XXIV
Mottram’s Account of It All
“Rapid adjustment of the mental perspective,” said Mr. Pulteney, “is an invaluable exercise, especially at my age. But I confess there is a point at which the process becomes confusing. Are we now to understand that Mr. Brinkman, so far from being a murderer, is simply an innocent man with a taste for motoring late at night? I have no doubt there is a satisfactory explanation of it all, but it looks to me as if there had been an absence of straightforwardness on somebody’s part.”
“Possibly on that of Mr. Eames,” said the Bishop. “I have to confess, on his behalf, that he has been concealing something, and to take the blame for his conduct—if blame attaches to it—unreservedly upon myself. However, I do not think that any earlier disclosure could have helped forward the cause of justice; and I have lost no time in putting it all before you.”
“You mean that letter which was left about in the gorge,” suggested Bredon, “addressed to the Bishop of Pullford? With a confession of suicide in it?”
“Goodness, Mr. Bredon, you seem to know as much about it as I do myself! Well, that is the long and short of it. When Mr. Eames was with you last night, Mr. Leyland, he told you that he had followed Brinkman along the gorge, and that Brinkman had disappeared in a motor. He did not tell you that, halfway through the gorge, he saw Brinkman leaping up under a ledge in the rock, as if to put something on it or take something down from it. The something which he was putting up or taking down was, I make no doubt, the document which I now hold in my hand. Mr. Eames found it after Brinkman had left, and, seeing that it was addressed to me with an intimation that it was private and confidential, thought it best to carry it straight to me without informing you of its existence. I understood him to say that he did not mention its existence to you, Mr. Bredon, either.”
“Nor did I,” put in Eames.
“How jolly of you, Mr. Eames,” said Angela. “You can’t think what a lot of trouble we’ve been having with my husband; he thinks he knows all about the mystery, and he won’t tell us; isn’t it odious of him? And I’m so glad to think that you managed to keep him in the dark about something.”
“Not entirely,” protested Bredon. “Cast your eye over that, Mr. Eames.” And a document was handed, first to Eames, then to the rest of the company, which certainly seemed to make Eames’s caution unnecessary. It was a plain scrap of paper, scrawled over in pencil with the handwriting of a man who is travelling at thirty-five miles an hour over bumpy roads in a badly sprung car. All it said was, “Make Eames show you what he found in the gorge. I thought it was you. F. Brinkman.”
“Ah!” said the Bishop. “Brinkman, it seemed, had some doubt as to the fate of a document which got into the hands of the Catholic authorities. Poor fellow, he was always rather bitter about it. However, here we are, Mr. Bredon, owning up like good boys. It was to put that very document into your hands that I came down this morning. But I think Mr. Eames was quite right in holding that the document, with such a superscription, ought to be handed over to me direct, without any mention even of its existence to a third party.”
“I for one,” put in Leyland, “applaud his action. I do not believe in all these posthumous revelations; I prefer to respect the confidence of the dead. But I understand that Your Lordship is prepared to let us see the contents of the letter after all?”
“Certainly. I think poor Mottram’s last directions were influenced simply by consideration for my own feelings in the matter. I have no hesitation myself in making it public. Shall I read it here and now?”
In deference to a chorus of assent, the Bishop took out the enclosure of the envelope and prepared to read. “I ought to say by way of preface,” he explained, “that I knew poor Mottram’s handwriting well enough, and I feel fully convinced that this is a genuine autograph of his, not a forgery. You will see why I mention that later on. This is how the letter runs:
“ ‘My dear Lord Bishop:
“ ‘Pursuant to our conversation of Thursday evening last, it will be within your Lordship’s memory that upon that occasion I asserted the right of a man, in given circumstances, to take his own life, particularly when same was threatened by an incurable and painful disease. This I only mentioned casually, when illustrating the argument I was then trying to put forward, namely that the end justifies the means, even in a case where said means are bad, provided said ends are good. I note that your Lordship is of the contrary opinion, namely that said end does not justify said means. I am, however, confident that in a concrete case like the present your Lordship will be more open to conviction re this matter, as it is a case where I am acting to the best of my lights, which, your Lordship has often told me, is all that a man can do when in doubtful circumstances.
“ ‘I regret to have to inform your Lordship that, interviewing recently a specialist in London re my health, said specialist informed me that I was suffering from an incurable disease. I have not the skill to write the name of it; and as it is of an unusual nature, maybe it would not interest your Lordship to know it. The specialist was, however, of the decided opinion that I could not survive more than two years or thereabouts; and that in the interim the disease would give rise to considerable pain. It is therefore my intention, in pursuance of the line of argument which I have already done my best to explain to your Lordship, to take my own life, in circumstances which will be sufficiently public by the time this reaches you.
“ ‘I have not, as your Lordship knows, any firm religious convictions. I believe that there is a future life of some kind, and that we shall all be judged according to our opportunities and the use we made of same. I believe that God is merciful, and will make allowances for the difficulties we had in knowing what was the right thing to do and in doing it. But I have been through some hard times, and maybe not always acted for the best. Being desirous, therefore, of making my peace with God, I have taken the liberty of devising some of the property of which I die possessed to your Lordship personally, to be used for the benefit of the diocese of Pullford. Said property consisting of the benefits accruing from the Euthanasia policy taken out by me with the Indescribable Insurance Company. And so have directed my lawyers in a will made by me recently.
“ ‘I believe that your Lordship is a man of God, and anxious to do his best for his fellow-citizens in the town of Pullford. I believe that the money will serve a good end, although I do not agree with what your Lordship teaches. I feel sure that your Lordship will realize the desirability of keeping this letter private, and not letting it be known that I took my own life. The insurance company would probably refuse to pay the claim if I was supposed to have died by my own hand, that being their rule in such cases, except where the deceased was of unsound mind, which is not the case, me being in full possession of all my faculties. If, however, the preparations which I have made should eventuate successfully, it will not be supposed by the coroner’s jury that I took my own life, and the claim will be paid accordingly. Your Lordship will realize that this is only fair, since (1) in taking my own life I am only anticipating the decree of nature by a few months, and (2) the object to which I have devised the money is not the selfish enjoyment of a few persons, but the spiritual benefit of a large number, mostly poor. I am writing this, therefore, for your Lordship’s own eyes, and it has no need to be made public. I am quite sure that God will forgive me what I am doing if it is at all wrong, for I am afraid to suffer pain and am doing my best to bequeath my money in such a way that same will be used for good purposes. With every gratitude for the kindness I have always received at the Cathedral House, though not of the same religion, I remain,
The Bishop’s voice quavered a little at certain points in this recital; it was difficult not to be affected by the laborious efforts of a pen untrained in language to do justice to the writer’s friendly intentions. “I’m very sorry indeed for the poor fellow,” the Bishop said. “The older we grow, the more tender we must become toward the strange vagaries of the human conscience. That’s not the letter of a man, whose mind is unhinged. And yet, what is one to make of a conscience so strangely misformed? However, I didn’t come here to talk about all that. You’ll see for yourselves that, although the writer recommends my keeping it dark, he places me under no obligation to do so—he would have put me in an uncommonly awkward position if he had. As it is, I’ve had no hesitation in reading it to you, and shall have no hesitation in producing it, if necessary, before a court of law. It seems that our legacy, after all, was only a castle in Spain.”
“The poor dear!” said Angela. “And it’s bad luck on you, Mr. Leyland. Did you realize, My Lord, that Mr. Leyland had just succeeded in persuading us all that Mr. Brinkman had murdered Mr. Mottram by letting in gas from the room above?”
“Well, thank God it was nothing as bad as that!” said the Bishop. “At least this letter will help us to take a kindlier view of him.”
“It would be a very singular and, I had almost said, a diverting circumstance, if both things could have happened at once,” said Mr. Pulteney, “if, while Mottram was busy poisoning himself with his own gas down below, Brinkman was at the same moment, in complete ignorance, feeding him with an extra supply of gas from above. It would be a somewhat knotty problem, in that case, to decide whether we were to call it suicide or murder. However,” he added with a little bow to the Bishop, “we have a competent authority with us.”
“Oh, don’t ask me, sir,” protested the Bishop, “I should have to consult my Canon Penitentiary. He would tell me, I fancy, that the act of murder in this case inflowed into the act of suicide, but I am not sure that would help us much.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Eames, “Mr. Bredon could tell us what view the Indescribable would take of such a case.”
“They would be hard put to it,” said Bredon. “Fortunately, there is no question of any such doubt here. For Leyland’s suggestion of murder was only based on the impossibility of suicide, in view of the gas being turned off. Whereas Mr. Pulteney’s ingenious suggestion has all the difficulties in it which Leyland was trying to avoid.”
“I’m hanged if I can make head or tail of it,” said Leyland. “It’s like a nightmare, this case; every time you think you’ve found some solid ground to rest on, it sinks under your feet. I shall begin to believe in ghosts soon. And what are we to make of the message itself? Might I see the envelope, My Lord? … Thank you. Well, it’s clear that Brinkman wasn’t putting the letter up on the ledge; he was taking it down. It’s so weather-stained that it must clearly have been there the best part of a week. Now, why on earth was Brinkman so anxious to take the letter away with him? For the letter proved it was suicide, and that’s precisely what he wanted to have proved.”
“Brinkman may not have known what was in the letter,” suggested Eames.
“He may have thought the thousand pounds were in it,” suggested Pulteney, “waiting there as a surprise present for the Bishop. I am no acrobat myself, but I believe I could jump pretty high if you gave me that sum to aspire to.”
“I wonder if Brinkman did know?” said Leyland. “Of course if he did he was an accessory before the fact to Mottram’s suicide. And that might make him anxious for his own position—but it doesn’t ring true, that idea.”
“Might I see the letter itself?” asked Bredon. “It sounds impolite, I know; but I only want to look at the way in which it’s written. … Thank you, My Lord. … It’s rather a suggestive fact, isn’t it, that this letter was copied?”
“Copied?” asked the Bishop. “How on earth can you tell that?”
“I am comparing it in my mind’s eye with the letter we found lying about in Mottram’s bedroom, half-finished. Mottram wrote with difficulty; his thoughts didn’t flow to his pen. Consequently, in that letter to the Pullford Examiner you will find that only the last sentence at the bottom of the page has been blotted when the ink was wet. The rest of the page had had time to dry naturally, while Mottram was thinking of what to say next. But this letter of yours, My Lord, has been written straight off, and the blotting process becomes more and more marked the further you get down the page. I say, therefore, that Mottram had already composed the letter in rough, and when he set down to this sheet of paper he was copying it straight down.”
“You’re not suggesting that Brinkman dictated the letter?” asked Leyland. “Of course that would open up some interesting possibilities.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking of that. I was only thinking it was rather a cold-blooded way for a suicide to write his last letter. But it’s a small point.”
“And meanwhile,” said Leyland, “I suppose you’re waiting for me to fork out those forty pounds?”
“What!” said the Bishop, “you have a personal interest in this, Mr. Bredon? Well, in any case you have saved your company a larger sum than that. I’m afraid you will have to write and tell them that it was suicide, and the claim does not urge.”
“On the contrary, My Lord,” said Bredon, knocking out his pipe thoughtfully into the fireplace, “I’m going to write to the company and tell them that the claim has got to be paid, because Mottram met his death by accident.”