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.
Chapter XII
In the course of the summer my wife and I paid our annual visit together to London, and I had a few days in Oxford before the end of the summer term.
I heard a good deal about Vane-Cartwright in London, for he had become a man of some mark in society, and moved in a little set, which was known among its members by a rather precious name, now forgotten though celebrated in the gossip of that time, and which included a statesman or two of either party and several men of eminence in letters, law or learning. By a strange coincidence of the sort which is always happening, I met at an evening party a friend who mentioned Longhurst, and I had just heard from him something of no moment about this man whose fate so deeply exercised me, when I saw Vane-Cartwright himself standing in another part of the throng. I took the opportunity of watching him, unobserved myself, as I supposed. I have hitherto forborne to describe his appearance, because such descriptions in books seldom convey a picture to me. But I must say that seen now in a room where there were several distinguished people, he made no less impression on me than before. He was, I should say, five foot eleven in height, thin and with a slight stoop, but with the wiry look which sometimes belongs to men who were unathletic and perhaps delicate when young, but whose physical strength has developed in after years. Hair which had turned rather grey, while the soft texture and uniformly dark hue of his skin still retained a certain beauty of youth, probably accounted for a good deal of his distinction of appearance, for he was not handsome, though his forehead, if narrow, was high, and his eyes which were small were striking—of a dark greenish-grey colour, I think. The expression of the mouth and of the clear-cut and firm-set jaw was a good deal hidden by a long though rather thin moustache, still black. I had time while he stood there to notice again one trick, which I already knew; he was, I supposed, bent upon being agreeable, so he was talking with animation, and when, in so talking, he smiled and showed his white teeth, his eyelashes almost completely veiled his eyes. To me, naturally, it gave him a hateful expression, yet I could see a certain fascination about it. Then he moved farther off—very quietly, but I could see as he made his way through the crowd that in reality every motion was extraordinarily quick.