skip (I
believe it is called) with what is described in such circumstance as
the boodle, that man was Brotherhood. He foresaw the probability of
this for years, and made very careful and subtle preparations for
meeting the situation. The important thing on such occasions is to
have an _alter ego_. The difficulty is to establish an _alter ego_ on
the spur of the moment. Brotherhood knew better. He had been working
up his _alter ego_ for years.”
“Right under our noses!” protested Reeves.
“That was the cleverness of it,” said Carmichael. “If there was a Mr.
Brotherhood at Paston Oatvile, and a Mr. Davenant every week-end at
Brighton, nobody would be deceived; it’s a stale old dodge to keep up
a double establishment in two different places. The genius of
Brotherhood’s invention was that he kept up two establishments within
a stone’s throw of each other. Nobody here could actually say that
he’d seen Brotherhood and Davenant together, that goes without saying.
But the two personalities were real personalities in the same world;
and there were hosts of witnesses who would declare that they knew
both. If Brotherhood suddenly ceased to exist, the last place where
anybody would thing of looking for him would be the house next door.”
“Good God, what a fool I’ve been!” said Mordaunt Reeves.
“The separate banking-account would be particularly useful to such a
man,” Carmichael went on. “If we could find out where Davenant banked,
I have no doubt that we should discover a substantial balance. But of
course, he wouldn’t bank here.”
“Why not?” asked Gordon.
“Because Brotherhood would want to deal with the local bank, and it’s
a very unsafe business making your signature in a forged writing. So
Davenant will have banked in London. By the way, that’s another point,
did you notice that Davenant always used a typewriter? He couldn’t
risk the use of a false handwriting.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” murmured Gordon to himself.
“Well, he knew when the crash was coming; it was all carefully
prearranged. He had even the impudence to book a sleeping car to
Glasgow.”
“But that’s a difficulty, surely,” put in Reeves. “Because he ordered
the sleeper not as Davenant but as Brotherhood. Now, you make out that
Brotherhood was to have disappeared, as from yesterday, and Davenant
was to have become a permanency. Why didn’t he order a sleeper in the
name of Davenant?”
“How often am I to tell you, my dear Reeves, that you are dealing with
a genius? If Davenant had ordered a sleeper just at that moment,
attention might have been directed to him. But ordering a sleeper for
Brotherhood would merely strengthen the impression that Brotherhood
had disappeared. If that was all—personally I believe the scheme was
even more audacious. I believe Davenant did mean to go away, for a
time at any rate, and by that very train. He would join it at Crewe,
travelling in an ordinary first-class carriage. Then at Wigan—bless my
soul!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Gordon.
“I find myself unaccountably unable to recollect whether the 7.30 from
Euston stops at Wigan. However, it will do for the sake of argument.
“At Wigan an anonymous passenger, Davenant, of course, would ask the
sleeping-car attendant whether he had a vacant berth. And the man was
bound to have a vacant berth—Brotherhood’s. There was one person in
the world whom nobody would suspect of being Brotherhood—the stranger
who had been accommodated, quite accidentally, with Brotherhood’s
berth.”
“It’s wonderful!” said Marryatt.
“But of course, all that is only speculation. Now we come to something
of which we can give a more accurate account—the plans which this
Brotherhood-Davenant made for the act of metamorphosis. I take it this
was his difficulty—Brotherhood and Davenant (naturally enough) do not
know one another. If Davenant walks out of Brotherhood’s office in
London, it will create suspicion—the change, then, must not happen in
London. If Davenant is suddenly seen walking out of Brotherhood’s
bungalow, that again will create suspicion; the change, then, must not
take place at Paston Whitchurch. The thing must be managed actually on
the journey between the two places. That is why Brotherhood-Davenant
wears such very non-committal clothes—hosiery by which, in case of
accident, he cannot be traced; the very handkerchief he takes with him
is one belonging to a stranger, which has come into his possession by
accident. He even has two watches, one to suit either character. Thus,
you see, he can be Brotherhood or Davenant at will, by slipping on a
wig and a pair of spectacles.
“He did not do anything so crude as to change once for all, suddenly,
from Brotherhood to Davenant at a given point on his journey. He
alternated between the two roles all along the line—I have always
wondered what is the origin of that curious phrase ‘all along the
line’; here I use it, you will understand, in a quite literal sense.
Davenant got out at Paston Oatvile—the porter saw him. But, as we now
know, it must have been Brotherhood who was travelling in the 4.50
from Paston Oatvile on. Yet it was as Davenant that he would have got
out at Paston Whitchurch.”
“How do you know that?” asked Reeves.
“The ticket, of course. Brotherhood had a season, naturally, for he
went up and down every day. At Paston Whitchurch, therefore,
Brotherhood would have produced a season. It was Davenant who needed
an ordinary single. The effect of all this was to create the
simultaneous impression that both Brotherhood and Davenant came back
to Paston Whitchurch that afternoon, and came by the same train. There
was only one hitch in the plan, which could hardly have been foreseen.
If Brotherhood happened to be murdered on the way, it would look very
much as if Davenant had murdered him. And unfortunately he was
murdered.”
“Then you don’t think it was suicide?” asked Marryatt, with a catch in
his voice.
“If it was suicide, it was the result of a momentary insanity, almost
incredibly sudden in its incidence. Suicide was certainly not part of
the plan. A bogus suicide was, of course, a conceivable expedient; it
would have been one way of getting rid of the undesirable
Brotherhood’s existence. But consider what that means. It means
getting hold of a substitute who looked exactly like Brotherhood—he
could not foresee the excoriation of the features—and murdering him at
unawares. It meant, further, that Davenant would be suspected of the
murder. No plan could have been more difficult or more clumsy.”
“Then you mean,” said Marryatt, “that we have to look for a murderer,
somebody quite unknown to us?”
“I didn’t say that,” replied Carmichael, with a curious look. “I mean
that we have to look for a murderer, some one whom we have not
hitherto suspected. If Davenant murdered Brotherhood, that was
certainly suicide; for Davenant was Brotherhood. But that seems to me
impossible. The evidence all goes to show that there was a very
careful plot in contemplation, which was cut short by a quite
unforeseen counterplot.”
“But look here,” said Reeves, “if the original plan had come off, did
he mean to come back here and live on here as Davenant?”
“You mustn’t expect me to know everything; I can only go by the
indications. But I should say that he really would have come back here
as Davenant, perhaps about three weeks later, and settled down
permanently at the Hatcheries; or perhaps even—he was a very
remarkable man—he would have bought up Brotherhood’s bungalow. You
see, he liked the place; he liked the company; the only thing he
disliked was having to play golf badly, and that necessity
disappeared, once he settled down as Davenant. A wig is a nuisance,
but so is baldness. The last place where anybody would look for Mr.
Brotherhood, last heard of on the way to Glasgow, would be Paston
Whitchurch, where Mr. Brotherhood had lived.”
“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” said Gordon, “one of Nature’s Watsons,
as I said yesterday. But what about all the silly little indications I
found at the Hatcheries an hour ago? Do they back up your theory, or
are they wide of the mark?”
“It’s all according to schedule,” explained Carmichael, “but for a
reason quite different from any you imagined. You must consider that
the things we really find it hard to change are not the important
things of life, our moral or religious or political standpoint, but
our common, daily habits of living. Brotherhood might be an atheist,
and Davenant a Catholic; Brotherhood a violent Radical, Davenant a
Diehard Tory. But every man has his own preference in razors and in
shaving-soap and in tooth-powder; and if you looked into the thing,
you would find that if Davenant used A’s shaving-soap, so did
Brotherhood; if Brotherhood used B’s tooth-powder, so did Davenant.
There lay the real danger of detection. There was just the danger that
somebody—shall we say, an interfering old don?—might hit upon the
truth of the secret, and make investigations. Accordingly, those
little traces must be obliterated. And they have been, for Davenant
was careful to take them away with him. And so has the photograph, a
photograph which, I suspect, had a duplicate in Brotherhood’s
house—you see, neither Brotherhood nor Davenant could live without
it.”
“But the collars and the socks? Surely nobody is so intimately wedded
to one particular type of collar——”
“A blind. Davenant was to look as if he were packing up to go away, so
he must take some clothes with him, not merely the shaving things.”
“But the towel and the soap? Surely they were not necessary to
complete the illusion?”
“No, they are even more significant. Davenant—don’t you remember?—had
rather darker eyebrows than Brotherhood. Quite easily done, of course,
with paint. But you want something to wash it off with; and there are
no corridors on the slow trains.”
“Yes, but look here,” objected Reeves, “why did he want to take all
these things away with him on Monday?—it was on Tuesday he was timed
to disappear—or rather, actually on Wednesday: his sleeper was for
Wednesday.”
“I don’t think he meant to sleep the Tuesday night at the Hatcheries.
He had transferred his base somewhere else—to London, I suppose—and
his visit to Paston Whitchurch, on the pretext of picking up something
he had left behind, was merely meant to establish, in our eyes, the
fact that he was a different man from Brotherhood.”
“There’s one more thing, though,” said Marryatt; “I’m afraid it’s a
kind of professional objection. Is it possible that a man who was
really an atheist would be at the pains to go over every Sunday to
Mass at Paston Bridge? Davenant, you see, was very regular about that.
Or, granted that he was really a Catholic, could he bring himself to
get up and preach atheist doctrines on the village green?”
Carmichael pulled a wry face. “I’m afraid, Marryatt, you are
altogether too confiding. Don’t you see that he was a Catholic, and
was doing the work of his own Church by turning the villagers against
you and your doctrines? Don’t you see that if he managed to make
atheists of your people, it would be all the easier for the priest at
Paston Bridge to make Romans of them?”
“In fact,” said Gordon, “what it comes to is this: we have got to look
for a criminal still; but it’s no use looking for Davenant?”
“You would be chasing a phantom,” said Carmichael.