II
The Detective Malgré Lui
I have already mentioned that the Indescribable kept its own tame doctor, a man at the very head of his profession. He was not in the least necessary to it; that is to say, a far cheaper man would have done the work equally well. But it suited the style of the Indescribable to have the very best man, and to advertise the fact that he had given up his practice in order to work exclusively for the company; it was all of a piece with the huge white building, and the frieze, and the palms in the waiting-room. It looked well. For a quite different reason the Indescribable retained its own private detective. This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the official communications of the company except as “our representative.” He carried neither a lens nor a forceps—not even a revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend; but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will not call him, for the company paid him, and as you would expect, quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland Yard, where the umbrellas go to.
He was not an ornament to the company; he fulfilled a quite practical purpose. There are, even outside the humorous stories, business men in a small way who find it more lucrative to burn down their premises than to sell their stock. There are ladies—ladies whose names the Indescribable would never dream of giving away—who pawn their jewels, buy sham ones, and then try to make the original insurance policy cover them in the event of theft. There are small companies (believe it or not) which declare an annual loss by selling their stuff below cost price to themselves under another name. Such people flocked to the Indescribable. It was so vast a concern that you felt no human pity about robbing it—it was like cheating the income tax, and we all know how some people feel about that. The Indescribable never prosecuted for fraud; instead, it allowed a substantial margin for these depredations, which it allowed to continue. But where shady work was suspected “our representative” would drop in in the most natural way in the world and by dint of some searching inquiries made while the delinquent’s back was turned would occasionally succeed in showing up a fraud and saving the company a few hundreds of thousands by doing so.
The company’s “representative,” and our hero, was Miles Bredon, a big, good-humoured, slightly lethargic creature still in the early thirties. His father had been a lawyer of moderate eminence and success. When Miles went to school it was quite clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, and very obscure how he was going to do it. He was not exactly lazy, but he was the victim of hobbies which perpetually diverted his attention. He was a really good mathematician, for example; but as he never left a sum unfinished and “went on to the next” his marks never did him justice. He was a good cross-country runner, but in the middle of a run he would usually catch sight of some distraction which made him wander three miles out of his course and come in last. It was his nature to be in love with the next thing he had to do, to shrink in loathing from the mere thought of the next but one. The war came in time to solve the problem of his career; and more fortunate than some he managed to hit on a métier in the course of it. He became an intelligence officer; did well, then did brilliantly; was mentioned in despatches, though not decorated. What was more to the point, his Colonel happened to be a friend of some minor director of the Indescribable, and, hearing that a discreet man was needed to undertake the duties outlined, recommended Bredon. The offer fell at his feet just when he was demobilized; he hated the idea of it, but was sensible enough to realize, even then, that ex-officers cannot be choosers. He was accepted on his own terms, namely, that he should not have to sit in an office kicking his heels; he would always be at home, and the company might call him in when he was wanted.
In a few years he had made himself indispensable to his employer; that is to say, they thought they could not get on without him, though in fact his application to his duties was uncertain and desultory. Four out of five inquiries meant nothing to him; he made nothing of them; and Whitechapel thanked the God of its fathers for his incompetence. The fifth case would appeal to his capricious imagination; he would be prodigal of time and of pains; and he would bring off some coup which was hymned for weeks behind closed doors in the Indescribable Building. There was that young fellow at Croydon, for example, who had his motor-bicycle insured, but not his mother-in-law. Her body was found at the foot of an embankment beside a lonely road in Kent, and there was no doubt that it had been shot out of the sidecar; only (as Bredon managed to prove) the lady’s death had occurred on the previous day from natural causes. There was the well-known bootlegger—well known, at least, to the United States police—who insured all his cargoes with the Indescribable and then laid secret information against himself whereby vigilant officials sank hundreds of dummy cases in the sea, all the bottles containing seawater. And there was the lady of fashion who burgled her own jewels in the most plausible manner you could imagine and had them sold in Paris. These crooked ways too the fitful intuitions of Miles Bredon made plain in the proper quarters.
He was well thought of, in fact, by everyone except himself. For himself, he bitterly regretted the necessity that had made him become a spy—he would use no other word for it—and constantly alarmed his friends by announcing his intention of going into the publishing trade, or doing something relatively honest. The influence which saved him on these occasions was that of—how shall I say it?—his wife. I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter, but it is not my fault. It is the fault of two mocking eyes and two very capable hands that were employed in driving brass-hats to and fro in London at the end of the war. Bredon surrendered to these, and made a hasty but singularly fortunate marriage. Angela Bredon was under no illusions about the splendid figure in khaki that stood beside her at the altar. Wiser than her generation, she realized that marriages were not “for the duration”; that she would have to spend the rest of her life with a large, untidy, absentminded man who would frequently forget that she was in the room. She saw that he needed above all things a nurse and a chauffeur, and she knew that she could supply both these deficiencies admirably. She took him as a husband, with all a husband’s failings, and the Indescribable itself could not have guaranteed her more surely against the future.
There is a story of some Bishop, or important person, who got his way at Rome rather unexpectedly over an appeal, and, when asked by his friends how he did it, replied, “Fallendo infallibilem.” It might have been the motto of Angela’s mastery over her husband; the detective, always awake to the possibilities of fraudulent dealing in every other human creature, did not realize that his wife was a tiny bit cleverer than he was and was always conspiring for his happiness behind his back. For instance, it was his custom of an evening to play a very long and complicated game of patience, which he had invented for himself; you had to use four packs, and the possible permutations of it were almost unlimited. It was an understood thing in the household that Angela, although she had grasped the rules of the game, did not really know how to play it. But when, as often happened, the unfinished game had to be left undisturbed all night, she was quite capable of stealing down early in the morning and altering the positions of one or two cards, so that he should get the game “out” in time to cope with his ordinary work. These pious deceits of hers were never, I am glad to say, unmasked.
About a fortnight after Mr. Mottram’s interview with the young man at Indescribable House these two fortunate people were alone together after dinner, she alternately darning socks and scratching the back of a sentimental-looking fox-terrier, he playing his interminable patience. The bulk of the pack lay on a wide table in front of him, but there were outlying sections of the design dotted here and there on the floor within reach of his hand. The telephone bell rang, and he looked up at her appealingly—obviously, he was tied hand and foot by his occupation—which to her only meant putting her darning away, lifting the fox-terrier off her feet, and going out into the hall. She understood the signal, and obeyed it. There was a fixed law of the household that if she answered a call which was meant for him he must try to guess what it was about before she told him. This was good for him, she said; it developed the sleuth instinct.
“Hullo! Mrs. Bredon speaking—who is it, please? … Oh, it’s you. … Yes, he’s in, but he’s not answering the telephone. … No, only drunk. … Just rather drunk. … Business? Good; that’s just what he wants. … A man called what? … M-o-t-t-r-a-m, Mottram, yes. … Never heard of it. … St. William’s? Oh, the Midlands, that are sodden and unkind, that sort of Midlands, yes? … Oh! … Is it—what? … Is it supposed to have been an accident? … Oh, that generally means suicide, doesn’t it? … Staying where? … Where’s that? … All right, doesn’t matter; I’ll look it up. … At an inn? Oh, then it was in somebody else’s bed really! What name? … What a jolly name! Well, where’s Miles to go? To Chilthorpe? … Yes, rather, we can start bright and early. Is it an important case? Is it an important case? … Oo! I say! I wish I could get Miles to die and leave me half a million! Righto, he’ll wire you tomorrow. … Yes, quite; thanks. … Good night.”
“Interpret, please,” said Angela, returning to the drawing-room. “Why, you’ve been going on with your patience the whole time! I suppose you didn’t listen to a word I was saying?”
“How often am I to tell you that the memory and the attention function inversely? I remember all you said, precisely because I wasn’t paying attention to it. First of all, it was Sholto, because he was ringing you up on business, but it was somebody you know quite well—at least I hope you don’t talk like that to the tradesmen.”
“Sholto, yes, ringing up from the office. He wanted to talk to you.”
“So I gathered. Was it quite necessary to tell him I was drunk?”
“Well, I couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment. I couldn’t tell him you were playing patience, or he might have thought we were unhappily married. Go on, Sherlock.”
“Mottram, living at some place in the Midlands you’ve never heard of, but staying at a place called ‘Chilthorpe’—he’s died, and his death wants investigating; that’s obvious.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
“From the way you said ‘Oh’—besides, you said he’d died in his bed, or implied it. And there’s some question of half a million insurance—Euthanasia, I suppose? Really, the Euthanasia’s been responsible for more crimes than psychoanalysis.”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’ve got it all right. What did he die of?”
“Something that generally means suicide—or rather, you think it does. The old sleeping draught business? Veronal?”
“No stupid, gas. The gas left turned on. And where’s Chilthorpe, please?”
“It’s on the railway. If my memory serves me right, it is Chilthorpe and Gorrington, between Bull’s Cross and Lowgill Junction. But the man, you say, belongs somewhere else?”
“Pullford; at least it sounded like that. In the Midlands somewhere, he said.”
“Pullford, good Lord, yes. One of these frightful holes. They make perambulators or something there, don’t they? A day’s run, I should think, in the car. But of course it’s this Chilthorpe place we want to get to. You wouldn’t like to look it up in the gazetteer while I just get this row finished, would you?”
“I shan’t get your sock finished, then. On your own foot be it! Let’s see, here’s Pullford all right. … It isn’t perambulators they make, it’s drainpipes. There’s a grammar school there, and an asylum; and the parish church is a fine specimen of early Perp., extensively restored in 1842; they always are. Has been the seat of a Roman Catholic Bishopric since 1850. The Baptist Chapel—”
“I did mention, didn’t I, that it was Chilthorpe I wanted to know about?”
“All in good time. Let’s see, Chilthorpe—it isn’t a village really, it’s a ship town. It has 2,500 inhabitants. There’s a lot here about the glebe. It stands on the River Busk, and there is trout fishing.”
“Ah, that sounds better.”
“Meaning exactly?”
“Well, it sounds as if the fellow had done himself in by accident all right. He went there to fish—you don’t go to a strange village to commit suicide.”
“Unless you’ve got electric light in your house and want to commit suicide with gas.”
“That’s true. What was the name of the inn, by the way?”
“The Load of Mischief. Such a jolly dedication, I think.”
“Now let’s try the map.”
“I was coming to that. Here’s the Busk all right. I say, how funny, there’s a place on the Busk called ‘Mottram.’ ”
“Anywhere near Chilthorpe?”
“I haven’t found it yet. Oh, yes, here it is, about four miles away. Incidentally, it’s only twenty miles or so from Pullford. Well, what about it? Are we going by car?”
“Why not? The Rolls is in excellent condition. Two or three days ought to see us through; we can stay, with any luck, at the Load of Mischief, and the youthful Francis will be all the better for being left to his nurse for a day or two. You’ve been feeding him corn, and he is becoming obstreperous.”
“You don’t deserve to have a son. However, I think you’re right. I don’t want to trust you alone in a ship town of 2,500 inhabitants, some of them female. Miles, dear, this is going to be one of your big successes, isn’t it?”
“On the contrary, I shall lose no time in reporting to the directors that the deceased gentleman had an unfortunate accident with the gas, and they had better pay up like sportsmen. I shall further point out that it is a great waste of their money keeping a private spy at all.”
“Good, then I’ll divorce you! I’m going to bed now. Not beyond the end of that second row, mind; we shall have to make an early start tomorrow.”