“It would be a curious coincidence,” Pepster remarked. “Not that I rule coincidences out myself. They happen. I have run up against some very queer instances in my time. I once had a case in which a man prepared a dose of poison for another man. The latter died of poison and the other gave himself up to justice. A clear case—but when the post-mortem took place it was found that the victim had died of quite another sort of poison altogether. He had, in fact, committed suicide and had never taken the dose prepared for him by the would-be murderer!”
“But if this isn’t a coincidence, then there must be an explanation,” I said. “How would this do? Ronald Thoyne quarrels with Sir Philip Clevedon over Miss—over a woman. Then Thoyne pays Tulmin to assassinate Sir Philip. That is why Thoyne took the man into his service so promptly. But they find the chase getting too hot for them and so they clear out. What?”
“Is that the story?” Pepster demanded, evidently impressed.
“No,” I replied, “I am quite sure it isn’t. But it would fit the facts up to date, wouldn’t it?”
“I shall go after Tulmin, anyway,” Pepster rejoined.
I nodded smilingly, but did not further discuss the matter though I divined Thoyne’s move. He had taken Tulmin away in order to divert suspicion from young Clevedon. How far Thoyne had taken Tulmin into his confidence I did not know. Perhaps he had bluffed him as he had tried to bluff me. And at all events he would have paid him well. Whatever faults Thoyne may have possessed any form of parsimony was certainly not one of them.
CHAPTER XIII
THE VICAR’S STORY
It was by means of the Vicar that the story was carried a stage further. I had made the old man’s acquaintance soon after I first came to Cartordale and had conceived a great liking for the gentle, kindly old parson and his bustling, energetic, rather autocratic wife.
The Rev. Herbert Wickstead was an elderly man, with a thin, colourless face, short-sighted eyes and a scholarly stoop. As a preacher, he was not very much, for, though he did some hard thinking and was now and again original, he possessed very little gift for literary expression and none at all for oratory. Nor was he very much more successful in parochial work, though that did not greatly matter since his wife—Mrs. Vicar, as she was generally labelled—possessor of the quickest of tongues and the kindest of hearts, took the heaviest part of that burden upon her own shoulders.
I met him by the vicarage on the afternoon of the day following our visit to Thoyne’s house and when he asked me to go in and have some tea I accepted chiefly because I thought he, or at any rate Mrs. Vicar, might be able to tell me some of the things I wanted to know. You see, I was still very much of a stranger in Cartordale with only a vague and shadowy knowledge of its people. In some ways that may have been a gain though, generally speaking, it was a handicap. He began on one of the subjects uppermost in my mind almost as soon as we were seated at the table.