“It’s very extraordinary to me,” said Carmichael, “that you should say all that, and yet not have arrived at the obvious fact about this mystery. The root fact, I mean, which you have to take into account before you start investigating the circumstances at all. You simply haven’t seen that fact, although it’s right under your nose. And that’s a very curious thing, the way you can look at a complex of facts ninety-nine times, and only notice the point of them the hundredth time. The phenomenon of attention——”
“Oh, cut it out,” said Gordon; “what is the fact we haven’t noticed?”
“Oh, that,” said Carmichael lightly, “merely that Brotherhood is Davenant, and Davenant is Brotherhood.”
Chapter VII.
Carmichael’s Account of it
“Good Lord,” said Reeves, when the first shock of astonishment was over, “tell us some more about it. How did you know?”
Carmichael joined the tips of his fingers and beamed at them, secure of an audience at last. “Well, you’ve just admitted that all you can remember about Davenant is hair and spectacles. That is, his disguise. Of course the man wore a wig. He was a fictitious personality from start to finish.”
“Except for his golf,” suggested Gordon.
“Yes, that was real enough; but Brotherhood’s wasn’t. Don’t you see that the two characters are complementary, suspiciously complementary? Brotherhood is here all the week, but never during the week-ends; Davenant is only seen from Saturday to Monday. Davenant is Catholic, so as to be violently distinguished from the atheist Brotherhood. Davenant is good at golf; so Brotherhood has to be distinguished by being very bad at golf, and that, to me, is the mystery of the whole concern. How a scratch player could have the iron self-control to play that rotten game all the week, merely to prevent our suspecting his identity, beats me entirely. And yet you could find parallel instances; old Lord Mersingham, for example——”
“Do you mean,” said Gordon in a shocked voice, “that Brotherhood pulled his drives like that on purpose?”
“Precisely. After all, don’t you remember that day, let me see, I think it was last February, when Brotherhood played for fifty pounds, and went round in eighty-nine? Of course, there are flukes even in golf. I remember myself——”