“Of course,” murmured Tommy, “I saw at once where the hitch1 in thisparticular case lay, and just where the police were going astray.”
“Yes?” said Tuppence eagerly.
Tommy shook his head sadly.
“I wish I did. Tuppence, it’s dead easy being the Old Man in the Cornerup to a certain point. But the solution beats me. Who did murder the beg-gar? I don’t know.”
He took some more newspaper cuttings out of his pocket.
“Further exhibits—Mr. Hollaby, his son, Mrs. Sessle, Doris Evans.”
Tuppence pounced2 on the last and looked at it for some time.
“She didn’t murder him anyway,” she remarked at last. “Not with a hat-pin.”
“Why this certainty?”
“A lady Molly touch. She’s got bobbed hair. Only one woman in twentyuses hatpins nowadays, anyway—long hair or short. Hats fit tight and pullon—there’s no need for such a thing.”
“Still, she might have had one by her.”
“My dear boy, we don’t keep them as heirlooms! What on earth shouldshe have brought a hatpin down to Sunningdale for?”
“Then it must have been the other woman, the woman in brown.”
“I wish she hadn’t been tall. Then she could have been the wife. I alwayssuspect wives who are away at the time and so couldn’t have had anythingto do with it. If she found her husband carrying on with that girl, it wouldbe quite natural for her to go for him with a hatpin.”
“I shall have to be careful, I see,” remarked Tommy.
But Tuppence was deep in thought and refused to be drawn3.
“What were the Sessles like?” she asked suddenly. “What sort of thingsdid people say about them?”
“As far as I can make out, they were very popular. He and his wife weresupposed to be devoted4 to one another. That’s what makes the business ofthe girl so odd. It’s the last thing you’d have expected of a man like Sessle.
He was an ex-soldier, you know. Came into a good bit of money, retired,and went into this Insurance business. The last man in the world, appar-ently, whom you would have suspected of being a crook5.”
“It is absolutely certain that he was the crook? Couldn’t it have been theother two who took the money?”
“The Hollabys? They say they’re ruined.”
“Oh, they say! Perhaps they’ve got it all in a bank under another name. Iput it foolishly, I dare say, but you know what I mean. Suppose they’dbeen speculating with the money for some time, unbeknownst to Sessle,and lost it all. It might be jolly convenient for them that Sessle died justwhen he did.”
Tommy tapped the photograph of Mr. Hollaby senior with his finger-nail.
“So you’re accusing this respectable gentleman of murdering his friendand partner? You forget that he parted from Sessle on the links in fullview of Barnard and Lecky, and spent the evening in the Dormy House.
Besides, there’s the hatpin.”
“Bother the hatpin,” said Tuppence impatiently. “That hatpin, you think,points to the crime having been committed by a woman?”
“Naturally. Don’t you agree?”
“No. Men are notoriously old-fashioned. It takes them ages to rid them-selves of preconceived ideas. They associate hatpins and hairpins7 with thefemale sex, and call them ‘women’s weapons.’ They may have been in thepast, but they’re both rather out of date now. Why, I haven’t had a hatpinor a hairpin6 for the last four years.”
“Then you think—?”
“That it was a man killed Sessle. The hatpin was used to make it seem awoman’s crime.”
“There’s something in what you say, Tuppence,” said Tommy slowly.
“It’s extraordinary how things seem to straighten themselves out whenyou talk a thing over.”
Tuppence nodded.
“Everything must be logical—if you look at it the right way. And remem-ber what Marriot once said about the amateur point of view—that it hadthe intimacy8. We know something about people like Captain Sessle and hiswife. We know what they’re likely to do—and what they’re not likely todo. And we’ve each got our special knowledge.”
Tommy smiled.
“You mean,” he said, “that you are an authority on what people withbobbed and shingled9 heads are likely to have in their possession, and thatyou have an intimate acquaintance with what wives are likely to feel anddo?”
“Something of the sort.”
“And what about me? What is my special knowledge? Do husbands pickup10 girls, etc?”
“No,” said Tuppence gravely. “You know the course—you’ve been on it—not as a detective searching for clues, but as a golfer. You know about golf,and what’s likely to put a man off his game.”
“It must have been something pretty serious to put Sessle off his game.
His handicap’s two, and from the seventh tee on he played like a child, sothey say.”
“Who say?”
“Barnard and Lecky. They were playing just behind him, you remem-ber.”
“That was after he met the woman—the tall woman in brown. They sawhim speaking to her, didn’t they?”
“Yes—at least—”
Tommy broke off. Tuppence looked up at him and was puzzled. He wasstaring at the piece of string in his fingers, but staring with the eyes of onewho sees something very different.
“Tommy—what is it?”
“Be quiet, Tuppence. I’m playing the sixth hole at Sunningdale. Sessleand old Hollaby are holing out on the sixth green ahead of me. It’s gettingdusk, but I can see that bright blue coat of Sessle’s clearly enough. And onthe footpath11 to the left of me there’s a woman coming along. She hasn’tcrossed from the ladies’ course—that’s on the right—I should have seenher if she had done so. And it’s odd I didn’t see her on the footpath before—from the fifth tee, for instance.”
He paused.
“You said just now I knew the course, Tuppence. Just behind the sixthtee there’s a little hut or shelter made of turf. Anyone could wait in thereuntil—the right moment came. They could change their appearance there.
I mean—tell me, Tuppence, this is where your special knowledge comes inagain—would it be very difficult for a man to look like a woman, and thenchange back to being a man again? Could he wear a skirt over plus-fours,for instance?”
“Certainly he could. The woman would look a bit bulky, that would beall. A longish-brown skirt, say a brown sweater of the kind both men andwomen wear, and a woman’s felt hat with a bunch of side curls attachedeach side. That would be all that was needed—I’m speaking, of course, ofwhat would pass at a distance, which I take to be what you are driving at.
Switch off the skirt, take off the hat and curls, and put on a man’s capwhich you can carry rolled up in your hand, and there you’d be—back as aman again.”
“And the time required for the transformation12?”
“From woman to man, a minute and a half at the outside, probably agood deal less. The other way about would take longer, you’d have to ar-range the hat and curls a bit, and the skirt would stick getting it on overthe plus fours.”
“That doesn’t worry me. It’s the time for the first that matters. As I tellyou, I’m playing the sixth hole. The woman in brown has reached the sev-enth tee now. She crosses it and waits. Sessle in his blue coat goes towardsher. They stand together a minute, and then they follow the path roundthe trees out of sight. Hollaby is on the tee alone. Two or three minutespass. I’m on the green now. The man in the blue coat comes back anddrives off, foozling badly. The light’s getting worse. I and my partner goon. Ahead of us are those two, Sessle slicing and topping and doingeverything he shouldn’t do. At the eighth green, I see him stride off andvanish down the slip. What happened to him to make him play like a dif-ferent man?”
“The woman in brown—or the man, if you think it was a man.”
“Exactly, and where they were standing13 — out of sight, remember, ofthose coming after them—there’s a deep tangle14 of furze bushes. You couldthrust a body in there, and it would be pretty certain to lie hidden untilthe morning.”
“Tommy! You think it was then.—But someone would have heard—”
“Heard what? The doctors agreed death must have been instantaneous.
I’ve seen men killed instantaneously in the war. They don’t cry out as arule—just a gurgle, or a moan—perhaps just a sigh, or a funny little cough.
Sessle comes towards the seventh tee, and the woman comes forward andspeaks to him. He recognises her, perhaps, as a man he knows masquerad-ing. Curious to learn the why and wherefore, he allows himself to bedrawn along the footpath out of sight. One stab with the deadly hatpin asthey walk along. Sessle falls—dead. The other man drags his body into thefurze bushes, strips off the blue coat, then sheds his own skirt and the hatand curls. He puts on Sessle’s well-known blue coat and cap and stridesback to the tee. Three minutes would do it. The others behind can’t see hisface, only the peculiar15 blue coat they know so well. They never doubt thatit’s Sessle—but he doesn’t play Sessle’s brand of golf. They all say he playedlike a different man. Of course he did. He was a different man.”
“But—”
“Point No. 2. His action in bringing the girl down there was the action ofa different man. It wasn’t Sessle who met Doris Evans at a cinema and in-duced her to come down to Sunningdale. It was a man calling himselfSessle. Remember, Doris Evans wasn’t arrested until a fortnight after thetime. She never saw the body. If she had, she might have bewildered every-one by declaring that that wasn’t the man who took her out on the golflinks that night and spoke16 so wildly of suicide. It was a carefully laid plot.
The girl invited down for Wednesday when Sessle’s house would beempty, then the hatpin which pointed17 to its being a woman’s doing. Themurderer meets the girl, takes her into the bungalow18 and gives her sup-per, then takes her out on the links, and when he gets to the scene of thecrime, brandishes19 his revolver and scares the life out of her. Once she hastaken to her heels, all he has to do is to pull out the body and leave it lyingon the tee. The revolver he chucks into the bushes. Then he makes a neatparcel of the skirt and—now I admit I’m guessing—in all probability walksto Woking, which is only about six or seven miles away, and goes back totown from there.”
“Wait a minute,” said Tuppence. “There’s one thing you haven’t ex-plained. What about Hollaby?”
“Hollaby?”
“Yes. I admit that the people behind couldn’t have seen whether it wasreally Sessle or not. But you can’t tell me that the man who was playingwith him was so hypnotised by the blue coat that he never looked at hisface.”
“My dear old thing,” said Tommy. “That’s just the point. Hollaby knewall right. You see, I’m adopting your theory — that Hollaby and his sonwere the real embezzlers. The murderer’s got to be a man who knewSessle pretty well—knew, for instance, about the servants being alwaysout on a Wednesday, and that his wife was away. And also someone whowas able to get an impression of Sessle’s latch20 key. I think Hollaby juniorwould fulfil all these requirements. He’s about the same age and height asSessle, and they were both clean-shaven men. Doris Evans probably sawseveral photographs of the murdered man reproduced in the papers, butas you yourself observed—one can just see that it’s a man and that’s aboutall.”
“Didn’t she ever see Hollaby in Court?”
“The son never appeared in the case at all. Why should he? He had noevidence to give. It was old Hollaby, with his irreproachable21 alibi22, whostood in the limelight throughout. Nobody has ever bothered to inquirewhat his son was doing that particular evening.”
“It all fits in,” admitted Tuppence. She paused a minute and then asked:
“Are you going to tell all this to the police?”
“I don’t know if they’d listen.”
“They’d listen all right,” said an unexpected voice behind him.
Tommy swung round to confront Inspector23 Marriot. The Inspector wassitting at the next table. In front of him was a poached egg.
“Often drop in here to lunch,” said Inspector Marriot. “As I was saying,we’ll listen all right—in fact I’ve been listening. I don’t mind telling youthat we’ve not been quite satisfied all along over those Porcupine24 figures.
You see, we’ve had our suspicions of those Hollabys, but nothing to goupon. Too sharp for us. Then this murder came, and that seemed to upsetall our ideas. But thanks to you and the lady, sir, we’ll confront young Hol-laby with Doris Evans and see if she recognises him. I rather fancy shewill. That’s a very ingenious idea of yours about the blue coat. I’ll see thatBlunt’s Brilliant Detectives get the credit for it.”
“You are a nice man, Inspector Marriot,” said Tuppence gratefully.
“We think a lot of you two at the Yard,” replied that stolid25 gentleman.
“You’d be surprised. If I may ask you, sir, what’s the meaning of that pieceof string?”
“Nothing,” said Tommy, stuffing it into his pocket. “A bad habit of mine.
As to the cheesecake and the milk—I’m on a diet. Nervous dyspepsia. Busymen are always martyrs26 to it.”
“Ah!” said the detective. “I thought perhaps you’d been reading—well,it’s of no consequence.”
But the Inspector’s eyes twinkled.
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收听单词发音
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1
hitch
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| v.免费搭(车旅行)；系住；急提；n.故障；急拉 | |
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2
pounced
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| v.突然袭击( pounce的过去式和过去分词 )；猛扑；一眼看出；抓住机会（进行抨击） | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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6
hairpin
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| n.簪,束发夹，夹发针 | |
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hairpins
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| n.发夹( hairpin的名词复数 ) | |
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8
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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9
shingled
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| adj.盖木瓦的；贴有墙面板的v.用木瓦盖(shingle的过去式和过去分词形式) | |
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pickup
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| n.拾起，获得 | |
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footpath
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| n.小路，人行道 | |
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transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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14
tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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15
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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16
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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bungalow
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| n.平房，周围有阳台的木造小平房 | |
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brandishes
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| v.挥舞( brandish的第三人称单数 )；炫耀 | |
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20
latch
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| n.门闩，窗闩；弹簧锁 | |
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irreproachable
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| adj.不可指责的，无过失的 | |
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22
alibi
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| n.某人当时不在犯罪现场的申辩或证明；借口 | |
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inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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porcupine
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| n.豪猪， 箭猪 | |
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stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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26
martyrs
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| n.martyr的复数形式；烈士( martyr的名词复数 )；殉道者；殉教者；乞怜者（向人诉苦以博取同情） | |
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