“Because he did it so badly, you mean?” suggested Angela. “Miles, you shouldn’t throw bread at breakfast, it’s rude.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that he had reason to believe Mr. Eames was at the cinema, whereas he knew Bredon was in the house, and saw him sitting in a window that looks down over the street. Almost inevitably he must have supposed that it was the watcher in the front of the house who had followed in his tracks.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Bredon. “I’m afraid, you see, when my wife went out of the room, she opened the door in that careless way she has, and three of my cards fell into the street below. Well, I thought Brinkman had disappeared; there was no sign of him. So I went downstairs and retrieved the cards, thinking it couldn’t do any harm. But I’ve been wondering since whether Brinkman wasn’t still watching, and whether my disappearance from the window didn’t give him the first hint that he was being followed. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Well, I don’t expect it made any difference. He was a cool hand, you see. I suppose he thought your sitting in the window must be a trap, and that the house was really watched at the back. He wasn’t far wrong there, of course.”
“Indeed he was not,” assented Mr. Pulteney. “You seem to me to have posted a singularly lynx-eyed gentleman in the stables.”
“And so, you see, he thought he’d brazen it out. He reckoned on being followed, but that didn’t matter to him as long as the man behind was a good distance off, and as long as he himself made sure of picking up his car at the right moment. The whole thing was monstrously mismanaged on my part. But, you see, I made absolutely certain that he was going for Mottram’s car, in which he’d obviously made all the necessary preparations. Even now I can’t understand how he consented so calmly to leave the car behind him. Unless, of course, he spotted that we were watching the garage, and knew that it would be unsafe. But he must be crippled for money without his thousand.”
“My husband,” said Angela mischievously, “seemed to know beforehand that he wouldn’t go off in Mottram’s car.”
“Yes, by the way,” asked Leyland, “how was that?”
“I’m sorry, it ought to have occurred to me earlier. It never dawned on me till the moment when I mentioned it, and of course then it was too late. But it was merely the result of a reasoning process which had been going on in my own mind. I had been trying to work things out, and it seemed to me that I had arrived at an explanation which would cover all the facts. And that explanation, though it didn’t exclude the possibility that Brinkman intended to skip with the thousand and the car, didn’t make it absolutely necessary that he should mean to.”
“I suppose you’re still hankering after suicide?”