Chapter XX.Proof at LastReeves went to sit in Gordon’s room when he got back; his own was apt to be a port of call for stray comers, and he wanted this to be atête-à-tête.“I wish to God,” he started, “that I’d never been dragged into this beastly thing at all.”“Getting a brain-storm over it? Much better take to golf again; there’s no sense in worrying over a problem that won’t be solved.”“I have solved it.”“What!”“I have solved it, and I wish to God I hadn’t. Look here, Gordon, I know who it was who came into my rooms and took out my Shakespeare. It was Marryatt.”“Yes, but you don’t mean——”“It was Marryatt who took out my Shakespeare; he wanted to look up a quotation for his evening sermon. I know what you’ll say—it was somebody else who took the Momerie. But it wasn’t; I’ve been into Marryatt’s room, and I found it there.”“Good Lord! Lying about?”“It was on his table, but entirely covered with papers—I thought, purposely. I didn’t like doing it, but I felt the obvious thing was to look through those papers on Marryatt’s table. Among them was a postcard from Brotherhood, dated a week ago, thanking him for the gift of a copy of Momerie’sImmortality.”“But, look here, the thing’s impossible! Marryatt, I mean, Marryatt isn’t the least the sort of person——”“Yes, I know all that. I’ve thought of all that. But just look at the facts. There’s not the least doubt it was Marryatt who came into my room, yesterday afternoon, I suppose. He came in, no doubt, for the pipe-cleaner or for the Shakespeare quotation—I don’t grudge him either. Then he must have seen the Momerie on the shelf, and I suppose couldn’t help taking it; he didn’t feel safe as long as the thing was in my hands. He is, of course, just the height Carmichael mentioned; he does smoke Worker’s Army Cut; his pipes always are foul.”“Yes, but he may have wanted the Momerie for anything.”“Why did he never tell me he’d taken it? Look here, you’ve got to face the facts. Let me marshal them for you; you can imagine I’ve been thinking them out pretty furiously. First, Marryatt had a reason for disliking Brotherhood.”“For disliking him, yes; but not for wanting to murder him.”“Of course to you and me it wouldn’t seem so; we don’t know the clerical temper from the inside. After all, Marryatt has a hard time of it in any case, trying to knock a little piety out of these villagers. What must he think of the man who comes and tries to take away what beliefs they’ve got?”“All right, go on. Of course, it’s quite impossible.”“Next point: it was Marryatt who gave Brotherhood that Momerie book. Brotherhood, of course, took it up to London with him in the train on Monday, but is it likely that anybody would notice it particularly? The one man who knew for certain that it was in his possession was the man who had given it to him.”“But did Marryatt know anything about Brotherhood’s connection with Miss Rendall-Smith—about his promise to her?”“We’ll come to that presently. It doesn’t arise yet, if you consider the actual wording of the cipher-message. What it said was, ‘You will perish if you go back upon yourfaith’—I now read that as a purely theological message, and I know of only one man in the neighbourhood who would have been likely to send such a message.”“You seem to be pressing words rather far.”“Next point: Marryatt did travel by the three o’clock train on Tuesday. He made no secret of the fact; he told us about it—why? Precisely because he had arranged the murder so as to look as if it was connected with the 3.47: the three o’clock train was his alibi, and he was determined to get his alibi well rubbed in. Don’t you remember, just before we found the body, the discussion we all had in the smoking-room about crime, and how Marryatt said it was very important for the criminal to behave naturally in company, so as to establish his alibi? Well, that’s what he was doing at the moment.”“I’d forgotten his saying that.”“It doesn’t do to forget these things. You’ve probably forgotten that it was Marryatt who started the whole subject, by saying it was the kind of afternoon when one would want to murder somebody. You see, he couldn’t get the subject out of his mind, and he thought the easiest way to get it off his chest was to start talking about murder, quite naturally, in an abstract sort of way.”“You’re making him out a pretty cool customer.”“He was, up to a point. Remember, he started out on a round, knowing that the body of his victim lay under the railway arch. Only at the third tee his nerve deserted him, and he pulled his drive.”“Yes, but hang it all, anybody——”“I’m only mentioning the fact; I don’t say there was necessarily anything significant about it. Anyhow, I sliced mine, and so we came to find Brotherhood’s body. And that was too much for him; you will remember that at the moment he was quite unnerved. We had to send him off to fetch Beazly—and he wasn’t half glad to go. After that, remember, right up to the time of the inquest, he was in a state of pitiful agitation. He explained that by telling us that he was nervous about whether he’d be allowed to bury Brotherhood or not; but when you come to think of it, does that account for the extraordinary excitement and nervousness he showed about the whole thing? Anyhow, the jury found suicide—and remember, he always wanted us to believe it was suicide—and immediately his trouble vanished. He seemed to lose interest in the business from then on.“But over one thing he did give himself away. Do you remember, when Carmichael produced that photo of Miss Rendall-Smith, Marryatt professed not to know who it was? Now, I fancy there are aspects of the case here which we haven’t been able to trace yet. But on the face of it, it was curious that Marryatt, who has lived here for quite a long time and knows all the clerical society round here, shouldn’t know the daughter of the man who used to be Rector of Binver. For some reason, he preferred not to be in the know. He said he’d take it over to Binver and identify it. He took it over: it was early-closing day, and Campbell’s studio must really have been shut. But Marryatt comes back with some lame story about Campbell not being shut after all; and he tells us, not only whom the photograph represents, but the whole life-story of the lady into the bargain. I say, he made a mistake there. We ought to have been suspicious.“We were not suspicious; he came and played bridge in my room the same night. It gave him a very nasty turn when, as we all thought, the photograph altered its appearance. He was completely unstrung; and the form his nerves took was an intense desire that we should drop the inquiry altogether. He had begun to grow superstitious, as so many murderers do. But he made the best use he could of it, by trying to shut down our investigations on the strength of it. That failed, but something even better turned up—Davenant’s hiding in the secret passage. By the way, I’m pretty well convinced, though I can’t prove it, that it was Marryatt and not Davenant who took away the copy of that paper, with the cipher on it. Of course, when we found Davenant, it not only concealed the fact that he had taken away the cipher, but also turned the suspicion into quite a different channel.“Here, I must admit, Marryatt shows up badly. He saw an innocent man accused, and he took no action to exculpate him. On the contrary, he stated to me quite emphatically his belief in Davenant’s guilt. But we mustn’t judge him hardly; he may have meant—he may still mean, for all we know, to come forward if Davenant is found guilty. Meanwhile, there’s one more piece of evidence which I understand now, though it has bothered us a good deal. You remember the thing we call the ‘washing-list,’ the words we found on the back of the anonymous letter?”“Yes, rather. What about it?”“Well, it clearly wasn’t part of the cipher, was it?”“Probably not—one can’t be certain, but it didn’t look like it.”“Well then, you’ve got to choose, it seems to me, between two possibilities. One is that this sheet of paper—it’s only a half-sheet in any case—was blank until the cipher was written on it. Then it passed into Brotherhood’s possession, and Brotherhood, looking about for a piece of paper to jot down a list on, found this one and used it.”“That’s what I’d assumed.”“In that case, it’s hard to see any special significance about the list, isn’t it? It’s not in Brotherhood’s writing, apparently; but of course if he wrote it in the train, it’s possible that his handwriting would be untraceable.”“What’s the other possibility?”“Why, just the other way round. That the list, whatever its meaning may be, was written on that piece of paper first. And then the murderer, wanting to send the cipher message to Brotherhood, took up that piece of paper at random to write it on, without noticing that there were already four words pencilled on the back.”“That’s possible, certainly.”“Well, don’t you see, in that case the list becomes very important, because it was written not by Brotherhood but by the murderer, and it may accidentally give us a clue to the murderer’s character.“A rather obscure clue. As far as I remember all it said was Socks, Vest, Hem, Tins.”“Yes, but look here: do you remember my asking whether those words were written on the paper, right at the edge of the paper, before or after the sheet was torn in half? Well, my own belief has always been that those are only parts of words, and that the other half, possibly with a lot more writing as well, was lost to us when the sheet was torn.”“And you’ve restored the full words?”“I think I have. I’m just going to write it out for you.” And, after scribbling for a moment, he put before Gordon two sheets of paper; one, which was blank, partly covered the other, so as to hide part of what had been written on it.“Well, that’s all correct,” said Gordon: “Socks, Vest, Hem, Tins, all present. Do you want me to guess the other halves of the words—the first half, I suppose, in each case? Because I give you fair warning that I have never guessed a riddle in my life.”Reeves took away the upper sheet of paper, and made Gordon read again.“Hassocks, Harvest, Anthem, Mattins—well, I’m blowed! You ought to be given a fountain-pen for this sort of thing.”“But seriously, isn’t it almost certain that those were the words of the original, before the sheet was torn in half? What connected them, of course, we can’t say. But they’re all ecclesiastical words—at least, you can say that ‘harvest’ is an ecclesiastical word at this time of the year, with harvest festivals coming on. Could such a sheet of paper have been lying about and been taken up carelessly anywhere but in a clergyman’s rooms? And honestly, doesn’t that clinch the case against Marryatt?”“Well, it certainly looks as if one would like to ask Marryatt a few questions. Though, mark you, I refuse to believe that Marryatt laid hands on Brotherhood.”“We can’t ask him questions. We must put him to a test.”“What sort of a test?”“Well, surely the stick might come in handy there. If we could somehow confront him with it suddenly, and see how he takes it—I believe they do that sort of thing in America.”“Carmichael, I fancy, would tell you that the system was originally Danish.”“Why Danish?”“Really, Reeves, what is the use of all your researches intoHamlet, if you don’t realize that your present idea is just what Hamlet does to the King and Queen when the Players come on? I think, you know, it’s rather a dangerous method, because it’s so easy to suggest things to a person’s mind when they’re not there already. But this I will say, if Marryatt recoils from the sight of that stick which you picked up this afternoon, or shows any trace of confusion when he sees it, then—I won’t say I’ll be prepared to regard Marryatt as guilty, but I’ll be prepared to ask him for an explanation.”“Well, Sadducee, have it your own way. We’ll put that stick and the golf-ball lying out prominently in my room. At dinner we’ll ask Marryatt to come along afterwards. We’ll go out of dinner early, and get into the secret passage. From there we can watch and see what happens when he comes in.”“Don’t you think it would be a mistake to ask him in? It might somehow put him on his guard. . . . Yes, I know, I can make sure that he comes into your room without being asked. Leave that part to me, and stand by as soon as dinner’s over. We can go up into the passage by the billiard-room end.”
Reeves went to sit in Gordon’s room when he got back; his own was apt to be a port of call for stray comers, and he wanted this to be atête-à-tête.
“I wish to God,” he started, “that I’d never been dragged into this beastly thing at all.”
“Getting a brain-storm over it? Much better take to golf again; there’s no sense in worrying over a problem that won’t be solved.”
“I have solved it.”
“What!”
“I have solved it, and I wish to God I hadn’t. Look here, Gordon, I know who it was who came into my rooms and took out my Shakespeare. It was Marryatt.”
“Yes, but you don’t mean——”
“It was Marryatt who took out my Shakespeare; he wanted to look up a quotation for his evening sermon. I know what you’ll say—it was somebody else who took the Momerie. But it wasn’t; I’ve been into Marryatt’s room, and I found it there.”
“Good Lord! Lying about?”
“It was on his table, but entirely covered with papers—I thought, purposely. I didn’t like doing it, but I felt the obvious thing was to look through those papers on Marryatt’s table. Among them was a postcard from Brotherhood, dated a week ago, thanking him for the gift of a copy of Momerie’sImmortality.”
“But, look here, the thing’s impossible! Marryatt, I mean, Marryatt isn’t the least the sort of person——”
“Yes, I know all that. I’ve thought of all that. But just look at the facts. There’s not the least doubt it was Marryatt who came into my room, yesterday afternoon, I suppose. He came in, no doubt, for the pipe-cleaner or for the Shakespeare quotation—I don’t grudge him either. Then he must have seen the Momerie on the shelf, and I suppose couldn’t help taking it; he didn’t feel safe as long as the thing was in my hands. He is, of course, just the height Carmichael mentioned; he does smoke Worker’s Army Cut; his pipes always are foul.”
“Yes, but he may have wanted the Momerie for anything.”
“Why did he never tell me he’d taken it? Look here, you’ve got to face the facts. Let me marshal them for you; you can imagine I’ve been thinking them out pretty furiously. First, Marryatt had a reason for disliking Brotherhood.”
“For disliking him, yes; but not for wanting to murder him.”
“Of course to you and me it wouldn’t seem so; we don’t know the clerical temper from the inside. After all, Marryatt has a hard time of it in any case, trying to knock a little piety out of these villagers. What must he think of the man who comes and tries to take away what beliefs they’ve got?”
“All right, go on. Of course, it’s quite impossible.”
“Next point: it was Marryatt who gave Brotherhood that Momerie book. Brotherhood, of course, took it up to London with him in the train on Monday, but is it likely that anybody would notice it particularly? The one man who knew for certain that it was in his possession was the man who had given it to him.”
“But did Marryatt know anything about Brotherhood’s connection with Miss Rendall-Smith—about his promise to her?”
“We’ll come to that presently. It doesn’t arise yet, if you consider the actual wording of the cipher-message. What it said was, ‘You will perish if you go back upon yourfaith’—I now read that as a purely theological message, and I know of only one man in the neighbourhood who would have been likely to send such a message.”
“You seem to be pressing words rather far.”
“Next point: Marryatt did travel by the three o’clock train on Tuesday. He made no secret of the fact; he told us about it—why? Precisely because he had arranged the murder so as to look as if it was connected with the 3.47: the three o’clock train was his alibi, and he was determined to get his alibi well rubbed in. Don’t you remember, just before we found the body, the discussion we all had in the smoking-room about crime, and how Marryatt said it was very important for the criminal to behave naturally in company, so as to establish his alibi? Well, that’s what he was doing at the moment.”
“I’d forgotten his saying that.”
“It doesn’t do to forget these things. You’ve probably forgotten that it was Marryatt who started the whole subject, by saying it was the kind of afternoon when one would want to murder somebody. You see, he couldn’t get the subject out of his mind, and he thought the easiest way to get it off his chest was to start talking about murder, quite naturally, in an abstract sort of way.”
“You’re making him out a pretty cool customer.”
“He was, up to a point. Remember, he started out on a round, knowing that the body of his victim lay under the railway arch. Only at the third tee his nerve deserted him, and he pulled his drive.”
“Yes, but hang it all, anybody——”
“I’m only mentioning the fact; I don’t say there was necessarily anything significant about it. Anyhow, I sliced mine, and so we came to find Brotherhood’s body. And that was too much for him; you will remember that at the moment he was quite unnerved. We had to send him off to fetch Beazly—and he wasn’t half glad to go. After that, remember, right up to the time of the inquest, he was in a state of pitiful agitation. He explained that by telling us that he was nervous about whether he’d be allowed to bury Brotherhood or not; but when you come to think of it, does that account for the extraordinary excitement and nervousness he showed about the whole thing? Anyhow, the jury found suicide—and remember, he always wanted us to believe it was suicide—and immediately his trouble vanished. He seemed to lose interest in the business from then on.
“But over one thing he did give himself away. Do you remember, when Carmichael produced that photo of Miss Rendall-Smith, Marryatt professed not to know who it was? Now, I fancy there are aspects of the case here which we haven’t been able to trace yet. But on the face of it, it was curious that Marryatt, who has lived here for quite a long time and knows all the clerical society round here, shouldn’t know the daughter of the man who used to be Rector of Binver. For some reason, he preferred not to be in the know. He said he’d take it over to Binver and identify it. He took it over: it was early-closing day, and Campbell’s studio must really have been shut. But Marryatt comes back with some lame story about Campbell not being shut after all; and he tells us, not only whom the photograph represents, but the whole life-story of the lady into the bargain. I say, he made a mistake there. We ought to have been suspicious.
“We were not suspicious; he came and played bridge in my room the same night. It gave him a very nasty turn when, as we all thought, the photograph altered its appearance. He was completely unstrung; and the form his nerves took was an intense desire that we should drop the inquiry altogether. He had begun to grow superstitious, as so many murderers do. But he made the best use he could of it, by trying to shut down our investigations on the strength of it. That failed, but something even better turned up—Davenant’s hiding in the secret passage. By the way, I’m pretty well convinced, though I can’t prove it, that it was Marryatt and not Davenant who took away the copy of that paper, with the cipher on it. Of course, when we found Davenant, it not only concealed the fact that he had taken away the cipher, but also turned the suspicion into quite a different channel.
“Here, I must admit, Marryatt shows up badly. He saw an innocent man accused, and he took no action to exculpate him. On the contrary, he stated to me quite emphatically his belief in Davenant’s guilt. But we mustn’t judge him hardly; he may have meant—he may still mean, for all we know, to come forward if Davenant is found guilty. Meanwhile, there’s one more piece of evidence which I understand now, though it has bothered us a good deal. You remember the thing we call the ‘washing-list,’ the words we found on the back of the anonymous letter?”
“Yes, rather. What about it?”
“Well, it clearly wasn’t part of the cipher, was it?”
“Probably not—one can’t be certain, but it didn’t look like it.”
“Well then, you’ve got to choose, it seems to me, between two possibilities. One is that this sheet of paper—it’s only a half-sheet in any case—was blank until the cipher was written on it. Then it passed into Brotherhood’s possession, and Brotherhood, looking about for a piece of paper to jot down a list on, found this one and used it.”
“That’s what I’d assumed.”
“In that case, it’s hard to see any special significance about the list, isn’t it? It’s not in Brotherhood’s writing, apparently; but of course if he wrote it in the train, it’s possible that his handwriting would be untraceable.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Why, just the other way round. That the list, whatever its meaning may be, was written on that piece of paper first. And then the murderer, wanting to send the cipher message to Brotherhood, took up that piece of paper at random to write it on, without noticing that there were already four words pencilled on the back.”
“That’s possible, certainly.”
“Well, don’t you see, in that case the list becomes very important, because it was written not by Brotherhood but by the murderer, and it may accidentally give us a clue to the murderer’s character.
“A rather obscure clue. As far as I remember all it said was Socks, Vest, Hem, Tins.”
“Yes, but look here: do you remember my asking whether those words were written on the paper, right at the edge of the paper, before or after the sheet was torn in half? Well, my own belief has always been that those are only parts of words, and that the other half, possibly with a lot more writing as well, was lost to us when the sheet was torn.”
“And you’ve restored the full words?”
“I think I have. I’m just going to write it out for you.” And, after scribbling for a moment, he put before Gordon two sheets of paper; one, which was blank, partly covered the other, so as to hide part of what had been written on it.
“Well, that’s all correct,” said Gordon: “Socks, Vest, Hem, Tins, all present. Do you want me to guess the other halves of the words—the first half, I suppose, in each case? Because I give you fair warning that I have never guessed a riddle in my life.”
Reeves took away the upper sheet of paper, and made Gordon read again.
“Hassocks, Harvest, Anthem, Mattins—well, I’m blowed! You ought to be given a fountain-pen for this sort of thing.”
“But seriously, isn’t it almost certain that those were the words of the original, before the sheet was torn in half? What connected them, of course, we can’t say. But they’re all ecclesiastical words—at least, you can say that ‘harvest’ is an ecclesiastical word at this time of the year, with harvest festivals coming on. Could such a sheet of paper have been lying about and been taken up carelessly anywhere but in a clergyman’s rooms? And honestly, doesn’t that clinch the case against Marryatt?”
“Well, it certainly looks as if one would like to ask Marryatt a few questions. Though, mark you, I refuse to believe that Marryatt laid hands on Brotherhood.”
“We can’t ask him questions. We must put him to a test.”
“What sort of a test?”
“Well, surely the stick might come in handy there. If we could somehow confront him with it suddenly, and see how he takes it—I believe they do that sort of thing in America.”
“Carmichael, I fancy, would tell you that the system was originally Danish.”
“Why Danish?”
“Really, Reeves, what is the use of all your researches intoHamlet, if you don’t realize that your present idea is just what Hamlet does to the King and Queen when the Players come on? I think, you know, it’s rather a dangerous method, because it’s so easy to suggest things to a person’s mind when they’re not there already. But this I will say, if Marryatt recoils from the sight of that stick which you picked up this afternoon, or shows any trace of confusion when he sees it, then—I won’t say I’ll be prepared to regard Marryatt as guilty, but I’ll be prepared to ask him for an explanation.”
“Well, Sadducee, have it your own way. We’ll put that stick and the golf-ball lying out prominently in my room. At dinner we’ll ask Marryatt to come along afterwards. We’ll go out of dinner early, and get into the secret passage. From there we can watch and see what happens when he comes in.”
“Don’t you think it would be a mistake to ask him in? It might somehow put him on his guard. . . . Yes, I know, I can make sure that he comes into your room without being asked. Leave that part to me, and stand by as soon as dinner’s over. We can go up into the passage by the billiard-room end.”