The Viaduct Murder/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
GORDON TAKES THE OPPORTUNITY TO PHILOSOPHIZE
" It seems," said Carmichael, blinking through his spectacles, "that I have been mistaken. My old tutor always used to say to me—that was Benger: I suppose he'd be before your time, Gordon? Of course he was—Benger always used to say to me, 'Mr. Carmichael, always follow your nose. You've got a straight nose, Mr. Carmichael, but a crooked brain.' Very witty old chap he was, Benger, always saying things like that."
"It was a dashed funny mistake, too," mused Reeves. "Do you realize that, quite possibly, Davenant may have stood behind that hole in the wall and heard us coming solemnly to the conclusion that he didn't exist? That he never had existed, except as a sort of spiritual projection of old Brotherhood, and now, consequently, he had ceased to exist?"
"And what is still more singular," said Carmichael, "is that so far from helping the cause of justice, we seem to have actually hindered it. For I take it there can be little doubt that it was our tapping and measuring upstairs which put Davenant on his guard and made him bolt."
"Tapping? Measuring?" protested Gordon. "Don't you believe it; it was Reeves singing. I always said the man would beat it if we let Reeves go on like that. I'd have done the same myself."
"I'm not at all sure," said Reeves, "that he may not have found the chewing-gum on his trousers, and formed his own conclusions that way. However, there isn't very much harm done. The police have got their man, with no great inconvenience to anybody except that poor old collie at Weighford. Rather a fine dog it was, and the owner wasn't a bit nice about it when I saw him."
"I suppose," Carmichael asked, "that the police can actually prove Davenant was the murderer?"
"Not a bit of it," said Reeves confidently, "unless they've got more up their sleeve than I think they have."
"But surely," urged Gordon, "if he went to all the trouble of hiding himself like a rat in the wainscoting———"
"That's all very well, but they haven't even proved Davenant was the man in the passage. You see, Davenant was travelling on that train, but it's the train he always does come up by every Saturday. He might say that he hadn't had time to get his ticket; that he had come all the way from London; that the real murderer must have slipped out on to the six-foot way and lost himself on the opposite platform. I don't know that he will say that; of course, he is reserving his defence. But even if they can bring people to prove—people who saw him boarding the train at Weighford—that he was the man we were pursuing, it still doesn't follow that he was the murderer. It's extraordinary, the shifts men have resorted to before now when they thought they were going to be accused of murder, although they were as innocent as you or me. Put it this way—suppose Davenant had actually come up by that train on Tuesday, for reasons best known to himself. He gets to Paston Whitchurch, and then hears of what we found at the third tee. He cannot give any plausible explanation of his coming back here on Tuesday at all. He has some grudge against Brotherhood which we know nothing about. Now, if he can conceal the fact that he came back here at all that day, he escapes suspicion. He knows, somehow, about this secret passage; knows that, as a member of the club, he can wander about here pretty safely without attracting attention. He decides to lie low in the priests' hiding-place till Saturday, and then turn up bright and smiling, knowing nothing about the murder. I say, innocent men have done stranger things before now."
"It sounds pretty thin to me," said Gordon.
"Once more I tell you, it is a fatal habit to proceed from observation to inference, and give inference the name of fact. You say Davenant is the murderer; I say, we don't know that; we only know that Davenant was a man who for some reason expected to be accused of the murder, and consequently behaved in a very peculiar way."
"I still don't quite see," said Carmichael, "what exactly happened while I was waiting outside the billiard-room door."
"Nothing happened while you were waiting outside the billiard-room door; it had all happened already. Quite early on, while we were worrying about up here, Davenant saw that the place was unhealthy for him. He wandered out into the billiard-room, arranging the balls, I think, as a kind of message for us, and then strolled off somewhere—into the servants' quarters, I suppose. It's obvious that he must have had a confederate in the house. Then the police came—I imagine they must have watched somebody bringing him things from outside."
"Sullivan," said Gordon. "That was what he was doing, obviously, the day I was over in Davenant's cottage, he was taking him collars and things."
"Anyhow, the police came and climbed in at the cellar, making a great song and dance about it as the police always do. Davenant saw that things were getting pretty serious, so he made for the nearest motorbike he could find—I don't know whether he knew it belonged to the police or not. Having once started to run away, of course he couldn't very well stop at Weighford and tell us it was all a silly mistake: having started to bolt, he had to go on bolting. And he did it damned cleverly: if he'd had time to shut the door of the carriage in the express, or had a season ticket to justify his presence in the Binver train, how could he have been caught? That was the train he always came back by on Saturdays."
"I don't think he would have escaped," said Carmichael. "Truth will out—there's a lot in the old saying. By the way, I wonder if either of you know the origin of the phrase magna est veritas et prævalebit, or rather prævalet, to give the exact form?"
"We'll buy it," said Gordon.
"Actually it comes from the third book of Esdras. That's a thing ninety-nine people out of a hundred don't know. But what was I saying? Oh, yes, it's extraordinary how criminals don't escape. If you come to think of it, we were close on the track of our man the whole time."
"There," said Gordon, "I can't agree with you. Up to a certain point we were on the right track. Then you came and confused all the tracks with your 'Davenant-is-Brotherhood' slogan. After that we were at a loss—or rather, it was worse than that, we were definitely off the true scent, although the man himself was within a few yards of us. It was only because he came out of his hiding-place and disturbed Reeves' papers—a sheer accident, from our point of view—that we were able to start again. Now, your ideal detective is never dependent upon an accident."
"Well, don't rub it in," suggested Reeves. "After all, we are both of us as much to blame, because we swallowed Carmichael's theory like lambs."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I never did agree with Carmichael."
"Never did agree with him? Well, you kept jolly dark about it. What weren't you satisfied with about his explanation?"
"Oh, it seemed to me to disregard human probabilities. And, as I told you the other day, I trust human probabilities more than I trust circumstantial evidence. I didn't believe, for example, that the same man could be a Catholic from Saturday to Monday and an atheist for the rest of the week."
"But Carmichael explained that. Surely it's reasonable that a Roman Catholic should want to sweep away what he regards as inadequate theologies?"
"No, it's just what he wouldn't do. I used to know a good many Catholics at one time, and I know a certain amount about their point of view. And they couldn't act in the way Carmichael described, because it would be doing evil in order that good might come of it. And Catholic theology, you see, doesn't allow that."
"I only gave that as a possible explanation," objected Carmichael. "There are plenty of other possible explanations."
"I know. But what's the good of any number of possible explanations when no single explanation is probable? I never can understand the kind of madness that imagines it has solved a difficulty when it has found a whole number of possible explanations that aren't probable. What difference does the number of them make? As a matter of fact, in this case there's only one—that Brotherhood really was an atheist, but posed as a Catholic when he was Davenant merely to put people off the scent. But can't you see how monstrous that is? Instead of taking the trouble to go over to Paston bridge every Sunday, he might have gained a far bigger local reputation for piety by sitting under Marryatt once in three weeks."
"Well, what other human probabilities are there?"
"Next to changing one's religion every Saturday to Monday, the most impossible thing in the world would be to change one's game of golf every Saturday to Monday. Theoretically it sounds all right; in practice I don't believe in it. I can't think how you did either, Carmichael, because golf is a thing of which you have some experience."
"Well, why didn't you communicate these doubts to us before?"
"You were talking too hard. But I can produce my diary to show you what I did think about your suggestion." And Gordon disappeared, to return after a few minutes with a formidable volume over which he spent an unvarying twenty minutes every evening. "Here you are. 'Thursday—Carmichael has had an inspiration—he thinks Davenant and Brotherhood were the same person, a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde pair. He overlooks, it seems to me, the obvious phenomena of religion and golf. But of course it is very typical'"—he broke off. "I don't expect that part would interest you."
"Go on," said Reeves. "I shouldn't have thought Carmichael was typical of anything. What's it all about?"
"Well, the truth is that in this diary I don't merely record what's happened; I've got into the way of philosophizing over it a bit. As you know, Reeves, I've got a bad habit of writing for the papers, and I find writing down my impressions every day often helps me to find subjects."
"It would be a privilege to hear what you made of all this," said Carmichael dryly.
"'But of course it is very typical,'" Gordon read on, "'of all these modern philosophies. They are always for explaining something in terms of something else, just as Carmichael wants to explain Davenant in terms of Brotherhood. In plain English it means mixing up two things that are entirely different. The moderns, for example, will have it that punishment is only another name for correction. And once you have said that, the whole idea of punishment drops out of sight altogether. Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual convenience, or that matter is a form of motion. The root of error is always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it isn't.
"'The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience, the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood; it explains such a lot—you always can explain a lot by overlooking the facts. But the result is that poor Reeves, who up till now at least had Davenant to hunt for, now regards Davenant as an imaginary being, and is reduced to hunting for an imaginary murderer. Just so it looks very neat and efficient to say that punishment is the same thing as correction; it explains a puzzling idea, simplifies your thought. But what you have done is to banish the whole idea of punishment from your mind, and turn a real thing into a mental figment.
"'But this theory of Carmichael's makes an even prettier parable of the great and unpardonable error which tries to make one thing out of matter and Spirit—tells you that Spirit is a mode of matter, or the other way round. Just as Carmichael will have it that Davenant is a mode of Brotherhood. Like the materialist or the idealist he is stultifying experience for the sake of a formula. Couldn't one write this up, somehow? Brotherhood, representing Matter, leaves off where Davenant, representing Spirit, begins. Carmichael, representing the modern mind, finds this an excellent reason for supposing that they are really, somehow, the same thing. The materialist sees Brotherhood everywhere, the Idealist sees Davenant everywhere, and consequently neither of them can solve the detective mystery of existence. It looks as if one could work up a sort of Oriental mythology out of it, as good as most Oriental mythologies anyway. And the joke of it is that Davenant's really round the corner the whole time.' I say, that was a pretty good shot anyhow. Why, Carmichael, I even seem to have anticipated your discovery of the secret passage."
"H'm," said Carmichael; "there are some interesting half-truths in all that."