XVIII
In Undisguise
For perhaps a quarter of a minute the whole company stared at one another. Then the family weakness of the Burtells saved the situation, and Nigel fainted.
It was when he had been carried up to his room, and Angela had imperiously assumed all responsibility for him, that Bredon and Leyland were free to discuss the situation. “How long have you known?” asked Leyland. “Did you recognize him from the start?”
“Not exactly. There was something reminiscent about him, though. The staff of the Gudgeon ought by rights to have recognized him, but they didn’t, you see. It’s quite easy to suspect a person of being in disguise; not nearly so easy to suspect him of being in undisguise.”
“How do you mean—in undisguise?”
“Why, that Nigel Burtell, the undergraduate, went about permanently disguised. He was round-shouldered, for example, but a singularly expensive tailor managed to turn him out a straight man. It was at Millington Bridge, wasn’t it, that the landlady remembered him as a gentleman who held himself very straight? Anyhow, that was the impression he contrived to make everywhere; or rather, his tailor contrived to make it for him. Mr. Quirk was the real Nigel, as his friends never saw him. The real Nigel, too, had his face disfigured by a yellow blotch—you’ve been seeing it on Mr. Quirk all this last week. As an undergraduate, he got rid of the defect by making up; he was a pretty good actor, you know, and his makeup imposed upon the world at large. … Though I imagine some of his friends wouldn’t have minded much if they had known about it; it would only have been a single affectation added to the rest. Of course, if that had been his natural complexion, it would have been tanned a deep brick-red after ten days on the river, and Mr. Quirk couldn’t have happened. But I think his hair made more difference than anything; he used to wear it very long and brushed straight back—rather shiny hair it was; and when he had it cropped quite close (that was at a small shop in Swindon) it showed up his slight baldness and made him look absolutely different. Another thing everybody remembered was his voice, a slow, affected, disgustingly superior drawl. That was quite unreal, too; he found no difficulty in dropping it when need arose, and talking like an American instead.”
“He’s certainly a good actor. I can’t think how he managed to keep up the American part so well.”
“You mean his pronunciation of English? No, that was comparatively simple; his mother, as you know, married an American, and his home was in the States, as far as he had one. What impresses me more is the way he managed to keep up the American attitude towards life—that curious freshness and simplicity they have; that was foreign to his nature, if you like. That habit of always talking as if everything was quite different on the other side of the Atlantic—I shouldn’t be surprised to hear an American say that the earth goes round the sun on the other side. He did that to perfection. Yet, in a sense, that simplicity was itself only a shedding of his own beastly affectedness. I don’t think he had any positive disguise, if you see what I mean, except, of course, the horn spectacles; and they don’t go far.”
“But you say you didn’t recognize him straight away from the start? Didn’t even feel suspicious about him?”
“No; why should I? I did take just a look to make sure he wasn’t Derek; but that was obvious; there’s no trace of drugs on him. I didn’t think of his being Nigel because, when he introduced himself here, Nigel wasn’t yet missing. If you’d come in at two o’clock, telling me that Nigel had disappeared, and then Mr. Quirk had rolled up at four, I should have spotted the thing at once. As it was, he got the start of you; he was already established here before you came. The human mind doesn’t solve problems until they have been set.”
“He took big risks in coming here.”
“Ah, but he had no notion I was here, you see. I was out when he arrived, and it was too late to draw back when Angela introduced us. As I say, I had a slight thrill of recognition, but I bottled it up—I always do. Of course, somebody coming out from Oxford might have recognized him, but it wasn’t likely; Oxford’s all down by now. And as for the staff of the hotel, they never notice that kind of thing. Business, to them, is an endless succession of strange faces; consequently no one face calls for remark.”
“What gave you the notion that something was wrong?”
“Why, I believe the first thing was when he told Angela it was lucky I was such a good photographer. What did he know about it? It puzzled me. Then, you remember, there was that business of the notecase.”
“Which notecase? The one at the island or the one the scouts found?”
“The one the scouts found. Of course, it was nonsense supposing that Derek Burtell carried two purses. That meant that one or the other was a fraud, a blind. It seemed natural to suppose that it was the one with the visiting-card in it. The visiting-card had so obviously been put there. Now, the curious thing was that those scouts had been diving in that precise spot from Monday till Saturday, but it wasn’t till Saturday they came across the notecase. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the notecase had been dropped in calmly overnight? If so, who had dropped it? Then I remembered that Mr. Quirk had been anxious to know the precise spot where the canoe was found, and that he had gone out for a walk there the evening before. I wanted to know more about Mr. Quirk.”
“Thank God that riddle’s solved. It was driving me crazy.”
“I still didn’t feel certain that Mr. Quirk was Nigel. I toyed with the idea that he was some American friend whom Nigel had put on to watch me. I’d only seen Nigel for quite a short time, you must remember, and in a rather dark room. But my suspicions were aroused, and I thought it would be a good thing to watch Mr. Quirk pretty closely, and give him his head. Though I never dared to credit him with the audacity which he proceeded to show.”
“You mean all that business about Millington Bridge—the one cousin sleeping in the two rooms? Yes, it was pretty bold. Why did he give us such a big slice of the truth?”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt as to his primary object. He wanted us to take him into his confidence, so that he could keep a watch on what we were doing. And in order to do that, he felt he must put up some sensational bit of detective work, to make us value his help. But I’m not quite so sure about his giving us a slice of the truth.”
“Surely you don’t believe that both cousins slept at Millington Bridge that night?”
“Well, we’ve no positive evidence about it except the fingermarks on the decanters. And those, of course, Nigel himself had just made, while we were looking at the window-frames.”
“Good Lord! My opinion of Mr. Quirk as a detective is going down; but I am beginning to think highly of him as a criminal.”
“It was a bad mistake he made, though. Of course, I never believed that those marks had been on the decanter the best part of a week. Grease! Why, he would have had to use plaster of Paris. I wonder that took you in, Leyland.”
“It all depends on whether you’re expecting a thing like that or not. I was perfectly taken in by Mr. Quirk, and I never dreamt that he could have made the fingermarks.”
“Anyhow, as I say, he made a mistake. Because, as you know, I had got the print of Nigel Burtell’s finger and thumb, and that told me exactly who Mr. Quirk was. All Saturday and Sunday, while you were away, I kept a keen eye on his movements. What worried me was the man’s audacity in coming to the very inn where I was staying. Then I found the book he’d been reading. Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year. If you’ve ever been old-fashioned enough to read that story, you will remember that the solicitors in it are Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap. That showed me where he’d taken the name from. And that showed me that he’d come to the Gudgeon quite carelessly, without even going to the trouble of inventing an alias before his arrival. In a word, he didn’t know I was at the Gudgeon at all—he had simply come there to watch proceedings. He wasn’t expecting the hotel people to ask him his name.”
“Yes, that’s pretty smart work. But why didn’t you let on to me, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Well, on the Saturday and Sunday you weren’t there, anyhow. And I’m afraid I must confess that I thought you might want to arrest him straight away, and spoil the little game I was playing with him. Have you ever noticed what happens if you catch sight of a rabbit before it catches sight of you, even at close quarters? If you stand absolutely still, the rabbit goes on feeding quite happily, and you can watch it for a long time. I enjoy doing that; I enjoyed doing the same thing with Mr. Quirk. I loved watching the skill with which Nigel Burtell posed as Mr. Quirk, and remembering the equal skill with which Mr. Quirk used to pose as Nigel Burtell. As long as you and I made no move, he wouldn’t run away; he was too vain for that. But the next day, yesterday, I confess that I did take liberties with you. I let Mr. Quirk go up to London.”
“To London?”
“Yes, by the three-twelve, and back by the four forty-five. That’s what he did when he went over to Oxford. I had misgivings about the whole thing; it seemed as if he might be doing a bolt. But somehow I felt convinced that he wouldn’t bolt now, because his game wasn’t fully played yet. He now had to create evidence, you see, that Derek didn’t die before Aunt Alma. So I risked letting him go away and manufacture his evidence. You’d have looked a pretty good fool if he had got away, because he was travelling on your train.”
“Confound you, I wish you wouldn’t take these risks.”
“Loyalty to employers, you see. You want to find a murderer. I want to find out whether there’s a corpse. For that purpose, it was worth while giving Nigel his head. If I hadn’t, we should never have known anything about White Bracton.”
“What do we know about White Bracton?”
“Why, that on Monday night Nigel addressed a letter to Derek at the inn there. In fact, we know for certain that Nigel, on Monday night, still believed his cousin to be alive, and believed he knew his address. That shows there was some hanky-panky about Nigel’s actions, and also about Derek’s intentions. When Angela has finished soothing the fevered brow, I hope to find out what.”
“It will be queer to hear Mr. Quirk not talking American.”
“It will be queer to think of him as not being an American. What an excellent disguise it was, after all! If we meet one of our own fellow-countrymen, a stranger, at an inn or in a railway-carriage, it is our instinct to want to know everything about him—what part of the country he comes from, what is his business, and so on. But an American we take for granted. We don’t want to hear what part of his country he comes from, because we know that we couldn’t place it on the map within a thousand miles. We are terrified of hearing all about his business. He is so ready to impart information that we never ask him questions.”
“Bredon, we’re beating about the bush. What each of us really wants to ask the other is whether he thinks Nigel Burtell is a murderer—or at least, a murderer’s accomplice. You say Nigel didn’t know where Derek was on Monday night, or he wouldn’t have written a letter to him at White Bracton. But you see as clearly as I do that it might all be part of his alibi; that he may have deliberately written that letter, and then deliberately led us on to find it, in the hopes of persuading us that he was entirely ignorant of his cousin’s death. Nigel Burtell is going to tell us his story—at least, if he doesn’t want to we shall find means to make him. But what we both want to know is whether the story he means to tell us is a true one.”
“Personally, I’m waiting to see what it is before I start wondering whether it’s true. But I’ll tell you this much. I believe the late Mr. Quirk was right when he said that it’s no good trying to prove Nigel was the murderer’s accomplice until we can find the murderer. Unless we do that, Nigel will always be able to profess ignorance of what happened. His alibi, you see, remains good. A canoe with a hole that size in it can’t have drifted downstream in the given time; therefore it was propelled downstream; Nigel didn’t do that, because he was on the nine-fourteen train; therefore somebody else did it; either Derek Burtell, still alive, or else a third person. And that third person must be found before we can definitely prove how Derek died, or indeed (for that matter) whether Derek is dead.”
“I never quite see why you lay so much stress on the question of the boat’s drifting. Surely even without that the alibi would be good—look at the time it must have taken, even if Derek was already dead, to photograph his corpse and lug it up on to the island.”
“I’m not so sure. It was quick work, of course, but the train, you found, wasn’t actually dead on time. I’ll tell you what, when we’ve heard Nigel Burtell’s story, we might do worse than spend part of tomorrow trying to reconstruct the thing. We’ll go up to Shipcote Lock, and you can act as the dummy corpse while I see how long it takes to do the trick.”
“I was thinking of going and asking for an interview with Mr. Farris.”
“No need. He can’t afford to bolt, anyhow. Hullo, Angela, how’s the patient?”