Antony Gillingham Quotes

At about the time when the Major (for whatever reasons) was fluffing his tee-shot at the sixteenth, and Mark and his cousin were at their business at the Red House, an attractive gentleman of the name of Antony Gillingham was handing up his ticket at Woodham station and asking the way to the village. Having received directions, he left his bag with the station-master and walked off leisurely. He is an important person to this story, so that it is as well we should know something about him before letting him loose in it. Let us stop him at the top of the hill on some excuse, and have a good look at him.

Above a clean-cut, clean-shaven face, of the type usually associated with the Navy, he carries a pair of grey eyes which seem to be absorbing every detail of our person.

Beverley and he met again a little later at a restaurant. Both of them were in evening-dress, but they did different things with their napkins, and Antony was the more polite of the two. However, he still liked Bill.

Antony couldn’t help feeling a thrill of excitement as he followed Cayley’s example, and put his face close up to the glass. For the first time he wondered if there really had been a revolver shot in this mysterious room. It had all seemed so absurd and melodramatic from the other side of the door.

“Who is it?” said Antony. “Robert Ablett.” “Oh!” said Antony. “I thought his name was Mark,” he added, more to himself than to the other. “Yes, Mark Ablett lives here. Robert is his brother.” He shuddered, and said, “I was afraid it was Mark.” “Was Mark in the room too?” “Yes,” said Cayley absently. Then, as if resenting suddenly these questions from a stranger, “Who are you?”

But then one always went about imagining that these things didn’t happen—except to other people. It was difficult to believe in them just at first, when they happened to yourself.

“Did you know him well?” said Antony quietly. He meant, “Were you fond of him?”

“Not that water is any use to a dead body,” he said to himself, “but the feeling that you’re doing something, when there’s obviously nothing to be done, is a great comfort.”

“I will stay if I can be of any help.” “Please do. You see, there are women. It will be rather painful. If you would—” He hesitated, and gave Antony a timid little smile, pathetic in so big and self-reliant a man. “Just your moral support, you know. It would be something.”

“You must make allowances for me, Mr. Gillingham. You see, I’ve known Mark for a very long time. But, of course, you’re quite right, and I’m merely being stupid.”

The window was open, and he looked out at the well-kept grass beneath him, and the peaceful stretch of park beyond; and he felt very sorry for the owner of it all, who was now mixed up in so grim a business.

Antony laughed. “Oh, well, I notice things, you know. I was born noticing.”

“He says that no doubt you would prefer, the house-party having been broken up in this tragic way, to leave as soon as possible.” He gave a pleasant apologetic little smile and went on, “I am putting it badly, but what he means, of course, is that you must consult your own feelings in the matter entirely, and please make your own arrangements about ordering the car for whatever train you wish to catch. There is one this evening, I understand, which you could go by if you wished it.”

“Oh! Well, come along, and let’s get the facts sorted out a bit. I like to know where I am, Mr. Gillingham.”

“D’you know where you are in this case?” “I know where I’m going to be.” “Where’s that?” “Put through it by Inspector Birch,” said Antony with a smile.

“I should hardly call it ‘reasonable’ to lose your head,” said Antony, getting up from his chair and coming towards them.

Robert is a stranger; Mark is an intimate friend. Robert has written a letter that morning, the letter of a man in a dangerous temper. Robert is the tough customer; Mark the highly civilized gentleman. If there has been a quarrel, it is Robert who has shot Mark.

“That’s the question,” said Antony to himself, as he filled his pipe, “and bless me if I know the answer.

“I was wanting a new profession,” he thought, “and now I’ve found it. Antony Gillingham, our own private sleuthhound. I shall begin to-day.”

He knew nothing about Mark; he knew nothing about Robert. He had seen the dead man before he was told who the dead man was. He knew that a tragedy had happened before he knew that anybody was missing. Those first impressions, which are so vitally important, had been received solely on the merits of the case; they were founded on the evidence of his senses, not on the evidence of his emotions or of other people’s senses.

It would have interested Antony to know that, just at the time when he was feeling rather superior to the prejudiced inspector, the Inspector himself was letting his mind dwell lovingly upon the possibilities in connection with Mr. Gillingham. Was it only a coincidence that Mr. Gillingham had turned up just when he did? And Mr. Beverley’s curious answers when asked for some account of his friend. An assistant in a tobacconist’s, a waiter! An odd man, Mr. Gillingham, evidently. It might be as well to keep an eye on him.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. But anyhow, Bill, I want you more than she does just now. So try and put up with me.” “I say, do you really?” said Bill, rather flattered. He had a great admiration for Antony, and was very proud to be liked by him.

Bill looked at him eagerly. “I say, are you being the complete detective?” “Well, I wanted a new profession,” smiled the other. “What fun! I mean,” he corrected himself apologetically, “one oughtn’t to say that, when there’s a man dead in the house, and one’s host—” He broke off a little uncertainly, and then rounded off his period by saying again, “By Jove, what a rum show it is. Good Lord!”

“What’s the good of talking about it at all, if it comes to that?” “What, indeed?” said Antony, and to Bill’s great disappointment they talked of books and politics during the meal.

“Are you prepared to be the complete Watson?” he asked. “Watson?” “Do-you-follow-me-Watson; that one. Are you prepared to have quite obvious things explained to you, to ask futile questions, to give me chances of scoring off you, to make brilliant discoveries of your own two or three days after I have made them myself—all that kind of thing? Because it all helps.” “My dear Tony,” said Bill delightedly, “need you ask?”

Properly speaking, I oughtn’t to explain till the last chapter, but I always think that that’s so unfair.

“My dear Watson,” he said, “you aren’t supposed to be as clever as this.”

“I love you on Mark,” he said. “You’re priceless.”

“One should modulate the voice, my dear William, while breathing gently from the hips. Thus one avoids those chest-notes which have betrayed many a secret..”

“Are you often like this at breakfast?” “Almost invariably. Said he with his mouth full. Exit W. Beverley, L.” “It’s a touch of the sun, I suppose,” said Bill, shaking his head sadly. “It’s the sun and the moon and the stars, all acting together on an empty stomach.”

Cayley says that you will amuse me, but so far you have not made me laugh once. You must try and be more amusing when you have finished your breakfast.

Bill continued his breakfast with a slightly bewildered air. He did not know that Cayley was smoking a cigarette outside the windows behind him; not listening, perhaps; possibly not even overhearing; but within sight of Antony, who was not going to take any risks. So he went on with his breakfast, reflecting that Antony was a rum fellow, and wondering if he had dreamed only of the amazing things which had happened the day before.

“It’s a funny business,” thought Antony. “The one obvious solution is so easy and yet so wrong. And I’ve got a hundred things in my head, and I can’t fit them together.

“I say, what fun! You do want me, don’t you?” “Of course I do. Only, Bill don’t talk about things inside the house, unless I begin. There’s a good Watson.”

The library was worth going into, passages or no passages. Antony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

“There’s one thing, which we have got to realize at once,” said Antony, “and that is that if we don’t find it easily, we shan’t find it at all.” “You mean that we shan’t have time?” “Neither time nor opportunity. Which is rather a consoling thought to a lazy person like me.”

“Shaw, Wilde, Robertson—I like reading plays, Bill. There are not many people who do, but those who do are usually very keen.”

“It’s what I was saying just now—a secret is a secret until you have discovered it, and as soon as you have discovered it, you wonder why everybody else isn’t discovering it, and how it could ever have been a secret at all.”

Yet, though he had hesitated to define his position that morning in regard to Mark, he did not hesitate to place himself on the side of the Law against Cayley. Mark, after all, had done him no harm, but Cayley had committed an unforgivable offence. Cayley had listened secretly to a private conversation between himself and Tony. Let Cayley hang, if the Law demanded it.

“I hope the landlord at ‘The George’ gave me a good character?” The Inspector looked at him quickly. “Now how on earth do you know anything about that?” Antony bowed to him gravely. “Because I guessed that you were a very efficient member of the Force.”

“By Jove! You mean that as soon as the pond has been dragged, Cayley will hide something there?” “Yes, I’m afraid so.” “But why afraid?” “Because I think that it must be something very important, something which couldn’t easily be hidden anywhere else.”

“What’s the safest place in which to hide anything very important?” “Somewhere where nobody will look.” “There’s a better place than that.” “What?” “Somewhere where everybody has already looked.”

“What did he want to shut the door for?” said Bill. “That’s what I don’t understand. You couldn’t have seen him, anyhow.” “No. So it follows that I might have heard him. He was going to do something which he didn’t want me to hear.” “By Jove, that’s it!” said Bill eagerly. “Yes; but what?” Bill frowned hopefully to himself, but no inspiration came.

“Oh, idiot, idiot!” Antony cried. “Oh, most super-excellent of Watsons! Oh, you lamb, you blessing! Oh, Gillingham, you incomparable ass!”

“The window, the window!” cried Antony, pointing to it. Bill turned back to the window, expecting it to say something. As it said nothing, he looked at Antony again.

“He came in here in order to open the window. He shut the door so that I shouldn’t hear him open the window. He opened the window. I came in here and found the window open. I said, ‘This window is open. My amazing powers of analysis tell me that the murderer must have escaped by this window.‘”

He understood now. It explained so much that had been puzzling him.

What is he to do? He does the natural thing, the thing which Mark would always do in such circumstances. He consults Cayley, the invaluable, inevitable Cayley.”

“Good Cayley. Faithful Cayley! Mark’s courage comes back. Cayley will explain all right. Cayley will tell the servants that it was an accident. He will ring up the police. Nobody will suspect Cayley—Cayley has no quarrel with Robert.”

“You’re being dashed mysterious, old boy.”

“Perhaps I’m being an ass, just a melodramatic ass. Well, I hope I am.”

He saw so much, and yet somehow it was all out of focus. It was like looking at an opal, and discovering with every movement of it some new colour, some new gleam of light reflected, and yet never really seeing the opal as a whole.

He was facing the secret door; if it opened he would see it. At any moment now it might open. Bill dropped into a chair and thought. Antony must be warned. Obviously. But how? How did one signal to anybody? By code. Morse code. Did Antony know it? Did Bill know it himself, if it came to that? He had picked up a bit in the Army—not enough to send a message, of course. But a message was impossible, anyhow; Cayley would hear him tapping it out. It wouldn’t do to send more than a single letter. What letters did he know? And what letter would convey anything to Antony?.... He pulled at his pipe, his eyes wandering from Cayley at his desk to the Reverend Theodore Ussher in his shelf. What letter? C for Cayley.

“There is nothing that you and I could not accomplish together, if we gave our minds to it.” “Silly old ass.” “That’s what you always say when I’m being serious. Well, anyway, thanks awfully. You really saved us this time.”

Antony was silent, and since it is difficult to keep up a conversation with a silent man for any length of time, Bill had dropped into silence too. Or rather, he hummed to himself, hit at thistles in the grass with his stick and made uncomfortable noises with his pipe.

“Well, I have got jolly good eyes.”

“We must be devilishly inconvenient for him, hanging about the house. Any moment he can get, when we’re definitely somewhere else, must be very useful to him.”

The girl who stood by the little white gate of Jallands was something more than “not bad-looking,” but in this matter Bill was keeping his superlatives for another. In Bill’s eyes she must be judged, and condemned, by all that distinguished her from Betty Calladine. To Antony, unhampered by these standards of comparison, she seemed, quite simply, beautiful.

Mrs. Norbury recognized at once that Antony was likely to be the more sympathetic listener; and when tea was over, and Bill and Angela had been dispatched to the garden with the promptness and efficiency of the expert, dear Mr. Gillingham found himself on the sofa beside her, listening to many things which were of even greater interest to him than she could possibly have hoped.

“Of course, yes, I was forgetting. But, believe me, Mr. Gillingham, you can trust a woman’s intuition in these matters.”

Antony was thinking of Miss Norbury’s feelings as a daughter, and wondering if she guessed that her affairs were now being discussed with a stranger. Yet what could he do? What, indeed, did he want to do except listen, in the hope of learning?

“I never liked him, never!” “Never liked——?” said Antony, bewildered. “That cousin of his—Mr. Cayley.”

“I never liked him,” said Mrs. Norbury firmly. “Never.” However, thought Antony to himself, that didn’t quite prove that Cayley was a murderer.

“You see,” he said to Bill, as they walked back, “we know that Cayley is perjuring himself and risking himself over this business, and that must be for one of two reasons. Either to save Mark or to endanger him. That is to say, he is either whole-heartedly for him or whole-heartedly against him. Well, now we know that he is against him, definitely against him.”

“But, I say, you know,” protested Bill, “one doesn’t necessarily try to ruin one’s rival in love.” “Doesn’t one?” said Antony, turning to him with a smile.

What was it which Cayley was going to hide in that pond that night? Antony thought that he knew now. It was Mark’s body.

Can’t arrange a suicide. Too difficult.

“Yes, but you were so dashed mysterious about that. I asked you what the point of it was, and you wouldn’t say anything.”

“I suppose you meant that Cayley deliberately betrayed Mark, and tried to make him look like a murderer?”

“I wanted to warn you that we should probably find Mark in the passage, alive or dead.”

“Now I think that his dead body is there.”

“Well, that’s what I shrink from, Bill. It’s so horribly cold-blooded. Cayley may be capable of it, but I hate to think of it.”

My theory is that he quarrelled violently with Mark over the girl, and killed him in sudden passion. Anything that happened after that would be self-defense.

Anything that happened after that would be self-defense. I don’t mean that I excuse it, but that I understand it.

“You may be right, but it’s all guess-work, you know.” Antony laughed. “Good Lord, of course it is,” he said. “And to-night we shall know if it’s a good guess or a bad one.”

“Of course,” he said at last, “we ought to inform the police, so that they can come here and watch the pond to-night.” “Of course,” grinned Bill. “But I think that perhaps it is a little early to put our theories before them.” “I think perhaps it is,” said Bill solemnly. Antony looked up at him with a sudden smile. “Bill, you old bounder.” “Well, dash it, it’s our show. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get our little bit of fun out of it.” “Neither do I. All right, then, we’ll do without the police to-night.” “We shall miss them,” said Bill sadly, “but ‘tis better so.”

“Let’s look at it from Cayley’s point of view,” said Antony. “He may not know that we’re on his track, but he can’t help being suspicious of us.

He’s bound to be suspicious of everybody in the house, and more particularly of us, because we’re presumably more intelligent than the others.

“Well, it’s rather useful, that’s all.” “Said Sherlock Holmes enigmatically,” added Bill. “A moment later, his friend Watson had hurled him into the pond.”

“I love being Sherlocky,” he said. “It’s very unfair of you not to play up to me.”

“Why is that fence useful, my dear Holmes?” said Bill obediently. “Because you can take a bearing on it. You see—” “Yes, you needn’t stop to explain to me what a bearing is.”

“And there, I almost forgot to remark, will the taller eagle, Beverley by name, do his famous diving act. As performed nightly at the Hippodrome.” Bill looked at him uneasily. “I say, really? It’s beastly dirty water, you know.”

Cayley seemed very fond of them that night. After dinner was over, he suggested a stroll outside. They walked up and down the gravel in front of the house, saying very little to each other, until Bill could stand it no longer. For the last twenty turns he had been slowing down hopefully each time they came to the door, but the hint had always been lost on his companions, and each time another turn had been taken.

Cayley’s business would make no noise, give no sign, to attract the most wakeful member of the household, so long as the household was really inside the house. But if he wished to reassure himself about his guests, he would have to wait until they were far enough on their way to sleep not to be disturbed by him as he came up to reassure himself. So it amounted to the same thing, really. He would wait until they were asleep.

Good heavens, what fools they had been!

The pond was waiting for them, more solemn in the moonlight. The trees which crowned the sloping bank on the far side of it were mysteriously silent. It seemed that they had the world very much to themselves.

For a long time, as it seemed to the watchers, he stood there, very big, very silent, in the moonlight. At last he seemed satisfied. Whatever his secret was, he had hidden it; and so with a gentle sigh, as unmistakable to Antony as if he had heard it, Cayley turned away and vanished again as quietly as he had come.

“You’re quite sure that you wouldn’t like to do the diving yourself?” “Quite, thanks.”

“What’s it like?” said Antony. “Cold. Well, here’s luck to it.”

“I feel that if I threw you a sardine,” said Antony, with a smile, “you’d catch it in your mouth quite prettily.” “It’s awfully easy to be funny from where you are. How much longer have I got to go on doing this?” Antony looked at his watch. “About three hours. We must get back before daylight. But be quicker if you can, because it’s rather cold for me sitting here.” Bill flicked a handful of water at him and disappeared again.

“I’m a bit lost for the moment, Bill, and that’s the fact.”

“I had many bright thoughts in my bath this morning,” began Antony. “The brightest one of all was that we were being damn fools, and working at this thing from the wrong end altogether.”

“Of course it’s very hampering being a detective, when you don’t know anything about detecting, and when nobody knows that you’re doing detection, and you can’t have people up to cross-examine them, and you have neither the energy nor the means to make proper inquiries; and, in short, when you’re doing the whole thing in a thoroughly amateur, haphazard way.”

He gave his evidence carefully, unemotionally—the lies with the same slow deliberation as the truth. Antony watched him intently, wondering what it was about him which had this odd sort of attractiveness. For Antony, who knew that he was lying, and lying (as he believed) not for Mark’s sake but his own, yet could not help sharing some of that general sympathy with him.

Cayley went back heavily to his seat. “Damn it,” said Antony to himself, “why do I like the fellow?”

It was nearly eight o’clock when William Beverley, the famous sleuth-hound, arrived, tired and dusty, at ‘The George,’ to find Antony, cool and clean, standing bare-headed at the door, waiting for him.

“Have some more beer,” said Antony with a smile. And Bill had to be content with that.

We might have been friends in another world—you and I, and I and she.

Don’t let Bill think too badly of me. He is a good fellow; look after him. He will be surprised. The young are always surprised. And thank you for letting me end my own way. I expect you did sympathize a little, you know.

“I couldn’t help liking Cayley in a kind of way, you know.”

“He’s a clever devil. If you hadn’t turned up just when you did, he would never have been found out.”

“I wonder. It was ingenious, but it’s often the ingenious thing which gets found out.

“Yes. Well, if any of ‘em should happen to be murdered, you might send for me. I’m just getting into the swing of it.”

I mean he may have been so full of his appearance as Robert that he had almost got to believe in Robert, and had to tell everybody.

He generally gets discovered in the end; a professional criminal; perhaps not—but an amateur like Mark!

“It was decent of you to give him a chance. I’m glad you did.”