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 wholehearted 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 forever. 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 armchair 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 nonexistence 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.
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
