I had left the police altogether, and was living very comfortably, my
good lady and I, up at Islington, in the same street with my married
daughter, who was doing very comfortably too, her husband having a
good berth in the City. I had always been of a saving turn, and had
bought two or three houses; so with a tidy pension, which I had earned
by thirty years' service, I could afford to go about a bit and enjoy
myself. Of course in all that time I had made the acquaintance of a
good many professional people; and there were very few theatres or
exhibitions that I couldn't get admission to. We--my wife and I, I
mean--made it a rule to go everywhere that we could get tickets for;
and whether it was the launch of a ship, the charity children at St
Paul's, or Sam Cowell at the Canterbury Hall, it didn't matter to us;
we went. And it was at the Canterbury I first had the Combestead murder
more particularly recalled to my mind.
I was there by myself, the old lady not being willing to leave my
married daughter--because, well, it was in consequence of her being
a married daughter--so I went by myself. There was a young woman who
sang a comic version of _There's a good Time coming_ splendidly; and
as I was always of a chatty turn, I couldn't help remarking to the
person that was sitting next to me how first-class she did it, when he
exclaimed: 'Hollo! why, never! Superintendent Robinson?' And then he
held out his hand.
It was young Lytherly, but so stout, and brown, and whiskery--if I may
say so--that I didn't know him.
'Mr Lytherly!' I exclaimed, 'I didn't expect to see _you_; and you're
right as to my being Robinson, although police officer no longer. Why,
I thought you were in the army.'
'So I was,' he returned; 'but I'm out of it now; and I'll tell you how
it was.'
It seems he had been to India, and got some promotion after three
years' service; and had the good fortune to save his colonel from
drowning, or what was more likely in those parts, being taken down by
a crocodile, under circumstances of extraordinary bravery. He did not
tell me this last bit, but I heard so afterwards. Lytherly was always a
wonderful swimmer, and I remembered his taking a prize at London. The
exertion or the wetting brought on a fever, and he was recommended for
his discharge. The colonel behaved most liberally. But what was the
best of all, the old fellow who kept the canteen at the station died
about this time, and Lytherly had been courting his daughter for a good
bit, more to the girl's satisfaction than that of her father; so then
they got married, and came home to England, and he was tolerably well
off. He naturally talked about the Combestead murder, and said frankly
enough, that--except the people with whom he lodged, and _they_ were
suspected, he said, of perjury--he thought I was the only person in
the town who did not believe him guilty of the murder.
'But murder will out, Mr Robinson,' he said; 'and you will see this
will be found out some day.'
'Well, I am sure I hope it will, Mr Lytherly,' I answered him. 'But as
for "murder will out" and all that, I don't think you will find any
policeman or magistrate who will agree with you there; and there was
less to help us when you had got out of the scrape in this Combestead
business, than any affair I was ever concerned in.'
'I don't care,' he says; 'it will come out, Mr Robinson. I dream
of it almost every night; and my wife consulted some of the best
fortune-tellers in India, and they all told her it would be discovered.'
'Hum!' I said; 'we don't think much of fortune-tellers here, you know.'
'I'm perfectly aware of that,' he says; 'and I shouldn't give them in
as evidence; but if you had lived three years in India with people who
knew the native ways, you might alter your mind about fortune-tellers.
Anyway, you will remember, when it's found out, that I told you how it
would be.'
I laughed, and said I should; and after we had had another glass
together, and he had given me his address and made me promise to call
on him, we parted.
I told my wife all about it; and it is very curious to see how
women are all alike in curiosity and superstition and all that; for
although my wife had been married to me for thirty years, and so had
every opportunity of learning better, yet she caught at what young
Lytherly--not so very young now, by-the-by--had said about these
fortune-tellers, and was quite ready to believe and swear that the
murder would be found out. It's no use arguing with a party like that;
so I merely smiled at her, and passed it off.
It was the very next day that Mrs Robinson and myself had agreed to go
and see a new exhibition of paintings which some one was starting in
London, and tickets were pretty freely given away for it; but the same
reason which stopped my wife from going to the Canterbury, stopped her
from going to the exhibition. I went, of course, because _I_ couldn't
be of any use, under the circumstances, to my married daughter; and a
very good exhibition it was too. There were plenty of paintings, and
I had gone through all the rooms and entered the last one. There were
very few persons, I was sorry to see, in the place, so that you could
have an uninterrupted view of any picture you pleased. After glancing
carelessly round the room, for one gets a kind of surfeited with
pictures after a bit, I was struck by a gloomy-looking painting to the
left of the doorway, and which I had not noticed on my first entry.
When I came to look closer into it, I was more than struck--I was
astounded. It was a picture representing the finding of old Trapbois
the miser, in the _Fortunes of Nigel_. The heavy dull room was lighted
only by the candle which the young nobleman held above his head; and
it appeared to be excellently painted. But what drew my attention was
that, as a part of the confusion in which the struggle between the
old man and his murderers had placed the room, the washstand had been
upset, had fallen into the fireplace, and the ewer had rolled into the
grate, where it was shewn as unbroken, although the water was flooding
the boards--all exactly as I had seen the same things five years
before--so exactly, that I was perfectly sure no chance coincidence had
produced the resemblance, but that whoever had painted this picture
had seen the room where Miss Parkway was murdered, and had had the
features of the scene stamped on his memory. Who so likely to have the
scene so stamped, I instantly thought, as the murderer himself? As this
rushed on my mind, I could not repress an exclamation, although pretty
well guarded as a rule. The only other person in the room heard me,
and came to see what had excited me so strongly. Apparently, he was
disappointed, for he looked from the picture to his catalogue, then to
the picture again, then at me, back to his catalogue, and then went
away with a discontented grunt. I did not move, however, but remained
quite absorbed in the study of this mysterious painting; and the more I
looked, the more convinced I became that it was copied from the scene
of Miss Parkway's murder. There were several little points which I had
not at first noticed, and in fact had quite forgotten; such as the
position of the fire-irons, the direction in which the water had run,
and so forth, which were all faithfully shewn in the picture. To be
brief, I had made up my mind before I left the room that I had at last
found the real clue to the Combestead murder.
The artist's name was Wyndham; and I determined that I would very soon,
as a natural beginning, make some inquiries about this Mr Wyndham; and
indeed I began before I left the exhibition. I engaged the hall-keeper
to have a glass with me at the nearest tavern, and when I got fairly
into conversation with him, asked carelessly where Mr Wyndham lived,
as I thought I had known him many years ago, giving a description of
some entirely imaginary person. The hall-keeper said: 'No--that was not
the sort of man at all. Mr Wyndham was' (here he described him); 'and
he doesn't live at the west-end of London, as you said, sir, but at a
place in Essex, not very far from Colchester.' He knew where he lived,
because he had several times posted letters to him at 'The Mount.'
This was about all I got from the hall-keeper, but it was as much as I
wanted.
I am not greatly in the habit of taking other people into my
confidence, but this was altogether an exceptional case; so, after a
little reflection, I went straight to the address John Lytherly had
given me, and told him what I had seen. He of course introduced me to
his wife, a very pretty dark-eyed young woman; and when I had told all,
they exchanged looks less of surprise than triumph. 'Oh, it is coming
all right!' he exclaimed. 'I knew the murder would cry out some day.
And now you will have a little more respect for Indian fortune-tellers.'
'I am not quite sure about that,' I said. 'But don't you go making so
certain that we are going to find out anything, Mr Lytherly: this may
be only an accidental resemblance.' Because, as you may suppose, I had
not told them how confident I felt in my own mind.
'Accidental! Nonsense!' was all he said to that; and then he asked me
what was the first step I proposed to take. I told him that I thought
we ought to go down to this village and see if we could learn anything
suspicious about Mr Wyndham; and by my old detective habits, and the
way in which the officers about would be sure to help me, I thought
we might reckon on finding out what was wanted. He was delighted, and
asked when we should start, and when I said that very night, he was
more delighted still.
It is always my rule to strike the iron while it's hot, and nothing
could possibly be got by waiting now; so I had made up my mind just to
run home, get a few things in my bag, and go down by the ten o'clock
train. My wife, you may be sure, was very much astonished; but, as I
expected she would be, was just as confident in the murder being found
out as young Lytherly himself. Of course the latter was ready. And
we were put down at our destination about twelve o'clock; too late
for anything that night, but still we were on the spot to begin the
first thing in the morning. And accordingly directly after breakfast
we began. John Lytherly would have begun before breakfast, but as an
old hand I knew better than that; because the party we were after,
allowing he was the right party, after a five years' rest, wasn't going
to bolt now; so it was no case for hurrying and driving. Well, soon
after breakfast, I sauntered into the bar, and began talking with the
landlord, who was an elderly sort of party about my own age, and who
bragged--as if it was a thing to be proud of--before we had talked
three minutes, that he had lived, man and boy, in Chumpley, which was
the name of the lively place, for more than fifty years.
'Then you're just the fellow for me,' I thought; and then began talking
of an old master of mine who was now living somewhere down in this
neighbourhood, by the name of Wyndham.
'Wyndham? Let me see; Wyndham?' says the landlord, putting on his
wisest look. 'No; I can't remember any party of that name. There's
Wilkinson, and Wiggins; perhaps it's one of them.'
I told him they would not do; and then added, that the party I meant
was something of an artist, painted pictures partly for pleasure and
partly for profit. This was only a guess of mine, but it was a pretty
safe one.
'Oh! there's lots of _them_ about here!' exclaims the old boy, grinning
very much, as if it was a capital idea. 'There's Mr De Lancy Chorkle,
Miss Belvidera Smith, Mrs Galloon Whyte, Mr Hardy Canute, and a lot
more; but I don't think there's a Wyndham.'
'Ah, well, it don't matter,' I said, very carelessly still; 'I may be
mistaken. I heard, however, he lived down here at a place called the
Mount. Is there such a place?'
'Is there such a place!' says the landlord, with as much contempt in
his voice as if I ought to be ashamed of myself for not knowing. 'Yes,
there is; and a first-rate gentleman artist lives there too; but his
name ain't Wyndham; his name happens to be Parkway, sir, Mr Philip
Parkway; though I have heard that he is too proud to paint under his
own name.'
'I think, landlord,' I said, 'that I'll have just three-penn'orth of
brandy, cold;' which I took, and left him without another word, for
when I heard this name, I felt struck all of a heap, because it made
a guess into a certainty, though in a way I had never dreamt of. I
couldn't even go back to Lytherly for a little while; it was all so
wonderful; and I was so angry with myself for never having thought at
the time that the man who, of all others in the world, had the most to
gain by the poor woman's death, might have been the one who killed
her. In the bitterness of my feeling I could not help saying that any
one but a detective would have pounced upon this fellow at the first.
However, I got over the vexation, and went back to Lytherly to tell
him my news. We were each very confident that we had the right scent
now; but yet it was not easy to see what we were to do. I could not
very well apply for a warrant against a man because he had painted a
picture; and so we walked and talked until we could think of nothing
better than going down to Combestead, and with our fresh information to
help us, seeing if we could not rake up something there.
We came to this resolution just as we reached a toll-gate, close
by which stood a little house, which appeared to be the beer-shop,
baker's, post-office, and grocer's for the neighbourhood. Not much
of a neighbourhood, by-the-by, for, excepting a few gentlemen's
seats, there was hardly another house within sight. One small but
comfortable-looking residence, we were informed by the chatty old lady
who owned the 'store,' was the Mount, where Mr Parkway lived. He was a
very retired, silent sort of a gentleman, she said, and people thought
his wife didn't have the happiest of lives with him. He had been
married for a few years, the old lady went on; soon after a relation
had died, and left him a good bit of money. Before that he only rented
apartments in the village; but then he married Miss Dellar, who was an
orphan, with a good bit of money too, but quite a girl to him, and they
went to live at the Mount. At this point the old lady broke suddenly
off, and said: 'Here they are!' going to the door immediately, and
dropping her very best courtesy. We followed her into the little porch;
and there, sure enough, was a low carriage, drawn by one horse, and in
it sat a gloomy dark man, whom I had no difficulty in recognising, and
by his side a slight, very pretty, but careworn-looking young woman.
Mr Parkway looked coolly enough at us, and we as carelessly returned
his glance, for we were both so much changed since the Combestead days,
that there was little fear of his remembering us.
It seemed they had called about a servant which the post-office keeper
was to have recommended, and Mrs Parkway alighted from the carriage
to write some memorandum on the business. Parkway had never spoken,
and I thought I could see in his harsh features traces of anxiety and
remorse. Lytherly had followed Mrs Parkway into the shop, and, as I
could see from where I stood, on the lady asking for a pen, he drew
his gold pencil-case from his pocket, and offered it, as probably
containing a better implement than any the post-office could afford.
The lady stared, looked a little startled, but after a moment's
hesitation accepted it with a very sweet smile. While Mrs Parkway
was engaged in writing her letter, Lytherly stood by her side, and
sauntered out after her. I had been waiting in the porch, watching
her husband, whose face was so familiar to me that I half expected to
see a look of recognition come into his eyes; but nothing of the sort
happened. Lytherly watched them drive off, then turning suddenly round,
exclaimed: 'It's as good as over, Robinson! We've got them!'
'Why, what is there afresh?' I asked.
'Just sufficient to hang the scoundrel,' said Lytherly. 'You remember,
of course, that among other things which were stolen on the night of
the murder was a curious locket which poor Miss Parkway used to wear,
and that some fragments of the chain were afterwards found.'