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Read books online » Fiction » The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (bill gates best books TXT) 📖

Book online «The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (bill gates best books TXT) đŸ“–Â». Author A. A. Milne



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matter, I think I deserve it for the way I pulled myself together in the face of the unexpected catastrophe of your arrival. Yes, I got a window open, Mr. Gillingham, under your very nose; the right window too, you were kind enough to say. And the keys—yes, that was clever of you, but I think I was cleverer. I deceived you over the keys, Mr. Gillingham, as I learnt when I took the liberty of listening to a conversation on the bowling-green between you and your friend Beverley. Where was I? Ah, you must have a look for that secret passage, Mr. Gillingham.

“But what am I saying? Did I deceive you at all? You have found out the secret—that Robert was Mark—and that is all that matters. How have you found out? I shall never know now. Where did I go wrong? Perhaps you have been deceiving me all the time. Perhaps you knew about the keys, about the window, even about the secret passage. You are a clever man, Mr. Gillingham.

“I had Mark’s clothes on my hands. I might have left them in the passage, but the secret of the passage was now out. Miss Norris knew it. That was the weak point of my plan, perhaps, that Miss Norris had to know it. So I hid them in the pond, the Inspector having obligingly dragged it for me first. A couple of keys joined them, but I kept the revolver. Fortunate, wasn’t it, Mr. Gillingham?

“I don’t think that there is any more to tell you. This is a long letter, but then it is the last which I shall write. There was a time when I hoped that there might be a happy future for me, not at the Red House, not alone. Perhaps it was never more than an idle day-dream, for I am no more worthy of her than Mark was. But I could have made her happy, Mr. Gillingham. God, how I would have worked to make her happy! But now that is impossible. To offer her the hand of a murderer would be as bad as to offer her the hand of a drunkard. And Mark died for that. I saw her this morning. She was very sweet. It is a difficult world to understand.

“Well, well, we are all gone now—the Abletts and the Cayleys. I wonder what old Grandfather Cayley thinks of it all. Perhaps it is as well that we have died out. Not that there was anything wrong with Sarah—except her temper. And she had the Ablett nose—you can’t do much with that. I’m glad she left no children.

“Good-bye, Mr. Gillingham. I’m sorry that your stay with us was not of a pleasanter nature, but you understand the difficulties in which I was placed. Don’t let Bill think too badly of me. He is a good fellow; look after him. He will be surprised. The young are always surprised. And thank you for letting me end my own way. I expect you did sympathize a little, you know. We might have been friends in another world—you and I, and I and she. Tell her what you like. Everything or nothing. You will know what is best. Good-bye, Mr. Gillingham.

“MATTHEW CAYLEY.

“I am lonely to-night without Mark. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER XXII.
Mr. Beverley Moves On

“Good Lord!” said Bill, as he put down the letter.

“I thought you’d say that,” murmured Antony.

“Tony, do you mean to say that you knew all this?”

“I guessed some of it. I didn’t quite know all of it, of course.”

“Good Lord!” said Bill again, and returned to the letter. In a moment he was looking up again. “What did you write to him? Was that last night? After I’d gone into Stanton?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say? That you’d discovered that Mark was Robert?”

“Yes. At least I said that this morning I should probably telegraph to Mr. Cartwright of Wimpole Street, and ask him to—”

Bill burst in eagerly on the top of the sentence. “Yes, now what was all that about? You were so damn Sherlocky yesterday all of a sudden. We’d been doing the thing together all the time, and you’d been telling me everything, and then suddenly you become very mysterious and private and talk enigmatically—is that the word?—about dentists and swimming and the ‘Plough and Horses,’ and—well, what was it all about? You simply vanished out of sight; I didn’t know what on earth we were talking about.”

Antony laughed and apologized.

“Sorry, Bill. I felt like that suddenly. Just for the last half-hour; just to end up with. I’ll tell you everything now. Not that there’s anything to tell, really. It seems so easy when you know it—so obvious. About Mr. Cartwright of Wimpole Street. Of course he was just to identify the body.”

“But whatever made you think of a dentist for that?”

“Who could do it better? Could you have done it? How could you? You’d never gone bathing with Mark; you’d never seen him stripped. He didn’t swim. Could his doctor do it? Not unless he’d had some particular operation, and perhaps not then. But his dentist could—at any time, always—if he had been to his dentist fairly often. Hence Mr. Cartwright of Wimpole Street.”

Bill nodded thoughtfully and went back again to the letter.

“I see. And you told Cayley that you were telegraphing to Cartwright to identify the body?”

“Yes. And then of course it was all up for him. Once we knew that Robert was Mark we knew everything.”

“How did you know?”

Antony got up from the breakfast table and began to fill his pipe.

“I’m not sure that I can say, Bill. You know those problems in Algebra where you say, ‘Let x be the answer,’ and then you work it out and find what x is. Well, that’s one way; and another way, which they never give you any marks for at school, is to guess the answer. Pretend the answer is 4—well, will that satisfy the conditions of the problem? No. Then try 6; and if 6 doesn’t either, then what about 5?—and so on. Well, the Inspector and the Coroner and all that lot had guessed their answer, and it seemed to fit, but you and I knew it didn’t really fit; there were several conditions in the problem which it didn’t fit at all. So we knew that their answer was wrong, and we had to think of another—an answer which explained all the things which were puzzling us. Well, I happened to guess the right one. Got a match?”

Bill handed him a box, and he lit his pipe.

“Yes, but that doesn’t quite do, old boy. Something must have put you on to it suddenly. By the way, I’ll have my matches back, if you don’t mind.”

Antony laughed and took them out of his pocket.

“Sorry.... Well then, let’s see if I can go through my own mind again, and tell you how I guessed it. First of all, the clothes.”

“Yes?”

“To Cayley the clothes seemed an enormously important clue. I didn’t quite see why, but I did realize that to a man in Cayley’s position the smallest clue would have an entirely disproportionate value. For some reason, then, Cayley attached this exaggerated importance to the clothes which Mark was wearing on that Tuesday morning; all the clothes, the inside ones as well as the outside ones. I didn’t know why, but I did feel certain that, in that case, the absence of the collar was unintentional. In collecting the clothes he had overlooked the collar. Why?”

“It was the one in the linen-basket?”

“Yes. It seemed probable. Why had Cayley put it there? The obvious answer was that he hadn’t. Mark had put it there. I remembered what you told me about Mark being finicky, and having lots of clothes and so on, and I felt that he was just the sort of man who would never wear the same collar twice.” He paused, and then asked, “Is that right, do you think?”

“Absolutely,” said Bill with conviction.

“Well, I guessed it was. So then I began to see an x which would fit just this part of the problem—the clothes part. I saw Mark changing his clothes; I saw him instinctively dropping the collar in the linen-basket, just as he had always dropped every collar he had ever taken off, but leaving the rest of the clothes on a chair in the ordinary way; and I saw Cayley collecting all the clothes afterwards—all the visible clothes—and not realizing that the collar wasn’t there.”

“Go on,” said Bill eagerly.

“Well, I felt pretty sure about that, and I wanted an explanation of it. Why had Mark changed down there instead of in his bedroom? The only answer was that the fact of his changing had to be kept secret. When did he change? The only possible time was between lunch (when he would be seen by the servants) and the moment of Robert’s arrival. And when did Cayley collect the clothes in a bundle? Again, the only answer was ‘Before Robert’s arrival.’ So another x was wanted—to fit those three conditions.”

“And the answer was that a murder was intended, even before Robert arrived?”

“Yes. Well now, it couldn’t be intended on the strength of that letter, unless there was very much more behind the letter than we knew. Nor was it possible a murder could be intended without any more preparation than the changing into a different suit in which to escape. The thing was too childish. Also, if Robert was to be murdered, why go out of the way to announce his existence to you all—even, at the cost of some trouble, to Mrs. Norbury? What did it all mean? I didn’t know. But I began to feel now that Robert was an incident only; that the plot was a plot of Cayley’s against Mark—either to get him to kill his brother, or to get his brother to kill him—and that for some inexplicable reason Mark seemed to be lending himself to the plot.” He was silent for a little, and then said, almost to himself, “I had seen the empty brandy bottles in that cupboard.”

“You never said anything about them,” complained Bill.

“I only saw them afterwards. I was looking for the collar, you remember. They came back to me afterwards; I knew how Cayley would feel about it.... Poor devil!”

“Go on,” said Bill.

“Well, then, we had the inquest, and of course I noticed, and I suppose you did too, the curious fact that Robert had asked his way at the second lodge and not at the first. So I talked to Amos and Parsons. That made it more curious. Amos told me that Robert had gone out of his way to speak to him; had called to him, in fact. Parsons told me that his wife was out in their little garden at the first lodge all the afternoon, and was certain that Robert had never come past it. He also told me that Cayley had put him on to a job on the front lawn that afternoon. So I had another guess. Robert had used the secret passage—the passage which comes out into the park between the first and second lodges. Robert, then, had been in the house; it was a put-up job between Robert and Cayley. But how could Robert be there without Mark knowing? Obviously, Mark knew too. What did it all mean?”

“When was this?” interrupted Bill. “Just after the inquest—after you’d seen Amos and Parsons, of course?”

“Yes. I got up and left them, and came to look for you. I’d got back to the clothes then. Why did Mark change his clothes so secretly? Disguise? But then what about his face? That was much more important than clothes. His face, his beard—he’d have to shave off his beard—and then—oh, idiot! I saw you looking at that poster. Mark acting, Mark made-up, Mark disguised. Oh, priceless idiot! Mark was Robert.... Matches, please.”

Bill passed over the matches again, waited till Antony had relit his pipe, and then held out his hand for them, just as they were going into the other’s pocket.

“Yes,” said Bill thoughtfully. “Yes.... But wait a moment. What about the ‘Plough and Horses’?” Antony looked comically at him.

“You’ll never forgive me, Bill,” he said. “You’ll never come clue-hunting with me again.”

“What do you mean?”

Antony sighed.

“It was a fake, Watson. I wanted you out of the way. I wanted to be alone. I’d guessed at my x, and I wanted to test it—to test it every way, by everything we’d discovered. I simply had to be alone just then. So—” he smiled and added, “Well, I knew you wanted a drink.”

“You are a devil,” said Bill, staring at him. “And your interest when I told you that a woman had been staying there—”

“Well, it was only polite to be interested when you’d taken

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