Towards the end of November, 1896, I again saw Callaghan. I had some
time before ascertained that he had returned to London, and I daresay
it may appear to the reader strange that I should not immediately upon
his return have sought him out and again compared notes with him. But
(not to mention that I had no reason, so far, to set great store upon
Callaghan’s observations and theories) it must be remembered that I
had received a very grave warning as to his possible character. It is
a serious matter for a father of a family to enter into intimate
relations with a gentleman who, according to an eminent specialist, is
a homicidal lunatic. So I made first a few enquiries from
acquaintances of his in regard to his character and recent
proceedings. For a while I intended to put off seeing him till a time,
which I was now unhappily compelled to foresee, when my wife and
children would be safe out of the country. But in the end my enquiries
and my wife’s absolute conviction satisfied me that the idea of his
lunacy was really, as I had at first supposed, quite unfounded and
foolish.
Anyway, I at last invited Callaghan to stay for a couple of days in
our new home. He accepted, but for one night only. He arrived in the
afternoon full of his Parisian adventures and to a less extent of his
detective researches. With these, or with an adorned version of them,
he entertained me for an hour or so before dinner. It seems that his
sudden departure for Paris was not altogether motiveless. He had, on
his arrival in London, heard by some accident of a gentleman in Paris
who was a correspondent and intimate of Thalberg. He had immediately
conceived the notion of scraping acquaintance with this gentleman and
using him as a means of information about Thalberg, and he was further
drawn towards Paris by a fancy that he would like to study French
methods of criminal investigation, into which, through the good
offices of some friends of his, he thought he could get some insight.
In the latter respect he was gratified. Now it seems that he had
already begun before Peters’ death to cherish the ambition of getting
high employment in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland
Yard. So it came to pass that his studies in the science of criminal
investigation generally, occupied more of his attention from that time
till our present meeting than the particular investigation which had
at first fascinated him. Moreover, before he had been long in Paris he
discovered, to his huge amusement, that he was himself the subject of
suspicion and of close observation, and without regard to how this
might affect his cherished ambition of an appointment at Scotland
Yard, he entered upon, and continued during three whole months, an
elaborate scheme of mystification for the French officials who were
observing him, and, through them, for that very Department in which he
wished to fill a high place. Nevertheless, he had pursued ingenious
enquiries in regard to the (as I still thought him) unfortunate
Thalberg, for which purpose he paid several flying visits to London
and elsewhere. The result of these enquiries he related to me,
mingling it up with the tale of his other adventures in such a manner
that it was hard for me to grasp what its importance might be. I was
able to see that Callaghan had employed quite extraordinary ingenuity
and pains in picking up the facts about Thalberg which he told me, but
that very ingenuity struck me as ludicrously disproportionate to the
importance of the facts which he had found, or was ever likely to find
along this road. Thalberg was a solicitor in the City who had been in
a small way of business, till the firm of which he was now the sole
surviving partner began, a good many years before, to be employed by
Vane-Cartwright. Vane-Cartwright got this firm appointed solicitors to
a company which was formed to take over his original venture in the
East, and he still continued to employ Thalberg from time to time upon
private business of his own. Thalberg’s family were interested in
Eastern commerce, and he had correspondence with many persons in
various parts of the far East. Years before he had transacted for
Vane-Cartwright a good deal of correspondence of a nature so secret as
to be unknown to his clerks, and in the course of this very year he
had again returned to an employment of the like kind for some one or
other. It appeared that it might have been upon an errand connected
with this secret correspondence that he had come down to Long Wilton.
Callaghan was much excited about a discovery which he had made that
Thalberg had in January of this year been in correspondence with a
personage in Madrid, telegraphing to him in a cipher employed by the
Spanish Consulate in London, of which he was able to make use through
an official in that Consulate, who had since been discharged for
misconduct and was now in Paris. There was more of this nature as to
the mysterious proceedings of Thalberg, but I cannot well remember how
much Callaghan told me on that occasion, and I must observe that I
have set down what he then told me as I understand it now. I was not
able to understand it completely at the time owing to the fact that
throughout his talk that afternoon Callaghan did not once allude to
Vane-Cartwright by his name.
I wondered then, and I wonder now, how far up to this time Callaghan
suspected Vane-Cartwright. I believe that he did not like to avow to
himself the full suspicion that he felt, and that this was why he
hesitated to name him to me. I am sure that in his heart he disliked
him very much; he had always seemed to do so. But I think that, to my
Irish friend, Vane-Cartwright appeared the embodiment of those
characteristics of the Englishman which an Irishman knows he dislikes,
but thinks that he ought to respect. So I should guess that, as long
as he could, he had dutifully forced himself to believe in
Vane-Cartwright as a very estimable person full of English rectitude.
In any case, for all the pains he took to follow up his suspicion that
Thalberg was somehow connected with the crime, I know that he had not
fully seen the conclusion to which this was leading him.
When I went up to dress for dinner, I reminded my wife of certain
passages in Peters’ manuscripts on psychology which we had read
together with very great interest. Among these was a curious paper on
“Imagination, Truth-telling and Lying,” in which, beginning with the
paradox that the correct perception of fact depended far more on moral
qualities, and truthfulness in ordinary speech far more on
intellectual qualities than was generally supposed, he proceeded to
describe with great wealth of illustration some of the types under
which races and individual men fall, in respect of their power of
getting hold of truth and of giving it out. Scattered through these
pages were a number of remarks which came to my mind in this talk with
Callaghan. With most of them I will not trouble the reader, but in one
passage in particular Peters had pointed out the mistake of thinking
that a man who commits glaring inaccuracies is necessarily on that
account not worth listening to. Ludicrous inaccuracies, even glaring
falsehoods as they may seem, spring often, he insisted, from the
peculiar abundance and vivacity of the impressions which a man
receives from what passes before his eyes. A person with this gift may
frequently in his memory put something that he has truly noticed into
a wrong connexion, or combine two scattered fragments of observation,
true in themselves, into a single totally erroneous recollection of
fact. But a man who gets things wrong in this way, is, said Peters,
often more full of information than a more sober observer, because he
has noticed far more, and after all, a very large part of what he has
noticed is sure to be accurately retained. In another passage, which I
am afraid I may mar by summarising it, Peters described how, with all
men in some degree, but with some men in a wonderful degree,
intellectual faculties are the servants of emotional interests, so
that not only the power of inference, but even memory itself will do
work at the bidding of pain or pleasure, liking or dislike, which it
will not do upon a merely rational demand. Reminding my wife of this,
I said I wished I knew by what test I could tell the true from the
false in Callaghan’s reminiscences, and by what spell I could turn the
flow of those reminiscences into the channel in which they would be
useful.
As we went down to dinner she whispered to me that, if Callaghan was
the sort of man that I seemed to think, she would try to turn his
thoughts in the useful direction; only I must let him alone for a
little while. In the course of dinner, she told our guest what she had
told me long before about Vane-Cartwright’s engagement, and how it had
been broken off, and just what the young lady had said to her. Only of
course she did not go on to tell him the rash inference which she had
drawn as to Vane-Cartwright’s guilt. I could see that Callaghan heard
her with strange emotion, but my wife speedily turned the conversation
on to more commonplace topics, upon which, during the remainder of
dinner, he responded to her brightly enough, but by no means with his
usual appearance of interest.
After dinner Callaghan and I retired to my study to smoke pipes. He
sat for a long while silent, and I thought that he had gone to sleep,
or should have thought so but for the contraction of his brows.
Suddenly he sat upright in his chair. “Faith!” he exclaimed with great
energy, and with the air of a man to whom a really thrilling thought
has just occurred, “I know what became of those eyeglasses of mine.”
“What eyeglasses?” I asked, disappointed and annoyed at the triviality
of what came forth as the issue of his cogitation. “Why,” he said, “I
once took for a short time to wearing eyeglasses. I was looking at the
stars with a man one night and I found I could not count seven
Pleiades. So I went to an oculist who said he would pass me for the
Navy, but as I was paying him a fee I might take a prescription for a
pair of double eyeglasses which I never could keep steady on my nose.”
“Well?” I said sulkily. “Well,” he answered, “it is only that I lost
them while I was staying with Peters. Of course they went into that
big despatch-box, which Vane-Cartwright always kept in his room. My
dear Mr. Driver,” he said in a more serious tone, “do you really
suppose that Vane-Cartwright had not possessed himself of something
handy for throwing suspicion upon you, if you had turned out to be the
convenient man? I might easily have been the convenient man, and in
that case, the morning after the murder, my eyeglasses would have been
found smashed and lying on the floor of Peters’ bedroom, as if he had
knocked them off in struggling with me. Only (fortunately for you and
me, Mr. Driver), Trethewy was chosen as the suitable man, and
accidents that we know of prevented the plot against Trethewy working
as well as perhaps the plot against you or me might have worked.
Well,” he continued with a smile, “I have a good deal more to tell you
about Mr. Thalberg, but that will keep for a bit, and we shall
understand it better later. I suspect there is something different
that you wanted to ask me about now.”
I asked him for anything that he remembered of that evening when
Vane-Cartwright had first visited Peters at Long Wilton, while
Callaghan was already staying in the house. He recounted to me and to
my wife, whom we called in, the conversation and events of that
evening in great detail. An indescribable change seemed to have come
over him for a time; not only was the matter which he had to relate
weighty, but the man himself gave me an impression of force and
character which I had not previously suspected. I repeat only so much
of his narrative as was of special interest for my purpose. “After a
bit,” said Callaghan, “Peters and Vane-Cartwright got away on to the
subject of their experiences in some Cannibal Islands, or French
possessions, or I do not know where. I was not much interested, and I
dozed a bit, till suddenly I was aroused and saw that there was
something up. I do not know what Vane-Cartwright had said, but
suddenly Peters said, ‘Sailed in what?’ three times as quick and three
times as loud as his usual way of speaking. That was what woke me up.
‘In the’—I don’t remember the name, I did not quite catch it, for
Vane-Cartwright was speaking very quietly, though I could see that his
face was set hard and that his eyes were bright, and I began to think
he did not look such a dull fellow as I thought him at first. Peters
said nothing but ‘Oh,’ and this time very quietly. Then he got up and
strode slowly about the room with his hands clenched. He did not seem
to notice Vane-Cartwright much, and Vane-Cartwright went on talking,
in as indifferent a way as he could, about cyclones and things, the
usual sort of travellers’ talk, only without the lies that I should
have thrown in; but he was watching Peters all the time like a cat.
After a while Peters sat down again and seemed quite composed, and
talked again in quite a friendly way, but it seemed to be an effort.
Then he went and wrote a letter at the other end of the room, two
letters rather; one I noticed was addressed to Bombay, or Beirut, or
somewhere beginning with a B. Both the letters had twopenny-halfpenny
stamps on them. Soon it was bedtime; but Peters was for taking his
letters down to the post that they might go early in the morning, and
Vane-Cartwright was very anxious to take the letters for him, as it
would be very little out of his way to go down to the post. Peters
thanked him in that very polite way which he had with him when he did
feel really obstinate. I was not going with them, for I thought I was
in the way, but, just as he was leaving, Peters turned back and asked
me rather pressingly to come too. I suppose he would have felt lonely
in that man’s company, for certainly he did not want to talk to me. I
do not think he said more than two words to me after we parted from
Vane-Cartwright, who, by the way, kept with us all the way to the post
office, which was not on his way home; but, just as we were getting
back, Peters said to me suddenly, ‘Let me see, did I ask him to stay
with me next time he came here?’ ‘I do not know,’ said I. ‘Well,
good-night,’ said he.”
At this point I broke in upon Callaghan’s story with loud regrets that
Peters had written those letters with the murderer in the room, “For
you know what those letters were about,” I added, remembering that he
did not. “I know,” said he, “but he could not help it; he was an
Englishman. You English always show your hand. Not because you are
frank and outspoken, for you are anything but that, but because you
are so proud. You know,” he went on, “that I have a devout belief in
the English qualities that all we Irish hear so much about; but when I
had an Englishman for my dearest friend, I could not help noticing the
national defects, could I? I could not have acted as Peters did. I
rather hope that when I had got scent of the fellow’s dirty
secret—whatever it was, for I have not a notion about that—I would
have exploded at once and had it out with him. I daresay I should not,
but, if I had not, at least I should have taken the trouble to
dissemble properly.” “If he had done either,” I said, “he would be
alive to-day, and Vane-Cartwright would not be a murderer, or at
least——” “I understand you,” said he.
He continued his story, and related with great detail what was done
and said day by day during Vane-Cartwright’s calamitous sojourn in
Peters’ house when he returned to stay there. He described the
relations of the two men as being exactly the reverse of what they had
been when he had formerly seen them together. Then Peters had been
genial and friendly, Vane-Cartwright stiff and unforthcoming. Now it
was very much the other way. Several times, it appeared, the
conversation had got upon the subject of Peters’ Eastern travels. Each
time the conversation had been led thither by Vane-Cartwright in a way
of which I was afterwards to have experience. Peters was in a manner
compelled to enter into it and compelled to yield information which
Callaghan at the moment had thought utterly trivial, but which he now
saw clearly Vane-Cartwright was anxious to possess. The information
which was extracted seems to have related to all the places that
Peters had visited in the East, and all the people whom he had ever
met, and Callaghan remembered, or fancied, that several times, while
he was being thus drawn out, Peters showed curious irritation. It
appeared most strikingly from Callaghan’s recital that Vane-Cartwright
had throughout shown the coolest readiness to talk about the scene of
his crime, if he had committed one, and to take Peters’ recollection
back to the old days of his association with Longhurst.
But now I must explain that through all that Callaghan told me, ran
the same strain of odd and fantastic inaccuracy to which I have more
than once alluded. Several times, for example, he said that I was
present at conversations at which I certainly was not present. He
repeated to me remarks of my own, which, if I ever said anything like
them, were made on a totally different occasion from that of which he
spoke. One of those remarks had really been made within three hours of
the time when he repeated it to me, and could not have been made
previously. This is perhaps the best example that I can give of what
caused me a most exasperating sense of disappointment. Disappointment
because, where I could not check him, Callaghan seemed to be supplying
me, in the greatest fulness and in the most credible manner, with just
the information that I desired; but where I could check him, though he
was now and then curiously accurate in his recollection of
circumstances well known to me, which I had not thought he could have
observed, it still more often happened that he was under some
grotesque mistake.
Worst of all, he gave me new details about the fatal night, which, if
they could have been trusted, would have had greater weight than any
other piece of evidence that had yet come to me, but they were just of
the sort in which he was likely to be mistaken. Speaking of the moment
at which he was called out from his room by the disturbance in the
street, he declared that knocking immediately at Vane-Cartwright’s
door he heard, as Vane-Cartwright answered from the far corner of the
room, a click which he was certain came from the lock of the
despatch-box which he had mentioned. He conjectured that among various
articles which were there for a dark purpose, the knife which was the
instrument of Peters’ death lay in that box, and that he had
interrupted Vane-Cartwright in the act of taking it forth. This of
course was mere conjecture, but what followed seemed at first evidence
enough to have hanged the criminal. He had opened Vane-Cartwright’s
door, and he now described to me almost every object that was in the
room as he entered it. Amongst others there lay upon the chest of
drawers George Borrow’s _Bible in Spain_ in a binding which he
described. Curiously enough he did not know the significance of this;
he had, as he told me, been so much overwhelmed with grief when the
murder was discovered that he had hardly begun to see or think
distinctly till after we had all left the room of death; but as the
reader may remember, this was the very book (and it was bound in the
same way) which was found in that room dropped from the dead man’s
hand with torn and crumpled leaves. Who but Vane-Cartwright could have
brought it there?
It was one of Peters’ oddities, well known to me (and perhaps
Vane-Cartwright had learnt it long ago at Saigon), that he would have
welcomed at any strange hour the incursion of a friend to talk about
anything. No doubt, I thought, Vane-Cartwright entered his room on the
pretext of showing him a passage which bore on something he had said.
Probably between the leaves of the _Bible in Spain_ he carried
something that looked like a paper-knife. Anyway here was proof that
after the hour at which any of us saw Peters alive, after
Vane-Cartwright, by his own account, had last seen him, that man
entered Peters’ room. “But,” I exclaimed, as all this ran through my
mind, “you spoke just now of the day when I was riding at Long Wilton,
whereas I was on a horse to-day for the first time for four years. Ten
times at least I have known you put things out of time or out of place
just like that, by way of giving colour to your story. How do I know
that you have not done so now, that you did not really see that book
in Vane-Cartwright’s room any one of the other times that you went
there, that it had not been back in Peters’ library and been brought
up again by Peters himself?”
To my surprise Callaghan answered most humbly. He was quite aware, he
said, of this evil trick of his mind; he had had it from a boy, and
his parents ought to have flogged it out of him. As to the particular
point on which I challenged him, he could not himself be quite sure.
During the remainder of his stay with me I gave him an outline of what
I had so far discovered, and we compared notes upon it, but he was not
long with me, as he had an important engagement next evening, and our
conference was not so full as it should have been. So it easily
happened that neither of us gained the enlightenment which he might
have gained if our talk had been fuller. But I must confess that I
fell into the fault which he called English. My disclosure was more
incomplete than it need have been; I had not quite got over my
instinctive wish to keep him at arm’s length, and my pride rebelled a
little at the discovery that this erratic Irishman was not a man whom
I could afford to patronise.