My story draws towards its close, and of mystery or of sudden peril it
has little more to tell. Upon one point, the most vital to me, let me
not give the reader a moment’s suspense. My wife did not die of
poison, had not been poisoned, had not been ill, had not sent that
telegram. What had happened was this: on one single occasion she had
not despatched her own message herself; through the misunderstanding
or too prompt courtesy of her host’s butler, the telegram which she
had written had been taken by a messenger, and it had fallen into the
hands of the enemy’s watchful emissary. It had revealed to him the
password which my wife used to me; and in its place there had gone
over the wires a message which would indeed have called me back at any
stage of the pursuit, but which was fated to arrive neither sooner nor
later than the moment when it must destroy Vane-Cartwright’s last hope
of escape.
I say not later, for indeed I have evidence strong enough for my now
suspicious mind that Vane-Cartwright had endeavoured to prepare his
escape in the event of his failure to persuade Callaghan and myself.
An unoccupied flat immediately below Callaghan’s had the day before
been engaged by a nameless man, who paid a quarter’s rent in advance,
and on the day of his interview with us, several strange persons, who
were never seen there again, arrived with every sign of belated haste;
but, whatever accident had delayed them, they arrived a quarter of an
hour after we had left.
And so on the 15th of May, 1897, nearly sixteen months after Peters’
death, his murderer was handed over to the police, with information
which, including as it did the fact of his confession, ensured their
taking him into custody.
Then I, in my turn, became Callaghan’s prisoner. I arrived at Charing
Cross station in good time for the night train, and found my luggage
already there and registered, and my ticket taken. Our tickets taken,
rather, for, protest as I might, I was escorted by Callaghan, indeed
nursed (and I needed it) the whole way to Florence, and to the villa
where my wife was staying. One item remains untold to complete for the
present the account of the debt which I owe him. We had hardly left
Charing Cross when his quick wits arrived at precisely that
explanation of the telegram which in happy fact was true; but all the
way, talkative man though he was, he refrained from vexing my bruised
mind with a hope which, he knew, I should not be able to trust.
When he had learnt at the door that his happy foreboding was true, no
entreaty would induce him to stay and break bread. He returned at once
to England, leaving me to enter alone to that reunion of which I need
say nothing, nor even tell how much two people had hungered for it.
The reader who is curious in such matters might almost reconstruct for
himself (in spite of the newspaper reports which naturally are
misleading) the trial of William Vane-Cartwright. He might pick out
from these pages the facts capable of legal proof, which, once proved
and once marshalled into their places, could leave no reasonable doubt
of the prisoner’s guilt.
But, however late, the trained intelligence of the police had now been
applied to the matter, and the case wore an altered aspect. No
startling discovery had come to pass, only the revelation of the
obvious. Some points had been ascertained which ought to have been
ascertained long before; still more, facts long known had been
digested, as, surely, it should have been somebody’s business to
digest them from the first. In particular, tardy attention had been
paid to the report of the young constable who, as I mentioned,
followed Sergeant Speke into Peters’ room, and who had incurred some
blame because his apparent slowness had allowed some trespassers to
come and make footprints on the lawn (I fancy his notes had been
overlooked when some officer in charge of the case had been superseded
by another). The observed movements, just after the crime, of two or
three people who were about the scene, had been set down in order.
Enquiries, such as only authority could make, had ultimately been made
among Vane-Cartwright’s acquaintance in the East, and though
disappointing in the main, they yielded one fact of importance.
Moreover, the researches which were made by Callaghan shortly after
the murder, and which I had supposed at the time were so futile, now
appeared in another light. Just before that suspicious flight to
Paris, he had given to the police at Exeter some scrappy and
ill-explained notes; and on a subsequent visit, which I have
mentioned, to Scotland Yard, he had handed in a long and
over-elaborate memorandum. These now received justice. I must,
therefore, attempt to state, with dry accuracy, the case which was
actually presented against the accused.
Upon the fact that he had confessed his guilt, though indeed it
reversed the surface improbability that a man in his position was a
criminal, I must lay no separate emphasis. Neither judge nor
prosecuting counsel did so. The defence dealt with it upon a theory
which turned it to positive advantage. I myself can well conceive that
a man, to whom his life was little and his reputation much, might have
taken the risk of a false confession to us in the hope of binding us
to silence.
But, to begin, Peters was without doubt murdered on a certain night,
and during that night Vane-Cartwright was one of a few who could
easily have had access to him.
Now years before one Longhurst had disappeared; a report had got
abroad that he went down in a certain ship which had been lost; the
report was false; but he never reappeared; several witnesses (traced
out by the enquiry of the police in the East) appeared at the trial,
and swore that Vane-Cartwright had often spoken of Longhurst’s sailing
in that ship; yet he must, according to Mr. Bryanston’s evidence, have
known that this was false; and, according to the same evidence, he had
been in Longhurst’s company after the time when the rest of
Longhurst’s neighbours last saw him. From this (though the other
proved facts of their connexion amounted to little more than they were
reputed partners) it followed that Vane-Cartwright was in a position
in which suspicion of foul play towards Longhurst might easily fall on
him.
Next, Peters at the time of his death not merely entertained this
suspicion but was taking steps to obtain proof of its truth; for there
were his letters to Bryanston and to Verschoyle still extant, and
admissible in evidence as _res gestæ_, the actual first steps which he
had taken with this aim.
Next, Vane-Cartwright knew of Peters’ suspicion and was greatly
perturbed by the knowledge. His whole conduct was in this regard most
significant. Callaghan showed that on the first evening when he had
seen the two men together their intercourse had at first been easy,
but that by the end of the evening something had happened which
completely altered their manners; the one became abstracted and aloof,
the other eagerly watched him. Of the talk which caused this change
Callaghan had only caught Peters’ question, “sailed in what,” but it
was evident now to what that question referred. It was in itself
strange that after this Vane-Cartwright should have availed himself of
a general invitation given by Peters earlier, and have come rather
suddenly to his house, putting off (as it was now shown) for that
purpose a previous important engagement. It was a sinister fact that,
before he did so, he had set on foot mysterious enquiries, some of
which related to the two men to whom, in his presence, Peters had
written letters about the affair of Longhurst, while the rest, though
less obviously, appeared to be connected with the same matter. The
first fruits of these enquiries (and they were telling) had been, by
his arrangement, brought to him on the very afternoon before the
murder. After the murder he had, it now seemed plain, stayed on at my
house merely in the hope of intercepting Bryanston’s answer. By what
means he knew that the sting of Dr. Verschoyle lay in his journals
cannot be conjectured, but there was no mistaking the purpose with
which, a little later, he obtained these journals by deceit.
Altogether his conduct had been that of a man in whom Peters had
aroused an anxiety so intense as to form a possible motive for
murdering him.
And altogether his conduct after the murder bore, now that it could be
fully traced, the flagrant aspect of guilt. He had unlatched the
window; this was now certain, though of course of that act by itself
an innocent account might be given. The reader knows too the whole
course of his action in regard to Trethewy and his family, beginning
with the lie, which made him appear as screening Trethewy when in fact
he was plotting his undoing, and ending with his breaking in upon my
talk with Ellen Trethewy, who had stood where she might have seen him
making those tracks in the snow. The making of the tracks,—this, of
course, was the key to his whole conduct, the one thing, which, if
quite certain, admitted of but one explanation. Only just here, when
last we dealt with that matter, a faint haze still hung. Thalberg
swore to having seen him in the field, where those tracks and no
others were just afterwards found; Ellen Trethewy had seen him start
to go there and again seen him returning. Yet, though the two
corroborated each other, there might be some doubt of the inference to
be drawn from what Ellen Trethewy saw (that depended on knowledge of
the ground), and of the correctness of the observation made by
Thalberg from afar. After all, was it absolutely impossible that
Trethewy had through some strange impulse, rational or irrational,
made those tracks himself,—perhaps, with his sense of guilt and in the
over-refinement of half-drunken cunning, he had fabricated against
himself a case which he thought he could break down.
But here the late revealed evidence came in. It was certain, first,
that those tracks did not exist in the morning. The constable who had
let the trespassers come in stopped them when he found them, and noted
carefully how far they had gone; he got one of them, an enterprising
young journalist, to verify his observation, and it resulted in this,
that the part of the lawn where those guilty tracks began was
absolutely untrodden then. Next it was certain now that throughout the
time when those tracks were made Trethewy had been in his house. Now,
when the whole course of events that morning was considered, there
could be no doubt that those tracks were made by some one who knew
exactly what the situation was. Since it was not Trethewy, it lay
between Sergeant Speke, myself, Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright.
Sergeant Speke and I could easily give account of our time that day,
but I think I mentioned that there had arisen some doubt as to where
Callaghan had been just at the critical hour. It was explained now;
Callaghan had been too far away; just at that time he had gone again
to the hotel, moved by one of his restless impulses to try and spy
upon Thalberg. It lay then beyond doubt that the tracks were made by
Vane-Cartwright, and it was beyond doubt why he made them.
But the case did not rest there. The front door of Grenvile Combe had
been bolted on the inside that night, before Peters died. Presumably
Peters did it; anyway Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, as they had said
next morning, found it bolted when they came down disturbed by the
noise, and themselves bolted it again; and Peters was then living, for
they heard him in his room. The other doors had been bolted in like
manner by the servants. Every window but two had also been latched.
The doors had remained bolted till the servants were about in the
morning, when Peters must have been some hours dead. The fastened
windows were still fastened when we came to the house (a window in the
back servants’ quarters had been open for a short while in the
morning, but the servants had been about all the time), for the
constable, before he obeyed the Sergeant and began his search outside,
had been in every room and noticed every fastening. The two exceptions
were Vane-Cartwright’s own open window, which did not matter, and the
little window at the back, already named as a possible means of
entrance. Careful experiment had now been made (Callaghan had long ago
suggested it), and it showed that, whoever could climb to that window,
only an infant could pass through it. No one then had entered the
house by night, or, if he had previously entered it, had escaped by
night; and it was also certain that no one could have lurked there
concealed in the morning. Therefore, Peters was murdered by an inmate
of the house, by the housemaid, or by the cook, or by Vane-Cartwright,
or by Callaghan. Now the housemaid and the cook had passed a wakeful
night; the disturbance in the road had aroused them and left them
agitated and alarmed; each was therefore able to swear that the other
had remained all night in the bedroom which they shared. Therefore,
Peters was murdered either by Vane-Cartwright or by Callaghan.
And why not, it might be asked, by Callaghan, against whom at one time
such good grounds of suspicion were to be found? The reader must by
this time have seen that the eccentric and desultory proceedings of
Callaghan, even his strange whim of staying in that crime-stricken
house and the silly talk with which he had put me off about his aim,
had, as he once boasted to me, a method, which though odd and
over-ingenious, was rational and very acute. The neglected memorandum
he had made for the police was enough in itself (without his frankness
under cross-examination) to set his proceedings since the murder in a
clear light. Callaghan, moreover, was the life-long friend of Peters.
True it was that (as the defence scented out) he had owed Peters
£2,000, and Peters’ will forgave the debt. True, but it was now proved
no less true, that since that will was made the debt had been paid,
and paid in a significant manner. Callaghan had first remitted to
Peters £500 from India. Peters, thereupon, had sent Callaghan an
acquittance of the whole debt. Callaghan’s response was an immediate
payment of £250 more. And the balance, £1,250, had been paid a very
few days before Peters was killed. This was what an ill-inspired
cross-examination revealed, and if the guilt lay between
Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, there could be no doubt which was the
criminal.
So Callaghan and I had gone through tangled enquiries and at least
some perilous adventures to solve a puzzle of which the solution lay
all the while at our feet, and at the feet of others.
It would be melancholy now to dwell on the daring and brilliance of
the defence. No witness was called for it. It opened with a truly
impressive treatment of Vane-Cartwright’s confession; and the broken
state of his temperament, originally sensitive and now harassed by
suspicion and persecution, was described with a tenderness of which
the speaker might have seemed incapable, and which called forth for
the hard man in the dock a transient glow of human sympathy. Every
other part of his conduct, so far as it was admitted, was made the
subject of an explanation, by itself plausible. But little was
admitted. Every separate item of the evidence was made the subject of
a doubt, by itself reasonable. If a witness had been called to tell
some very plain matter of fact, that kind of plain fact under one’s
eyes was notoriously the sort of thing about which the most careless
mistakes were made. If a witness had had a longer tale to tell he had
revealed some poisonous pre-possession. I, for example, a most
deleterious type of cleric, had, besides a prejudice against
unorthodox Vane-Cartwright, an animus to defend Trethewy, arising from
that sickly sentiment towards Miss Trethewy which I betrayed when I
fled to her from my ailing family at Florence. In Trethewy’s case
again there had been a confession of a very different order; and the
suggestion was dexterously worked that something still lay concealed
behind Trethewy’s story. Withal the vastness of the region of
possibility was exhibited with vigorous appeals to the imagination.
Strong in every part, the defence as a whole was bound to be weak; the
fatality which made so many lies and blunders work together for evil
was beyond belief; the conduct which needed so much psychology to
defend it was indefensible.
So the verdict was given and the sentence was passed.