At last I went home, to find the churchwarden irate at my lateness for an appointed interview about the accounts of the dole charities, and to have a forgotten but much-needed breakfast pressed upon me. I would rather have been alone, but Callaghan gave me his company as far as my house, and expounded his view about Trethewy all the way. He left me at my door to go in search of Thalberg, whom up to that moment we had all forgotten.
In about three-quarters of an hour Callaghan burst in on me. Where he had breakfasted, if at all, I neglected to ascertain, but he had contrived to get shaved at the village barber’s, and he now looked fresh and seemed keen. He was this time in a state of great indignation against Thalberg. He had been unable to see him, but had ascertained that he was still at the hotel, and that he had heard the news of Peters’ murder, but had seemed little interested in it, and had rejected the landlady’s suggestion that he might like to go up to the house to learn the last news of his unhappy friend. It appeared that Thalberg had shut himself up in his room ever since, but had ordered a fly to drive him to the afternoon train at the station five miles off. The landlady and Callaghan seemed to have agreed that there was something peculiarly heartless in his omission to call at Peters’ or to make any inquiries.
Callaghan soon left me, returning, as I thought, to Grenvile Combe, while I endeavoured to settle myself to prepare my sermon for the next day, Sunday, with a mind hardly indeed awake as yet to the horror of the morning or to the loss I had sustained, much less able in any connected way to think over the meaning of our observations, but mechanically asking over and over again whether it was reasonable that my now confirmed aversion from Thalberg was somehow associated in my mind with the object of our investigations.
I say “our” investigations; as a matter of fact I had no intention whatever at that time of busying myself with investigation at all. In the first place I was quite aware that I had no aptitude for such work, and in the second, and far more important place, I, who hold it most undesirable that a clergyman should be a magistrate, could not but feel it still less fitting that he should be a detective in his own parish. But I could not escape altogether. About 2:45 I received a visit from the Sergeant, a much-embarrassed man now, for he brought with him the Superintendent, who had driven over in hot haste to take charge of the inquiry. The Sergeant had zealously endeavoured to rise to the occasion, and to my unpractised judgment seemed to have shown much sense. Perhaps his zeal did not endear him the more to the keen, and as I guessed, ambitious gentleman who now took over the inquiry, but anyway he had been guilty of real negligence in allowing the snow round the house to be trampled over by trespassers, and at this the Superintendent, who had rapidly gathered nearly all that the Sergeant had to tell, seemed greatly exasperated; moreover, the Superintendent had noticed, if the reader has not, that the public-house had been open very late the previous night. His present errand was to ask me to come to the house, not because I was the deceased man’s legal personal representative, but because he foresaw possible explorations in which my topographical knowledge of my large and scattered parish might be of use.
We returned to Grenvile Combe, and the Superintendent went straight to the death-chamber where he remained some minutes with the Sergeant and me, taking note with much minuteness and astonishing rapidity of all the details which I have already mentioned. Suddenly he opened the door and called up the housemaid; she arrived at length, the housekeeper, who fetched her, being refused admittance. “Why,” said the Superintendent pointing to the window, “is that window latch unfastened and the other fastened?” The housemaid said shyly but quite decidedly that she did not know, but this she did know, that both had been fastened by her last night, that one of the few matters in which her master showed any fussiness was insisting that a window should be latched whenever it was shut, and that he never neglected this himself. Why had the Sergeant not noticed this in the morning? Poor Sergeant Speke, already crestfallen, had no answer; at least he made none. Our stay in the room was short. The Superintendent, I believe, returned there that evening and spent an hour or two in searching microscopically for traces of the criminal; but now he was in haste to search the garden. “I shall begin,” he said, “at the point under that window. It is past three already. Come on, there is not a minute of daylight to be lost.” At the point under the unlatched window he made a startling discovery, startling in that it had not been made before.
IV
I am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up a steep hill to the church, built at some distance
