“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 weekends; 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—”

“Well,” said Gordon, “I think the Committee ought to do something about it. Dash it all, I was his partner in the foursomes.”

“De mortuis,” suggested Reeves. “But I still don’t see why he wanted to do it, I’m afraid. Why, the thing’s been going on for years.”

“Well, none of us know much about Brotherhood’s business; but I gather from what people are saying about the bankruptcy that it was a pretty shady one. They haven’t traced any hole in the accounts; but if there ever was a man you would expect to go bankrupt and then skip (I believe it is called) with what is described in such circumstance as the boodle, that man was Brotherhood. He foresaw the probability of this for years, and made very careful and subtle preparations for meeting the situation. The important thing on such occasions is to have an alter ego. The difficulty is to establish an alter ego on the spur of the moment. Brotherhood knew better. He had been working up his alter ego for years.”

“Right under our noses!” protested Reeves.

“That was the cleverness of it,” said Carmichael. “If there was a Mr. Brotherhood at Paston Oatvile, and a Mr. Davenant every weekend at Brighton, nobody would be deceived; it’s a stale old dodge to keep up a double establishment in two different places. The genius of Brotherhood’s invention was that he kept up two establishments within a stone’s throw of each other. Nobody here could actually say that he’d seen Brotherhood and Davenant together, that goes without saying. But the two personalities were real personalities in the same world; and there were hosts of witnesses who would declare that they knew both. If Brotherhood suddenly ceased to exist, the last place where anybody would thing of looking for him would be the house next door.”

“Good God, what a fool I’ve been!” said Mordaunt Reeves.

“The separate banking-account would be particularly useful to such a man,” Carmichael went on. “If we could find out where Davenant banked, I have no doubt that we should discover a substantial balance. But of course, he wouldn’t bank here.”

“Why not?” asked Gordon.

“Because Brotherhood would want to deal with the local bank, and it’s a very unsafe business making your signature in a forged writing. So Davenant will have banked in London. By the way, that’s another point, did you notice that Davenant always used a typewriter? He couldn’t risk the use of a false handwriting.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” murmured Gordon to himself.

“Well, he knew when the crash was coming; it was all carefully prearranged. He had even the impudence to book a sleeping car to Glasgow.”

“But that’s a difficulty, surely,” put in Reeves. “Because he ordered the sleeper not as Davenant but as Brotherhood. Now, you make out that Brotherhood was to have disappeared, as from yesterday, and Davenant was to have become a permanency. Why didn’t he order a sleeper in the name of Davenant?”

“How often am I to tell you, my dear Reeves, that you are dealing with a genius? If Davenant had ordered a sleeper just at that moment, attention might have been directed to him. But ordering a sleeper for Brotherhood would merely strengthen the impression that Brotherhood had disappeared. If that was all⁠—personally I believe the scheme was even more audacious. I believe Davenant did mean to go away, for a time at any rate, and by that very train. He would join it at Crewe, travelling in an ordinary first-class carriage. Then at Wigan⁠—bless my soul!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Gordon.

“I find myself unaccountably unable to recollect whether the 7:30 from Euston stops at Wigan. However, it will do for the sake of argument.

“At Wigan an anonymous passenger, Davenant, of course, would ask the sleeping-car attendant whether he had a vacant berth. And the man was bound to have a vacant berth⁠—Brotherhood’s. There was one person in the world whom nobody would suspect of being Brotherhood⁠—the stranger who had been accommodated, quite accidentally, with Brotherhood’s berth.”

“It’s wonderful!” said Marryatt.

“But of course, all that is only speculation. Now we come to something of which we can give a more accurate account⁠—the plans which this Brotherhood-Davenant made for the act of metamorphosis. I take it this was his difficulty⁠—Brotherhood and Davenant (naturally enough) do not know one another. If Davenant walks out of Brotherhood’s office in London, it will create suspicion⁠—the change, then, must not happen in London. If Davenant is suddenly seen walking out of Brotherhood’s bungalow, that again will create suspicion; the change, then, must not take place at Paston Whitchurch. The thing must be managed actually on the journey between the two places. That is why Brotherhood-Davenant wears such very noncommittal clothes⁠—hosiery by which, in case of accident, he cannot be traced; the very handkerchief he takes with him is one belonging to a stranger, which has come into his possession by accident. He even has two watches, one to suit either character. Thus, you see, he can be Brotherhood or Davenant at will, by slipping on a wig and a pair of spectacles.

“He did not do anything so crude as to change once for all, suddenly, from Brotherhood to Davenant at a given point on his journey. He alternated between the two roles all along the line⁠—I have always wondered what is the origin of that curious phrase ‘all along the line’; here I use it, you will understand, in a quite literal sense. Davenant got out at Paston Oatvile⁠—the porter saw him. But, as we now know, it must have been Brotherhood who was travelling in the 4:50 from Paston Oatvile on. Yet it was as Davenant that he would have got out at Paston Whitchurch.”

“How do you know that?” asked Reeves.

“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, someone 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—”

“A blind. Davenant was to look as if he were packing up to go away, so he must take some clothes with him, not merely the shaving things.”

“But the towel and the soap? Surely they were not necessary to complete the illusion?”

“No, they are even more significant. Davenant⁠—don’t you remember?⁠—had rather darker eyebrows than Brotherhood. Quite easily done, of course, with paint. But you want something to wash it off with; and there are no corridors on the slow trains.”

“Yes, but look here,” objected Reeves, “why did he want to take all these things away with him on Monday?⁠—it was on Tuesday he was timed to disappear⁠—or rather, actually on Wednesday: his sleeper was for Wednesday.”

“I don’t think he meant to sleep the Tuesday night at the Hatcheries. He had transferred his base somewhere else⁠—to London, I suppose⁠—and his visit to Paston Whitchurch, on the pretext of picking up something he had left behind, was merely meant to establish, in our eyes, the fact that he was a different man from Brotherhood.”

“There’s one more thing, though,” said Marryatt; “I’m afraid it’s a kind of professional objection. Is it possible that a man who was really an atheist would be at the pains to go over every Sunday to Mass at Paston Bridge? Davenant, you see, was very regular about that. Or, granted that he was really a Catholic, could he bring himself to get up and preach atheist doctrines on the village green?”

Carmichael pulled a wry face. “I’m afraid, Marryatt, you are altogether too confiding. Don’t you see that he was a Catholic, and was doing the work of his own Church by turning the villagers against you and your doctrines? Don’t you see that if he managed to make atheists of your people, it would be all the easier for the priest at Paston Bridge to make Romans of them?”

“In fact,” said Gordon, “what it comes to is this: we have got to look for a criminal still; but it’s no use looking for Davenant?”

“You would be chasing a phantom,” said Carmichael.