The enquiry upon which I had now stirred myself to enter, could not be
an easy one, but it should have seemed for the present to be narrowed
down to a question about a single man. Perhaps it was from repugnance
against consciously going about to hang a man who had sheltered under
my roof, that I did not even then definitely put to myself the
question of that man’s guilt. By some half-conscious sequence of
thought I was led to begin my search far afield. It started with the
two letters which had come for Peters from Mr. Charles Bryanston, or
rather first with the later letter.
I had some time before written briefly and formally to Mr. Bryanston
to acquaint him with the fact of Peters’ murder, but had, for a while
since, thought no more of him. Now I began to do what one very seldom
does, steadily and methodically think. I mooned up and down with a
pipe in my garden or in the lanes. I sat, with those letters in my
hand, alone before the fire. I sat at my writing-table with paper
before me, and made incoherent jottings with a pencil. I should be
afraid to say how often and how long I did all these seemingly idle
things. Till at last, in the time between tea and dinner, with the
children playing in the room, I arrived at actually spelling the
matter out.
“This time I will not delay my answer.” “This time——” Then at other
times he did delay his answer. That might have some significance when
I turned to the earlier letter. “This time I will not delay my
answer.” It was an answer to a question in a letter just received from
Peters, an answer probably by return of post. Why not delay it this
time as usual? Why, of course, because the question was one which both
to Peters and to Bryanston seemed important, perhaps momentous. Simple
enough so far. “Longhurst did sail in the _Eleanor_, and she did not
go down.” It was clear enough that some one had thought that Longhurst
had sailed in a ship that did go down. Peters had thought otherwise,
and Peters was right. What of that? There is nothing momentous in
that. Stop, though. It is not necessarily that. Some one need not have
thought it—he may have said it to Peters, and Peters may have thought
it was a lie. And what did it matter, and why did some one say it?
Well, of course, Longhurst would be dead if the ship had gone down;
and Longhurst was not really dead, and some one was interested in
saying that he was. Perhaps Longhurst was the next heir to some
property, and search ought to have been made for him; and my mind
wandered over all the stories I had ever read of lost heirs, in fact
or in fiction. Or perhaps—— Who said Longhurst and his ship went down?
“C.” said it, whoever “C.” might be.
Then I took up the earlier letter. I knew from the other letter that
this had been sent late. There was nothing further to be gained from
the words of it, but a flood of suspicion broke upon me as I held it
in my hand. Had “C.” another initial to his surname, a double name?
Did I know this “C.”? Had I not seen this very letter in the hands of
“C.”? Had I not thought it rather odd that he, a man so decidedly “all
there,” had opened and read it before it was given to me? Had I not
rather wondered at the pains he had kindly taken to help me with
several letters before? Did he not laugh rather strangely as he read
it, though I never heard him laugh at anything amusing? Did he not go
away just after the letter came, though he had not been intending to
go so soon? Was it conceivable that he knew that Peters had asked that
question, and thought the first letter (“very uninforming,” as he
called it) was the answer to that question, and an answer which made
him safe? After that one laugh I thought he became suddenly downcast.
Had he really read in that letter that he need not have feared Peters,
and that he had—yes, murdered him for nothing? Had the accident that
Peters had written, perhaps long before, some unimportant question to
Bryanston, and the accident that Bryanston had delayed his answer
betrayed this man into leaving me alone with my letters a week too
soon; and would this trifling mistake lead him to—to the gallows? and
I remembered with a start the grim end which I was preparing. Yes, all
this was conceivable. There is an old maxim that you should beware of
going back upon your first instinctive impressions of liking or
dislike when you happen to have them. There are qualifications to it;
the repulsions that start from ugliness or strangeness or difference
of opinion may not be safe guides. But broadly the maxim is true. It
was true in this instance. No, I too had never liked “C.”
It is strange that I should have received Mr. Bryanston’s answer the
very next morning, a long, full, warm-hearted letter on the death of
the friend to whose letters in life—and what letters Peters wrote!—he
made such scrappy replies. In a P.S. at the end, as if the writer had
hesitated whether to write it, were the words: “It is curious and may
be news to you that Mr. Peters, at the time he was murdered, was
unravelling the mystery of another murder, committed, as he suspected,
many years ago”.
So then, as I had half-guessed, Longhurst was dead. It was not that he
was alive and Cartwright pretended he was dead, he was dead, and
Cartwright had a motive for falsely pretending he was drowned.