VII
From Leyland’s Notebook
“Now that I have put that fiver on with Bredon, I begin to doubt my own conclusions. That is the extraordinary effect of having a ‘will to believe.’ As long as you have no prejudices in the case, no brief to maintain, you can form a theory and feel that it is a mathematical certainty. Directly you have a reason for wanting to believe the thing true that same theory begins to look as if it had all sorts of holes in it. Or rather, the whole theory seems fantastic—you have been basing too much on insufficient evidence. Yesterday I was as certain that the case was one of murder as I am certain of my own existence. Today I am developing scruples. Let me get it all down on paper, anyhow; and I shall be able to show my working to Bredon afterward, however the case turns out.
“There is one indication which is absolutely vital, absolutely essential: that is the turning off of the tap. That is the pinpoint of truth upon which any theory must rest. I don’t say it’s easy to explain the action; but it is an action, and the action demands an agent. The fact that the gas was tampered with would convince me of foul play, even if there were no other direct indications. There are such indications.
“In the first place, the window: If the window had stood all night as it was found in the morning, wide open and held by its clasp, there could have been no death. Pulteney tells me that there was a strong east wind blowing most of the night, and you can trust a fisherman to be accurate in these matters. The window, then, like the gas, had been deliberately arranged in an artificial position between Mottram’s death and the arrival of the rescue party. If the death had been accidental, the window would have been shut and remained shut all night. You do not leave a window half open, with nothing to fix it, on a windy night. If it had been a case of suicide, it is equally clear that the window would have remained shut all night. If you are proposing to gas yourself you do not take risks of the window blowing open and leaving you half-asphyxiated. There is only one explanation of the open window, as there is of the gas-tap: and that explanation involves the interference of a person or persons unknown.
“Another direct indication is the match found in the grate. Bredon’s suggestion that this match was used by the maid earlier in the evening is quite impossible; there was a box on the mantelpiece, which would be plainly visible in daylight, and it was not one of those matches that was used. It was a smaller match, of a painfully ordinary kind; Brinkman uses such matches, and Pulteney, and probably every smoker within miles around. Now, the match was not used to light the gas. It would have been necessary to light the gas in two places, and the match would have burned some little way down the stem, whereas this one was put out almost as soon as it was lit. It must have been used, I think, to light the gas in the passage outside, but of this I cannot be sure. It was thrown carelessly into the grate because, no doubt, the nocturnal visitor assumed as a matter of course that others like it would already have been thrown into the grate. As a matter of fact, Mottram must have thrown the match he lit the gas with out of the window: I have not found it.
“From various indications, it is fairly clear that Mottram did not foresee his end. Chief among these is the order which he gave that he was to be woken early in the morning. This might of course be bluff; but if so it was a very heartless kind of bluff, for it involved the disturbing of the whole household with the tragic news in the small hours, instead of leaving it to transpire after breakfast. And this leads us on to another point, which Bredon appears to have overlooked: A man who wants to be woken up early in the morning does not take a sleeping draught overnight. It follows that Mottram did not really take the sleeping draught. And that means that the glass containing it was deliberately put by his bed to act as a blind. The medical evidence is not positive as to whether he actually took the stuff or not. My conjecture is, then, that the man who came in during the night—twice during the night—put a glass with the remains of a sleeping draught by the bed in order to create the impression that Mottram had committed suicide.
“When I struck upon this idea, it threw a flood of light on various other details of the case. We have to deal with a murderer who is anxious to create the impression that the victim has died by his own hand. It was for this reason that he left a half-finished letter of Mottram’s on the table—a letter which Mottram had actually written downstairs; this would look like the regular suicide’s dodge of trying to cover up his tracks by leaving a half-finished document about. It would make a mind like Bredon’s suspect suicide at once. The same may be said of the ridiculous care with which the dead man was supposed to have wound up an eight-day watch before retiring; it was a piece of bluff which in itself would deceive nobody; but here it was double bluff, and I expect it has deceived Bredon. He will see everywhere the marks of a suicide covering up his tracks, which is exactly what the murderer meant him to see.
“The thing begins to take shape in my mind, then, as follows: When he feels confident that his victim is asleep the murderer tiptoes into the room, puts down the glass by the bedside and the letter on the table; winds up the watch (a very silent one); then goes over to the gas, wipes off with a rag the mark of Mottram’s hand turning it off, and then, with the same rag, gently turns it on once more. The window is already shut. He tiptoes through the doorway, and waits for an hour or two till the gas has done its deadly work. Then, for some reason, he returns; for what reason, I cannot at present determine. Once he had taken all these precautions, it must have looked to him as if a verdict of suicide was a foregone conclusion. But it is a trick of the murderer—due, some think, to the workings of a guilty conscience—to revisit the scene of his crime and spoil the whole effect of it. It is this reason, of course, that I must find out before I am certain of my case; leaving aside all further questions as to the murderer’s identity and his motives.
“In fact, there are two problems: a problem of why and a problem of how. Why did the murderer turn the gas off? And how did he leave the door locked behind him? I suspect that the answer to the first question is, as I have said, merely psychological; it was some momentary instinct of bravado, or remorse, or sheer lunacy. The answer to the second question must be something more complicated. In the abstract it is, I suppose, possible to turn a key in a lock from the wrong side by using a piece of wire or some instrument. But it is almost inconceivable that a man could do this without leaving scratches on the key; I have examined the key very carefully and there are no scratches. Bredon, I can see, hopes to arrive at some different conclusion about the evidence; somebody, he thinks, is lying. But Brinkman, and Ferrers the doctor, and the Boots, all rushed into the room at the same moment. Ferrers is an honest man, and I am sure he is telling the truth when he says he found the gas turned off; and he went to it at once, before either of the others had time to interfere. It was the Boots who found the key on the inside of the door, and the Boots will not do for the murderer; a man with one hand cannot have done conjuring tricks with a lock. Brinkman’s own evidence is perfectly straightforward and consistent with that of the others. He seems secretive, but that, I think, is the fellow’s manner. I cannot at present see any motive which could have made him want to do away with Mottram; the two seem to have been on intimate terms, and there is no evidence of a quarrel.
“I am inclined to exonerate Pulteney of all knowledge, even of all interest in the affair. He was a complete stranger to Mottram, so far as I can discover. But suspicion may equally well fall on people outside the house; for, although the doors of the inn were locked, there is a practicable window on the ground floor which is not always shut at night. Mottram was known in Chilthorpe, and had lived there when he was young; there is the chance, then, of a local vendetta. Pullford is only twenty miles or so distant; and in Pullford he may easily have had enemies; the letter from ‘Brutus’ shows that. But, since the salient fact about Mottram was his wealth, it seems obvious that the first question to be settled is that of his testamentary dispositions. I must telegraph to London tomorrow for full information about these, and pursue my local inquiries in the meantime. The only person on the spot who has any close tie of blood with the deceased is the young fellow who owns the big shop here. He is Mottram’s nephew; Mottram himself started it long ago, and afterward made it over to his sister and her husband, both of whom are now dead. Unfortunately for himself, the young man seems to have been something of a radical, and he made an injudicious speech at a time when Mottram was proposing to run himself as an independent Parliamentary candidate for the constituency. There was a quarrel; and Mrs. Davis thinks that the two never met again.
“These are only my first impressions. They may have to be revised drastically as the case proceeds. But of one thing I am confident—there has been foul play, and the effort to represent it as a case of suicide is necessarily doomed to failure.”