It was one of Peters’ oddities, well known to me (and perhaps Vane-Cartwright had learnt it long ago at Saigon), that he would have welcomed at any strange hour the incursion of a friend to talk about anything. No doubt, I thought, Vane-Cartwright entered his room on the pretext of showing him a passage which bore on something he had said. Probably between the leaves of the Bible in Spain he carried something that looked like a paper-knife. Anyway here was proof that after the hour at which any of us saw Peters alive, after Vane-Cartwright, by his own account, had last seen him, that man entered Peters’ room. “But,” I exclaimed, as all this ran through my mind, “you spoke just now of the day when I was riding at Long Wilton, whereas I was on a horse today for the first time for four years. Ten times at least I have known you put things out of time or out of place just like that, by way of giving colour to your story. How do I know that you have not done so now, that you did not really see that book in Vane-Cartwright’s room any one of the other times that you went there, that it had not been back in Peters’ library and been brought up again by Peters himself?”
To my surprise Callaghan answered most humbly. He was quite aware, he said, of this evil trick of his mind; he had had it from a boy, and his parents ought to have flogged it out of him. As to the particular point on which I challenged him, he could not himself be quite sure.
During the remainder of his stay with me I gave him an outline of what I had so far discovered, and we compared notes upon it, but he was not long with me, as he had an important engagement next evening, and our conference was not so full as it should have been. So it easily happened that neither of us gained the enlightenment which he might have gained if our talk had been fuller. But I must confess that I fell into the fault which he called English. My disclosure was more incomplete than it need have been; I had not quite got over my instinctive wish to keep him at arm’s length, and my pride rebelled a little at the discovery that this erratic Irishman was not a man whom I could afford to patronise.
XV
The chapter which I am about to write may well prove dreary. It will be nothing but a record of two deaths and of much discouragement. Here was I with my theory (for it had been no more) grown into a fairly connected history which so appealed at many points to a rational judgment as to leave little room for doubt of its truth. And yet, as I could not but see, there was very little in it at present which could form even a part of the evidence necessary to convict Vane-Cartwright in a Court of Law. I determined all the same to get advice upon the matter from a lawyer, who was my friend, thinking that it was now time to put my materials in the hands of the authorities charged with the detection of crime, and that, with this to start upon, and with the skill and resources which they possessed, they could hardly fail before long to discover the evidence needed for a prosecution. But my lawyer friend, though he quite agreed with me in my conviction that Vane-Cartwright was guilty of two murders, doubted whether the facts which I had got together would move the authorities to take up the matter actively. Still he undertook, with my approval, to talk about the subject with someone in the Public Prosecutor’s office or in the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, I do not know which. Nothing resulted from this, and the failure needs little explanation. Some want of touch between town and country police, some want of eagerness on the part of a skilled official who had lately incurred blame and disappointment through the ludicrous failure of a keen pursuit upon a somewhat similar trail, these might account for it all. But besides, Callaghan had been beforehand with us, and on this occasion had managed to raise a spirit of incredulity about it all. Perhaps too even hardened experts recoiled instinctively from associating with guilt one of the few great men of finance who were at once well known to the outside public and respected in the City itself.
For me then there was nothing but to wait for the further things which I somehow felt certain would turn up. As for Callaghan it happened just about this time that he became keenly enamoured of an invention, made by an engineer friend of his, through which he persuaded himself that he could make his own and his friend’s fortune. Henceforward for some time the affair of Peters seems to have passed from his mind, and he was prevented from meeting me at the few times at which I should have been able to see him.
In the course of December I had a letter from my old parish from a friend who was kind enough to keep me posted in the gossip of the place. He said that the police were now busy over a new clue as to the murder. It may be remembered that according to Trethewy he had, as he returned home on the night of the murder, been passed in the
