I instantly went over in my mind the list of those few who were so placed as to lie within the reach of suspicion. Trethewy could no longer be suspected. Thalberg surely could not. I dismissed the two women servants from my mind immediately. There remained two men—three men—three men, of whom I was one. I knew how easily I could clear myself, for the door had been locked behind me before that candle was lit. But I was the last man known to have seen Peters, and my confused current of thought included me as a man to be suspected. I asked myself of each in turn, is he the guilty man? and in each case I answered no. As I look back now, it seems to me, that the answer “no” did not come to my mind with the same whole-hearted conviction in each case. But I did not in the few moments for which I then reflected, I did not till long after do more than go round in this circle: One of us three men murdered Peters. Was it—— each of us in turn? No. Could it after all be one of the servants? No! Was there not then in the vast region of possibility some way of accounting for Peters’ death without the guilt of any of us. The plainest reasons bade me answer yes, and yet again I answered no. And so back round the circle.
But the girl was with me and I could not keep her waiting for ever. I arrested my mental circle where it began, at the thought: it seems Peters was murdered while two inches of ordinary candle, lighted before 11.30 P.M. on the 28th of January, burnt out. I started up to take the girl at once to see the police, but on a sudden idea I desisted. I wrote a note to the housekeeper, asking that the girl should again come to see me at eight in the evening, and I sent a message to the police-sergeant, asking him to come at the same time. Of course I had often interviewed him on parish matters, and having got him settled into the arm-chair in my study, in which I could usually put him at his ease, I fired upon him the question, “Sergeant, were those tracks, which we found, really there when you came to Mr. Peters’ house in the morning?” Now Sergeant Speke was a very honest man, but he was (most properly, I am sure) a creature of discipline, and his answer threw, for me, a flood of light on the problem how it is that the very best of the police are so ready to back up one another. He answered immediately and with conviction: “Well, you see, sir, it is not for me to judge”. The answer was on the face of it preposterous. He alone had searched the front of the house that morning, and it was for him alone, of all men, to say whether the tracks were there. He obviously did not see this at all, and I was wise enough to let go an opportunity for moralising to him. I beguiled him, with a glass of wine and other devices of the tempter, into feeling himself off duty for the while, and talking with me as fellow-mortal to fellow-mortal. I very soon discovered, first, that Sergeant Speke had searched carefully enough around the house that morning to have seen the tracks if they had been there, and, secondly, that the man, Speke, as distinct from the Sergeant, knew perfectly well that they were not there.
Not till then did I summon the girl Edith from the servants’ hall where she was waiting. I made her tell her tale. I saw the Sergeant take a due note of it for transmission to those, to me mysterious, headquarters where I supposed all such matters were digested. I got the assurance that Sergeant Speke was really man enough to see that his own evidence, as to the non-existence of the tracks that morning, would be noted and digested too. I dismissed the Sergeant and Edith, and went slowly to bed. Did I suspect this person? No! Did I suspect that person? N—no. At last I determined that I would not let my suspicions fasten on any one man, while it might be just as reasonable that his suspicions should fasten on me. But my mind remained full of horror and of the image of a candle-end spluttering out, while the man, who had lighted it to read by, lay dead in those bloody sheets. Very, very glad I was that my wife was at last coming home next day.
I suppose it was from the association of two female names that my dreams, when at last I slept, were of nothing more horrible than the ship Eleanor, which, as the reader remembers, probably still sailed the seas.
Chapter VIII
With some doubt as to whether it was what I ought to do, but with no doubt that it was what I wanted to do, I sought out Callaghan next morning for a final talk with him before he left; for he was at last to tear himself away from the scene which he haunted. I tried on him, I do not know why, the effects of Edith’s disclosure without telling him what I now knew about the tracks. I could see that he accepted the truth of the girl’s statement, and had grasped, much more quickly than I had, what it imported. It was therefore wearisome to me, and, in my then state of mind, most jarring, that for some time he persisted in playing with the idea that Trethewy might still be guilty. He supported it, as he went on, with more and more far-fetched arguments, so that my patience was nearly at an end, when, to my amazement, I found my friend off at full speed again upon a fresh track, that of Thalberg. I listened, and this time seriously, to several things which he told me about Thalberg, which were new to me and threw an unpleasant light upon him. Then I interposed. Thalberg had left the house with me, and it had been made all but certain that he went straight to his hotel and never left it until many hours after the murder had been discovered. In any case it was not he who had made those tracks, for he had certainly kept in his hotel from early morning on the 29th till he left. And I then told Callaghan my reason for believing that those tracks were made in the middle of the day on the 29th. “My dear friend,” he exclaimed, this time with all the appearance of earnestness, “I no more really believe than you do that Thalberg actually did the deed. He is not man enough. But I have a method, I have a method. I am used to these things. I am off to Town now; I shall be there some time; you know my address. I mean,” he added grandiloquently, “to work through all the outside circumstances and possibilities of the case, and narrow down gradually to the real heart of the problem; it is my method.”
Well, there may have been some method in his madness, for there was certainly some madness in his method. I took leave of him (after he had called, that afternoon, to renew acquaintance with my wife) little foreseeing what his two next steps would be. He stopped on his way to London at the county town, where he went to the county police office to communicate some information or theory about Thalberg. He went on to London, as he had said he would, but, instead of remaining there as he had said, he suddenly departed next day for the Continent, leaving no address behind.
We have now arrived at the first week in March, the several events (if I may include under the name of events the slow emergence of certain thoughts in my own mind) which prepared the way for the eventual solution of our mystery, occurred at intervals, and in an order of which my memory is not quite distinct, during that and the remaining nine months of the year.
The resolution at which I had arrived, not to occupy my mind with suspicions, or to regard the detection of crime as part of my business, was not a tenable resolution, and it was entirely dissipated by my wife in a talk which we had on the first evening after her arrival. I was aware that she would not be able to share with me in the determination not to harbour suspicions of any particular person, but I had thought she would be averse to my taking positive steps towards the detection of the crime. She, however, was indignant at the idea that I could let things be. “Several innocent men will be under a cloud all their lives,” she said, “unless the guilty man is found. There is Trethewy, I suppose they will let him out some day; but who is going to employ him? Not that uncle of his; and we cannot. Who do you suppose is going to see this through if you do not?” She was powerfully seconded in this by a neighbour of ours, now an old man, who had had much experience as a justice. “Mr. Driver,” he said, “you may think this is the business of the police, but remember who the police are. They do their ordinary work excellently, but their ordinary work is to deal with ordinary crime. This was not an ordinary crime, and it was done by no ordinary man. If it is ever discovered, it will be by a man whose education gives him a wider horizon than that of professional dealers with criminals.”
I do not know how far the reader may have been inclined to suspect Callaghan (that depends, I suppose, on whether the reader has been able to form any idea of his character, and I myself had not, so far, formed any coherent idea of his character; there seemed little coherence in it), but the police certainly had begun to suspect him.