Читать книгу The Footsteps at the Lock - Ronald Arbuthnott Knox - Страница 15

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When I said that no human soul mourned Derek dead or cared whether Derek lived I spoke too hastily; I should have excepted the Indescribable. To a Company with such vast assets, the sum needed to cover Derek's policy was of course a mere drop in the ocean. But (it has been finely said) business is business; just as a prudent housewife will waste hours tracing a missing sixpence in the accounts sooner than pay in sixpence from her own purse, so the Indescribable would set agencies to work sooner than lose the paltry sum of fifty thousand pounds. It was a matter of principle.

In this illiterate age, it is perhaps too much to expect that my reader is familiar with the name of Miles Bredon. I must, therefore, at the risk of being tedious to the better-informed, remind the public that Miles Bredon was the agency which the Indescribable always set to work on such occasions; he was their very own private detective, paid handsomely to do their work for them, and paid still more handsomely to do nobody else's. The employment, naturally, was an intermittent one, which exactly suited the indolence of the man's taste—his round of golf, an evening spent over his favourite and unintelligible form of patience, his country cottage, and the unstated companionship of his really admirable wife, this was all Bredon asked, and this, for some months at a stretch, would be all that he got. Then there would be a loss of fashionable jewels, a fire in an East End warehouse, and Bredon, greatly protesting, would be launched out anew upon that career of detection for which he had so remarkable an instinct, and so profound a distaste.

He had been summoned up to London for an emergency interview, and it was with an unpleasant sense of being 'for it' that he entered the loathed portals of Indescribable House. I will not attempt to give any word-picture of the upstairs room into which he was shown, for that would be to suggest that I was familiar with it, whereas neither you, reader, nor I are ever likely to be shown up beyond the second floor, even if either of us is lucky enough to be insured with this admirable Company. Somewhere in the vast labyrinth of the third floor Bredon disappeared from sight; we may listen at the keyhole, if you will, but profane eyes must not peep through it. I picture gold ash-trays lying about on the tables, real oak panelling, and one or two Rubenses on the walls; but perhaps I exaggerate. Anyhow, here it was that he was closeted with Sholto, an important cog in the business and a personal friend; with Dr. Tremayne, too, that eminent practitioner who had been so highly paid to leave off saving life, and devote his talents to prophesying the probabilities of death.

Bredon was given something to smoke. I suppose a two-and-sixpenny cigar. 'It's about this Burtell business,' said Sholto.

'Oh Lord, not that! I read about it in the paper as I came up. I was really delighted to notice how mysterious the circumstances were. I assure you, there is nothing more refreshing to my mind than not solving mysteries. Do you mean to tell me that the Company was involved?'

'It was. It's a matter of fifty thousand.'

'Fifty thousand be hanged! Let 'em sack the under-porter and call it quits. How did this Burtell manage to pay his premiums, anyhow? I know people who know him, and I always understood that he was never supposed to pay for anything.'

'It wasn't he who paid the premiums; it was his creditors. They sent a deputation round here about it; I tell you, it was like the Flight from Egypt. You see, he'd been raising heavy loans, and he couldn't touch his money till he was twenty-five. That's where we came in.'

'And how old is he, or was he?'

'Policy's only got two months to run.'

'Good Lord! Sounds like old Mottram again. What was all this about weak health, doctor? You vetted him, I suppose?'

'Weak health, my dear Bredon, isn't in it. The man was a wreck. I've never seen anybody who'd gone the pace so thoroughly.'

'Punch? Or Judy?—as Father Healy used to say.'

'Oh, anything you like. But this last year or two he'd been drugging. When I saw him, he'd obviously more or less reached the line of perpetual snow. And his heart was all to pieces. I wouldn't have given him two years; but then, we only insured him up to twenty-five. Simmonds said the same. He did his best for him, and tried to pull him round a bit.'

'Was it Simmonds who suggested this canoe-trip?'

'Yes, it's a fad of his. I think Simmonds must get a commission from the Thames Conservancy; they'd never keep their locks in repair without him.'

'Well, he'd better recommend bath-chairs in future. What does he say about this heart-failure business?'

'Oh, it's all right; it's perfectly possible. If Burtell had been slacking for a bit, say, and had suddenly tried to put on speed, he might quite easily have had a seizure, fallen over sideways, capsized the boat, and there he is at the bottom, with the Company responsible for fifty thousand.'

'Seems to me my job is to save Simmonds' character. What about hocus-pocus, Sholto—you know, the disappearing trick?'

'It's possible. I've fished on the Thames before now, and it's possible to go miles, sometimes, without meeting a soul. But how was the fellow going to do it? You see, the money would go to the cousin; and it's quite certain that there wasn't any love lost between them. Why should Mr. Derek Burtell obligingly disappear, to let Mr. Nigel Burtell come in for a nice legacy?'

'What sort of fellow is this Nigel? He wasn't inset.'

'We've made inquiries, and he seems to be a pretty poisonous sort of worm. Fifty per cent. aesthete and the rest devil, I should say. But there are no convictions against him for murder so far, if that's what you mean.'

'Well, we seem to be in with a gaudy crowd. Seems to me the Company ought to engage a parson to inspect people's morals before we insure them. What exactly am I expected to do?'

'Oh, go down to the Upper Thames and look about for cigarette-ends. Not such a bad place either, at this time of year. If they fish out a corpse, it's all up. If they don't we shall have to presume death after a time, unless you can produce the man alive, or evidence that he was alive on September the third. It doesn't do for the Indescribable to keep people waiting. If I were you, I'd go down at once, because the papers have given the thing big head-lines, and there's the hell of a lot of trippers will be coming up the Thames before long. It's good for you, you know; it'll take down your fat. I wish I could be there, to see you diving in the mud on the spot marked with an X. Well, go to it. Them's orders.'

Bredon sent his wife an urgent request to pack and picked her up at the cottage. It was she who drove (while he, as he said, did the thinking) on the motor-infested journey to Oxford. 'I don't like it, Angela,' he said, as he sat beside her. 'I feel as if it was going to be the beast of a complicated business.'

'It may be your idea of a complicated business, it's not mine. All you and I have got to do is to lounge about the Upper River in a canoe until the watermen dig out the body. It's a long time, you know, Miles, since you took me out in a canoe. I shouldn't wonder if my service arm has got a bit flabby. I'm the only person who loses by this, because of course I shall look a fright on the river. Why is it that men always look like heroes when they're boating, and women always look like frumps? "These little ladies are determined to make the most of the sunshine"—that kind of thing. What's worrying you, anyhow?'

'Oh, I've no theories about it, but even from what the papers print you can see it isn't a straightforward case. It's a frame-up of some kind, that's the trouble. It wears all the air of a frame-up, and that means that somebody's been covering his traces, and we've got to find out who, where, and why.'

'But why a frame-up?'

'Why, don't you see, the whole thing's a little too good to be true. The canoe-trip's all right; Simmonds is always recommending it. But why should Mr. Derek Burtell take his cousin, whom apparently he loathed, on a tour of that kind? Nothing puts two people at closer quarters than a week on the river. It doesn't look right, their going together.'

'But they weren't together when the accident happened.'

'I know, and why weren't they? That's all wrong, too. All the week, while they're together, Derek Burtell is at liberty to throw as many fits as he pleases. But he doesn't—he waits till his cousin is out of the way, and then conks out. Meanwhile, the cousin isn't permanently out of the way; he comes back again just in time to be in at the death.'

'Sure you're not being fanciful?'

'Woman, I'm never fanciful. I have no instincts, no premonitions, no unaccountable intuitions. I just see the logic of the thing, nothing else. And I say that all this is just a little too good to be coincidence. Remember, too, that it happens on one of the loneliest parts of the river; that it happens in the morning, the one time when there wouldn't be any fishermen about. These young men, you see, had been up the river and were coming down again; they had had full opportunity to explore the ground beforehand. No, somehow, somewhere, it's a put-up job.'

'But what kind of a job? Suicide? I know how fond you are of the suicide theory.'

'Suicide doesn't work. A canoe's a perfectly sensible kind of boat to go out in if you want to commit suicide, more particularly if you want to let on that it's an accident. Nobody can say, "How could he have managed to fall out?" if you're in a canoe. But, just for that reason, we've no sort of use for a canoe with a hole in the bottom. If you want to drown, the simplest way is to drop into the water and have done with it, not to lie in a scuttled canoe feeling the water gradually come up and soak your bags. I don't believe there's anybody who could commit suicide in such a cold-blooded way as that. On the other hand, if he did just jump into the water and drown, leaving the canoe to mark the spot, why didn't he leave the canoe afloat properly—or water-logged if you like, but at least without a hole in the bottom? Assuming that he wants to make the thing look like accident, that's the very way to advertise the fact that he did it on purpose.'

'Holmes, I seem to see what you are hinting at. We're on the tracks of a murder, after all.'

'No, confound it, the murder idea is wrong too. The Upper River is the last place where you're likely to meet an old acquaintance with a grievance and a shot-gun. If it was to be murder, it would have to be this Nigel who's responsible, and that doesn't do. For it must have been the other one, Derek, who proposed the canoe trip. It's asking too much of coincidence to suppose that the murderee deliberately put himself, for a whole week, at the disposal of the murderer. Of course, we've got to take the possibility into account. But I don't like the possibility.'

'Disappearance, then? The Mottram touch? It might have been worth his while.'

'Yes, but if you want to disappear, you want to disappear in an orderly and unobtrusive sort of way; you want to get clear before anybody notices a gap in the ranks of Society. You don't want people scouring round after you; you don't want the papers making a stunt of it next morning; you don't want to have the bows of your canoe stove in, so that the police might think you were murdered. That idea fits in with bits of the story—the deliberate way, for example, in which the cousin appears to leave him for two or three hours unaccompanied. But the bottom of the canoe seems to knock the bottom out of it. No, it's no use worrying, we must have a good look round before we try to go any further. I'm not sure it wouldn't be a good thing to buy half a dozen canoes in Oxford, just to try experiments with.'

'We're not going to stay in Oxford, then? You know, you haven't been very communicative.'

'Not if we can get a room at this inn by Eaton Bridge. The nearer the spot the better. It must be about twenty-four hours now since the thing happened, and I don't want the scent to get cold if I can help it. Besides, I want to get the atmosphere of the place. Oxford's all wrong.'

'I just thought you might be going to interview this cousin person. He must be about in Oxford still.'

'I doubt if the young gentleman shares your admiration for me, Angela. What right have I got to go and interview him? I can't send up a card with "Indescribable Company" marked on it, as if I'd come to see about the electric light. The Company prefers to remain anonymous in these cases. Unless I can scrape an acquaintance with him by accident, the cousin will have to continue in his lamentable ignorance that I exist. No, the Bridge for me, and the lock-keeper; one can always get conversation out of a lock-keeper.'

'This one may be pretty peevish, though; he must have been answering a lot of questions these last twenty-four hours.'

'That's where you come in. There are times, you know, when I'm almost glad I married. You'll have to win his heart somehow; let's see, what shall it be? Dogs? They generally keep dogs. No, I know; gardens. They all keep gardens. You will have to take a really intelligent interest in this one.'

'What is the husband of the gardener doing? The husband of the gardener is looking for footprints on the back lawn. All right. If he seems difficile, I shall ask for cuttings from his lobelias. But I don't quite see how we're to explain our presence at the lock. The road there doesn't go any further. Do we just say we've been told he's got a pretty garden and——'

'On the contrary, we open the conversation by saying "Lock!" Then you get to work.'

'Oo, are we really going to start boating at once? I say, you'll be pretty tired and pretty late by the time you've paddled me six miles upstream.'

'I had thought of obviating that by taking two paddles. Look out, this is going to be Magdalen Bridge, not Brooklyn Bridge; try to have some regard for the safety of the public.'