XXII
At a Standstill
It was nearly eleven o’clock before Angela returned; and, since she resolutely refused to disclose anything about her movements unless Bredon divulged his theory, there were no explanations at all that night. “It’s not that I’m inquisitive,” she explained, “but I do want to break you of that bad habit of obstinacy.” “Well, well,” said Bredon, “if you choose to drag my name in the dust, not to mention my car, by these midnight expeditions, there’s no more to be said.” And no more was said.
They found Leyland already at breakfast when they came down. He had been up, he said, since six, making inquiries in every conceivable direction. “I must say,” he added, “it wasn’t Mrs. Bredon’s fault we didn’t catch our man last night.”
“The woman was reckless, I suppose, as usual?” asked Bredon.
“Oo, no,” said Angela in self-defence, “I only got her going a little.”
“It’s eight miles to Lowgill by the signposts,” said Leyland, “and a little more in real life. Mrs. Bredon did it—and, remember, the gradients are far worse than those on the Pullford road—in just over twelve minutes. But we’d no luck. The up-train from Lowgill—it’s the only one of the big expresses that stops there—had just gone before we arrived. And, of course, we couldn’t tell whether Brinkman had gone on it or not. His car passed us on the road, only a few hundred yards from the station, and we hadn’t time to stop.”
“What car was he in?”
“That’s the devilish part of it—I’m sorry, Mrs. Bredon.”
“That’s the damnable part of it,” amended Angela serenely. “It was the car from the garage; and it sailed out at twenty-five minutes to nine, under Mr. Leyland’s nose. Even the sleuthlike brain of Mr. Pulteney didn’t realize what was happening.”
“You see,” explained Leyland, “it was a very well-arranged plant. Brinkman had rung up earlier in the afternoon, asking the garage to meet the late train which gets in to Chilthorpe at 8:40. He gave the name of Merrick. The garage naturally asked no questions as to where the message came from; they’re always meeting that late train. And, of course, they assumed that there was somebody arriving by that train. Then, when the man had got a little way out of the town, just above the gorge there, he was stopped on the road by a passenger with a despatch-box in his hand, who was walking in the direction of Chilthorpe, as if coming from the station. He waved at the car, and asked if it was for Mr. Merrick; then he explained that he was in a great hurry, because he wanted to catch the express at Lowgill. It was a perfectly normal thing to want to do, and there wasn’t much time to do it in; so the man went all out, and just caught the express in time. He didn’t know who we were when we passed him, and it wasn’t till he got back to Chilthorpe that he realized what he’d done. Meanwhile, who’s to say whether Brinkman stopped at Lowgill, or really got into the express?”
“Or took the later train back to Pullford?” suggested Bredon.
“No, we kept a good lookout to see that he didn’t do that. But the other uncertainty remained, and it was fatal to my plans. I sent word to London to have the train watched when it got in, giving a description of Brinkman; but of course that’s never any use. In half an hour or so I shall get a telegram from London to say they’ve found nothing.”
“You couldn’t have the express stopped down the line?”
“I’d have liked to, of course. But it’s a mail train, and it’s always full of rich people in first-class carriages. Give me a local train on a Saturday night, and I’ll have it stopped and searched and all the passengers held up for two hours, and not so much as a letter to the papers about it. But if you stop one of these big expresses on the chance of heading off a criminal, and nothing comes of it, there’ll be questions asked in the House of Commons. And I was in a bad position, you see. I can’t prove that Brinkman was a murderer. Not at present, anyhow. If he’d run off in Mottram’s car, I could have arrested him for car-stealing, but he hadn’t. Why, he even paid Mrs. Davis’s bill!”
“Do you mean to say he asked for his bill yesterday afternoon, and we never heard of it?”
“No, he calculated it out exactly, left a tip of two shillings for the barmaid, and went off leaving the money on his chest of drawers.”
“What about his suitcase?”
“It wasn’t his, it was Mottram’s. He carried off all his own things in the despatch-box. Apart from the fact that he gave a false name to the garage people, his exit was quite en règle. And it’s dangerous to stop a train and arrest a man like that. Added to which, it was perfectly possible that he was lying doggo at Lowgill.”
It was at this point that Mr. Pulteney sailed into the room. The old gentleman was rubbing his hands briskly in the enjoyment of retrospect; he had scarce any need of breakfast, you would have said, so richly was he chewing the cud of his experiences overnight. “What a day I have spent!” he exclaimed. “I have examined a motorcar, and even opened part of its mechanism, without asking the owner’s leave. I have been suspected of murder. I have set up in an extremely draughty garage, waiting to pounce upon a criminal. And, to crown it all, I have approached a total stranger with the words ‘Here we are again.’ Really life has nothing more to offer me. But where is Mr. Eames?”
“We took him to Lowgill with us,” explained Angela, “and when he got there he insisted on taking the late train back to Pullford. He said he had something to talk over with the Bishop. He has left some pyjamas and a toothbrush here as hostages, and says he will look in on us in the course of the day to reclaim them. So you’ll see him again.”
“A remarkable man. A shrewd judge of character. He recognized me at once as a man of reflection. God bless my soul! Do I understand that Mrs. Davis has provided us with sausages?”
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” said Angela. “She must have felt that the occasion had to be marked out somehow. And she was so pleased at having her bill paid. I don’t think Brinky can have been such an unpleasant man, after all.”
“Believe me,” said Leyland earnestly, “there is no greater mistake than to suppose your criminal is a man lost to all human feelings. It is perfectly possible for Brinkman to have murdered his master, and have been prepared to run off with a car and a thousand pounds which didn’t belong to him, and yet to have shrunk from the prospect of leaving an honest woman like Mrs. Davis the poorer for his visit. We are men, you see, and we are not made all in one piece.”
“But how odd of him to pop off into the gorge like that! I mean, it’s a very jolly place, they tell me; and we know Brinky admired the scenery of it, because he told my husband so. But isn’t it rather odd of him to have wanted to take a long, last lingering look at it before he bolted for South America?”
“It is perfectly possible that it may have had a fascination for him,” assented Leyland. “But I think his conduct was more reasonable than you suppose. After all, by coming up at the farther end of the gorge he managed to make it look quite natural when the motor found him walking in the direction of Chilthorpe. And, more than that, I have little doubt that he knew he was followed. Eames is a most capable fellow, but he must, I think, have followed his man a little carelessly, and so given himself away. Brinkman probably thought that it was Bredon who was following him.”
“Because he did it so badly, you mean?” suggested Angela. “Miles, you shouldn’t throw bread at breakfast, it’s rude.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that he had reason to believe Mr. Eames was at the cinema, whereas he knew Bredon was in the house, and saw him sitting in a window that looks down over the street. Almost inevitably he must have supposed that it was the watcher in the front of the house who had followed in his tracks.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Bredon. “I’m afraid, you see, when my wife went out of the room, she opened the door in that careless way she has, and three of my cards fell into the street below. Well, I thought Brinkman had disappeared; there was no sign of him. So I went downstairs and retrieved the cards, thinking it couldn’t do any harm. But I’ve been wondering since whether Brinkman wasn’t still watching, and whether my disappearance from the window didn’t give him the first hint that he was being followed. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Well, I don’t expect it made any difference. He was a cool hand, you see. I suppose he thought your sitting in the window must be a trap, and that the house was really watched at the back. He wasn’t far wrong there, of course.”
“Indeed he was not,” assented Mr. Pulteney. “You seem to me to have posted a singularly lynx-eyed gentleman in the stables.”
“And so, you see, he thought he’d brazen it out. He reckoned on being followed, but that didn’t matter to him as long as the man behind was a good distance off, and as long as he himself made sure of picking up his car at the right moment. The whole thing was monstrously mismanaged on my part. But, you see, I made absolutely certain that he was going for Mottram’s car, in which he’d obviously made all the necessary preparations. Even now I can’t understand how he consented so calmly to leave the car behind him. Unless, of course, he spotted that we were watching the garage, and knew that it would be unsafe. But he must be crippled for money without his thousand.”
“My husband,” said Angela mischievously, “seemed to know beforehand that he wouldn’t go off in Mottram’s car.”
“Yes, by the way,” asked Leyland, “how was that?”
“I’m sorry, it ought to have occurred to me earlier. It never dawned on me till the moment when I mentioned it, and of course then it was too late. But it was merely the result of a reasoning process which had been going on in my own mind. I had been trying to work things out, and it seemed to me that I had arrived at an explanation which would cover all the facts. And that explanation, though it didn’t exclude the possibility that Brinkman intended to skip with the thousand and the car, didn’t make it absolutely necessary that he should mean to.”
“I suppose you’re still hankering after suicide?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But, hang it all, though there’s little enough that’s clear, it’s surely clear by now that Brinkman was a wrong ’un. And if he was a wrong ’un, what can his motive have been throughout unless he was Mottram’s murderer? I don’t associate innocence with a sudden flitting at nightfall, and a bogus name given in when you order the car to take you to the station.”
“Still, it’s not enough to have a general impression that a man is a wrong ’un, and hang him on the strength of it. You must discover a motive for which he would have done the murder, and a method by which he could have done it. Are you prepared to produce those?”
“Why, yes,” said Leyland. “I don’t profess to have all the details of the case at my fingers’ ends; but I’m prepared to give what seems to me a rational explanation of all the circumstances. And it’s an explanation which contends that Mottram met his death by murder.”