XIX
The Story Nigel Told
Nigel’s trouble proved to be something more serious than a common fainting-fit. It was a heart attack, which demanded a visit from the doctor, and its inevitable sequel—the prescription of “a few days in bed.” Leyland was delighted at this turn of affairs. He had an intense horror of making unnecessary arrests, of putting suspects in prison and letting them out again with apologies. Nothing was so repellent to his professional pride. Yet it would have been difficult to avoid taking out a warrant against Nigel, so clever had been his manoeuvres, so widely had his description been circulated. In bed, and with his clothes removed under some hospital pretext, Nigel was as good as arrested; the invalid is, for all practical purposes, a jailbird. It was not, however, till the morning after his seizure that he was allowed to give any account of himself.
“I think I ought to warn you, Mr. Burtell,” Leyland began, “that, though no arrest has been made, I mean to make notes of your story, and shall be prepared to produce them in case of emergency.”
“Yes, rather,” said the sick man. “I’m hanged if I know whether I’m a criminal or not, you see. The situation has got so complicated. I think I should find it easiest if you just let me tell the story my own way, and don’t interrupt me till afterwards.
“You know, of course, that Derek and I weren’t on very good terms. There was a woman—but I expect you’ve heard all about that. Anyhow, I was rather surprised at getting a visit from him the other day, suggesting that I should go out with him in a canoe up the river. He explained why; Aunt Alma, he said, was beginning to sit up and take notice of the fact that she had great-nephews, and was wishing that we could hit it off better. If I was willing, he would come down to Oxford and meet me; I would have a boat ready, and we would go up to Cricklade, making the best of a bad job, and tell Aunt Alma about it afterwards. I agreed, only I was doubtful about being able to finish the journey before my Viva. He pointed out that I could go ashore anywhere I liked, if we were pressed for time. Actually, I had made a mistake about my Viva, and expected it a day earlier than it came.
“It was a queer journey, one way and another, but there’s no need to describe it in detail. For a good deal of the time, Derek wasn’t worth talking to; he’d brought some of his drug with him, the silly ass, and he took it at intervals. Once he let me try some, and it pretty well laid me out—beastly, I thought it. But, what was much more important, in the course of the journey he explained to me a plan he’d got for saving his financial position, with or without Aunt Alma. He was sick of London, he said, and the fellows he met in London; he wanted to emigrate somewhere, and start afresh. Only he’d no intention of starting penniless; and that’s what he’d have to do if things went on as they were. But why shouldn’t he, instead of emigrating in the ordinary way, simply manage to disappear? If he did that, his death would be presumed after a time, and the beastly Insurance Company would have to pay up; the fifty thousand would remain safely in the family.
“Only, as he explained to me with some candour, a confederate was necessary to the plan, and that confederate had got to be myself. In three years’ time the fifty thousand would come to me, and I could borrow in the meanwhile on the strength of it. He suggested, then, that he should disappear, and I should automatically become my grandfather’s heir; we were to go halves in all the profits that resulted. He didn’t (he was kind enough to explain) trust me a yard. But this agreement, once made, I should necessarily have to keep; if I tried to play him false, he could simply reappear and, with some loss of dignity, expose me. He intimated that this was my only chance of seeing the colour of the legacy; he was quite determined not to die before he was twenty-five, and so leave the field open to me; sooner than that, he would turn teetotaller.
“I had no moral scruples about the suggestion, but I hesitated a little at the idea of breaking the law in order to enrich a fellow like Derek. But it appealed to my pocket, and it appealed to my sense of adventure. We struck the bargain, and then he began to talk to me about the details. This canoe trip, he said, was providential; it was quite easy to disappear when you went out on the river, and the police would drag it for a fortnight, and then say you were dead. I said I thought most bodies of people drowned in the Thames were recovered, but he assured me there would be no difficulty so far as that was concerned. And I must say he had worked out the plan very ingeniously. That was the extraordinary thing, because Derek, you know, was always a bit of a chump. I think it was that dope he used to take which had given him the idea; while its effect lasted, it really made Derek quite lively, and his brain worked like a two-year-old.
“The great trouble about disappearing, he said, was that you couldn’t actually hide in a haystack; you must still go about and meet people, but of course under an alias. And the difficulty of an alias was that it began just where your old self left off—Derek Burtell disappeared, if you see what I mean, and immediately Mr. X came into existence. A clever detective would spot that; would connect the facts and put two and two together. To avoid that difficulty, you must make your alias overlap with your real self. Mr. X must come into existence at least a day before Derek Burtell disappeared. You see the idea? And he had a sound way of working the scheme. When we reached our last stage, at Millington Bridge, I was to go up to the inn twice in succession, pretending to be two different people; I was to sleep in two beds, wash in two basins, get through two breakfasts, and pay two bills. So that everybody would take it for granted we had both slept at Millington Bridge. Meanwhile, he would totter off to White Bracton, a mile or two away, and establish himself there as a Mr. H. Anderton, a commercial traveller, or something of that sort. (He wasn’t sure, he said, whether we shouldn’t finish up on a Sunday, and if we did, of course it wouldn’t look well to be a commercial.) The point of the plan was that Mr. Anderton would come into existence on (say) Sunday night, and Derek Burtell wouldn’t disappear till Monday. Who would be likely to connect the two, when everybody assumed that Derek Burtell spent the night at Millington Bridge, and we could prove that Mr. Anderton spent it at White Bracton?
“All that we carried out. I left him at Millington Bridge, and did the two-headed man trick, while he sloped off. Next morning he met me a little way down below the bridge, and asked me if it had all gone off all right. White Bracton, he said, was a pretty putrid hole, but he got a shakedown at the inn; still, he felt awfully sleepy. So we went on down to Shipcote Lock; it was still quite early in the morning, and there was nobody about much, though we passed one man in a punt.”
“Excuse me one moment,” Bredon interrupted, “but did you really take a photograph of Burgess, the lock-keeper?”
“Of course I did. You showed it me, didn’t you? The last one that came out on that spool; the other two were fogged.”
“Did you never expose the last two, then?”
“I didn’t, but Derek may have. You see, while we were in the lock, just when I was going off to the station, Derek shouted up that I might as well leave him the camera, and then he could finish up the spool if he saw anything worth taking. So I gave it him.”
“You’re contradicting, aren’t you, what you told me at Oxford—that you must have dropped the films near the station?”
“Yes. I thought it best to say that, because I couldn’t imagine how the films got there, and I thought it might lead to awkward inquiries.”
“One more question before you go on. Did you throw the camera down, or did you go down the steps and hand it to your cousin?”
“Went down and handed it to him. Derek couldn’t catch for nuts. Then he pushed off from the bottom of the steps, and I crossed the weir bridge and took the path for the station. We had agreed that I must have a perfect alibi, so that I should know nothing about his disappearance. I got the exact time from the lock-keeper. I looked round to see somebody on the way to the station, so that he could swear to me. But there was nobody; and so—it was a suggestion Derek had made—I cut through the hedge on my left, and went through a sort of farm place that was quite out of my way, really—there were certain to be people about there, Derek said. I only saw one old lady in a top window, but I took off my hat to her, so that she’d remember my passing through.
“I had dawdled purposely, so as to be able to catch the train at the last moment; that was another of Derek’s ideas. If I travelled without a ticket, he said, I could own up to the man at the barrier in Oxford station, and he’d have to sell me a ticket, so he’d remember about it afterwards, and cover my alibi. That worked out all right. Then, of course, my Viva was going to cover the next stage of the proceedings. That didn’t come off, but I took a taxi out here, and asked for a drink so that I could have an argument about the time with the barmaid. That covered the other end of my alibi, you see.
“Then I had to sit down and wait—we hadn’t intended, of course, that I should have so long to wait—that was due to the mistake about the Viva. The arrangement was that at about half-past one I should be somewhere near the disused boathouse; the canoe, we calculated, ought to be somewhere near there by then. I left Derek to arrange that as he thought best; he was to give the impression, as best he could, that he’d fallen into the river with a heart-attack, that the canoe had been swamped, and so on.
“Well, I did the agitated part all right, and took a man from here with me so as to have a witness when I found the canoe. It came up to time splendidly, and the man got it in to shore, then started diving to see if he could find Derek anywhere. While he was doing that, I found a beastly hole in the bottom of the canoe, as I was trying to right it. That annoyed me, because I assumed that Derek had done it as the simplest way of swamping the boat, forgetting, the silly chump, that people would ask questions about it afterwards. That was the first thing that went wrong about the plan.
“But the next thing was much worse. We had agreed that he was to send a letter to me as soon as he got home to White Bracton—that would be about ten o’clock in the morning, and it ought to arrive the same night. I was to write to him from my digs just to confirm the fact that everything had gone off all right. Afterwards, there was to be no correspondence, for fear my letters should be watched. Now, when I got home that night, there was no letter waiting for me. So I thought out a cipher, and wrote it off to ‘H. Anderton,’ thinking that it might be easier for him to send messages that way, through the papers if necessary. But next morning there was still no letter from White Bracton. I began to get alarmed, and yet I could do nothing without attracting suspicion. And so it went on from one day to the next; no message from Derek, and no prescriptions about what I should do.
“You don’t know, probably, what the end of term’s like at Oxford—the end of one’s last term, I mean. There’s a sickening feeling of being at a loose end that makes you want to go away and die somewhere. All that ridiculous aesthetic business looks so empty and pointless when you’ve got to go down; it felt like being in a theatre when you’ve lost your hat at the end of a play, and they’re all turning down the lights. Its effect on me was that I wanted to cut adrift from the whole business and start again on a fresh tack; I suppose it was a kind of conversion. … If Derek was going out to the Colonies, why shouldn’t I? And then in a flash the thought occurred to me: If Derek was going to disappear, why shouldn’t I?
“I didn’t know then that my own movements had aroused any suspicion. I wanted to keep near the scene of action, but staying in Oxford, with all that mockery of a past behind me, was too much. Why shouldn’t I fade off into the surrounding country somewhere, and become a fresh person for a bit? There was no need to disguise myself; I had only to drop a disguise. It might be safer, perhaps, to pose as an American; I’ve lived so much in the States that the impersonation was hardly any effort to me. I thought of this pub, which had seemed rather comfortable; I was sure they wouldn’t recognize me with my hair cut short and all the rest of it. I determined to do it. Fortunately I’d lots of cash in hand, because I’d been meaning to travel on the Continent, and hadn’t yet booked my passage. I would let my luggage go up to London without me, and disappear into the blue by the next train, a few minutes later. It all seemed to work without a hitch. At the last moment I got the impression that somebody was watching me; so I was very careful to skip off while he wasn’t looking.
“The train journey was a simple one—I expect you’ve worked it out for yourselves. Change platforms at Swindon, then double back by a slow train to Faringdon, and you’re within a bus ride from here. On my way I called at White Bracton, and was really appalled to find my letter to ‘H. Anderton’ still in the rack. Then for the first time I realized that something had gone very wrong indeed. I hung about for nearly an hour, waiting till the passage should be empty and I could get hold of the letter, but they never gave me a chance; so I got tired of it and came on here.
“I had hoped to find the inn empty; and it was annoying when a strange lady came up and talked to me. But I remembered that I was an American, and it was therefore my duty to introduce myself by name; I picked it at random from a book I’d been looking at. Then I found I’d put my foot in it, because suddenly you walked in, and I had to be presented to you. But you seemed to have no suspicion at all. You must be a far better actor than I am, because until yesterday evening I hadn’t the faintest idea that you suspected who I was. I got reckless, and determined to see the thing through. Among other things, I thought I’d help to establish Derek’s death. I had a card which Derek had left on me; I had a fiver of his, which he’d given me when we were settling up our hotel bills; I put them into a notecase and planted them out in the river for the scouts to find. Then I thought it would be a good idea to worm myself into your confidence, so I planned out that Millington Bridge affair, with the marks on the decanters. You seemed to be drinking it all in.
“Aunt Alma’s death was what altered the look of things. When you told me about the will, I realized what a silly position I’d put myself in. Here was all Aunt Alma’s money going to that ass Farris, unless Derek could be produced, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where Derek was! So I remembered the letter at White Bracton, and I thought I’d try the cipher stunt. I posted the card to myself at Paddington. I could have cried with delight when the visit to White Bracton worked out so well. And then … well, there I was, and here I am. Can I be prosecuted for a conspiracy to defraud? I suppose I can; but it isn’t worth while unless you can find Derek alive; and if you do, why there’s all Aunt Alma’s money to pay off our liabilities with. On the whole, I’m feeling more comfortable than I’ve felt for a week.”
“M’m!” said Leyland, “you’ve been conspiring to defeat the ends of justice all right, by your own account, but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s actionable. May I just ask whether you’ve given us a complete list of your movements? Or whether we have to thank you for any more of the little conundrums we’ve been trying to solve in these last ten days?”
“No, I think not. … Oh yes, of course, there was one thing I did, but not very important. When I found the canoe, you know, and saw that it had a hole dug in the bottom of it, it worried me a good deal; because Derek’s disappearance was meant to suggest accidental death. But this neat little hole in the bottom of the boat suggested murder or suicide or a game of some sort. Nobody could think that was an accident. Then it occurred to me that it might be taken for an accident if only the edges of the hole weren’t so confoundedly regular. Well, there was this chap who was with me, you know, plunging about in the water like any old porpoise. So I got hold of a sharp piece of stone, and worried round the edges of the hole at the bottom, in the hope that it would look as if the canoe had run aground and got smashed up that way.”
“Did you now?” said Bredon, his eyes burning. “And did you by any chance happen to make the hole at all larger while you were about it?”
“Oh yes, lots. It was quite a little hole to start with.”
Bredon got up and walked about the room with his hands in his coat pockets, whistling.