The Red House MysteryMilne, A. A. (Alan Alexander)
General
The Red House Mystery
Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander)
Detective and mystery stories; England -- Fiction
“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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