At this point I broke in upon Callaghan’s story with loud regrets that Peters had written those letters with the murderer in the room, “For you know what those letters were about,” I added, remembering that he did not. “I know,” said he, “but he could not help it; he was an Englishman. You English always show your hand. Not because you are frank and outspoken, for you are anything but that, but because you are so proud. You know,” he went on, “that I have a devout belief in the English qualities that all we Irish hear so much about; but when I had an Englishman for my dearest friend, I could not help noticing the national defects, could I? I could not have acted as Peters did. I rather hope that when I had got scent of the fellow’s dirty secret—whatever it was, for I have not a notion about that—I would have exploded at once and had it out with him. I daresay I should not, but, if I had not, at least I should have taken the trouble to dissemble properly.” “If he had done either,” I said, “he would be alive today, and Vane-Cartwright would not be a murderer, or at least—” “I understand you,” said he.
He continued his story, and related with great detail what was done and said day by day during Vane-Cartwright’s calamitous sojourn in Peters’ house when he returned to stay there. He described the relations of the two men as being exactly the reverse of what they had been when he had formerly seen them together. Then Peters had been genial and friendly, Vane-Cartwright stiff and unforthcoming. Now it was very much the other way. Several times, it appeared, the conversation had got upon the subject of Peters’ Eastern travels. Each time the conversation had been led thither by Vane-Cartwright in a way of which I was afterwards to have experience. Peters was in a manner compelled to enter into it and compelled to yield information which Callaghan at the moment had thought utterly trivial, but which he now saw clearly Vane-Cartwright was anxious to possess. The information which was extracted seems to have related to all the places that Peters had visited in the East, and all the people whom he had ever met, and Callaghan remembered, or fancied, that several times, while he was being thus drawn out, Peters showed curious irritation. It appeared most strikingly from Callaghan’s recital that Vane-Cartwright had throughout shown the coolest readiness to talk about the scene of his crime, if he had committed one, and to take Peters’ recollection back to the old days of his association with Longhurst.
But now I must explain that through all that Callaghan told me, ran the same strain of odd and fantastic inaccuracy to which I have more than once alluded. Several times, for example, he said that I was present at conversations at which I certainly was not present. He repeated to me remarks of my own, which, if I ever said anything like them, were made on a totally different occasion from that of which he spoke. One of those remarks had really been made within three hours of the time when he repeated it to me, and could not have been made previously. This is perhaps the best example that I can give of what caused me a most exasperating sense of disappointment. Disappointment because, where I could not check him, Callaghan seemed to be supplying me, in the greatest fullness and in the most credible manner, with just the information that I desired; but where I could check him, though he was now and then curiously accurate in his recollection of circumstances well known to me, which I had not thought he could have observed, it still more often happened that he was under some grotesque mistake.
Worst of all, he gave me new details about the fatal night, which, if they could have been trusted, would have had greater weight than any other piece of evidence that had yet come to me, but they were just of the sort in which he was likely to be mistaken. Speaking of the moment at which he was called out from his room by the disturbance in the street, he declared that knocking immediately at Vane-Cartwright’s door he heard, as Vane-Cartwright answered from the far corner of the room, a click which he was certain came from the lock of the despatch-box which he had mentioned. He conjectured that among various articles which were there for a dark purpose, the knife which was the instrument of Peters’ death lay in that box, and that he had interrupted Vane-Cartwright in the act of taking it forth. This of course was mere conjecture, but what followed seemed at first evidence enough to have hanged the criminal. He had opened Vane-Cartwright’s door, and he now described to me almost every object that was in the room as he entered it. Amongst others there lay upon the chest of drawers George Borrow’s Bible in Spain in a binding which he described. Curiously enough he did not know the significance of this; he had, as he told me, been so much overwhelmed with grief when the murder was discovered
