XVII
Mr. Quirk Disappears
There are few more humiliating sensations than that of the man who comes into a room bursting with stale news. When Leyland returned he was plainly full of important secrets. He did not even hesitate at seeing Mr. Quirk in the room. “Derek Burtell’s alive!” he announced. “I must have a pint of bitter.”
“Alive?” queried Bredon.
“Well, he’s putting his signature to cipher messages, anyhow.” Something in Angela’s face checked him; he was conscious of a repression. “Good Lord!” he said, “don’t say you’ve been and read the cipher, Bredon!”
“I’m afraid he has,” Angela apologized. “If he wasn’t so loathsomely idle he’d have read it three hours ago, and saved you that long, silly journey to White Bracton.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t have wanted to be saved that,” said Leyland. “That was all right—I found out more than the meaning of the cipher, you know.”
“This is very interesting,” put in Mr. Quirk. “You mean, I guess, that we’ve all got something to learn not only from the cipher itself, but from the way you found it?”
“Oh, this morning’s been full of adventures. For one thing, I called at the lock above Millington Bridge, and was told that the punt had been found. Nothing desperately mysterious about it, either. It was tucked away in a curious, purposeless kind of stone quay there is, hidden behind rushes, at the opposite side of the river just close to the Blue Cow. Of course, it’s pretty evident that there was something fishy about Mr. Wallace, or he wouldn’t have hidden the punt away like that. I suppose he made for the railway—it’s not far from the river there.”
“Not so very fishy either, if you come to think of it,” said Bredon. “If he was making for the railway, he had to cross the river, and there’s no regular ferry at the Blue Cow; besides, he wanted to go downstream a bit. Naturally he took his punt with him; naturally, if he wanted to go overland, he stowed it away in a place where the casual passerby wouldn’t find it. You can explain his movements by haste, without suspecting secrecy.”
“Anyhow, there the punt is, with some remains of the man’s stores in it, but no clue to his identity or his destination. However, that isn’t all.”
“You were going to tell us,” Mr. Quirk pointed out, “what it was you found at White Bracton.”
“Yes, I was. There are several pubs at White Bracton, but only one that looks as if it wanted you to stay at it. The White Hart, its name is. But when I went in I found it was the sort of place where nobody pays any attention to you; you rap on the floor with your stick, and nothing happens, except that a dog barks somewhere in the distance; you could run off with the stuffed trout, and no one the wiser. Just opposite me was one of those letter-racks they have at all these inns; and on the rack there was a single letter.
“For several reasons that letter interested me. In the first place, it was addressed by somebody who was writing with his left hand; it isn’t difficult to see when that’s happened. In the second place, although the name was written in full, ‘Mr. H. Anderton,’ the address wasn’t in full; it was simply ‘The Inn, White Bracton.’ In the third place, the letter had been there a week, to judge by the postmark, and nobody had claimed it.
“Those derelict letters always interest me; it comes, I suppose, Bredon, of being a professional spy. And this one, lying about in a place which I’d gone to on purpose in the hope of picking up information, intrigued me particularly. The postmark said ‘Oxford,’ but there was nothing enlightening in that. I dallied with the temptation for a moment, then slipped the letter into my pocket, and left the White Hart without asking any questions at all. When I was round the corner, I opened the letter, and found that it was exactly the thing I had come for. It was from somebody who signed himself Nigel to somebody whom he addressed as Derek; and it explained in words of one syllable the whole system of the Bradshaw cipher which you solved this morning.”
“Have you got the letter here?” asked Bredon. “I’d rather like to see the postmark. Yes, the postmark’s all right; it was posted late on the day of Derek’s disappearance. And the envelope was untouched, I suppose, when you found it? But of course, you’d have been bound to notice if it had been tampered with. Yes, that letter’s genuine enough, and, as Mr. Quirk says, it’s all very interesting. I suppose you’ve got specimens of Nigel Burtell’s handwriting to compare it with?”
“Trust me for that. The whole thing’s genuine. And it looks rather as if we’d got to revise our whole view of the business, don’t it?”
“As how?”
“Why, on the face of it it looks as if the two cousins were both alive, and in active correspondence with one another. And if that’s so, all the other clues we’ve been following up, the photographs, and the two sovereign-purses, and you-know-what on the island, must all have been simply a blind of some sort. And the hole in the canoe must be either a blind or an accident. And I don’t quite see that we want to find the man in the punt any more. We certainly don’t want to drag the river above Shipcote.”
“Yes, but you’re going much too fast. You say, on the face of it both cousins are alive. But is that a necessary conclusion?”
“No, not necessary, of course. But it proves, surely, that one or other of them’s alive? It’s not very likely that a third person would be in the secret of the cipher.”
“Yes, I think it’s reasonable to assume that at least one of them is alive. But then, you go on to say that they’re in active correspondence. There I don’t agree with you at all; it seems to me much the most interesting feature of the case that the correspondence between them is so extraordinarily passive.”
“How passive?”
“Why, my dear chump, don’t you see that neither of them knows where the other is, or what’s happening to him? A week ago, Nigel wrote a very intimate letter to his cousin, addressing it to the inn at White Bracton. He had reason to believe that his cousin was at White Bracton; that means there had been some prearrangement; he did not know the name of the pub at White Bracton, therefore the prearrangement, such as it was, was very incomplete. Nigel sent a code, to be used in case of emergency—why hadn’t that code been arranged already? It means, surely, that when Nigel wrote there was already some hitch in the plan; things weren’t quite working out to time, and therefore it would be prudent to have a cipher.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s sound, as far as it goes.”
“But it’s not nearly all. The alias, H. Anderton, must obviously have been arranged beforehand. If Derek ever went to the pub at White Bracton—that’s to say, if he ever went to the right pub—he must have looked about for letters addressed to H. Anderton. And if he had found one, he would have lost no time in taking it down from the rack. You wouldn’t want to take any risks in such a correspondence.”
“Yes, confound it all, I wondered why the letter was unclaimed, but I didn’t see how important it was. You mean Nigel doesn’t know where Derek is?”
“Didn’t know, anyhow. And, what’s still odder, he thought he did know. Surely it’s fair to say that there must have been a disarrangement of their plans? And, if so, the clues we picked up round the island and so on may still have a meaning.”
“But this morning’s message looks as if they’d got in touch again.”
“Not a bit of it. If it was really Derek who wrote that post card, it shows that he hasn’t kept informed of his cousin’s movements in the least. If he had, he would have known, in the first place, that Nigel has gone down from Oxford; and in the second place he would know that Nigel’s movements have been suspicious, and that his old digs would be watched by the police. Therefore he wouldn’t have sent him an incriminating message at that address. (I say incriminating, because there is always a chance of any cipher being read.) No, if Derek wrote that post card, it was a hopeless shot in the dark. But, of course, Derek didn’t write that post card.”
“You mean that he can’t know the cipher, because he never got the letter addressed to him at White Bracton? But that letter may have been verbally confirmed since.”
“Not a bit of it. The two cousins haven’t met, or Derek would know that Nigel isn’t in Oxford any longer.”
“That’s true. But he might have written the post card, knowing that it would fall into the hands of the police, precisely because he wanted it to fall into the hands of the police. After all, up till now Derek Burtell has had a good motive for stopping in the background. But since Aunt Alma’s death he’s got a remarkably good motive for reappearing.”
“But does he know what was in the will? If not, it would be risky to reappear. Besides, why not simply reappear, instead of setting puzzles to the police? Besides, at the risk of being rude, I must say I think he’d have set a much easier puzzle to the police while he was about it. I am personally rather proud of myself for having solved it at all.”
“Still, he might have guessed that we should have the White Bracton letter in our hands by now. … I don’t know; I suppose you’re right about Derek. What you mean is that Nigel sent that post card from Paddington to himself?”
“Exactly. And we’re still completely without evidence whether Derek is alive or dead. I doubt if Derek knew, or knows, that the White Bracton letter was ever written. But Nigel knows that it was written, and Nigel might quite reasonably guess, mightn’t he, that with all the hue and cry there’s been, the White Bracton letter would have been found. Don’t you think so, Mr. Quirk?”
“Why, certainly I’m of that opinion. Seems to me it was very odd the idea of making inquiries at White Bracton never occurred to anybody till I got my little brainwave.”
“But what’s Nigel’s game?” objected Leyland. “He wanted his cipher to fall into the hands of the police, to make them think—what? That Derek was alive?”
“Of course. Assuming that Nigel has lost track of Derek, it’s the simplest way he could find of convincing the police that Derek isn’t dead—or at any rate that he wasn’t dead when Aunt Alma died, and her will took effect. After that, Derek can die as much as he wants to. The point is that he mustn’t be allowed to predecease Aunt Alma, and so rob himself of the legacy. Do you find any difficulty in that explanation, Mr. Quirk?”
“Why, no; I can’t say that I do.”
“Then you must be very differently built from me. I find one enormous difficulty in that explanation. How did Nigel know for certain that Mrs. Coolman had left her money to Derek, and therefore that it was necessary for Derek to reappear? If he didn’t know for certain, you see, he could hardly have acted so promptly. From the point of view of the original legacy, it was still imperative that Derek should stay dead.”
“Surely it was worth the risk,” suggested Angela. “Because Derek didn’t need to be dead until September the 16th. It wouldn’t do much harm for him to come to life in the meantime, as long as he was killed again.”
“It would hardly do for him to develop a habit of alternate decease and resuscitation. Such a habit would awake suspicions among the most guileless of lawyers.”
“I see one thing clearly,” broke in Leyland. “Whatever way you look at it, there’s no reason to believe that Nigel knows more than we do about what’s happened to his cousin. If the post card was his work, he was obviously trying a shot in the dark. And therefore it’s still important to find the man in the punt before we find Nigel Burtell.”
“In a sense,” Bredon admitted. “And yet if we could lay our hands on Nigel, he might have something to tell us.”
“I suppose it’s something,” said Leyland, “to know that he’s loose in London. He may have been seen there by people who knew him.”
“If he’s really living there. But the post card, you must remember, was handed in at Paddington. In order to post a letter at Paddington, you don’t need to be living in London. It’s quite as simple to be living anywhere on the Great Western. You just take a train up to London and then take the next train back.”
“I’ve just one quarrel to pick with your analysis, Mr. Bredon,” suggested the American, who for some minutes appeared to have been plunged in thought. “You allow that young Nigel wanted his post card to fall into the hands of the police. Well, if that’s so, why didn’t he send it to the address of Derek Burtell’s flat in London? It would reach quicker, for one thing; and for another thing he could be quite certain, instead of just guessing, that it would fall into the hands of the police.”
“I know. But to put the London address on the post card would suggest collusion. Putting himself in Derek’s place, the most natural assumption would be that the Oxford address was permanently likely to answer.”
“Well,” said Angela, “one way and another we seem to be about as far on as we were before.”
“I know,” agreed her husband. “Don’t you think it’s time you told us all you know about the business, Mr. Burtell?”