By the time that my wife, who had been again obliged to be in London
while I was spelling out this story, had returned, I had long come to
the conclusion that my theory had enough in it to be worth submitting
to her criticism. But she forestalled me with news of her own, and
news which concerned Vane-Cartwright. The young lady, Miss Denison,
whom he was to have married had suddenly broken off the engagement
within two days of his joining her upon the Riviera. The girl could
give no good reason for her conduct, and her own people loudly
condemned it; they had been against the engagement, for the difference
of age was too great; they were still more against the flighty breach
of it; but she was obdurate. She and her people returned home for
Easter, and my wife, who had already known her a little, now met her
several times at the house of a common friend in London. The foolish
or unhappy young lady had given my wife her confidence. Far from
having any suspicion about the murder, she had never even heard, when
she made her decision, that there had been a murder at all; for she
and her mother did not read news of that order, and Vane-Cartwright,
though he had said that he had been through a dreadful experience, of
which he was anxious to tell her, had not yet said what it was. There
had evidently been a quite unaccountable quarrel in which the
high-tempered girl had, in all things external, begun, continued and
ended in the wrong; and she did not now defend herself. Somehow, she
said, he was changed. No, not in his manner to her; she had not
doubted his attachment to her. Only she had thought she had loved him
before, and she knew now that she did not. Something, which she had
seen in him before but not disliked, now jarred upon her feelings in a
new way. She had been very, very foolish, very, very wrong; she could
explain nothing; she was very unhappy, very angry with herself; but
this she knew, and this alone she knew, that it would be wrong for her
to become William Vane-Cartwright’s wife.
So much my wife told me. Then, with that precipitancy in travelling to
remote conclusions which sometimes seems so perilous in able women,
she said, as quietly as if it were the most obvious comment, “Robert,
it was Vane-Cartwright that did the murder”. Now she had never even
spoken to him.
Accordingly, she received my theory of the murder almost with
enthusiasm. None the less, she immediately put her finger upon the
weakest part of it. “I wonder, all the same,” she exclaimed, “why he
murdered Eustace?” “Why,” I said, “he saw in a moment that Eustace
knew he was lying and suspected him of the murder.” “That would not
have been enough,” she said; “he must be a very cool-headed man from
the way he behaved after the murder, and he would never have run the
risk he ran by a second murder, if there had not been much more than
suspicion of the first.” “Then,” I suggested, “perhaps Eustace already
knew it, and the lie he told only provoked Eustace into showing it.”
“If,” she replied, “Eustace knew it, he would never have had him
within his doors.” “Well,” I said wearily, because I could not
immediately see how to answer, “perhaps he did not murder Eustace.”
Then she turned on me with a woman’s promptitude and a woman’s
injustice: “You can always argue me down,” she said, “but he did
murder Eustace Peters, and you have got to find out all about it and
bring him to justice. I am sure you have the ability to do it. You may
have to wait, but, if you wait patiently and keep your eyes open, all
sorts of things will turn up to help you. I shall be very angry with
you,” she added, in a tone not at all suggestive of anger, “if you do
not do it.”
I felt, like my wife, that it was a matter of waiting for what would
turn up. In the neighbourhood of the murder there was probably very
little to turn up. The police, I felt no doubt, had made all manner of
enquiries; and as for anything that I was likely to pick up, I
supposed I had already heard all, and more than all that any person in
the neighbourhood knew about the matter. I may anticipate a little and
say that in the whole of the four months, which, as it proved, were
all that remained to me as Rector of Long Wilton, no fresh information
was given to me by my neighbours there. It soon occurred to me that
the murder of Longhurst, far away and long ago, might be easier to
trace than the recent, but perhaps more carefully veiled, crime
committed to cover it. Peters, I reasoned, must have been in
possession of proofs of it, and probably, as I searched his voluminous
papers, something would appear to indicate the nature of those proofs.
I began, as in any case I should have done, a careful reading of his
papers. It took up no small part of my spare time, for I found that he
had prepared little enough for immediate publication, but fuller and
more valuable materials for his projected book of psychology than I
should at all have expected from his manner of proceeding. But, of
what now interested me more than my friend’s philosophy, I found
nothing in all this mass of letters and notes and journals; nothing,
that is, which threw direct light on this mystery, for indeed his
psychological notes and my discussions with a friend of his, an Oxford
philosophy tutor, to whom I eventually committed them, did, I think,
influence me not a little in one important part of my enquiry later.
In pushing enquiries further afield there was need for some caution.
An indiscretion might have brought what I was doing unnecessarily soon
to the notice of the suspected man, and the great ability with which I
credited him might suggest some effective scheme for baffling my
search. But of course I wrote early to Mr. Bryanston to ask if he
would tell me to whom he alluded as “C.,” whether Longhurst was the
man whom Peters suspected had been murdered, and whether I inferred
rightly that “C.” was involved in this suspicion.
It was my duty to put all that I knew at the disposal of the police,
and the opportunity for doing so soon presented itself in the visit,
which, as I have said, was paid to me to enquire about Callaghan. My
visitor was an important official, since dead, whom I need not more
clearly indicate. He had been a military man, and he struck me as, in
some ways, admirably qualified for his post. He was, I believe,
excellent in the discipline he maintained among his subordinates and
in all the dispositions he made for meeting the common public
requirements. I am told also that he had wonderful familiarity with
the ways of ordinary law-breakers, but he did not appear to me to have
much elasticity of mind. After answering fully his question about
Callaghan, I thought it right to give my own impression of his
innocence. My visitor answered me with a somewhat mysterious reference
to those who really guided the conduct of the affair. He could not
himself, he said, go behind their views. Then with an evident sympathy
for my concern about Callaghan, he told me in confidence and still
more mysteriously that the opinion of an eminent specialist had been
taken.
I then ventured to press the question of Trethewy’s release, and
learnt that it was being carefully considered, but he could not be set
free immediately. Then I told my visitor of the statement of
Vane-Cartwright when Callaghan first spoke of Trethewy, and how
Trethewy’s confession proved this to have been a deliberate falsehood.
I showed him and gave him copies of the letters of Bryanston to Peters
and to me. I informed him, and at my request he noted, that
Vane-Cartwright had opened the first letter. I stated what I had
myself observed of Vane-Cartwright’s conduct, and indicated frankly
the conclusion which I was disposed to draw. It did not seem to me
that I produced any impression. My visitor listened, if I may say so,
with the air of a man who completely takes in the fact and sees that
it should be put in some pigeon-hole, but is without either
apprehension or wonder as to its real bearing. I gathered, on the
whole, that the official mind was chiefly taken up with the theory
that Callaghan was guilty; but that there was also thought to be an
off-chance that something might yet turn up to repair the seemingly
shattered case against Trethewy. I gathered too, and, I hope, gave due
weight to the fact, that there was some likely way, of which I had
before heard nothing, by which an unknown person might have entered
and escaped from the house that night. One thing more I learnt;
nothing suspicious had been discovered about Thalberg’s movements, but
it appeared, and this seemed to be considered as in his favour, that
he had a great deal to do with Vane-Cartwright.
After my visitor had taken courteous leave of me, it dawned upon me
what was meant by his dark sayings about Callaghan. I had wondered how
the opinions of an eminent specialist in police matters could be so
cogent in a case about which he knew nothing at first hand. Suddenly
it occurred to me that the eminent specialist really was a physician
well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The police then were not
being guided by those superficial and so to speak conventional notes
of guilt, of which I had thought, to the exclusion to all those sides
of character which I had noted. On the contrary they had a view of
their own on which these two conflicting sets of phenomena might be
reconciled, a view which explained why Callaghan was to me so
inexplicable. The man was not sane.
I could not conceal from myself that there was at least something
plausible in this view. There is a sort of marked eccentricity and, as
it were, irresponsibility of conduct of which I had always thought as
something not merely different from incipient madness but very far
removed from it. Yet I had once before been terribly mistaken in
thinking thus about a friend, and I might, I reflected, be mistaken
now. The natural effect upon me was, or should have been, a keener
sense of the unsubstantial nature of the story which I had built up
about Vane-Cartwright. But I believed it still.