The two servants were now summoned, and the Sergeant had a number of questions to ask them. The housekeeper in particular had a good deal to say about her master’s ways, the household arrangements and so forth, and seemed to find satisfaction in saying it at length. So a lot of trivial details came forth, which I, who was by this time becoming exhausted, had little patience to follow. Was the candle which was found burnt out a new candle the evening before, or a candle-end, or what? The question was asked of the housekeeper, but the housemaid answered with promptitude that it was a full new candle which she had herself put there last evening, shortly before the master went to bed. We learnt also that Peters was very irregular about going to bed; sometimes he would take a fit of sitting up, working or reading, night after night, and sometimes he would go to bed early, but always he had a book with him and lay awake for a while (often for hours and hours, as he had confessed to her) reading it after he went to bed. Sometimes it would be a story book, but more often one of those dull books of his; and much more on the same subject would have been forthcoming if the housekeeper had not at last been stopped, without, as I thought, having told us anything of importance.
At last I went home, to find the churchwarden irate at my lateness for an appointed interview about the accounts of the dole charities, and to have a forgotten but much-needed breakfast pressed upon me. I would rather have been alone, but Callaghan gave me his company as far as my house, and expounded his view about Trethewy all the way. He left me at my door to go in search of Thalberg, whom up to that moment we had all forgotten.
In about three-quarters of an hour Callaghan burst in on me. Where he had breakfasted, if at all, I neglected to ascertain, but he had contrived to get shaved at the village barber’s, and he now looked fresh and seemed keen. He was this time in a state of great indignation against Thalberg. He had been unable to see him, but had ascertained that he was still at the hotel, and that he had heard the news of Peters’ murder, but had seemed little interested in it, and had rejected the landlady’s suggestion that he might like to go up to the house to learn the last news of his unhappy friend. It appeared that Thalberg had shut himself up in his room ever since, but had ordered a fly to drive him to the afternoon train at the station five miles off. The landlady and Callaghan seemed to have agreed that there was something peculiarly heartless in his omission to call at Peters’ or to make any inquiries.
Callaghan soon left me, returning, as I thought, to Grenvile Combe, while I endeavoured to settle myself to prepare my sermon for the next day, Sunday, with a mind hardly indeed awake as yet to the horror of the morning or to the loss I had sustained, much less able in any connected way to think over the meaning of our observations, but mechanically asking over and over again whether it was reasonable that my now confirmed aversion from Thalberg was somehow associated in my mind with the object of our investigations.
I say “our” investigations; as a matter of fact I had no intention whatever at that time of busying myself with investigation at all. In the first place I was quite aware that I had no aptitude for such work, and in the second, and far more important place, I, who hold it most undesirable that a clergyman should be a magistrate, could not but feel it still less fitting that he should be a detective in his own parish. But I could not escape altogether. About 2.45 I received a visit from the Sergeant, a much-embarrassed man now, for he brought with him the Superintendent, who had driven over in hot haste to take charge of the inquiry. The Sergeant had zealously endeavoured to rise to the occasion, and to my unpractised judgment seemed to have shown much sense. Perhaps his zeal did not endear him the more to the keen, and as I guessed, ambitious gentleman who now took over the inquiry, but any way he had been guilty of real negligence in allowing the snow round the house to be trampled over by trespassers, and at this the Superintendent, who had rapidly gathered nearly all that the Sergeant had to tell, seemed greatly exasperated; moreover, the Superintendent had noticed, if the reader has not, that the public-house had been open very late the previous night. His present errand was to ask me to come to the house, not because I was the deceased man’s legal personal representative, but because he foresaw possible explorations in which my topographical knowledge of my large and scattered parish might be of use.
We returned to Grenvile Combe, and the Superintendent went straight to the death-chamber where he remained some minutes with the Sergeant and me, taking note with much minuteness and astonishing rapidity of all the details which I have already mentioned. Suddenly he opened the door and called up the housemaid; she arrived at length, the housekeeper, who fetched her, being refused admittance. “Why,” said the Superintendent pointing to the window, “is that window latch unfastened and the other fastened?” The housemaid said shyly but quite decidedly that she did not know, but this she did know, that both had been fastened by her last night, that one of the few matters in which her master showed any fussiness was insisting that a window should be latched whenever it was shut, and that he never neglected this himself. Why had the Sergeant not noticed this in the morning? Poor Sergeant Speke, already crestfallen, had no answer; at least he made none. Our stay in the room was short. The Superintendent, I believe, returned there that evening and spent an hour or two in searching microscopically for traces of the criminal; but now he was in haste to search the garden. “I shall begin,” he said, “at the point under that window. It is past three already. Come on, there is not a minute of daylight to be lost.” At the point under the unlatched window he made a startling discovery, startling in that it had not been made before.
Chapter IV
I am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up a steep hill to the church, built at some distance from the village for the benefit of the former owners of the manor house. Just beyond the church lies a house which was the manor house, but has now lost its identity in improvements and extensions and become a new and not very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin to the South-Western Counties Development Company, Limited, which discovered in its neighbourhood promising golf links, whose promise may be fulfilled when the extension of the railway is completed. I ought to but do not thank the Company for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel spoils the view from Grenvile Combe, across the valley. Its upper windows command a prospect of the whole of Peters’ grounds. This, however, does not concern us yet.
The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane diverges from the road and leads in a North-Westerly direction. Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late, stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the North-East corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one goes towards the kitchen, stands an out-building in which is the pump. A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house, just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where the dinners of former owners had been cooked.
In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a North-East wind, and any one who may have wrestled with my essay in topography will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near, before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way, not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the same point in the wall.