With some doubt as to whether it was what I ought to do, but with no
doubt that it was what I wanted to do, I sought out Callaghan next
morning for a final talk with him before he left; for he was at last
to tear himself away from the scene which he haunted. I tried on him,
I do not know why, the effects of Edith’s disclosure without telling
him what I now knew about the tracks. I could see that he accepted the
truth of the girl’s statement, and had grasped, much more quickly than
I had, what it imported. It was therefore wearisome to me, and, in my
then state of mind, most jarring, that for some time he persisted in
playing with the idea that Trethewy might still be guilty. He
supported it, as he went on, with more and more far-fetched arguments,
so that my patience was nearly at an end, when, to my amazement, I
found my friend off at full speed again upon a fresh track, that of
Thalberg. I listened, and this time seriously, to several things which
he told me about Thalberg, which were new to me and threw an
unpleasant light upon him. Then I interposed. Thalberg had left the
house with me, and it had been made all but certain that he went
straight to his hotel and never left it until many hours after the
murder had been discovered. In any case it was not he who had made
those tracks, for he had certainly kept in his hotel from early
morning on the 29th till he left. And I then told Callaghan my reason
for believing that those tracks were made in the middle of the day on
the 29th. “My dear friend,” he exclaimed, this time with all the
appearance of earnestness, “I no more really believe than you do that
Thalberg actually did the deed. He is not man enough. But I have a
method, I have a method. I am used to these things. I am off to Town
now; I shall be there some time; you know my address. I mean,” he
added grandiloquently, “to work through all the outside circumstances
and possibilities of the case, and narrow down gradually to the real
heart of the problem; it is my method.”
Well, there may have been some method in his madness, for there was
certainly some madness in his method. I took leave of him (after he
had called, that afternoon, to renew acquaintance with my wife) little
foreseeing what his two next steps would be. He stopped on his way to
London at the county town, where he went to the county police office
to communicate some information or theory about Thalberg. He went on
to London, as he had said he would, but, instead of remaining there as
he had said, he suddenly departed next day for the Continent, leaving
no address behind.
We have now arrived at the first week in March, the several events (if
I may include under the name of events the slow emergence of certain
thoughts in my own mind) which prepared the way for the eventual
solution of our mystery, occurred at intervals, and in an order of
which my memory is not quite distinct, during that and the remaining
nine months of the year.
The resolution at which I had arrived, not to occupy my mind with
suspicions, or to regard the detection of crime as part of my
business, was not a tenable resolution, and it was entirely dissipated
by my wife in a talk which we had on the first evening after her
arrival. I was aware that she would not be able to share with me in
the determination not to harbour suspicions of any particular person,
but I had thought she would be averse to my taking positive steps
towards the detection of the crime. She, however, was indignant at the
idea that I could let things be. “Several innocent men will be under a
cloud all their lives,” she said, “unless the guilty man is found.
There is Trethewy, I suppose they will let him out some day; but who
is going to employ him? Not that uncle of his; and we cannot. Who do
you suppose is going to see this through if you do not?” She was
powerfully seconded in this by a neighbour of ours, now an old man,
who had had much experience as a justice. “Mr. Driver,” he said, “you
may think this is the business of the police, but remember who the
police are. They do their ordinary work excellently, but their
ordinary work is to deal with ordinary crime. This was not an ordinary
crime, and it was done by no ordinary man. If it is ever discovered,
it will be by a man whose education gives him a wider horizon than
that of professional dealers with criminals.”
I do not know how far the reader may have been inclined to suspect
Callaghan (that depends, I suppose, on whether the reader has been
able to form any idea of his character, and I myself had not, so far,
formed any coherent idea of his character; there seemed little
coherence in it), but the police certainly had begun to suspect him.
On a superficial view of the matter there was every reason to do so.
Short of bolting on the night of the murder, before it was discovered,
he had done all that, theoretically, a guilty man should have done. He
had lost no time whatever in attempting to put suspicion on one
innocent man. He had striven to intermeddle officiously in the
investigations conducted by the police. There was more than one
apparent lie in the information he had given. He had haunted the scene
of the crime as though it fascinated him. When the first innocent man
was cleared, he had at once suggested another man, who was almost
certainly innocent also, and he had then, after giving false accounts
of his intentions, quitted the country without leaving his address.
Then he was certainly in the house when the crime was committed. His
movements on the following day were nearly accounted for, but not so
fully that he could not have made those false tracks. After all it was
a circumstance of deep suspicion that he had been so quick to
recognise the peculiar print of Trethewy’s boot.
Alas, even to the test _cui bono_, “that stock question of Cassius,
‘whom did it profit?’” Callaghan responded ill. I knew, and somewhat
later in reply to an enquiry by the police, it was my duty to say,
that Callaghan was in a certain sense a gainer by Peters’ death. He
had been a most imprudent investor (not, I believe, a speculator), and
had in his embarrassment borrowed £2,000 from Peters. Peters, while
living, would not have been at all hard on him if he had been honestly
unable to pay, but was just the man to have made Callaghan’s life a
burden to him if he thought he was not doing his best to keep above
water. Peters’ will cancelled the debt, and it was not impossible that
Callaghan knew it. But this last point illustrates the real weakness
of the argument against him. Nobody could know Callaghan a little and
think that either this interest in the will or any other point in this
hypothetical story of his crime, however much it might be like human
nature, was in the least like him.
Here, for want of a good description of him, are a few traits of his
sojourn in my parish. He was, it is true, with difficulty dragged out
of a furious brawl with a gentleman from the North of Ireland who, he
said, had blasphemed against the Pope. The man had not so blasphemed,
and Callaghan himself was not a Roman Catholic. On the other hand, he
had habitually since his arrival lain in wait for the school children
to give them goodies and so forth. He assaulted and thrashed two most
formidable ruffians who were maltreating a horse, and then plastered
their really horrible bruises with so much blarney that they forgave,
not merely him, but the horse. He had brought for Peters, with
infinite pride, a contraband cargo of his native potheen, a terrible
fluid; and after Peters’ death he would sit up alone in that desolate
house, drinking, not the potheen, which, in intended charity, he
suggested that I should bestow on the poor in the workhouse, but Mrs.
Travers’ barley water, and writing a rather good and entirely bright
and innocent fairy story.
This is emphatically not evidence, but it made me sure of Callaghan’s
innocence. Looking at what I suppose was evidence, I had wondered
whether I was not soft in this, and I brought the matter to the test
of my wife’s judgment. I knew that, at least at her earlier meetings
with Callaghan, she had disliked him, and, out of the facts which she
knew already, I made what I flattered myself was a very telling case
against him. It did not disconcert me that the lady, who, when told of
his flight, had trusted he would remain out of England till she went
abroad, said without much interest, “What stuff,” and then suddenly
kindling, exclaimed, “What, Robert, are you turning against that poor
man?” When I asked for the reasons why she scouted the idea of his
guilt, she seemed to consider the request quite frivolous; but at last
I extracted from her a sentence which expressed what I think was at
the root of my own thought. “Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent
enough to commit a murder and cunning enough to conceal anything, but
I cannot imagine his violence and his cunning ever working together.”
Of course we both thought of him as sane, though he was just one of
those people to whose doings one constantly applies the epithet “mad”.