“The ticket, of course. Brotherhood had a season, naturally, for he went up and down every day. At Paston Whitchurch, therefore, Brotherhood would have produced a season. It was Davenant who needed an ordinary single. The effect of all this was to create the simultaneous impression that both Brotherhood and Davenant came back to Paston Whitchurch that afternoon, and came by the same train. There was only one hitch in the plan, which could hardly have been foreseen. If Brotherhood happened to be murdered on the way, it would look very much as if Davenant had murdered him. And unfortunately he was murdered.”
“Then you don’t think it was suicide?” asked Marryatt, with a catch in his voice.
“If it was suicide, it was the result of a momentary insanity, almost incredibly sudden in its incidence. Suicide was certainly not part of the plan. A bogus suicide was, of course, a conceivable expedient; it would have been one way of getting rid of the undesirable Brotherhood’s existence. But consider what that means. It means getting hold of a substitute who looked exactly like Brotherhood—he could not foresee the excoriation of the features—and murdering him at unawares. It meant, further, that Davenant would be suspected of the murder. No plan could have been more difficult or more clumsy.”
“Then you mean,” said Marryatt, “that we have to look for a murderer, somebody quite unknown to us?”
“I didn’t say that,” replied Carmichael, with a curious look. “I mean that we have to look for a murderer, some one whom we have not hitherto suspected. If Davenant murdered Brotherhood, that was certainly suicide; for Davenant was Brotherhood. But that seems to me impossible. The evidence all goes to show that there was a very careful plot in contemplation, which was cut short by a quite unforeseen counterplot.”
“But look here,” said Reeves, “if the original plan had come off, did he mean to come back here and live on here as Davenant?”
“You mustn’t expect me to know everything; I can only go by the indications. But I should say that he really would have come back here as Davenant, perhaps about three weeks later, and settled down permanently at the Hatcheries; or perhaps even—he was a very remarkable man—he would have bought up Brotherhood’s bungalow. You see, he liked the place; he liked the company; the only thing he disliked was having to play golf badly, and that necessity disappeared, once he settled down as Davenant. A wig is a nuisance, but so is baldness. The last place where anybody would look for Mr. Brotherhood, last heard of on the way to Glasgow, would be Paston Whitchurch, where Mr. Brotherhood had lived.”
“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” said Gordon, “one of Nature’s Watsons, as I said yesterday. But what about all the silly little indications I found at the Hatcheries an hour ago? Do they back up your theory, or are they wide of the mark?”
“It’s all according to schedule,” explained Carmichael, “but for a reason quite different from any you imagined. You must consider that the things we really find it hard to change are not the important things of life, our moral or religious or political standpoint, but our common, daily habits of living. Brotherhood might be an atheist, and Davenant a Catholic; Brotherhood a violent Radical, Davenant a Diehard Tory. But every man has his own preference in razors and in shaving-soap and in tooth-powder; and if you looked into the thing, you would find that if Davenant used A’s shaving-soap, so did Brotherhood; if Brotherhood used B’s tooth-powder, so did Davenant. There lay the real danger of detection. There was just the danger that somebody—shall we say, an interfering old don?—might hit upon the truth of the secret, and make investigations. Accordingly, those little traces must be obliterated. And they have been, for Davenant was careful to take them away with him. And so has the photograph, a photograph which, I suspect, had a duplicate in Brotherhood’s house—you see, neither Brotherhood nor Davenant could live without it.”
“But the collars and the socks? Surely nobody is so intimately wedded to one particular type of collar——”