“He wasn’t very handy with his pen,” observed Bredon. “I suppose friend Brinkman would have had to get onto this in the morning and put it into English. Yes, I know what you’re going to say: if the man had foreseen his end he either wouldn’t have taken the trouble to start the letter or else he’d have taken the trouble to finish it. But I tell you, I don’t like this letter—I say, we must be getting down to dinner; attract suspicion, what, if we’re found nosing round up here too long? All right, Leyland, I won’t spoil your sport. What about having a fiver on it—suicide or murder?”
“I don’t mind if I do. What about telling one another how we get on?”
“Let’s be quite free about that. But each side shall keep notes of the case from day to day, putting down his suspicions and his reasons for them, and we’ll compare notes afterward. Ah, is that Mrs. Davis? All right, we’re just coming.”
Chapter V.
Supper, and Mr. Brinkman
Mrs. Davis’s cuisine, if it did not quite justify all the ironic comments of the old gentleman, lent some colour to them. With the adjectival trick of her class she always underestimated quantity, referring to a large tureen as “a drop of soup,” and overestimated quality, daily suggesting for her guests’ supper “a nice chop.” The chop always appeared; the nice chop (as the old gentleman pointed out) would have been a pleasant change. As surely as you had eggs and bacon for breakfast, so surely you had a chop for supper; “and some nice fruit to follow” heralded the entrance of a depressed blanc-mange (which Mrs. Davis called “shape,” after its principal attribute) and some cold green-gages. These must have come from Alcinous’s garden, for at no time of the year were they out of season. If Angela had stayed in the house for a fortnight, it is possible that she would have taken Mrs. Davis in hand and inspired her with larger ideas, As it was, she submitted, feeling that a suicide in the house was sufficiently unsettling for Mrs. Davis without further upheavals.
The coffee room at the Load of Mischief was not large enough to let the company distribute itself at different tables, each party conversing in low tones and eyeing its neighbours with suspicion. A single long table accommodated them all, an arrangement which called for a constant exercise of forced geniality. Bredon and Leyland were both in a mood of contemplation, puzzling out the secret of the room upstairs; Brinkman was plainly nervous, and eager to avoid discussing the tragedy; Angela knew, from experience in such situations, the value of silence. Only the old gentleman seemed quite at his ease, dragging in the subject of Mottram with complete sang-froid and in a tone of irony which seemed inseparable from his personality. Brinkman parried these topical references with considerable adroitness, showing himself as he did so a travelled man and a man of intelligence, though without much gift of humour.
Thus, in reply to a conventional question about his day’s sport, the old gentleman returned, “No, I cannot say that I caught any. I think, however, that I may claim without boasting to have frightened a few of them. It is an extraordinary thing to me that Mottram, who was one of your grotesquely rich men, should have come down for his fishing to an impossible place like this, where every rise deserves a paragraph in the local paper. If I were odiously rich, I would go to one of these places in Scotland, or Norway, even, though I confess that I loathe the Scandinavians. I have never met them, but the extravagant praise bestowed upon them by my childhood’s geography books makes them detestable to me.”
“I think,” said Brinkman, “that you would find some redeeming vices among the Swedes. But poor Mottram’s reason was a simple one; he belonged to these parts; Chilthorpe was his home town.”
“Indeed,” said the old gentleman, wincing slightly at the Americanism.
“Oo, yes,” said Angela, “we saw Mottram on the map. Was he a sort of local squire, then?”