VI
The Archimedes Touch
The Gudgeon Inn is the sort of institution that only exists for the sake of people who see life in inverted commas. Externally it is just like a thousand other inns; the creaking signboard, the modest lintel-announcement of the licence, the perspective of doors and passages that greets you as you enter, show no promise of disillusionment. But once you are really inside, you know the difference. The dining-room has no muslin curtains, there is no bamboo firescreen; the tables are not covered with ashtrays and saltcellars advertising beer and mineral waters; there is no vast, unwieldy sideboard heaped with unnecessary coffeepots. The tables are of fumed oak, and the flower-vases on them are of modern crockery in a daring orange; the sideboard is real Elizabethan, and serves no purpose whatever, any more than the three large pewter plates which rest upon it, obviously straight from an old curiosity shop. There are no stuffed animals in glass cases, no sentimental pictures with explicit legends in the manner of the later nineteenth century; no strange seashells on the mantelpieces, no horsehair sofas, no superannuated musical-boxes. The walls are very bare and beautifully whitewashed; a few warming-pans and some mezzotints are all their ornament; there are open fireplaces with brightly polished dogs, tiled floors, rush mats, wooden coal-scuttles with archaic mottoes carved on them. In a word, the inn has been recently “done up.”
“It isn’t an inn,” Bredon was complaining to his wife over their evening meal; “it’s an old-world hostelry, and it irritates me. I believe they expected us to dress for dinner; there isn’t any commercial room, only a place they call the Ingle Nook; I can’t find a dartboard anywhere, or an antimacassar. Their idea of a beer-mug is a thing you stick up on a shelf and look at.”
“It’s such a pity you’ve no taste,” suggested Angela.
“Taste? Who wants taste in a country pub? You can get taste in your own drawing-room. A country pub ought to grow up anyhow; with grandfather clocks that really belonged to grandfathers, and a spotty piano all out of tune, and sham flowers and things. Don’t you see that this kind of thing isn’t natural?”
“Well, switch off the art-criticism and do a little brain work. Tell me why poor old Burgess is all wrong about the drowning mystery.”
“Oh, that? Well, in the first place, as I said this morning, what’s the use of the hole in the canoe? If the man isn’t really drowned, but wants us to think he is, why doesn’t he pretend the canoe just tipped over on one side and swamped? They often do.”
“It only surprises me that they don’t do it oftener. But go on.”
“Here’s another improbability—Burtell’s got a weak heart. Tremayne’s vetted him, and Simmonds has vetted him, and they both know what they’re talking about. Now, Burgess wants us to believe that that man pulled himself up by the arms from a canoe on to the top of a bridge, and then, probably, swam the stream. If he did do either of those things, it was suicide all right for a man with a heart like Burtell’s. And that brings up a further point—why should he want to leave the boat just there, such a short way down the lock stream? If he’d only held on another half-mile or so, he’d have got past the junction where the weir stream flows in, and then he could land and make tracks for the station without crossing any branch of the river at all. Again, Burgess found the prints of a naked foot. What on earth did Burtell want to go and take off his shoes and socks for? He’d want them when he got ashore. Ninthly, and lastly, if he scuttled the canoe right up there, just below the lock, how did it manage to float down three miles, all waterlogged, before it was found at half-past one?”
“Still, you’ve got to give some account of those footmarks.”
“Oh, I’m not denying there’s been some hanky-panky at the bridge. Assuming, of course, that Mr. Burgess is telling the truth, and he doesn’t seem to me to have much imagination. I’m only here to establish a death, or if possible the absence of a death. So I’m only concerned with what Mr. Derek Burtell has been up to. But if I were the police, and if I hadn’t the singular fondness of the police for trying to find the body before you do anything else, I should be beginning to wonder what Mr. Nigel Burtell has been up to.”
“But his alibi is surely pretty sound.”
“It’s too sound, that’s the trouble. It looks so confoundedly like an alibi, if you see what I mean. He leaves the canoe with just twenty minutes to catch his train. He engages the lock-keeper in conversation about the exact time, so that the lock-keeper can swear not only to him but to the precise hour at which he left. Then he reappears here an hour or two later, and starts talking to the barmaid about the time—I found out that from her. Then he conceives some anxiety about his cousin—and why was he so anxious? Why did he set out almost expecting to find him drowned?—and he marches off up the river, not alone, mark you, but with an independent witness who can swear to his actions. I dare say it’s all right. I only get the impression that Mr. Nigel Burtell’s behaviour is a little too like an alibi to be true.”
“Do you always suspect a man if he’s got a good alibi?”
“No, but hang it all, there’s the motive here as plain as a pikestaff. I gather he wasn’t particularly fond of his cousin in any case. And he was the residuary legatee; he walks into the fifty thousand if his cousin is proved dead. On the other hand, it was necessary to do something pretty quick; because by September Derek is due to be twenty-five, and then the money all goes to the Jews. On the principle that motive is the first thing to go for, Mr. Nigel Burtell is the first man to come under suspicion. And his alibi has got to be pretty good wearing material. Though, as I say, it’s no business of mine.”
“What you mean is, you think Nigel Burtell slipped round to the wooded part of the island, waylaid his cousin, and murdered him just at the bridge; then he scuttled the canoe—why? Perhaps he thought it would sink, and so hide the traces. Then he ran back to the station and got there just in time for the train.”
“If so, the young gentleman is probably suffering from a cold. Half an hour’s journey in a railway carriage, when you are dripping wet in all your clothes, is trying to the strongest constitution. You seem to forget that he’s got to swim the weir stream.”
“But he could take off his clothes to do that.”
“And travel as a third-class faun? No, don’t say that men have swum rivers with their clothes balanced on their heads. I don’t deny that men have done it, but I’m quite sure Nigel Burtell never did. It’s a matter of practice. No, let us amend your proposition by suggesting that he crossed the weir by the bridge, ran up along the further bank of the weir-stream, stripped, swam across, ran through the wood, and so caught and murdered his cousin as he came past. That would explain why the marks on the bridge were the marks of naked feet.”
“That isn’t giving him very much time to do it in.”
“Exactly. It isn’t the running that is so apt to take up time; it’s the killing. A really tidy murder can seldom be arranged in the fraction of a second. Besides, what made him want to hop up on to a bridge? The sides are open, so he wasn’t hidden. Of course, if there were a body forthcoming, we might know more about the cause of death, and we might be able to see the point of the bridge. At present I can’t. But the time! It meant cutting the thing beastly close. It would be all right, perhaps, either to kill your man or to scuttle your boat, but could there be time for both?”
“Miles, I expect you’ll think me a most appalling fool, but I’ve got an idea.”
“I know what it is.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“Then you’d say you knew it was that. You tell me.”
“Then you’d say that was your idea.”
“Write it down, then.”
“We both will.” Miles scribbled a sentence on the back of an envelope, and Angela on a tiny memorandum sheet. Then the documents were exchanged.
“Yes,” said Miles, “I don’t think you’d better take to crime. I can read you like a book, can’t I? You know, your idea’s quite an ingenious one, and I dare say I didn’t think of it more than half an hour before you did. But it won’t do—you see that, don’t you?”
Angela seemed a little hurt. “You mean, who pushed off from the lock?”
“No, that might just be managed. But the distance—how is a wind, short of a hurricane, going to blow a canoe a hundred yards downstream in ten minutes? That’s where it doesn’t work.”
“I suppose not. Blow, it was rather a clever idea. Still, you’d got it too. I suppose you’re not going to release any theories, then? I know that mulish face of yours when you want to look sphinx-like.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had any expression of the kind.”
“Oh, but you have, dearest, it’s quite notorious. Only this afternoon, when you were paying for the tea, Mr. Burgess said to me, ‘Why does he look so sphinx-like, standing among the pinks, like?’ Anyhow, you don’t mean to part with your own ideas, do you?”
“Not till I’ve got some. Tomorrow, you see, if you’re feeling very kind, you are going into Oxford to get that reel of films developed. If you get them done quick, and stand over the man to see that he does it, I suppose you ought to be able to produce some unfixed prints by the afternoon, oughtn’t you? Meanwhile, I shall have been conducting a few experiments.”
“What sort of experiments?”
“Oh, just in drowning myself.”
“Well, don’t be too successful about it. Or if you are, do get found all right; it would be a great bore not to know whether one was a widow or not.”
“You never know. I might get carried down into the paper mill, and come out at the other end in folio lengths. It would be very annoying to have the account of one’s own death printed on one, wouldn’t it? Meanwhile, what do you say to a little bézique before we retire ourselves? I wish you’d let me bring the real cards with me, so that I could have started a patience.”
It was, as a matter of fact, scarcely luncheon-time next day when Angela returned, full of mystery. According to a long-standing compact, they tossed up as to which should make a report first; and the lot fell upon Bredon. “Well,” he said, “I’ve spent my morning in a way very uncommon among English gentlemen. Largely, I may say, in a bathing suit.”
“Better than nothing,” commented Angela. “Start from the beginning.”
“I took the canoe down to the lock just below here, because that’s where they’ve got the Burtell canoe—it’s lying careened on the bank. Of course I wanted the man to let me take it away with me and have all sorts of fun with it, but it appeared to be more than his place was worth. I did, however, by means of a bet, manage to find out what I wanted to know—which was, how long it would take the canoe to fill with a hole that size in its bottom.”
“You mean he let you sink it?”
“No, but we put it in together and let it sink with a rope round each thwart to haul it out again with. I took care to lose my bet, of course. Meanwhile I found out exactly how long it would take to fill. I also noticed how long it would take to get one inch of water in, and so on. Then I went off and did the Archimedes touch.”
“Who’s he?”
“Surely you have not forgotten Archimedes in the Latin grammar, who was so intent on watching the way his bath was overflowing that he did not even notice his country had been captured? I retired to a position where I could undress with decency, got into the canoe in my gent’s University bathing suit, and drifted downstream, baling for dear life. Only I was baling in, not out, if you understand me.”
“But how did you know how much to bale?”
“It was only approximate, of course. But I calculated the time fairly easily by knowing how soon the first inch of water ought to get inside. I don’t know if I ever told you that at school they thought me rather a dab at mathematics.”
“You whispered it in my ear, darling, when we sat making love on the promenade at Southend. But what did all this tell you?”
“Why, approximately how far a canoe would drift, with wind and stream in its favour, when it was sinking at a given rate. It didn’t get very far. Incidentally, I fell out after a bit, which was what I expected. One’s balance is never perfect. However, I swam to shore all right, and dressed. Then I paddled up here, got hold of another canoe, and repeated the same experiment, leaving our canoe to float down empty and baling into it as we went. That showed me how far a canoe would float before it filled when there was no heavy body in it.”
“I still don’t see exactly what use it all was. You don’t pretend to be able to say exactly how far the Burtells’ canoe was paddled down from the lock, and how much it drifted? Or how far it drifted before it got the hole made in it?”
“No, but you can get negative results which are rather important. I tested also, of course, the rate at which a waterlogged canoe floats downstream, getting no help from the wind. And therefore I’m in a position to say that the accident, or whatever it was, can’t possibly have happened higher up the stream than a certain roughly-calculated point—if it had, the canoe wouldn’t have had time to drift down to the place at which it was found. It couldn’t conceivably, for example, have drifted all the way down from the bridge over the lock-stream in the time given, with that hole in it. Body or no body.”
“In fact, whatever else happened at the iron bridge, it wasn’t there that the boat was scuttled? I see you’re trying to exculpate Mr. Nigel Burtell.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. But my experiments do seem to suggest that he can’t have had a hand in it.”
“That’s a tiny bit disappointing. Because, you see, my experiments do very much suggest that Mr. Nigel Burtell had a hand in it.”