“He didn’t kill her, you know,” he said, in desperate extenuation. “She just jumped out of the cab, when she found it was dead, and was run over. There was a fog at the time.”
The fog, I thought, was lifting.
“Mr Churton,” I said, “so Luck favour us, you shall never see or hear from me again.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
TELEGRAMS
Now, henceforth, I was to move on with a set and deadly purpose. Murder was in the air, and I was stalking it, a hooded falcon on my wrist. Though I knew only what the reader knows, I had the feeling that, were I once to loose the jess, some strange and unexpected quarry would be brought down from the skies. Mark is a significant name to the beasts of chase. In the meantime, awaiting the psychologic moment, I had reason to reflect that there is generally somewhere that flaw in the boldest criminal calculations which sooner or later will give the crime away. The wicked astute man thinks astuteness impossible to virtue—one of those mistakes of generalising which lead to accidents. He estimates all goodness at credulity, all vice at subtlety. Yet both Solomon and Sancho Panza were good men. Now, if for twenty years Mr Churton’s mouth had remained sealed from terror, why should that terror become suddenly inoperative in the twenty-first year? It is just the contempt for providing against such unforeseen contingencies which constitutes the flaws. But it would have been quite possible to close Mr Churton’s mouth at once and for ever at the beginning of things. Casual concessions to humanity are the weaknesses of all but Napoleonic criminals. Mr Dalston, then, it would appear, was not a Napoleonic criminal. He attached too much value, perhaps, to the mere terror of his personality.
I found, when I reached home, a very batch of telegrams awaiting me. They had arrived, it seemed, in pretty quick succession, and had been brought down from the house. The sight of them first astounded, then frightened me. I opened one with a shrinking, not to say a slinking, feeling about my backbone, and instantly collapsed into a chair. My sickest apprehensions were realised. It was from Johnny, and fatefully potential of entanglements. With a beating pulse I examined the rest of the batch, and gave a groan of despair. The wretched boy had got, it seemed, on the track of some preposterous chimera, and was off after his quarry with a whoop. It had been enough for him to gather (quite mistakenly) that Pugsley was an enemy to my (non-existent) pretensions. Henceforth every act of that dyspeptic cleric was open to suspicion. For what had I not in one reckless moment made myself responsible?
Suddenly, in the midst of my desperation, the picture of my friend, round and jocund, tiptoeing, tomahawk in hand, in the unconscious tracks of a poor evangelical missionary, rose before me and sent me off into a fit of helpless laughter. “Well,” I thought, when I had gasped myself sober, “the thing has started, and I’ve no means now of stopping it. I can only pray not to be included in its retributions.”
Its retributions, indeed! Not on that day alone, but through many days to follow, did those unconscionable telegrams come swooping upon me, in flights and swarms, a plague of devouring locusts, desecrating my green solitude, keeping me in a perpetual flurry between shame and hysterics. I thought I should never hear the end of them—of the tap of their arrival, of the story they unfolded, of the sort of inebriated phraseology in which they were couched. And when at last the visitation stopped suddenly, I could hardly credit my release. But it did come at length; and then, when I could breathe once more in self-confidence, I set to classifying the whole mad array, and to endeavouring to make a consistent tale out of it. Whether or not I have succeeded in my object, let the reader decide from the following:—
1. (Handed in at 12.10 P.M. Footover.) Watched house saw Tip emerge eleven small black handbag what containing thought suspicious followed tracked to station. The Eye.[1]
2. (Handed in at 12.15 P.M. Footover.) Still at station expect arrival Dog Tip at bookstall examining County Blue Book letter S funny. The Eye.