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Discordant Notes
The Burtell sensation was still making good copy in the newspapers. It was part of Leyland’s technique, perhaps a fault in it, that he never put a suspected man on his guard; consequently, although the police and the harbour authorities were warned of Nigel’s disappearance, nothing revealed the fact in print. On the other hand, descriptions of Derek were widely circulated, and it was understood to be the “official theory” that the unfortunate young gentleman, who was known to be in weak nervous health, must in all probability be wandering about somewhere, suffering from a loss of memory. Nothing stimulates the public imagination so powerfully as the existence of an official theory; its merits and demerits were hotly debated in clubs and railway-carriages; bets were freely exchanged, hairdressers became intolerable on the subject, and even dentists would gag you and then let you have the benefit of their opinions on it. The forebodings Bredon had expressed were amply justified. To the intense irritation of the local fishermen, the banks of the river were lined all Saturday afternoon by amateur detectives who had bicycled over to try their hand at the game; the locks were almost congested with inquisitive punts and pleasure-boats; a couple of charabancs ran from Oxford, and their enterprise did not prove a disappointment.
It was not only on the Upper River, or in the neighbourhood of Oxford, that the search went on. Photography has made it possible for us all, wherever we are, to join in the criminal-hunt; and that peculiarly blurred impression which reproduction in a daily paper superinduces on a photograph has added zest to the sport—there is scarcely any stranger whom you cannot, by a stretch of imagination, identify with the wanted man. So far as Nigel was concerned, the police were in a difficulty. Nigel, though he affected the camera himself, could never be induced to sit for it. No portrait of him was forthcoming except a photograph taken when he was seven, and a Futurist sketch by a friend in Chelsea which might equally well have represented any other man, woman, or ant-heap. But Derek’s portrait was forthcoming, and was printed in thousands of papers, with the most encouraging results. Imaginary Dereks were held up at Aberdeen, at Enniskillen, and at Bucharest; all three had to be released with profuse apologies. A well-known medium published the fact that Derek was dead; but happy, very happy. Unfortunately, on the same day a rival medium announced that Derek was alive and well, but had lost his memory. Which put revelations, for the moment, at a discount.
But this worldwide publicity hardly affected the persons genuinely concerned. What was more serious was that one or two gentlemen of leisure had apparently set their hearts on solving the mystery; and these showed every sign of infesting the district permanently. One of them, a Mr. Erasmus Quirk, took rooms at the Gudgeon itself on the Thursday, a short time before Leyland’s arrival, and it looked as if the Bredons would have to live at close quarters with him. That Mr. Erasmus Quirk was an American, his pronunciation of our common speech gave ample evidence. His personal aspect hardly lived up to his speech, apart from the ritual horn spectacles. One’s impression of our male visitors from the United States is that they are all very fine and large, with square shoulders and a certain attitude of domination. Mr. Quirk seemed to be a little weed of a man, who stooped so that you almost put him down for a hunchback; his face was very pale, and disfigured by a yellow blotch on the left cheek; his hair closely cropped, so that it revealed to the full a little tonsure of apparently premature baldness. Every movement of his was unobtrusive; his hands were glued in his coat pockets; and—a rare gift among his compatriots—he seemed altogether disinclined for company.
He was not allowed, however, to indulge whatever disinclination he may have felt. Angela had an inexhaustible capacity for acquaintance with strangers; it did not matter if they were boring strangers—she collected bores. She had that useful habit of enjoying an interview in retrospect which makes it possible to sit through hours of conversational tedium. Mr. Quirk had got to be brought out of his shell, and he came out obediently after dinner. Angela sat knitting, with that air of pleased attention which only knitting can give, in the intolerably chaste drawing-room of the Gudgeon, while Mr. Quirk poured out his artless confidences. He was, it seemed, a member of the Detective Club of America; and it was his duty to write up a detective mystery of some kind before the fall, as a condition of his membership. He had been vegetating at Burford, not far off, when the newspapers put him wise to the Burtell mystification; and it was a matter of little difficulty to pack his traps and proceed to the scene of action. He invited Angela to say whether it wasn’t just an extraordinary piece of luck. It was his conjecture that he might have gone round Europe on all fours with a magnifying glass without managing to strike oil like this. In the States they had a very great admiration for the methods of detection used over here; he could assure Mrs. Bredon that every development in the Burtell case was being followed with the very greatest interest by every paper on the other side. He didn’t suppose Mrs. Bredon quite understood the way he felt about it; but it seemed to him just extraordinary the way the police in England allowed every fool of an amateur to get busy over a case like this; why, in Chicago it was to be surmised that the civilian population would be being held up with revolvers at a barrier. It was just another instance of the remarkable hospitality you always got from the British nation.
To all this monologue Angela paid a demure attention, and it was not until Mr. Quirk began speculating whether he owed the presence of such delightful companions as Mr. and Mrs. Bredon to the tragedy recently reported in the locality that she was suddenly faced with the necessity of disclosures on her own part. It would be absurd to deny that Miles was interested in the case; his daily proceedings would have given a ready lie to the statement. She fell back, therefore—I am afraid it was her custom—on a misleading series of half-truths; her husband had been remotely acquainted with the young man who had disappeared, and certain business friends had urged him, since he was at leisure, to apply what diligence he could to the solution of the mystery. His was not in any sense an official errand. And so the difficulty was tided over, with a minimum of prevarication and a minimum of enlightenment.
Mr. Quirk assured her that he would be the last person to jump another man’s claim in any way, but he would esteem it a very great privilege if Mrs. Bredon could inform him, without any breach of confidence, what was generally thought to have been the exact scene of the tragedy. It would be a bit discouraging to have to go over six miles of river with a fine-tooth comb; and if Mr. Bredon’s deductions had led him to any conclusion about the precise locality that was concerned, why, Mr. Quirk would be extraordinarily obliged if Mrs. Bredon could put him wise to them.
“Oh, there’s no secret about that,” said Angela. “You’ll find the spot marked, not with a cross, but with a troop of about sixteen boy scouts with no clothes on, diving into the river all day in the hopes of fishing something up. Or, if for any reason their operations should be suspended, you’ll know the place because it’s just opposite a disused boathouse, the only one of its kind. The boathouse would be on the right-hand side as you go up, but it’s easier to get at the river from the other side, because of the towpath.”
Leyland called round the next morning soon before luncheon. They sat and talked on the lawn, while Mr. Quirk, who had returned from a morning ramble, watched them, with Angela, from the drawing-room window. Leyland and Bredon were examining what looked like photographs. “How lucky,” observed Mr. Quirk, “that your husband should be a photographic expert.”
“Why, how on earth did you know?” asked Angela, genuinely surprised.
“I don’t pride myself very much on my observation, Mrs. Bredon, but I think I can recognize the stains on a man’s hands when he has been developing films recently.”
Leyland had a long tour of examination to report, which for the most part had produced painfully negative results. They remembered, at Shipcote Station, a gentleman catching the nine-fourteen to Oxford at the last moment. The ticket-collector at Oxford remembered a gentleman travelling by that train who had no ticket, and had to buy one at the guichet. The porter at the schools remembered a gentleman presenting himself for his viva a day too soon. All these agreed roughly in their description of Nigel; and the fact that it was really Nigel who went back on that train seemed established beyond all possibility of doubt by the testimony of his landlady, who had met him at the door when he came to his digs. With some difficulty, Leyland even found the taxi-driver who took up a fare close to Carfax and put him down at the Gudgeon “round about eleven o’clock.”
“That alibi seems all right, don’t it?” suggested Leyland.
“Yes, only (as I say) it’s just a bit too perfect. The young man seems to have been at such elaborate pains to leave memories of himself wherever he went. There’s not a link missing in the chain, you see; it looks as if he’d definitely meant to establish his whereabouts at every moment of the day. But perhaps I’m fanciful. What about the other end? Did you get any evidence about his staying here all the time between eleven and one o’clock that morning?”
The evidence here seemed less satisfactory. The barmaid could remember Nigel’s arrival; she had told him that it was not possible to serve him with cherry brandy at that hour; she had served him, however, with ginger-beer. She had not watched him at all as he sat on the lawn, though she had passed by once with a message, and had seen him sitting there—she was not quite sure what the time would be. The people camping on the opposite bank had been conscious of his presence; they had noticed his attempts to feed the peacock; but they, too, could only say that it would be some time between eleven and twelve. His further movements were not definitely dated, except by the fact that he ordered luncheon at a quarter, or it might be, half-past twelve. “Granted that he was feeding the peacock about a quarter-past eleven,” said Leyland, “that gives him an hour to hurry along the towpath, do what he came to do, and get back.”
“Yes, but you don’t believe that. You don’t believe he would take the risk. This is what I should consider a real alibi—a natural one. He made no efforts to advertise his presence—didn’t rush into the bar for a cherry brandy, for example, exactly at twelve o’clock. No, my feeling is, that up to eleven, Master Nigel was very careful to be where somebody could see him; after that, he doesn’t appear to have minded. I wonder why? Dash it all, I suppose it ought to suggest something.”
Leyland shook his head. “All too confoundedly theoretical. I tried Spinnaker Farm, too; but there they could give me nothing in the way of a description. The old lady had only seen the stranger from an upstairs window as he hurried through the yard; she had guessed that he was running for the train, and had looked out to see the smoke of the train later on, from anxiety to know whether he had caught it or not.”
“Did the stranger see her?” asked Bredon.
“Yes, oddly enough he must have; because he took off his hat to her. Rather an unusual exercise of politeness, for a man catching a train.”
“Precisely. But, you see, once more he makes absolutely certain of his alibi.”
“Then I tried the lock-keeper. He was absolutely positive that he saw nobody else about so early in the morning, except the boy who brings the milk, and the man who went up in a punt just before the Burtells passed. He never saw the man in the punt again. Had the man in the punt come back yet? (I asked). He wasn’t certain, didn’t think he had, but hadn’t paid much attention to him. As for the canoe, he described Nigel quite unmistakably; he was sure that there was another gentleman in the canoe, but had not seen him move; nor had he heard him speak, because he was below the level of the lock, mostly. I asked, Mustn’t he have moved so as to push the boat out of the lock? Mr. Burgess, who sticks (I fancy) to his old mumpsimus, thought that the other gentleman might have given the canoe a shove to get it clear of the lock—he was down at the bottom of the steps, it seems, at the time. So that was all Mr. Burgess could tell me, except about his discovery this morning.”
“A discovery this morning? You never told me about that.”
“I was saving it up. Yes, Mr. Burgess, it seems, is neglecting his garden nowadays, and spends his odd time poking about in the lock-stream with one of those long hayfork things (you must have seen them) which watermen always have. Well, this morning he was prodding about off the island, just below the bridge, and, more by accident than by design, his hayfork came up with something that looked like a pouch on the end of it. It fell in again, but Burgess fished round and got it out again. Here it is.”
Leyland took out a green leather wallet, much faded and disfigured by water, which was clearly meant to contain Treasury notes. From its inner pocket he produced two five-pound notes—it was these that Mr. Quirk mistook for photographs. There was nothing else in the wallet.
“You know, that’s confoundedly interesting,” said Bredon. “I must say it looks as if that wallet had dropped off a genuine corpse. Imagine that there was no corpse—that Derek was simply doing the disappearing trick; it would surely have been possible to find a less expensive souvenir to leave lying about—a shoe, for example. And even if he had to jettison a purse, one note would have been quite enough to leave in it. Whereas wallets do fall out of pockets. But of course, we’ve no evidence that it was Derek’s at all.”
“Excuse me, we have. I telegraphed to his bank for the numbers of any notes he’d drawn out in the last three weeks, and these numbers were among them.”
“Come, that’s better. … The actual notes—and two of them. It certainly looks like an involuntary jettison. And that would presumably mean, either that he met somebody just below the bridge, and the wallet fell out, perhaps in the course of a struggle; or else that that was the exact spot at which the canoe toppled over and the body fell out. I can’t see any other way to it, unless it were sheer insane accident.”
“That’s about my own feeling. It’s not far, mark you, from the place where the tobacco-pouch was found, with the films in it.”
“There’s a little lad to see you, sir,” announced the landlady without warning.
Bredon had not been slow to cultivate the acquaintance of the boy scouts, and he had little doubt that it was one of these unofficial allies who was looking for him. It must surely mean a discovery. Excusing himself to Leyland, he hurried to the front door, and found his expectations justified. The matted hair proclaimed that his visitor had not been long out of the water; and the disorder of his clothes seemed to suggest that their resumption was only a reluctant sacrifice to the convenances. On his face was a broad smile, and in his hand a small, dark object.
“Found the gentleman’s money-purse, sir,” he said.