“But the information doesn’t impress you?”
“Not much.”
“Very well, then. Will you double that bet?”
“Double the bet? You’re mad! Why, I was just going to make the same offer, feeling sure you’d refuse. It’s taking your money.”
“Never mind that. Are you on?”
“On? Why, I’m prepared to redouble if you like.”
“Done! That’s twenty pounds each way. Now, would you like to hear my reading of the story?”
“By all means. And then I shall have the pleasure of putting you wise.”
“Well, from the first, the whole thing smelled of suicide to me. Every step Mottram took seemed to be the calculated step of a man who was leading up to some deliberate dénouement. He was mysterious, he was excited, when he went round the other night to the Cathedral house. When he came here, he made the most obvious attempts to try to behave as if everything was going on just as usual. He made fussy arrangements about being called in the morning; he pretended to have left a letter half-finished; he put a novel down by the bedside, wound up his watch, put studs in his shirt—he did everything to create the surface impression, good enough (he thought) for the Coroner, that whatever else was the truth suicide was out of the question. He made one or two slips there—writing down his name in the visitors’ book with a blank for his date of departure, as if any guest ever did that; putting the flies ready on his rod, but (so Pulteney tells me) the wrong kind of flies. To make sure that there was not a verdict of suicide, he even made arrangements—through Brinkman, through Mrs. Davis, I don’t know how—to have the gas in his bedroom turned off again after it had done its work. Then he tossed off his sleeping draught, turned the gas on, and got into bed. I was sure of all that, even before I went over to Pullford, before you got the telegram from London. What I couldn’t understand was the motive; and now that’s as plain as daylight. He was determined to endow the Pullford Diocese with half a million, so as to be sure of having his nest well lined in the next world. He knew that Christian morality doesn’t permit suicide, but he thought he was all right, because he was only doing evil in order that good might come of it. And so he got rid of the spectre of a painful death from disease, and at the same time made sure, he thought, of a welcome on the other side, if there should prove to be an eternity.”
“Well, that’s your idea. I don’t deny it hangs together. But it comes up against two things—fatally, I think. If Mottram was so set upon endowing the Pullford Diocese, why did he bequeath most of his fortune to a footling Town Council and only leave the diocese the one bit of money which, if a verdict of suicide was given, could never be touched? And granted that he was at pains to get some one to turn off the gas for him, so as to avoid the appearance of suicide, why did he tell that person to lock the door, and leave the key on the wrong side? That’s the problem you’ve set yourself.”