“I don’t believe it. The place where he fell was just the one place about here where he was bound to kill himself, not merely maim himself. That looks like preparation.”
“All right. Any more?”
“No, but I think that’s enough to go on with. The probability I’m going to bet on is murder.”
“You’re up against coincidence again, though, there. Why should somebody happen to murder Brotherhood on the very day he went bankrupt?”
“You will go on assuming that it is Brotherhood. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Brotherhood has saved a nest-egg for himself, and is skipping to avoid his creditors—what better way of throwing people off the scent than by a pretended suicide?”
“That is, by pitching a total stranger down the viaduct.”
“I didn’t say a total stranger. Suppose it were somebody in pursuit of him, or somebody he suspected of pursuing him?”
“But he couldn’t be sure that the face would get mangled like that. It was only one chance in a thousand that the body should scrape down all along that buttress on its face.”
“He may simply have wanted to kill the man, without hoping that the corpse would be mistaken for him. After all, we’ve got to explain the ticket; a man who takes a single ticket down here is almost certainly not a resident here—the half-fare is so cheap. A spy, tracking him, or somebody he takes to be a spy tracking him. He stuns the man while he’s not looking, and then pitches him out. He’s desperate, remember.”
“Well, it seems to hang together that way.”