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.
On a superficial view of the matter there was every reason to do so. Short of bolting on the night of the murder, before it was discovered, he had done all that, theoretically, a guilty man should have done. He had lost no time whatever in attempting to put suspicion on one innocent man. He had striven to intermeddle officiously in the investigations conducted by the police. There was more than one apparent lie in the information he had given. He had haunted the scene of the crime as though it fascinated him. When the first innocent man was cleared, he had at once suggested another man, who was almost certainly innocent also, and he had then, after giving false accounts of his intentions, quitted the country without leaving his address. Then he was certainly in the house when the crime was committed. His movements on the following day were nearly accounted for, but not so fully that he could not have made those false tracks. After
