XXV
Bredon’s Account of It All
“God bless my soul!” cried the Bishop, “you don’t mean to say you’re preparing to hush it up! Why, your moral theology must be as bad as poor Mottram’s.”
“It isn’t a question of theology,” replied Bredon, “it’s a question of fact. I am going to write to the Indescribable Company and tell them that Mottram died by accident, because that happens to be the truth.”
“Ah‑h‑h!” said Angela.
“Indeed?” said Mr. Eames.
“Not another mental perspective!” groaned Mr. Pulteney.
“That’s exactly what it is. I’m not a detective really; I can’t sit down and think things out. I see everything just as other people do, I share all their bewilderment. But suddenly, when I’m thinking of something quite different, a game of patience, for example, I see the whole thing in a new mental perspective. It’s like the optical illusion of the tumbling cubes—you know, the pattern of cubes which looks concave to the eye, and then, by a readjustment of your mental focus, you suddenly see them as convex instead. What produces that change? Why, you catch sight of one particular angle in a new light, and from that you get your new mental picture of the whole pattern. Just so, one can stumble upon a new mental perspective about a problem like this by suddenly seeing one single fact in a new light. And then the whole problem rearranges itself.”
“I am indebted to you for your lucid exposition,” said Mr. Pulteney, “but even now the events of the past week are not quite clear to me.”
“Miles, don’t be tiresome,” said Angela. “Start right from the beginning, and don’t let’s have any mystery-making.”
“All right. It would make a better story the other way, but still—well, first you want to get some picture of Mottram. I can only do it by guesswork, but I should say this: He had an enormous amount of money, and no heir whom he cared for. He was a shrewd, rather grasping man, and he came to think that everybody else was after his money. It’s not uncommon with rich people—what you might call the Chuzzlewit-complex. Am I right so far?”
“Absolutely right,” said the Bishop.
“Again, he was a man who loved a mystery for its own sake, surprises, almost practical jokes. And again, he was a vain man in some ways, caring intensely what other people thought of him, and very anxious to know what they thought of him. Also, he had a high respect for the Catholic Church, or at least for its representatives in Pullford.”
“All that’s true,” said Eames.
“Well, I think he really did mean to leave some money to the Pullford Diocese. No, don’t interrupt; that’s not as obvious as it sounds. He really did mean to endow the diocese, and he disclosed his intention to Brinkman. Brinkman, as we know, was a real anti-clerical, and he protested violently. Catholics were alike, he said, all the world over; the apparent honesty of a man like Your Lordship was only a blind. In reality Catholics, and especially Catholic priests, were always hunting for money and would do anything to get it—anything. At last Mottram determined that he must settle the point for himself. First of all, he went round to the Cathedral house and defended the proposition that it was lawful to do evil in order that good might come. He wanted to see whether he would get any support for that view in the abstract; he got none. Then he decided, with Brinkman’s collaboration, on a practical test. He would put Your Lordship’s honesty to the proof.
“He went up to London, saw his solicitors, and added a codicil to his will, leaving the benefits of the Euthanasia policy to the Bishop of Pullford. I am afraid it must be admitted that he did not, at the time, mean that codicil to become operative. It was part of his mystery. Then he went on to our people at the Indescribable, and spun a cock-and-bull yarn about seeing a specialist, who had told him that he had only two more years to live. Actually he was in robust health; he only invented this story and told it to the Indescribable in order that, when it came to the point, it might be reasonable (though not necessary) to explain his death as suicide. Then he came, back here and made preparations for his holiday. He was going to take his holiday at Chilthorpe—to be more accurate, he meant to start his holiday at Chilthorpe. He strongly urged Your Lordship to come down and share part of it with him; it was essential to his plan.”
“And that,” suggested the Bishop, “explains his intense eagerness that I should come down?”
“Precisely. He made certain, as best he could, that you would arrive here on the morning after him; that you would be told he had gone out to fish the Long Pool, and that you would be asked to follow him. This would ensure that you would be the first witness of his disappearance.”
“His what?”
“His disappearance. He meant to disappear. Not only for the sake of the test, I imagine; he wanted to disappear for the fun of the thing; to see what happened. He wanted to be a celebrity in the newspapers. He wanted to read his own obituaries. That was why he wrote, or rather got Brinkman to write, a letter to the Pullford Examiner, calling him all sorts of names—the letter was signed, of course, with a pseudonym. You found that out, didn’t you, Leyland?”
“Yes, confound it all, I heard only this morning that ‘Brutus’ was really Brinkman. But I never saw the point.”
“Then he sat down and wrote an unfinished letter in answer to these charges. That letter, of course, was to be found after his disappearance, and would be published in thick type by the Pullford Examiner. That would set everybody talking about him, and his obituary notices would be lively reading. He wanted to read them himself. But in order to do that he must disappear.
“The Chilthorpe gorge is a good place to disappear from. Leave your hat on the edge of it, and go and hide somewhere—you will be reported the next morning as a tragic accident. Mottram had made all arrangements for hiding. He was going to spend his holiday incognito somewhere; I think in Ireland, but it may have been on the Continent. He was going to take Brinkman with him. He would disappear, of course, in his car. He had victualled it before he left Pullford. On his arrival at Chilthorpe his first act was to paint out its numberplate. He hid some notes in the cushions of the car—that, I think, was a mere instinct of secretiveness; there was no need to do so.
“The plan, then, was this. On Tuesday morning, early, Mottram was to set out for the gorge. Almost immediately afterward, Brinkman was to take out the motor, as if to go to Pullford. He was to pick up Mottram, who would hide under the seat or disguise himself or smuggle himself away somehow, and drive like mad for the coast. Later, you, My Lord, would come to the Load of Mischief, and would get the message about going out to join Mottram at the Long Pool. In passing through the gorge, you would (I fancy) have found some traces there—Mottram’s hat, for example, or his fishing-rod; and your first thought would have been that the poor fellow had slipped in. Then, looking round, you would find this letter half-concealed on a high ledge. You would read it, and you would think that Mottram had committed suicide.
“And then—then you would either make the contents of this letter public or you wouldn’t. If Brinkman was right in his estimate, you would keep the letter dark; the death, before long, would be presumed. The Indescribable Company would have been on the point of paying out the half-million when—Mottram would have reappeared, and Your Lordship would have been in a delicate position. If Mottram was right in his view of your character, then you would produce the letter; Mottram’s death would be regarded as suicide, and the Indescribable would refuse all claims. Then Mottram would have reappeared, and would have seen to it that, in one way or another, the Pullford Diocese should be rewarded for the honesty of its Bishop.
“He was not really a very complete conspirator, poor Mottram. He made three bad mistakes, as it proved. Though indeed they would not have mattered, or two of them would not have mattered, if events had proceeded according to plan.
“In the first place, he went and wrote his name in the visitors’ book immediately on arrival. He wanted to leave no doubt that it was Jephthah Mottram in person who arrived at the Load of Mischief on Monday night. He wanted journalists to come down here and look reverently at the great man’s signature. Of course, in reality, it is a thing nobody ever does on the night of arrival. It has made me suspicious from the very first, as my wife will tell you.
“In the second place, when he took the precaution of drawing up a new will he neglected to sign it overnight. Brinkman, I suppose, pointed out to him that if any fatal accident occurred—say a motor accident—the codicil leaving the half-million to the Bishop would be perfectly valid. To avoid this danger they must have drawn up a new will, and if Mottram had signed this overnight his death would have made it valid. As it was, for some reason—probably because Brinkman himself was drawing it up (I think the writing is Brinkman’s) late on Monday night—the will was never signed and was useless.
“In the third place, he did something overnight which he ought to have left till the next morning. He not only wrote his confidential letter to the Bishop but he went out with Brinkman to the gorge and posted it—put it on the ledge ready for the Bishop to find next morning. He did not mean to go into the gorge at all the next morning. He would start out on the way to it, say, at eight, and at ten minutes past eight Brinkman, driving the car, would pick him up on the road. From the side of the road they could throw over Mottram’s hat, possibly, and they could slide his rod down the rocks, so as to make it appear that he had been there. (Brinkman, in this way, would establish an alibi; he could not be supposed to have murdered Mottram in the gorge.) But it was not safe to let the letter drop in this casual way; therefore the letter must be planted out overnight. There was no great danger of its premature discovery; in any case, Mottram put it rather out of sight on a ledge so high up that only a tall man would see it, and only if he was looking about him carefully.
“That is the complicated part of this business; the rest of it depends on two simple accidents. Mottram went to bed rather early; he was in an excited frame of mind, and determined to steady himself with a sleeping draught. The watch, the studs, were only symptoms of that fussiness we all feel on the eve of a great adventure. I suppose he borrowed a match from Brinkman to light his gas with. But it was a clear night; there was no need of light to go to bed by. But just at the last moment—a fateful moment for himself—he did light the gas; perhaps he wanted to read a page or two of his novel before turning in.
“The rest of the story could be more easily told upstairs. I wonder if you would mind all coming up into the actual room? It makes it so much easier to construct the scene if you are on the spot.”
The whole party applauded this decision. “This is what is called an object-lesson, in the education of the young,” observed Mr. Pulteney. “The young like it; they are in a position to hack one another’s shins when the teacher’s back is turned.”
When they reached the bedroom, Bredon found himself falling into the attitude of a lecturer. “The guide,” murmured Angela, “taking a party round the ruins of the old dungeon. Scene of the ’orrible crime. Please pay attention, gentlemen!”
“You see how the gas works in here,” began Bredon. “There’s the main tap, we’ll call it A, which controls the whole supply. Tap B is for the bracket; tap C leads through the tube to the standard lamp. It doesn’t matter leaving tap B or tap C on as long as tap A is turned off.
“When Mottram went up to bed, tap B and tap C were both open, but tap A was properly turned off. Mottram took no particular notice of the disposition of taps; he turned on one tap at random, tap A. Then he lit his match, and put it to the bracket, which naturally lit. He then immediately threw the match away. We know that, because we found the match, and it was hardly burned down the stalk at all. Meanwhile, of course, he had also allowed the gas to escape through the tube into the standard lamp; it never occurred to him to light this. The standard was at the other end of the room, close to the open window; the slight escape of gas did not, unfortunately for him, offend his nostrils. Brinkman told me, and it is probably true, that Mottram had not a very keen sense of smell. After a minute or two, feeling ready to go to sleep, he went up to the taps again, and forgot to reverse the process he had gone through before. Instead of turning off the main tap, A, he carelessly turned off tap B. And the light on the bracket obediently went out.
The three taps as Brinkman found them.
“That is the lesson of a fingerprint. Tap A was stiff, and Mottram left a mark when he turned it on; he would have left another if he had turned it off. He did not; he turned off tap B, which works at a mere touch, and of course he left no mark in doing so. There, then, lies Mottram; the sleeping draught has already taken effect; the wind gets up, and blows the window to; tap A is still open, and tap C is still open; and through the burner of the standard lamp the acetylene is pouring into the room.
“Brinkman is not a late sleeper. The Boots, who is the earliest riser in this establishment, tells me that Brinkman was always awake when he went round for the shoes. On Tuesday morning Brinkman must have woken early, to be greeted by a smell of gas. It may have crept in through his window, or even come up through the floor, for the floors here are full of cracks. Once he had satisfied himself that the escape was not in his own room, he must have thought of the room below. When he reached the lower passage, the increasing smell of gas left him in no doubt. He knocked at Mottram’s door, got no answer, and rushed in, going straight across and opening the window so as to get some air. Then he had time to turn round and see what was on the bed. There was no doubt that he was too late to help.”
“Did he know it was accident?” asked Eames. “Or did he think it was suicide?”
“I think he must have known it was accident. And now, consider his position. Here was Mottram, dead by accident. There up in London was Mottram’s codicil, willing half a million to the Diocese of Pullford. And that codicil had not been meant to become operative. It had been made only for the purposes of the test. And now, through this accident, the codicil, which did not represent Mottram’s real wishes, had suddenly become valid. It would certainly be judged valid, unless—unless the claim were dismissed owing to a verdict of suicide. Brinkman may or may not have been a good man; he was certainly a good secretary. Put yourself in his position, Mr. Eames. He could only give effect to his dead master’s real wishes by pretending that his dead master had committed suicide.
“You remember the remark in The Importance of Being Earnest, that to lose one parent may be an accident, to lose both looks like carelessness? So it was with Mottram and the taps. Two taps turned on meant, and would be understood to mean, an accident. But, and this is worth remembering, if all three taps were found on, it would look like suicide. Brinkman acted on the spur of the moment; he was in a hurry, for the atmosphere of the room was still deadly. He wrapped his handkerchief round his fingers, so as to leave no mark, then, in his confusion, he turned the wrong tap! He meant to turn tap B on; instead, he turned tap A off. That sounds impossible, I know. But you will notice that whereas tap A and tap B are turned off when they are at the horizontal, tap C is turned off when it is at the vertical, When Brinkman, then, saw the three taps, B and C were both horizontal, and A was vertical, it was natural, in the flurry of the moment, for him to imagine that if all three taps were in the same position (that is, all horizontal) they would all be turned on. Instinctively, then, he turned tap A from the vertical to the horizontal. And in doing so he left the whole three in the same position in which they were before Mottram lit his match. No gas was escaping at all. The result of Brinkman’s action was not to corroborate the theory of suicide, but to introduce a quite new theory—that of murder. Half-stifled, he rushed from the room, locked the door on the outside, and took the key away with him up to his room.”
The three taps as they were found in the morning
“Steady on,” put in Angela, “why did he lock the door?”
“It may have been only so as to keep the room private till he had thought the thing out, and the Boots may have come round too soon for him. Or, more probably, it was another deliberate effort to encourage the idea of suicide. Anyhow, his actions from that moment onward were perfectly clearheaded. He helped to break down the door, and, while Ferrers was examining the gas, while the Boots was lighting a match, he thrust the key in on the inner side of the door. It was only when he had done this, when he thought that he had made the suicide theory an absolute certainty, that he was suddenly confronted with the horrible mistake he had made in turning the wrong tap. It was a bad moment for him, but fortunately one which excused a certain display of emotion.”
“And he thought he would be run in for the murder?” asked Leyland.
“Not necessarily. But your arrival worried him badly; you got hold of the murder idea from the start.”
“Why didn’t he skip, then? There was the car, all ready provisioned.”
“The trouble is that Brinkman is, according to his lights, an honest man. And he hated the idea of the Euthanasia money going to the Bishop. I was a godsend to him; here was a nice, stupid man, briefed to defend the thesis of suicide. As soon as I came, he tried to take me out for a walk in the gorge.”
“Why in the gorge?” asked the Bishop.
“So that I should find the letter. Yesterday he did manage to take me to the gorge, and actually drew my attention to the ledge. I saw a bit of paper there, but it never occurred to me to wonder what it was. Poor Brinkman! He must have thought me an ass!”
“But why didn’t he get the letter himself, and bring it to us? Or leave it lying about?”
“That was the maddening thing, the poor little man just couldn’t reach it. The wind of Monday night had blown it a bit further away, I suspect. Of course, he could have gone out with a stepladder, or rolled stones up to stand on. But, you see, you were watching him, and I’m pretty sure he knew you were watching him. He thought it best to lead us on, lead me on rather, and make me find out the envelope for myself. When he’d drawn me right across the trail of it, and I’d failed to see it, he was in despair. He decided that he must bolt after all. It was too horrible a position to be here under observation, and fearing arrest at any moment. If he were arrested, you see, he must either tell a lie, and land himself in suspicion, or tell the truth, and see the Euthanasia money fall into Catholic hands.
“He ordered a car from the garage to meet the train which arrives at Chilthorpe at 8:40. He determined to meet it on the way to the station. I don’t think the thought of the car lying at the garage, with the ‘sangwiches’—I mean the sandwiches—and the whisky on board, occurred to him for a moment. He is an honest man. But on his way to meet the car he would go through the gorge, and make sure that he was followed; he would draw attention to the document, and then disappear from the scene. He had not much luggage; he had only to clear up a few papers, mostly belonging to Mottram. Among these was the unsigned will which had been drawn up, ready for Mottram’s signature, on the Monday night. This he burned; it could be no use to anybody now. He burned it standing at the window, and the last, unburnt piece escaped from his fingers, and fluttered down through a second window into the room below—this room, which had been Mottram’s. That was your find, Leyland. And the odd thing is that it was through this absurd detail that I got onto the track of the whole thing; because one of my patience cards fluttered down through a ground-floor window; and as I was carrying it upstairs I realized that was how the scrap of paper came to be lying about in Mottram’s room. Then I began wondering what the will was, and why Brinkman should have been burning it, and suddenly the whole truth began to sketch itself in my mind, just as I’ve been telling it you.
“Brinkman had bad luck to the last. I dropped that card just after he started out with his despatch-box; he saw that I’d disappeared from the window, and supposed, with delight, that I was following him. With delight, for of course I was the one man who was interested in proving the death to be suicide. He went back to the cache in the gorge, leading me (as he supposed) all the way; then he waited for a flash of lightning, and jumped up so as to draw attention to the envelope. As he came down again he looked round, and, in the last rays of the lightning flash, saw that it was Eames, not I, who was following him. Eames—the one man who would certainly make away with the precious document! But there was no time to be lost; he could hear the taxi already on the hill. He ran round to the road, leaped on board the taxi, and, in desperation, sent a note to me by the taxi-man telling me to make Eames show me what he had found. I don’t know where Brinkman is now, but I rather hope he gets clear.”
“Amen to that,” said Leyland; “it would be uncommonly awkward for us if we found him. What on earth could we charge him with? You can’t hang a man for turning the wrong gas-tap by mistake.”
“Poor Mr. Simmonds will be relieved about this,” said Angela.
“By the way,” said the Bishop, “I hear that Mottram did leave some unsettled estate after all, and that, I suppose, will go to Simmonds. Not a great deal, but it’s enough for him to marry on.”
Angela swears that at this point she heard, on the other side of the door, a scuffle and the rustle of departing footsteps. She says you can’t cure maids of their bad habits, really.
“My own difficulty,” said the Bishop, “is about my moral claim to this money. For it was left to me, it seems, by a will which the testator did not mean to take effect.”
“On the other hand, you’ve earned it, My Lord,” suggested Bredon. “After all, poor Mottram was only waiting to find out whether you would prove to be an honest man or not. And I think you’ve come out of the test very well. Besides, you can’t refuse the legacy; it’s in trust for the diocese. I hope Pullford will see a lot of Catholic activity now.”
“The church collections will be beginning to fall off almost at once,” said Eames, with a melancholy face.
“I wish I had scrutinized those motor-cushions more closely,” said Mr. Pulteney. “It seems to me that I get nothing out of all this.”
“Which reminds me,” said Leyland, “I suppose the bet’s off.”
“And Mr. Bredon,” added the Bishop, “will get no thanks from his company. I’m afraid, Mr. Bredon, you will have carried nothing away with you from your visit to these parts.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Bredon.