Alas, even to the test cui bono, “that stock question of Cassius, ‘whom did it profit?’ ” Callaghan responded ill. I knew, and somewhat later in reply to an enquiry by the police, it was my duty to say, that Callaghan was in a certain sense a gainer by Peters’ death. He had been a most imprudent investor (not, I believe, a speculator), and had in his embarrassment borrowed £2,000 from Peters. Peters, while living, would not have been at all hard on him if he had been honestly unable to pay, but was just the man to have made Callaghan’s life a burden to him if he thought he was not doing his best to keep above water. Peters’ will cancelled the debt, and it was not impossible that Callaghan knew it. But this last point illustrates the real weakness of the argument against him. Nobody could know Callaghan a little and think that either this interest in the will or any other point in this hypothetical story of his crime, however much it might be like human nature, was in the least like him.
Here, for want of a good description of him, are a few traits of his sojourn in my parish. He was, it is true, with difficulty dragged out of a furious brawl with a gentleman from the North of Ireland who, he said, had blasphemed against the Pope. The man had not so blasphemed, and Callaghan himself was not a Roman Catholic. On the other hand, he had habitually since his arrival lain in wait for the school children to give them goodies and so forth. He assaulted and thrashed two most formidable ruffians who were maltreating a horse, and then plastered their really horrible bruises with so much blarney that they forgave, not merely him, but the horse. He had brought for Peters, with infinite pride, a contraband cargo of his native potheen, a terrible fluid; and after Peters’ death he would sit up alone in that desolate house, drinking, not the potheen, which, in intended charity, he suggested that I should bestow on the poor in the workhouse, but Mrs. Travers’ barley water, and writing a rather good and entirely bright and innocent fairy story.
This is emphatically not evidence, but it made me sure of Callaghan’s innocence. Looking at what I suppose was evidence, I had wondered whether I was not soft in this, and I brought the matter to the test of my wife’s judgment. I knew that, at least at her earlier meetings with Callaghan, she had disliked him, and, out of the facts which she knew already, I made what I flattered myself was a very telling case against him. It did not disconcert me that the lady, who, when told of his flight, had trusted he would remain out of England till she went abroad, said without much interest, “What stuff,” and then suddenly kindling, exclaimed, “What, Robert, are you turning against that poor man?” When I asked for the reasons why she scouted the idea of his guilt, she seemed to consider the request quite frivolous; but at last I extracted from her a sentence which expressed what I think was at the root of my own thought. “Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent enough to commit a murder and cunning enough to conceal anything, but I cannot imagine his violence and his cunning ever working together.”
Of course we both thought of him as sane, though he was just one of those people to whose doings one constantly applies the epithet “mad.”
IX
The enquiry upon which I had now stirred myself to enter, could not be an easy one, but it should have seemed for the present to be narrowed down to a question about a single man. Perhaps it was from repugnance against consciously going about to hang a man who had sheltered under my roof, that I did not even then definitely put to myself the question of that man’s guilt. By some half-conscious sequence of thought I was led to begin my search far afield. It started with the two letters which had come for Peters from Mr. Charles Bryanston, or rather first with the later letter.
I had some time before written briefly and formally to Mr. Bryanston to acquaint him with the fact of Peters’ murder, but had, for a while since, thought no more of him. Now I began to do what one very seldom does, steadily and methodically think. I mooned up and down with a pipe in my garden or in the lanes. I sat, with those letters in my hand, alone before the fire. I sat at my writing-table with paper before me, and made incoherent jottings with a pencil. I should be afraid to say how often and how long I did all these seemingly idle things. Till at last, in the time between tea and dinner, with the children playing in the room, I arrived at actually spelling the matter out.
“This time I will not delay my answer.” “This time—” Then at other times he did delay his answer. That might have some significance when I turned to the earlier letter. “This time I will not delay my answer.” It was an answer to a question in a letter just received from Peters, an answer probably by return of post. Why not delay it this time as usual? Why, of course, because the question was one which both to Peters and to Bryanston seemed important, perhaps momentous. Simple enough so far. “Longhurst did sail in the Eleanor, and she did not go down.” It was clear enough that someone had thought that Longhurst had sailed in a ship that did go down. Peters had thought otherwise, and Peters was right. What of that? There is nothing momentous in that. Stop, though. It
