The Red House Mystery
was quite certain that she had heard his voice. But then Bill had said
that it was a very characteristic voice—an easy voice, therefore, to
imitate. If Bill could imitate it so successfully, why not Cayley?
But perhaps it had not been such a cold-blooded killing, after all.
Suppose Cayley had had a quarrel with his cousin that afternoon over
the girl whom they were both wooing. Suppose Cayley had killed Mark,
either purposely, in sudden passion, or accidentally, meaning only to
knock him down. Suppose that this had happened in the passage, say
about two o’clock, either because Cayley had deliberately led him
there, or because Mark had casually suggested a visit to it. (One could
imagine Mark continually gloating over that secret passage.) Suppose
Cayley there, with the body at his feet, feeling already the rope round
his neck; his mind darting this way and that in frantic search for a
way of escape; and suppose that suddenly and irrelevantly he remembers
that Robert is coming to the house at three o’clock that
afternoon—automatically he looks at his watch—in half an hour’s
time.... In half an hour’s time. He must think of something quickly,
quickly. Shall he bury the body in the passage and let it be thought
that Mark ran away, frightened at the mere thought of his brother’s
arrival? But there was the evidence of the breakfast table. Mark had
seemed annoyed at this resurrection of the black sheep, but certainly
not frightened. No; that was much too thin a story. But suppose Mark
had actually seen his brother and had a quarrel with him; suppose it
could be made to look as if Robert had killed Mark—
Antony pictured to himself Cayley in the passage, standing over the
dead body of his cousin, and working it out. How could Robert be made
to seem the murderer, if Robert were alive to deny it? But suppose
Robert were dead, too?
He looks at his watch again. (Only twenty-five minutes now.) Suppose
Robert were dead, too? Robert dead in the office, and Mark dead in the
passage—how does that help? Madness! But if the bodies were brought
together somehow and Robert’s death looked like suicide?.... Was it
possible?
Madness again. Too difficult. (Only twenty minutes now.) Too difficult
to arrange in twenty minutes. Can’t arrange a suicide. Too
difficult.... Only nineteen minutes....
And then the sudden inspiration! Robert dead in the office, Mark’s body
hidden in the passage—impossible to make Robert seem the murderer, but
how easy to make Mark! Robert dead and Mark missing; why, it jumped to
the eye at once. Mark had killed Robert—accidentally; yes, that would
be more likely—and then had run away. Sudden panic.... (He looks at his
watch again. Fifteen minutes, but plenty of time now. The thing
arranges itself.)
Was that the solution, Antony wondered. It seemed to fit in with the
facts as they knew them; but then, so did that other theory which he
had suggested to Bill in the morning.
“Which one?” said Bill.
They had come back from Jallands through the park and were sitting in
the copse above the pond, from which the Inspector and his fishermen
had now withdrawn. Bill had listened with open mouth to Antony’s
theory, and save for an occasional “By Jove!” had listened in silence.
“Smart man, Cayley,” had been his only comment at the end.
“Which other theory?”
“That Mark had killed Robert accidentally and had gone to Cayley for
help, and that Cayley, having hidden him in the passage, locked the
office door from the outside and hammered on it.”
“Yes, but you were so dashed mysterious about that. I asked you what
the point of it was, and you wouldn’t say anything.” He thought for a
little, and then went on, “I suppose you meant that Cayley deliberately
betrayed Mark, and tried to make him look like a murderer?”
“I wanted to warn you that we should probably find Mark in the passage,
alive or dead.”
“And now you don’t think so?”
“Now I think that his dead body is there.”
“Meaning that Cayley went down and killed him afterwards—after you had
come, after the police had come?”
“Well, that’s what I shrink from, Bill. It’s so horribly cold-blooded.
Cayley may be capable of it, but I hate to think of it.”
“But, dash it all, your other way is cold-blooded enough. According to
you, he goes up to the office and deliberately shoots a man with whom
he has no quarrel, whom he hasn’t seen for fifteen years!”
“Yes, but to save his own neck. That makes a difference. My theory is
that he quarrelled violently with Mark over the girl, and killed him in
sudden passion. Anything that happened after that would be
self-defense. I don’t mean that I excuse it, but that I understand it.
And I think that Mark’s dead body is in the passage now, and has been
there since, say, half-past two yesterday afternoon. And to-night
Cayley is going to hide it in the pond.”
Bill pulled at the moss on the ground beside him, threw away a handful
or two, and said slowly, “You may be right, but it’s all guess-work,
you know.”
Antony laughed.
“Good Lord, of course it is,” he said. “And to-night we shall know if
it’s a good guess or a bad one.”
Bill brightened up suddenly.
“To-night,” he said. “I say, to-night’s going to be rather fun. How do
we work it?”
Antony was silent for a little.
“Of course,” he said at last, “we ought to inform the police, so that
they can come here and watch the pond to-night.”
“Of course,” grinned Bill.
“But I think that perhaps it is a little early to put our theories
before them.”
“I think perhaps it is,” said Bill solemnly.
Antony looked up at him with a sudden smile.
“Bill, you old bounder.”
“Well, dash it, it’s our show. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get our
little bit of fun out of it.”
“Neither do I. All right, then, we’ll do without the police to-night.”
“We shall miss them,” said Bill sadly, “but ’tis better so.”
There were two problems in front of them: first, the problem of getting
out of the house without being discovered by Cayley, and secondly, the
problem of recovering whatever it was which Cayley dropped into the
pond that night.
“Let’s look at it from Cayley’s point of view,” said Antony. “He may
not know that we’re on his track, but he can’t help being suspicious of
us. He’s bound to be suspicious of everybody in the house, and more
particularly of us, because we’re presumably more intelligent than the
others.”
He stopped for a moment to light his pipe, and Bill took the
opportunity of looking more intelligent than Mrs. Stevens.
“Now, he has got something to hide to-night, and he’s going to take
good care that we aren’t watching him. Well, what will he do?”
“See that we are asleep first, before he starts out.”
“Yes. Come and tuck us up, and see that we’re nice and comfortable.”
“Yes, that’s awkward,” said Bill. “But we could lock our doors, and
then he wouldn’t know that we weren’t there.”
“Have you ever locked your door?”
“Never.”
“No. And you can bet that Cayley knows that. Anyway, he’d bang on it,
and you wouldn’t answer, and then what would he think?”
Bill was silent; crushed.
“Then I don’t see how we’re going to do it,” he said, after deep
thought. “He’ll obviously come to us just before he starts out, and
that doesn’t give us time to get to the pond in front of him.”
“Let’s put ourselves in his place,” said Antony, puffing slowly at his
pipe. “He’s got the body, or whatever it is, in the passage. He won’t
come up the stairs, carrying it in his arms, and look in at our doors
to see if we’re awake. He’ll have to make sure about us first, and then
go down for the body afterwards. So that gives us a little time.”
“Y-yes,” said Bill thoughtfully. “We might just do it, but it’ll be a
bit of a rush.”
“But wait. When he’s gone down to the passage and got the body, what
will he do next?”
“Come out again,” said Bill helpfully.
“Yes; but which end?”
Bill sat up with a start.
“By Jove, you mean that he will go out at the far end by the
bowling-green?”
“Don’t you think so? Just imagine him walking across the lawn in full
view of the house, at midnight, with a body in his arms. Think of the
awful feeling he would have in the back of the neck, wondering if
anybody, any restless sleeper, had chosen just that moment to wander to
the window and look out into the night. There’s still plenty of
moonlight, Bill. Is he going to walk across the park in the moonlight,
with all those windows staring at him? Not if he can help it. But he
can get out by the bowling green, and then come to the pond without
ever being in sight of the house, at all.”
“You’re right. And that will just about give us time. Good. Now, what’s
the next thing?”
“The next thing is to mark the exact place in the pond where he
drops—whatever he drops.”
“So that we can fish it out again.”
“If we can see what it is, we shan’t want to. The police can have a go
at it to-morrow. But if it’s something we can’t identify from a
distance, then we must try and get it out. To see whether it’s worth
telling the police about.”
“Y-yes,” said Bill, wrinkling his forehead. “Of course, the trouble
with water is that one bit of it looks pretty much like the next bit. I
don’t know if that had occurred to you.
“It had,” smiled Antony. “Let’s come and have a look at it.”
They walked to the edge of the copse, and lay down there in silence,
looking at the pond beneath them.
“See anything?” said Antony at last.
“What?”
“The fence on the other side.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s rather useful, that’s all.”
“Said Sherlock Holmes enigmatically,” added Bill. “A moment later, his
friend Watson had hurled him into the pond.”
Antony laughed.
“I love being Sherlocky,” he said. “It’s very unfair of you not to play
up to me.”
“Why is that fence useful, my dear Holmes?” said Bill obediently.
“Because you can take a bearing on it. You see—”
“Yes, you needn’t stop to explain to me what a bearing is.”
“I wasn’t going to. But you’re lying here”—he looked up—“underneath
this pine-tree. Cayley comes out in the old boat and drops his parcel
in. You take a line from here on to the boat, and mark it off on the
fence there. Say it’s the fifth post from the end. Well, then I take a
line from _my_ tree—we’ll find one for me directly—and it comes on to
the twentieth post, say. And where the two lines meet, there shall the
eagles be gathered together. Q.E.D. And there, I almost forgot to
remark, will the taller eagle, Beverley by name, do his famous diving
act. As performed nightly at the Hippodrome.”
Bill looked at him uneasily.
“I say, really? It’s beastly dirty water, you know.”
“I’m afraid so, Bill. So it is written in the book of Jasher.”
“Of course I knew that one of us would have to, but I hoped—oh, well,
it’s a warm night.”
“Just the night for a bathe,” agreed Antony, getting up. “Well now,
let’s have a look for my tree.”
They walked down to the margin of the pond and then looked back. Bill’s
tree stood up and took the evening, tall and unmistakable, fifty feet
nearer to heaven than its neighbours. But it had its fellow at the
other end of the copse, not quite so tall, perhaps, but equally
conspicuous.
“That’s where I shall be,” said Antony, pointing to it. “Now, for the
Lord’s sake, count your posts accurately.”
“Thanks very much, but I shall do it for my own sake,” said Bill with
feeling. “I don’t want to spend the whole night diving.”
“Fix on the post in a straight line with you and the splash, and then
count backwards to the beginning of the fence.”
“Right, old boy. Leave it to me. I can do this on my head.”
“Well, that’s how you will have to do the last part of it,” said Antony
with a smile.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly time to change for dinner. They
started to walk back to the house together.