Chapter IV.The BedroomThey did not escape another dose of Mrs. Davis, who appeared soon afterward to announce that the big room upstairs was ready for them, and would they step up and mind their heads please, the stairs were that low. It was indeed a rambling sort of house, on three or four different levels, as country inns are wont to be; it did not seem possible to reach any one room from any other without going down and up again or up and down again. At the head of the stairs Mrs. Davis turned dramatically and pointed to a door marked “5”. “In there!” she said, the complicated emotion in her voice plainly indicating what was in there. To her obvious confusion the door opened as she spoke, and a little, dark man, whom they guessed then and knew afterward to be the secretary, came out into the passage. He was followed by a policeman—no ingenuity could have doubted the fact—in plain clothes. Bredon’s investigations were ordinarily made independently of, and for the most part unknown to, the official champions of justice. But on this occasion Fate had played into his hands. “By Gad!” he cried, “it’s Leyland!”It was, and I will not weary the reader by detailing the exclamations of surprise, the questionings, the reminiscences, the explanations which followed. Leyland had been an officer in the same battalion with Bredon for more than two years of the war. It was at a time when the authorities had perceived that there were not enough well-dressed young men in England to go round, and a Police Inspector who had already made a name for efficiency easily obtained commissioned rank; with equal ease he returned to the position of an Inspector when demobilized. Their memories of old comradeship promised to be so exhaustive and, to the lay mind, so exhausting, that Brinkman had gone downstairs and Angela Bredon to their room long before it was over; nay, Mrs. Davis herself, outtalked for once, retired to her kitchen.“Well, this is Al,” said Leyland at last. “Sure to be left down here for a few days until I can clear things up a bit. And if you’re working on the same lay, there’s no reason why we should quarrel. Though I don’t quite see what your people sent you down for to start with.”“Well, the man was very heavily insured, you know; and, for one reason or another, the company is inclined to suspect suicide. Of course if it’s suicide it doesn’t pay up.”“Well, you’d better lie low about it and stay on for a few days. Good for you and Mrs. Bredon to get a bit of a holiday. But of course suicide is right off the map.”“People do commit suicide, don’t they, by leaving the gas on?”“Yes, but they don’t get up and turn the gas off and then go back to bed to die. They don’t open the window, and leave it open”——“The gas turned off? The window opened? You don’t mean”——“I mean that if it was suicide it was a very rum kind of suicide, and if it was accident it was a very rum kind of accident. Mark you, I’m saying that to you; but don’t you go putting it about the place. Some of these people in the inn may know more about it than they ought to. Mum’s the word.”“Yes, I can see that. Let’s see, who were there in the house? This secretary fellow, and the old gentleman I saw down by the river, I suppose, and Mrs. Davis and the barmaid and the Boots—that’s all I’ve heard of up to now. That’s right, keep ’em all under suspicion. But I wish you’d let me see the room; it seems to me there must be points of interest about it.”“Best see it now, I think. They’re going to fix up the corpse properly to-night; so far they’ve left things more or less untouched. There’s just light enough left to have a look round.”The inn must at some time have known better days, for this room was generously proportioned, and could clearly be used as a bed-sitting room. But the wall-paper had seen long service; the decorations were mean, the furniture shabby; it was not the sort of accommodation that would attract a rich man from Pullford but for the reputation the place had for fishing and, perhaps, the want of any rival establishment. Chilthorpe, in spite of its possibilities of water-power, had no electric light; but the inn, with one or two neighbouring houses, was lighted by acetylene gas from a plant which served the vicarage and the parish hall. These unpleasant fumes, still hanging in the air after two days, were responsible, it seemed, for the tragic loading of the bed which stood beside them.To this last, Bredon paid little attention. He had no expert medical knowledge, and the cause of death was unquestioned; both the local man and a doctor whom the police had called in were positive that the symptoms were those of gas poisoning and that no other symptoms were present; that there were no marks of violence, no indications even of a struggle; the man had died, it seemed, in his sleep as if from an overdose of anæsthetic. Beside his bed stood a glass slightly encrusted with some whitish mixture; Bredon turned toward Leyland with an inquiring look as his eye met it.“No good,” said Leyland. “We had it analysed, and it’s quite a mild sort of sleeping draught. He sometimes took them, it seems, because he slept badly, especially in a strange bed. But there’s no vice in the thing; it wouldn’t kill a man however heavily he doped himself with it, the doctor says.”“Of course it explains why he slept so soundly and didn’t notice the gas leaking.”“It does that; and, if it comes to that, it sets me wondering a little. I mean, supposing it was murder, it looks as if it was done by somebody who knew Mottram’s habits.”“If it was murder, yes. But if itwassuicide, it’s easy to understand the man doping himself, so that he should die off more painlessly. The only thing it doesn’t look like is accident, because it would be rather a coincidence that he should happen to be laid out by a sleeping draught just on the very night when the gas was left on. I’d like to have a look at this gas.”There was a bracket on the wall, not far from the door, which originally had been the only light in the room. But for bed-sitting room purposes a special fitting had been added to this giving a second vent for the gas; and this new vent was connected by a long piece of rubber tubing with a standard lamp that stood on the writing-table near the window. There were thus three taps in all, and all of these close together on the bracket. One opened the jet on the bracket itself, one led to the rubber tubing and the standard lamp and the third was the oldest and closest to the wall, serving to cut off the supply of gas from both passages at once. This third main tap was turned off now; of the other two, the one on the bracket was closed, the one which led to the standard lamp stood open.“Is this how the taps were when the body was first found?” asked Bredon.“Exactly. Of course we’ve turned them on and off since to make certain that the jets were both in working order. They were, both of them. And we tried the taps for finger-prints—with powder, you know.”“Any results?”“Only on the main tap. We could just trace where it had been turned on, with the thumb pressing on the right-hand side. But there were no marks of fingers turning it off.”“That’s damned queer.”“Gloves?”“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it should have been the murderer who turned it onandoff. Why did he conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”“Well, as a matter of fact, it was Mottram who turned the gas on. At the main, that is. The tap of the standard seems to have been on all the time, at least there were no marks on it. That’s queer too.”“Yes, if he wanted it to be known that he committed suicide. But if he didn’t, you see, the whole business may have been bluff.”“I see, you want it to be suicide masquerading as accident. I want it to be murder masquerading as suicide. Your difficulty, it seems to me, is explaining how the tap came to be turned off.”“And yours?”“I won’t conceal it. The door was locked, with the key on the inside.”“How did anybody get in, then, to find the corpus?”“Broke down the door. It was rotten, like everything else in this house, and the hinges pulled the screws out. You can see, there, where we’ve put fresh screws in since.”“Door locked on the inside. And the window?” Bredon crossed to the other side of the room. “Barred, eh?” It was an old-fashioned lattice window with iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized approach. The window itself opened outward, its movement free until it reached an angle of forty-five degrees; at that point it passed over a spring catch which made it fast. It was so made fast now that Bredon examined it.“This too?” he asked. “Was the window just like this?”“Just like that. Wide open, so that it’s hard to see why the gas didn’t blow out of doors almost as soon as it escaped; and there was a high wind on Monday night, Pulteney tells me. And yet, with those bars, it seems impossible that any one should have come in through it.”“I think you’re going to have difficulties over your murder theory.”“So are you, Bredon, over your suicide theory. Look at that shirt over there; the studs carefully put in overnight; and it’s a clean shirt, mark you; the outside buttonholes haven’t been pierced. Do you mean to tell me that a man who is going to commit suicide is going to let himself in for all that tiresome process of putting studs in before he goes to bed?”“And do you mean to tell me that a man goes out fishing in a boiled shirt?”“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class theory. I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey, merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.”“Well, grant the point; why shouldn’t a man who wants to commit suicide put studs in his shirt to make it look as if it wasn’t suicide? Remember, it was a matter of half a million to his heirs. Is that too heavy a price for the bother of it?”“I see you’re convinced; it’s no good arguing with you. Otherwise, I’d have pointed out that he wound up his watch.”“One does. To a man of methodical habit it’s an effort to leave a watch unwound. Was he a smoker?”“Brinkman says not. And there are no signs of it anywhere.”“The law ought to compel people to smoke. In bed, especially—we should have got some very nice indications of what he was really up to if he had smoked in bed. But I see he wasn’t a bedroom smoker in any case; here’s a solitary match which has only been used to light the gas—he hasn’t burnt a quarter of an inch of it.”“That match worries me too. There’s a box on the mantelpiece, but those are ordinary safeties. This is a smaller kind altogether, and I can’t find any of them in his pockets.”“The maid might have been in before him and lighted the gas.”“They never do. At least, Mrs. Davis says they never do.”“It was dark when he went to bed?”“About ten o’clock, Brinkman says. You would be able to see your way then, but not much more. And he must have lit the gas, to put the studs in his shirt—besides, he’s left some writing, which was probably done late that night, though we can’t prove it.”“Writing! Anything important?”“Only a letter to some local rag at Pullford. Here it is, if you want to read it.” And Leyland handed Bredon a letter from the blotting-pad on the table. It ran:To the Editor of thePullford Examiner:Dear Sir:Your correspondent, “Brutus,” in complaining of the closing of the Mottram Recreation Grounds at the hour of sevenp.m., describes these grounds as having been “presented to the town with money wrung from the pockets of the poor.” Now, Sir, I have nothing to do with the action of the Town Council in opening the Recreation Grounds or closing same. I write only as a private citizen who has done my best to make life amenable for the citizens of Pullford, to know why my name should be dragged into this controversy, and in the very injurious terms he has done. Such recreation grounds were presented by me twelve years ago to the townspeople of Pullford, not as “blood-money” at all, but because I wanted them, and especially the kiddies, to get a breath of God’s open air now and again. If “Brutus” will be kind enough to supply chapter and verse, showing where or how operatives in my pay have received less pay than what they ought to have done——At this point the letter closed abruptly.“He wasn’t very handy with his pen,” observed Bredon. “I suppose friend Brinkman would have had to get onto this in the morning and put it into English. Yes, I know what you’re going to say: if the man had foreseen his end he either wouldn’t have taken the trouble to start the letter or else he’d have taken the trouble to finish it. But I tell you, I don’t like this letter—I say, we must be getting down to dinner; attract suspicion, what, if we’re found nosing round up here too long? All right, Leyland, I won’t spoil your sport. What about having a fiver on it—suicide or murder?”“I don’t mind if I do. What about telling one another how we get on?”“Let’s be quite free about that. But each side shall keep notes of the case from day to day, putting down his suspicions and his reasons for them, and we’ll compare notes afterward. Ah, is that Mrs. Davis? All right, we’re just coming.”
They did not escape another dose of Mrs. Davis, who appeared soon afterward to announce that the big room upstairs was ready for them, and would they step up and mind their heads please, the stairs were that low. It was indeed a rambling sort of house, on three or four different levels, as country inns are wont to be; it did not seem possible to reach any one room from any other without going down and up again or up and down again. At the head of the stairs Mrs. Davis turned dramatically and pointed to a door marked “5”. “In there!” she said, the complicated emotion in her voice plainly indicating what was in there. To her obvious confusion the door opened as she spoke, and a little, dark man, whom they guessed then and knew afterward to be the secretary, came out into the passage. He was followed by a policeman—no ingenuity could have doubted the fact—in plain clothes. Bredon’s investigations were ordinarily made independently of, and for the most part unknown to, the official champions of justice. But on this occasion Fate had played into his hands. “By Gad!” he cried, “it’s Leyland!”
It was, and I will not weary the reader by detailing the exclamations of surprise, the questionings, the reminiscences, the explanations which followed. Leyland had been an officer in the same battalion with Bredon for more than two years of the war. It was at a time when the authorities had perceived that there were not enough well-dressed young men in England to go round, and a Police Inspector who had already made a name for efficiency easily obtained commissioned rank; with equal ease he returned to the position of an Inspector when demobilized. Their memories of old comradeship promised to be so exhaustive and, to the lay mind, so exhausting, that Brinkman had gone downstairs and Angela Bredon to their room long before it was over; nay, Mrs. Davis herself, outtalked for once, retired to her kitchen.
“Well, this is Al,” said Leyland at last. “Sure to be left down here for a few days until I can clear things up a bit. And if you’re working on the same lay, there’s no reason why we should quarrel. Though I don’t quite see what your people sent you down for to start with.”
“Well, the man was very heavily insured, you know; and, for one reason or another, the company is inclined to suspect suicide. Of course if it’s suicide it doesn’t pay up.”
“Well, you’d better lie low about it and stay on for a few days. Good for you and Mrs. Bredon to get a bit of a holiday. But of course suicide is right off the map.”
“People do commit suicide, don’t they, by leaving the gas on?”
“Yes, but they don’t get up and turn the gas off and then go back to bed to die. They don’t open the window, and leave it open”——
“The gas turned off? The window opened? You don’t mean”——
“I mean that if it was suicide it was a very rum kind of suicide, and if it was accident it was a very rum kind of accident. Mark you, I’m saying that to you; but don’t you go putting it about the place. Some of these people in the inn may know more about it than they ought to. Mum’s the word.”
“Yes, I can see that. Let’s see, who were there in the house? This secretary fellow, and the old gentleman I saw down by the river, I suppose, and Mrs. Davis and the barmaid and the Boots—that’s all I’ve heard of up to now. That’s right, keep ’em all under suspicion. But I wish you’d let me see the room; it seems to me there must be points of interest about it.”
“Best see it now, I think. They’re going to fix up the corpse properly to-night; so far they’ve left things more or less untouched. There’s just light enough left to have a look round.”
The inn must at some time have known better days, for this room was generously proportioned, and could clearly be used as a bed-sitting room. But the wall-paper had seen long service; the decorations were mean, the furniture shabby; it was not the sort of accommodation that would attract a rich man from Pullford but for the reputation the place had for fishing and, perhaps, the want of any rival establishment. Chilthorpe, in spite of its possibilities of water-power, had no electric light; but the inn, with one or two neighbouring houses, was lighted by acetylene gas from a plant which served the vicarage and the parish hall. These unpleasant fumes, still hanging in the air after two days, were responsible, it seemed, for the tragic loading of the bed which stood beside them.
To this last, Bredon paid little attention. He had no expert medical knowledge, and the cause of death was unquestioned; both the local man and a doctor whom the police had called in were positive that the symptoms were those of gas poisoning and that no other symptoms were present; that there were no marks of violence, no indications even of a struggle; the man had died, it seemed, in his sleep as if from an overdose of anæsthetic. Beside his bed stood a glass slightly encrusted with some whitish mixture; Bredon turned toward Leyland with an inquiring look as his eye met it.
“No good,” said Leyland. “We had it analysed, and it’s quite a mild sort of sleeping draught. He sometimes took them, it seems, because he slept badly, especially in a strange bed. But there’s no vice in the thing; it wouldn’t kill a man however heavily he doped himself with it, the doctor says.”
“Of course it explains why he slept so soundly and didn’t notice the gas leaking.”
“It does that; and, if it comes to that, it sets me wondering a little. I mean, supposing it was murder, it looks as if it was done by somebody who knew Mottram’s habits.”
“If it was murder, yes. But if itwassuicide, it’s easy to understand the man doping himself, so that he should die off more painlessly. The only thing it doesn’t look like is accident, because it would be rather a coincidence that he should happen to be laid out by a sleeping draught just on the very night when the gas was left on. I’d like to have a look at this gas.”
There was a bracket on the wall, not far from the door, which originally had been the only light in the room. But for bed-sitting room purposes a special fitting had been added to this giving a second vent for the gas; and this new vent was connected by a long piece of rubber tubing with a standard lamp that stood on the writing-table near the window. There were thus three taps in all, and all of these close together on the bracket. One opened the jet on the bracket itself, one led to the rubber tubing and the standard lamp and the third was the oldest and closest to the wall, serving to cut off the supply of gas from both passages at once. This third main tap was turned off now; of the other two, the one on the bracket was closed, the one which led to the standard lamp stood open.
“Is this how the taps were when the body was first found?” asked Bredon.
“Exactly. Of course we’ve turned them on and off since to make certain that the jets were both in working order. They were, both of them. And we tried the taps for finger-prints—with powder, you know.”
“Any results?”
“Only on the main tap. We could just trace where it had been turned on, with the thumb pressing on the right-hand side. But there were no marks of fingers turning it off.”
“That’s damned queer.”
“Gloves?”
“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it should have been the murderer who turned it onandoff. Why did he conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it was Mottram who turned the gas on. At the main, that is. The tap of the standard seems to have been on all the time, at least there were no marks on it. That’s queer too.”
“Yes, if he wanted it to be known that he committed suicide. But if he didn’t, you see, the whole business may have been bluff.”
“I see, you want it to be suicide masquerading as accident. I want it to be murder masquerading as suicide. Your difficulty, it seems to me, is explaining how the tap came to be turned off.”
“And yours?”
“I won’t conceal it. The door was locked, with the key on the inside.”
“How did anybody get in, then, to find the corpus?”
“Broke down the door. It was rotten, like everything else in this house, and the hinges pulled the screws out. You can see, there, where we’ve put fresh screws in since.”
“Door locked on the inside. And the window?” Bredon crossed to the other side of the room. “Barred, eh?” It was an old-fashioned lattice window with iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized approach. The window itself opened outward, its movement free until it reached an angle of forty-five degrees; at that point it passed over a spring catch which made it fast. It was so made fast now that Bredon examined it.
“This too?” he asked. “Was the window just like this?”
“Just like that. Wide open, so that it’s hard to see why the gas didn’t blow out of doors almost as soon as it escaped; and there was a high wind on Monday night, Pulteney tells me. And yet, with those bars, it seems impossible that any one should have come in through it.”
“I think you’re going to have difficulties over your murder theory.”
“So are you, Bredon, over your suicide theory. Look at that shirt over there; the studs carefully put in overnight; and it’s a clean shirt, mark you; the outside buttonholes haven’t been pierced. Do you mean to tell me that a man who is going to commit suicide is going to let himself in for all that tiresome process of putting studs in before he goes to bed?”
“And do you mean to tell me that a man goes out fishing in a boiled shirt?”
“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class theory. I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey, merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.”
“Well, grant the point; why shouldn’t a man who wants to commit suicide put studs in his shirt to make it look as if it wasn’t suicide? Remember, it was a matter of half a million to his heirs. Is that too heavy a price for the bother of it?”
“I see you’re convinced; it’s no good arguing with you. Otherwise, I’d have pointed out that he wound up his watch.”
“One does. To a man of methodical habit it’s an effort to leave a watch unwound. Was he a smoker?”
“Brinkman says not. And there are no signs of it anywhere.”
“The law ought to compel people to smoke. In bed, especially—we should have got some very nice indications of what he was really up to if he had smoked in bed. But I see he wasn’t a bedroom smoker in any case; here’s a solitary match which has only been used to light the gas—he hasn’t burnt a quarter of an inch of it.”
“That match worries me too. There’s a box on the mantelpiece, but those are ordinary safeties. This is a smaller kind altogether, and I can’t find any of them in his pockets.”
“The maid might have been in before him and lighted the gas.”
“They never do. At least, Mrs. Davis says they never do.”
“It was dark when he went to bed?”
“About ten o’clock, Brinkman says. You would be able to see your way then, but not much more. And he must have lit the gas, to put the studs in his shirt—besides, he’s left some writing, which was probably done late that night, though we can’t prove it.”
“Writing! Anything important?”
“Only a letter to some local rag at Pullford. Here it is, if you want to read it.” And Leyland handed Bredon a letter from the blotting-pad on the table. It ran:
To the Editor of thePullford Examiner:Dear Sir:Your correspondent, “Brutus,” in complaining of the closing of the Mottram Recreation Grounds at the hour of sevenp.m., describes these grounds as having been “presented to the town with money wrung from the pockets of the poor.” Now, Sir, I have nothing to do with the action of the Town Council in opening the Recreation Grounds or closing same. I write only as a private citizen who has done my best to make life amenable for the citizens of Pullford, to know why my name should be dragged into this controversy, and in the very injurious terms he has done. Such recreation grounds were presented by me twelve years ago to the townspeople of Pullford, not as “blood-money” at all, but because I wanted them, and especially the kiddies, to get a breath of God’s open air now and again. If “Brutus” will be kind enough to supply chapter and verse, showing where or how operatives in my pay have received less pay than what they ought to have done——
To the Editor of thePullford Examiner:
Dear Sir:
Your correspondent, “Brutus,” in complaining of the closing of the Mottram Recreation Grounds at the hour of sevenp.m., describes these grounds as having been “presented to the town with money wrung from the pockets of the poor.” Now, Sir, I have nothing to do with the action of the Town Council in opening the Recreation Grounds or closing same. I write only as a private citizen who has done my best to make life amenable for the citizens of Pullford, to know why my name should be dragged into this controversy, and in the very injurious terms he has done. Such recreation grounds were presented by me twelve years ago to the townspeople of Pullford, not as “blood-money” at all, but because I wanted them, and especially the kiddies, to get a breath of God’s open air now and again. If “Brutus” will be kind enough to supply chapter and verse, showing where or how operatives in my pay have received less pay than what they ought to have done——
At this point the letter closed abruptly.
“He wasn’t very handy with his pen,” observed Bredon. “I suppose friend Brinkman would have had to get onto this in the morning and put it into English. Yes, I know what you’re going to say: if the man had foreseen his end he either wouldn’t have taken the trouble to start the letter or else he’d have taken the trouble to finish it. But I tell you, I don’t like this letter—I say, we must be getting down to dinner; attract suspicion, what, if we’re found nosing round up here too long? All right, Leyland, I won’t spoil your sport. What about having a fiver on it—suicide or murder?”
“I don’t mind if I do. What about telling one another how we get on?”
“Let’s be quite free about that. But each side shall keep notes of the case from day to day, putting down his suspicions and his reasons for them, and we’ll compare notes afterward. Ah, is that Mrs. Davis? All right, we’re just coming.”