“Heard what?”
“Why, that it is Brotherhood. They recognized him from the birth-mark.”
“So that’s that,” said Mordaunt Reeves, a little bitterly. “Trust the Insurance people not to make a mistake. I confess that, after the handkerchief clue failed, I had begun to think it must be Brotherhood who was dead. I suppose your caddie didn’t happen to mention whether it was suicide or murder?”
“He assumed it to be suicide; but not, I think, with any inside information. Of course, it was a foggy day. Did you know that, as a matter of statistics, there are more suicides in November than in any other month?”
“I will make a note of the fact,” said Mordaunt Reeves.
Chapter V.
On the Railway
The afternoon seemed a compensation for yesterday; October sun glowed temperately over the links, with the air of a kind old gentleman producing sweetmeats unexpectedly. The rich but transient gold of summer evenings seemed hoarded in this summer of St. Luke; the air not over-charged with uneasy heat, but lucid and caressing; the leaves no longer in the shock of their summer finery, but dignified in the decayed gentility of their autumn gold. A perfect day for golf, such was the immediate impression of the Paston Oatvile mind; but to Reeves a second thought occurred—it was a bad day for following up the clues of a murder.
“It’s all very well,” he said to Gordon, “the visibility’s good, and we shan’t be interrupted by rain; but we can’t get the atmosphere; the spiritual atmosphere, I mean, of yesterday’s fog and drizzle. We shall see where a man fell down the embankment, but we shan’t feel the impulse of that weeping depression which made him throw himself over, or made somebody else save him the trouble. We haven’t got the mise-en-scène of a tragedy.”
They climbed together, Gordon and he; a zigzag path up the side of the huge embankment, close to the club-house. When it reached the level of the line, it kept close to the trim hedge that marked the boundary of the railway’s property, and so lasted till the very beginning of the viaduct, where it dived under the first arch at a precarious angle and came up the other side. It was a matter of common knowledge to the good-humoured porters of Paston Oatvile that the shortest way from that station to the neighbouring station of Paston Whitchurch was along the railway line itself—the shortest, because it avoided the steep dip into the valley. Accordingly, it was the habit of residents, if pressed for time, to follow this path up to the viaduct, then to break over the sacred hedge and walk over the railway bridge till a similar path was available on the Paston Whitchurch side. This local habit Reeves and Gordon now naturally followed, for it gave them access to the very spot from which, twenty-four hours before, a human body had been hurled down on to the granite buttress and the osier-bed that lay beneath.
“You see what I mean,” said Reeves. “We can’t, of course, tell what pace the train was going; they vary so much in the fog. But if, for the sake of argument, you take the force with which I throw this stone as the impetus of the train, you see how the curve of the slope edges it out to the right—there—and it falls either exactly on the buttress or next door to it. That’s how I picture yesterday afternoon—the man takes a good jump—or gets a good shove, and falls just over the edge; there’s nothing for him to catch on to; and between his own motion and the slope of the embankment he gets pitched on to the buttress. I don’t know any place along this line where the drop comes so close. The coroner will call attention to that—it’s extraordinary the way coroners do draw attention to all the least important aspects of the case. I read a newspaper account once of a man who was killed by a motor-car just as he came out of church, and I’m blessed if the coroner didn’t draw attention to the dangerous habit of standing about outside churches.”