XII
The Secret of the Island
Bredon did not expand until he and Leyland were alone together. “I’m going to leave it to you,” he said, “how much you take Mr. Quirk into your confidence. Meanwhile, I must tell you that I’ve got Nigel Burtell’s fingerprints; and I’m confoundedly glad that I did. When I called on him to show him those photographs, I took good care that he should finger the envelope in which the photographs were, and that he should return it to me. As soon as I’d left him I took a photo of the prints, and here it is. Unless my memory is at fault, I think it’s the duplicate of the marks on those decanters.”
His forecast was fully justified. “Well,” said Leyland, “we’ve got the facts clear, anyhow. Until Sunday night, according to what you tell me, the Burtell cousins travelled together. On Sunday night Nigel Burtell was the only one who slept at Millington Bridge; and he took particularly good care to let it be supposed that Derek was there too. He must have been at pains, for example, to tumble the bedclothes in Number Three.”
“Yes, and don’t make any mistake about it—you can’t tumble the bedclothes in ten minutes. People do in books, but in real life you can’t make a bed look as if it had been lain on unless you actually lie on it for an hour or more. Nigel Burtell, I take it, must have divided his night between the two bedrooms and the two beds. That night, of course, he climbed out of the window and came back again to the inn door posing as the gentleman with the camera. He had the reputation, you know, of being quite a decent actor as amateurs go. The next morning found him in Number Three—he had locked the door of Number Two when he changed beds in the night. He made a feint of eating the breakfast, washed in that room and then in Number Two, packed, came down and ate his second breakfast, and went off, paying the bill. Not a bad night’s work. But whatever for?”
“I may be a fool,” said Leyland meditatively, “but I believe I’m getting nearer the solution of the whole thing. Look here, let me just rough it out, and see what you think of it. I’m taking it as a fixed certainty—almost the only fixed certainty we’ve lighted on so far—that Nigel Burtell deliberately pretended to be two people on the Sunday night, although his cousin was certainly with him when they paddled down the river next morning. The only strong motive I can see for Nigel’s fantastic behaviour is a fantastic motive. He acted as he acted because he wanted it to be thought that Derek Burtell was alive, whereas in reality he was dead. That means he had already murdered his cousin, on the Sunday.”
“It would be an ingenious idea, certainly. You mean that he left the body in the canoe, and tethered the canoe somewhere where it was not likely to be found?”
“Possibly. Or possibly he sank the body, somewhere where he could get at it again easily. Meanwhile, since there had been two gentleman staying in all the inns they had visited hitherto, he must create the impression that two gentlemen had slept at Millington Bridge. He did that, as we know. But his precautions went further; he was determined to play the old Cid trick with his brother’s body, pretending he was still alive, I mean; and to do that right under the nose of the lock-keeper. He arranged the body in the attitude of a man lying asleep—or possibly drugged—on the floor of the canoe, and then solemnly paddled down to Shipcote Lock. By a piece of luck for him, the water in the lock was at high level. If it had been at low level, the lock-keeper would have come out on to the nearer bridge to turn the winches, and would have been staring right down into the canoe. As it was, the lock-keeper had only to open the gates at that end; and he did so, after the manner of lock-keepers, with his back turned to the audience.”
“Yes, Nigel was taking a risk. But, as you say, the luck was with him.”
“From the further, lower end of the lock there was not much danger. In turning the winches, the lock-keeper still had his back to the canoe; and in a short time, as the water got lower, the canoe itself faded out of sight. Then it was that Nigel stood on the edge of the lock, and began a one-sided conversation with the lifeless figure in the canoe. No answers were audible, but that would not create any surprise in the lock-keeper; between the depth of the walls and the rushing of the water he wouldn’t be likely to hear the other side of the conversation. Only one difficulty remained—how to get the canoe clear of the lock, when the man inside it was dead. This difficulty Nigel solved, rather ingeniously, by pretending that he had remembered something at the last moment—the camera, or something like that—and running down the steps to the canoe. Here, still out of sight, he gave the canoe one good, straight shove, enough to carry it out into the stream, where the wind would catch it and help it along. Then he proceeded to establish his alibi.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile—why, I’m coming round to your idea of a third person, only I believe that third person to have been an accomplice. The accomplice’s job was to dispose, somehow, of the body, and then paddle on downstream, to a point remote from Shipcote, where he would scuttle the canoe and make off.”
“You’re suggesting that this accomplice disposed of the body first, and then paddled downstream without it?”
“Yes. You see, as a matter of fact both the river and its banks appear to have been entirely deserted at that hour in the morning. But they couldn’t bet on their being deserted. Now, if they were seen, it was essential that there should be only one human figure in the canoe. If there were only one, the casual passerby would be prepared to swear afterwards that it was Derek. Casual passersby will always swear anything. The accomplice, therefore, went on by himself; it didn’t matter how many people saw him, except at the precise moment when he was engaged in scuttling the boat. It meant, you see, that he must leave the body somewhere, and somewhere where it wouldn’t be found.”
“Yes, I see that. I suppose, by the way, you’re taking it for granted that they meant to spirit the body away somewhere, not to let it be found in the river?”
“I’m working on that supposition. After all, though it is possible for a body to sink and never be recovered, the chances are very much against it. So that if the dragging hasn’t brought a body to light, that means there probably isn’t a body there. And if so, that’s because Nigel and his accomplice—to call them that for the sake of argument—didn’t want the body to be found.”
“Excellent. And, of course, that means in its turn—”
“That the body itself wouldn’t bear inspection; there were marks of violence, or some other marks on it, which wouldn’t look well at a coroner’s inquest. The body, then, must be left lying about for a time. The accomplice couldn’t take it in his canoe, Nigel couldn’t take it in his railway carriage. It would have been possible, but laborious, to sink it somewhere and recover it afterwards. It would be a simpler plan to hide it somewhere on land till they could fetch it away.”
“They hadn’t very long, you know. The search began about four hours afterwards.”
“Exactly. All the better reason for choosing a place where People wouldn’t look. And, for that reason, I’m inclined to think that they hid the body on the island. That other end of the island, you remember, away from the lock, is all deep in woods, and there’s plenty of bracken and undergrowth. Searchers would go up the river all the way to the lock, and would scour either bank for miles round. But the island would be just the place where they wouldn’t look. They would assume that if Derek had lost his memory, or if he had done a bolt for it, he would be miles away by that time. Did anybody search the island, as a matter of fact?”
“I don’t think they did. But there’s one point to consider—leaving the body on the island would make it precious difficult to cart it away again. They could hardly reach it, either by land or on water, without being seen.”
“I know. And yet, would it be so very difficult for them to take advantage of the searching operations. Nigel, at all events, seems to have been up till all hours on the Monday night looking for the corpse—what if he knew where it was, and found it? And having found it, proceeded to dispose of it?”
“Well, there’s still time to have a look round. Or do you want specially to get back to Oxford? If you’re a strong man with the paddle, it wouldn’t take us long to go up there in the canoe, and that makes it easier to hunt round.”
“Just the two of us?”
“I’m not going three in a canoe for anybody. Angela has insisted on spending two nights at home; she has some absurd idea that her children like her to be about. And I don’t think Mr. Quirk is on in this act. Let it be just the two of us.”
The river lay infinitely beautiful, windless under a cloudless sky. The tiniest fidgeting motion of your body pencilled fresh ripples on the cool surface of the stream. The red earth of the banks, and the green fringe that surmounted them, showed in mellow contrast under the equable light of evening. The reeds stood straight and motionless as sentinels, just fringed with a distant horizon of treetops. The splashing of cows in the shallows, the churning of far-off reaping-machines, the cries of children, punctuated the stillness with companionship. Mint and meadowsweet and lying hay blended their scents with intolerable sweetness in that most delicate of all mediums, the smell of clean river-water. The stream, now dazzling in the sunlight, now mysterious and dark under the tree-shadows, seemed to conspire with the easy strokes of the paddle. Nature had determined, it appeared, to forget the tragedy and go on as if nothing had happened. Only the occasional dredgers reminded them of the past and their grim errand.
The island confronted them at last, a haunted spot, you would say, with its laced interplay of sun and shadow. There must be a complex in the blood of us island-born people that makes us feel, in the presence of an island, something of mystery and charm; it came out in us when we dug sand castles on the beach, it comes out in us still wherever the water isolates the land. But above all in lakes or in rivers; for here the strip of sundering tide is so narrow, the unattainable shore so near. Who has ever seen a Thames island that has not peopled it, in his imagination, with merry, lurking outlaws, or with the shy forms of some forgotten race of men? As you approached Shipcote Island, experience might remind you that at its higher end it was yoked with bridges and tamed with the laborious effort of human cultivation. But the illusion persisted in fancy; it seemed a spot remote, holy, uncontaminated by the daily instance of the surrounding world.
“Just here, I think,” said Leyland. “It was immediately off this part of the island that Burgess found the notecase. By his description it must originally have been lying quite close in to the shore—as if somebody or something had disembarked just here. There’s no sign of any disturbance on the bank, though, is there?”
But this impression proved only skin-deep. They had scarcely landed, when they found an unmistakable path through the bracken; a path, as they noticed with excitement, such as would be made by the dragging of a weight through the tangled fronds, not the mere casual wake left by a foot-passenger. For a few yards it diverged only a little from the shore, then, behind a screen of overhanging bushes, it climbed up the slope towards the centre of the island, through the thickest of the fern. Here and there was a bare patch of clayey soil, and always the clay was seamed as if by the jutting extremities of some heavy weight dragged over it. Yet the direction was uncertain, as if the man who had made this path had been doubtful of his objective; it had purposeless (or were they purposeful?) windings. It came to a standstill, you might say, close to the summit of the island, where the trees grew thickly, but there was an interval in the carpet of the fern; a bare patch of clay, still wet under the protecting shadow of the branches. And here, it seemed, the burden must have been laid down, for there was a firm though indistinct impress on the clay. Bredon and Leyland drew nearer, scanning the surface for any trace of a more definite outline. “Look!” said Leyland suddenly. About halfway down the area of the disturbance was a tiny depression which only one object could have caused. It was the imprint of a button; to judge by its size, a coat-button.
“M’m!” said Bredon; “those are hardly the tracks of a living man.”
“He’d be a fool, wouldn’t he, if he wanted to rest or sleep, to rest or sleep on a rheumaticky spot like this? He had plenty of bracken to make his bed if he wanted to. No, the body that lay there was dead, or at least drugged.”
“Not much difference, either, if Derek Burtell was in question. He hadn’t the sort of constitution that would stand a clay bath.”
“And what happened then?” asked Leyland. “Did they take it back the same way or—no, the track goes on further. But it wasn’t dragged any further; it must have been carried. Though I’m bound to say there’s no clear mark of two men here: they must have been careful to keep the same track. Let’s see the thing through.”
This time, the path made no divagations except where they were imposed on it by the steepness of the ground. It led straight down to the water of the weir stream, and came out on to a patch of open grass by the waterside. The bank itself was of hardish clay, and here, just opposite the end of their track, they found the unmistakable indentation that is made by the sharp bows of a boat run suddenly in to land.
“And then?” asked Leyland.
“No need to ask what they did then. They didn’t take the body downstream again, to be found by the first fool who searched for it. They didn’t put it ashore on the other side and give themselves the trouble of lugging it across country. They took it up to the weir, dragged the canoe and the body across the bank, then paddled upstream a bit, and lowered the body, weighted, of course, into the stream. They left it exactly where no living man was ever likely to look for it—in the wrong stretch of the river, on the wrong side of a Thames Conservancy lock.”
“By Gad, yes, that was the thing to do. What about looking for traces by the side of the weir?”
“No good; it’s hard ground and smooth grass; you wouldn’t get any traces. Besides, anybody drags his boat over there if he wants to avoid the lock fee. I’ve done it once myself, I’m sorry to say, in the course of the last week. But that’s what they did; that’s what they did, unless they were fools. The question is, can we start dragging the river above Shipcote Lock without looking like madmen?”