The Red House Mystery
that, when dressed, he should go out by the secret passage to the
bowling-green, and come back by the drive, taking care to enter into
conversation with the lodge-keeper. In this way I would have two more
witnesses of Robert’s arrival—first the lodge-keeper, and secondly one
of the gardeners whom I would have working on the front lawn. Mark, of
course, was willing enough. He could practise his Australian accent on
the lodge-keeper. It was really amusing to see how readily he fell into
every suggestion which I made. Never was a killing more carefully
planned by its victim.
“He changed into Robert’s clothes in the office bedroom. This was the
safest way—for both of us. When he was ready, he called me in, and I
inspected him. It was extraordinary how well he looked the part. I
suppose that the signs of his dissipation had already marked themselves
on his face, but had been concealed hitherto by his moustache and
beard; for now that he was clean-shaven they lay open to the world from
which we had so carefully hidden them, and he was indeed the wastrel
which he was pretending to be.
“‘By Jove, you’re wonderful,’ I said.
“He smirked, and called my attention to the various artistic touches
which I might have missed.
“‘Wonderful,’ I said to myself again. ‘Nobody could possibly guess.’
“I peered into the hall. It was empty. We hurried across to the
library; he got into the passage and made off. I went back to the
bedroom, collected all his discarded clothes, did them up in a bundle
and returned with them to the passage. Then I sat down in the hall and
waited.
“You heard the evidence of Stevens, the maid. As soon as she was on her
way to the Temple in search of Mark, I stepped into the office. My hand
was in my side-pocket, and in my hand was the revolver.
“He began at once in his character of Robert—some rigmarole about
working his passage over from Australia; a little private performance
for my edification. Then in his natural voice, gloating over his
well-planned retaliation on Miss Norris, he burst out, ‘It’s my turn
now. You wait.’ It was this which Elsie heard. She had no business to
be there and she might have ruined everything, but as it turned out it
was the luckiest thing which could have happened. For it was the one
piece of evidence which I wanted; evidence, other than my own, that
Mark and Robert were in the room together.
“I said nothing. I was not going to take the risk of being heard to
speak in that room. I just smiled at the poor little fool, and took out
my revolver, and shot him. Then I went back into the library and
waited—just as I said in my evidence.
“Can you imagine, Mr. Gillingham, the shock which your sudden
appearance gave me? Can you imagine the feelings of a ‘murderer’ who
has (as he thinks) planned for every possibility, and is then
confronted suddenly with an utterly new problem? What difference would
your coming make? I didn’t know. Perhaps none; perhaps all. And I had
forgotten to open the window!
“I don’t know whether you will think my plan for killing Mark a clever
one. Perhaps not. But if I do deserve any praise in the matter, I think
I deserve it for the way I pulled myself together in the face of the
unexpected catastrophe of your arrival. Yes, I got a window open, Mr.
Gillingham, under your very nose; the right window too, you were kind
enough to say. And the keys—yes, that was clever of you, but I think I
was cleverer. I deceived you over the keys, Mr. Gillingham, as I learnt
when I took the liberty of listening to a conversation on the
bowling-green between you and your friend Beverley. Where was I? Ah,
you must have a look for that secret passage, Mr. Gillingham.
“But what am I saying? Did I deceive you at all? You have found out the
secret—that Robert was Mark—and that is all that matters. How have you
found out? I shall never know now. Where did I go wrong? Perhaps you
have been deceiving me all the time. Perhaps you knew about the keys,
about the window, even about the secret passage. You are a clever man,
Mr. Gillingham.
“I had Mark’s clothes on my hands. I might have left them in the
passage, but the secret of the passage was now out. Miss Norris knew
it. That was the weak point of my plan, perhaps, that Miss Norris had
to know it. So I hid them in the pond, the Inspector having obligingly
dragged it for me first. A couple of keys joined them, but I kept the
revolver. Fortunate, wasn’t it, Mr. Gillingham?
“I don’t think that there is any more to tell you. This is a long
letter, but then it is the last which I shall write. There was a time
when I hoped that there might be a happy future for me, not at the Red
House, not alone. Perhaps it was never more than an idle day-dream, for
I am no more worthy of her than Mark was. But I could have made her
happy, Mr. Gillingham. God, how I would have worked to make her happy!
But now that is impossible. To offer her the hand of a murderer would
be as bad as to offer her the hand of a drunkard. And Mark died for
that. I saw her this morning. She was very sweet. It is a difficult
world to understand.
“Well, well, we are all gone now—the Abletts and the Cayleys. I wonder
what old Grandfather Cayley thinks of it all. Perhaps it is as well
that we have died out. Not that there was anything wrong with
Sarah—except her temper. And she had the Ablett nose—you can’t do much
with that. I’m glad she left no children.
“Good-bye, Mr. Gillingham. I’m sorry that your stay with us was not of
a pleasanter nature, but you understand the difficulties in which I was
placed. Don’t let Bill think too badly of me. He is a good fellow; look
after him. He will be surprised. The young are always surprised. And
thank you for letting me end my own way. I expect you did sympathize a
little, you know. We might have been friends in another world—you and
I, and I and she. Tell her what you like. Everything or nothing. You
will know what is best. Good-bye, Mr. Gillingham.
“MATTHEW CAYLEY.
“I am lonely to-night without Mark. That’s funny, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER XXII.
Mr. Beverley Moves On
“Good Lord!” said Bill, as he put down the letter.
“I thought you’d say that,” murmured Antony.
“Tony, do you mean to say that you knew all this?”
“I guessed some of it. I didn’t quite know all of it, of course.”
“Good Lord!” said Bill again, and returned to the letter. In a moment
he was looking up again. “What did you write to him? Was that last
night? After I’d gone into Stanton?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say? That you’d discovered that Mark was Robert?”
“Yes. At least I said that this morning I should probably telegraph to
Mr. Cartwright of Wimpole Street, and ask him to—”
Bill burst in eagerly on the top of the sentence. “Yes, now what was
all that about? You were so damn Sherlocky yesterday all of a sudden.
We’d been doing the thing together all the time, and you’d been telling
me everything, and then suddenly you become very mysterious and private
and talk enigmatically—is that the word?—about dentists and swimming
and the ‘Plough and Horses,’ and—well, what was it all about? You
simply vanished out of sight; I didn’t know what on earth we were
talking about.”
Antony laughed and apologized.
“Sorry, Bill. I felt like that suddenly. Just for the last half-hour;
just to end up with. I’ll tell you everything now. Not that there’s
anything to tell, really. It seems so easy when you know it—so obvious.
About Mr. Cartwright of Wimpole Street. Of course he was just to
identify the body.”
“But whatever made you think of a dentist for that?”
“Who could do it better? Could _you_ have done it? How could you? You’d
never gone bathing with Mark; you’d never seen him stripped. He didn’t
swim. Could his doctor do it? Not unless he’d had some particular
operation, and perhaps not then. But his dentist could—at any time,
always—if he had been to his dentist fairly often. Hence Mr. Cartwright
of Wimpole Street.”
Bill nodded thoughtfully and went back again to the letter.
“I see. And you told Cayley that you were telegraphing to Cartwright to
identify the body?”
“Yes. And then of course it was all up for him. Once we knew that
Robert was Mark we knew everything.”
“How _did_ you know?”
Antony got up from the breakfast table and began to fill his pipe.
“I’m not sure that I can say, Bill. You know those problems in Algebra
where you say, ‘Let _x_ be the answer,’ and then you work it out and
find what _x_ is. Well, that’s one way; and another way, which they
never give you any marks for at school, is to guess the answer. Pretend
the answer is 4—well, will that satisfy the conditions of the problem?
No. Then try 6; and if 6 doesn’t either, then what about 5?—and so on.
Well, the Inspector and the Coroner and all that lot had guessed their
answer, and it seemed to fit, but you and I knew it didn’t really fit;
there were several conditions in the problem which it didn’t fit at
all. So we knew that their answer was wrong, and we had to think of
another—an answer which explained all the things which were puzzling
us. Well, I happened to guess the right one. Got a match?”
Bill handed him a box, and he lit his pipe.
“Yes, but that doesn’t quite do, old boy. Something must have put you
on to it suddenly. By the way, I’ll have my matches back, if you don’t
mind.”
Antony laughed and took them out of his pocket.
“Sorry.... Well then, let’s see if I can go through my own mind again,
and tell you how I guessed it. First of all, the clothes.”
“Yes?”
“To Cayley the clothes seemed an enormously important clue. I didn’t
quite see why, but I did realize that to a man in Cayley’s position the
smallest clue would have an entirely disproportionate value. For some
reason, then, Cayley attached this exaggerated importance to the
clothes which Mark was wearing on that Tuesday morning; all the
clothes, the inside ones as well as the outside ones. I didn’t know
why, but I did feel certain that, in that case, the absence of the
collar was unintentional. In collecting the clothes he had overlooked
the collar. Why?”
“It was the one in the linen-basket?”
“Yes. It seemed probable. Why had Cayley put it there? The obvious
answer was that he hadn’t. Mark had put it there. I remembered what you
told me about Mark being finicky, and having lots of clothes and so on,
and I felt that he was just the sort of man who would never wear the
same collar twice.” He paused, and then asked, “Is that right, do you
think?”
“Absolutely,” said Bill with conviction.
“Well, I guessed it was. So then I began to see an x which would fit
just this part of the problem—the clothes part. I saw Mark changing his
clothes; I saw him instinctively dropping the collar in the
linen-basket, just as he had always dropped every collar he had ever
taken off, but leaving the rest of the clothes on a chair in the
ordinary way; and I saw Cayley collecting all the clothes
afterwards—all the visible clothes—and not realizing that the collar
wasn’t there.”
“Go on,” said Bill eagerly.
“Well, I felt pretty sure about that, and I wanted an explanation of
it. Why had Mark changed down there instead of in his bedroom? The only
answer was that the fact of his changing had to be kept secret. When
did he change? The only possible time was between lunch (when he would
be seen by the servants) and the moment of Robert’s arrival. And when
did Cayley collect the clothes in a bundle? Again, the only answer was
‘Before Robert’s arrival.’ So another x was wanted—to fit those three
conditions.”
“And the answer was that a murder was intended, even before Robert
arrived?”
“Yes. Well now, it couldn’t be intended on the strength of that letter,
unless there was very much more behind the letter than we knew. Nor was