The surgeon stepped quickly to the body, slightly raised the left arm, drew aside the already open jacket of the sleeping suit, and silently indicated the cause of death. This was a knife, a curious, long, narrow, sharp knife for surgical use, which the murderer had left there, driven home between two of his victim’s ribs. I say “the murderer,” for the surgeon’s first words were, “Not suicide”. I had no suspicion of suicide, but thought that he pronounced this judgment rather hastily, and that the Sergeant was right when he asked him to examine the posture of the body more closely. He did so, still, as I thought, perfunctorily, and gave certain reasons which did not impress either my judgment or my memory. I was more convinced by his remark that he had studied in Berlin and was familiar with the appearances of suicide. I may say at once that it appeared afterwards, at the inquest, that there was reason to think that Peters had not had such a knife, for he never locked up drawers or cupboards, and his servants knew all his few possessions well. It appeared, too, that the owner of the knife had taken precautions against being traced, by carefully obliterating the maker’s name and other marks on it with a file.
In the midst of our observations in the room a vexatious interruption happened. I have forgotten to say that the servants had been sent out of the room by the police-sergeant, and that, almost immediately after, the constable who brought the doctor had been sent down to examine the outside of the house. For some reason he was slow in setting about this; it is possible that he stopped to talk to the servants, but in any case, he went out through the kitchen, and explored first the back of the house, where he thought he knew of an easy way of making an entrance. Meanwhile the neighbours, who had collected about the gate, had been drawn by their curiosity into the garden, and by the time the constable had got round to the front of the house several were wandering about the drive and the lawn which lay between it and the road. They had no more harmful intention than that of gazing and gaping at the windows, but it led to the very serious consequence that a number of tracks had now been made in the snow which might very possibly frustrate a search for the traces of the criminal. This the Sergeant now noticed from the window.
As for the actual carriage-drive I was fortunately able to remember (and it was the only useful thing that I did observe for myself) that when I had arrived there had been no footmarks between the gate and the front door except the unmistakable print of the goloshes worn by the housemaid on her way to call the police. But the tracks on the lawns and elsewhere about the house might cause confusion.
Upon seeing what was happening the Sergeant asked Vane-Cartwright, Callaghan and myself to await him in Peters’ study, while he went out to drive away the intruders, to make the constable keep others out and to pursue his own investigations. While we waited Vane-Cartwright, who had spoken little but seemed to watch all proceedings very attentively, made the sensible suggestion that we should look for Peters’ will, as we ought to know who were his executors. We consulted the housekeeper, who pointed out the drawer in which the few papers of importance were kept, and there we soon found a will in a sealed envelope. The first few lines, which were all that we read, showed me that, as I had expected, I was Peters’ executor along with an old friend of his whom I had never met but who, I believed, as was the fact, now lived in America.
The Sergeant now rejoined us; he had discovered nothing outside, and, though the tracks of the intruders made it difficult to be certain, he believed that there was nothing to discover; he thought that the murderer had approached the house before the snow began to fall, and he found no sign that he had entered the house in the manner of a housebreaker. He had, I must say, taken a very short time about his search. He wished now that the servants should be summoned, as of course it was necessary to make inquiries about the movements of all persons connected with the house. But he was here delayed by Callaghan who had matters of importance to relate.
He and Vane-Cartwright had been disturbed during the night in a notable manner. They had actually had an alarm of murder, and curiously enough a false and even ludicrous alarm. About 11.30 o’clock they had been roused by loud shouting outside the house, amid which Callaghan declared that he had distinguished a cry of murder. He had come tumbling out of his room, calling Vane-Cartwright, who slept in the next room, and who immediately joined him in the passage. Without waiting to call Peters, whose room was some distance from theirs and from the staircase by which they descended (for there were two staircases in the main part of the house), they went to the front door and opened it. The flash of a bull’s-eye lantern in the road, the policeman’s voice quietly telling some revellers to go home and the immediate cessation of the noise, showed them that they had been roused by nothing more serious than the drunken uproar which I had predicted to Peters would disturb him. The two men had returned to their rooms after locking the front door again; they had noticed that the library door was open and the lights out in that room; they had noticed also as they went upstairs (this time by the other staircase) light shining through the chink under Peters’ bedroom door; and they had heard him knock out the ashes of a pipe against the mantelpiece. The pipe now lay on the mantelpiece; and, of course, that particular noise is unmistakable. They concluded that, though he was awake and probably reading, he had not thought the noise outside worth noticing. Callaghan added that he himself had lain awake some time, and that for half an hour afterwards there had been occasionally sounds of talking or shouting in the lane, once even a renewal of something like the first uproar.
The report subsequently received from the constable who had been on duty along the road that night confirmed the above, and a little reflexion made it appear that the disturbance outside had nothing to do with the murder. In fact the only thing connected with this incident which much impressed me at the time was Callaghan’s manner in relating it. He had up to now been very silent, he now began to talk with furious eagerness. He readily saw and indeed suggested that the disturbance which he related was of little consequence. But having to tell of it he did so with a vividness which was characteristic of him, so that one saw the scene as he described it, saw indeed more than there was to see, for he spoke of the ground already white and the snow falling in thick flakes, when he was pulled up by the Sergeant who said that the snow had not begun to fall till three o’clock that morning. Callaghan began angrily persisting, and the Sergeant appealed to Vane-Cartwright, who up till now had said little, merely confirming Callaghan’s narrative at various points with a single syllable or with a nod of his head, but who now said that Callaghan was wrong about the snow. He added the benevolent explanation that Callaghan, who was really much excited, had combined the impressions of their false alarm over night with those of their all too real alarm in the morning.
Chapter III
Hereupon Callaghan, who had a more important matter to relate, changed the subject abruptly by saying, “Sergeant, have your eye on that man Trethewy”. He told us that, ten days before, Trethewy had quarrelled with his master. Peters, he said, had met Trethewy in the drive, at a point which he indicated, and, noticing a smell of spirits, had firmly but quietly taken him to task, telling him that his occasional drinking was becoming a serious matter. Callaghan had come up at the moment and had heard Trethewy, who was by his account dangerous with drink at the time, answer with surly insolence, making some malicious counter-insinuation against his master’s own habits, exploding for a moment into wild anger, in which he seemed about to strike his master, but to refrain upon catching sight of Callaghan’s powerful frame beside him, then subsiding again into surliness and finally withdrawing to his own cottage with muttered curses and a savage threat. This was the substance of Callaghan’s statement. But there was a great deal in it besides substance; the whole of the conversation, from the moment at which Callaghan came up, was professedly repeated word for word with a slight but dramatic touch of mimicry, and the tone and temper of master and man were vividly rendered. I can never myself remember the words of any conversation, and for that reason I am unable now to set out Callaghan’s narrative, and was unable at the time to put faith in its accuracy. Here and there a phrase was presumably truly given because it was given in Trethewy’s own dialect, but once at least the unhappy Trethewy was made responsible for a remark which he surely never made, for it was pure Irish, and indeed I think it was the very threat of picturesque vengeance which I had myself heard Callaghan address to a big boy in the street who was on the point of thrashing a little boy. One detail of the description was a manifest mistake. Callaghan indicated (truly, I have some reason to think) the spot in the drive where such altercation as did happen took place, but he added that Peters stood watching Trethewy with his hand upon a young tree. Now Peters had planted that tree with Trethewy several days later, just before the frost set in; and other details in the story seemed equally incredible. “Ever since then,” concluded Callaghan, “I have seen murder in that fellow’s eye. Mind you, I have had to do with murderers in India. Three times have I marked that look in a man’s eye, and each time the event has proved me right, though in one case it was long after. I tell you this man Trethewy——” But here Vane-Cartwright stopped him. He had already disconcerted Callaghan a little by pointing out the Hibernicisms that adorned the alleged remarks of Trethewy; and now he quelled him with the just, but, as I thought, unseasonably expressed, sarcasm, that if he had seen murder portended in Trethewy’s glance it would have been a kind attention to have given his host warning of the impending doom. He went on to insist warmly on the totally different impression he had himself gathered from Trethewy’s demeanour to his master. He was not apt to say more than was needed, but this time he ran on, setting forth his own favourable view of Trethewy, till he in turn was stopped by the Sergeant who said, “Really, sir, I do not think I ought to listen now to what any gentleman thinks of a man’s manner of speaking, not if it is nothing more than that”.
The Sergeant then sent for Trethewy. I had wondered that we had not seen him before, the explanation was that he had been away at night, had returned home very late, and so had come late to the house in the morning and was still doing the pumping when the Sergeant sent for him. However, he seemed at last to have slept off the effect of whatever his nocturnal potion had been, and he gave a clear account of his movements without hesitation and with a curiously impressive gravity. He had suddenly made up his mind at dusk on the previous evening to go to his uncle’s house, where there was a gathering of friends and kinsfolk, which he had at first intended to avoid. They had made a night of it. He had started home, as several, whom he named, could testify, at four o’clock in the morning (the church clock near his uncle’s was then striking), and the violence of the snowstorm was abating. He had come across the moor by a track of which he knew the bearings well. This track struck into the grass lane which passed near the back of the house at the other side of the pasture, and which curved round into the road joining it close by Trethewy’s cottage. As he came along the lane a man on horseback leading a second horse had overtaken him and exchanged greetings with him. He had seen the man before, but could not tell his name or dwelling or where he was going. The snow had done falling when he reached his cottage. Once home, he had turned in and slept sound till he was roused soon after eight by his wife with the news of the murder. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, guessed nothing which could throw light on the dreadful deed of the night. Trethewy was dismissed with a request from the Sergeant to keep in his house, where he could instantly be found if information was wanted from him. This he did.