“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 week-end 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.”