Chapter VOn Wednesday, the 2nd of February, Candlemas Day, I read the burial service over my friend’s body. I will not dwell upon what that service was to me, but like many funerals of my friends it is associated in my mind with the singing of birds. The inquest had taken place on the Monday and Tuesday, and while it clearly established the fact that the death had been caused by murder, not suicide, nothing was laid before the jury which would have justified a verdict against any particular person. I believe that some doubt had arisen as to the identification of the boots. The village shoemaker, whose expert opinion was asked, had said that though he never arranged hobnails in that way himself, he had seen the same arrangement in boots that had been brought to him to be repaired, by some man who was not Trethewy. Later on, however, it was ascertained, I fancy through Callaghan’s ingenuity, that Trethewy, who liked dabbling in various handicrafts, had cobbled and nailed some boots for a friend, that this friend was the man whose hobnails had been noticed by the shoemaker, and that he had been safe out of the way at the time of the murder. Moreover—perhaps I forgot it, perhaps I assumed that they would find it out for themselves and preferred that they should—anyhow I had not mentioned to the police that I heard Trethewy alone had had access to the ladder (they found it out later).Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright stayed with me for the funeral. A large crowd of merely impertinent people, as I confess I regarded them, collected from the neighbourhood and even from far away for the occasion. Two only of Peters’ family were there, or could have been there. He had two nephews in the Army, but they were then in India. The rest of his near belongings were an old gentleman (a cousin of his father’s, whom I had heard Peters himself describe as a relative whom he had only met at burials, but whom he regarded as an essential part of the funeral ceremony) and a maiden aunt, his mother’s sister. Both of them came; both insisted on staying at the hotel, instead of at the Rectory, for the night before, but they had luncheon and tea at the Rectory after the funeral, and departed by the evening train. The old gentleman was, I believe, a retired stipendiary magistrate. Vane-Cartwright very obligingly devoted himself to entertaining him and took him for a walk after luncheon, while Callaghan roamed about, observing the people who had come for the funeral, expecting, as he told me, that there might be something to discover by watching them. I was thus left alone for a while with Peters’ aunt, who, by the way, appeared to have known Vane-Cartwright as a boy.Having with some difficulty overcome her formidable reserve and shyness, I learnt from her much that I had not known about my friend, her nephew, how really remarkable had been the promise of his early days, though he had idled a little at Oxford; and how he had left Oxford prematurely and taken up an appointment abroad, because he felt that his parents could not well afford to keep him at the university until he could earn his living in a profession at home. Of his later life too, including his latest projects of study, she had much to tell me, for she had followed him and his pursuits with an affectionate interest. This contrasted strangely both with her evident indifference on her own account to books and such matters as delighted him, and with the strange calmness with which she seemed to regard his death and the manner of his death. I was becoming greatly attracted by this quiet, lonely old lady, when the return of the cousin and Vane-Cartwright and of Callaghan at the same time put an end to our conversation. Probably it was only that she did not feel equal to the company of such a number of gentlemen, but I half-fancied that some one of the number—I could not guess which, but I suspected it was the old cousin—was antipathetic to her.I went to London myself that night, returning next afternoon. I had to go and see my wife and children. They had gone soon after Christmas to stay with my wife’s father, and she had taken the children for a night to London on their way home. She was compelled to stop there because my daughter, who was delicate, caught a bad chill. It was now so cold for travelling that I urged her to remain in London yet a little longer.I am not sure why I am being so precise in recording our movements at that time. Perhaps it is merely from an impulse to try and live over again a period of my life which was one of great and of increasing, not diminishing, agitation. But having begun, I will proceed.I returned to my rectory the day after the funeral hoping to be free from any share in a kind of investigation which consorted ill with the ordinary tenour of my work. But of course I could not remove myself from the atmosphere of the crime. To begin with, I had an important interview with Trethewy (which I will relate later) the day after my return. But, besides, rumours of this clue or that, which had been discovered, came to me in the common talk of my parish, for every supposed step towards the discovery of the criminal seemed to be matter of general knowledge. So the crime went with me in my parish rounds, and in the privacy of my house I was still less able to escape from it, for Callaghan was with me, and Callaghan’s mind was on fire with the subject.I discovered very soon that Callaghan, whom I had asked to stay for the funeral, was bent upon staying in the village as long as he could. He conceived that, with the knowledge he possessed and his experience in India, he might, if on the spot, be able to contribute to the ends of justice; and he seemed to find a morbid satisfaction, most unlike my own feeling, in being near to the scene of crime and the scene of detection. Moreover, he exhibited an esteem and love for Peters and a desolate grief at his loss which, though I had not known that the two men were quite such friends, I was almost forced to think unaffected. So I readily invited him to stay at the Rectory, and he stayed there some ten days altogether, when he declared that he would put himself upon me no more and would move to the hotel. At the last moment he changed his mind, and said he had taken a fancy to stay at Peters’ house if he might. I was persuaded to acquiesce in this, and there he stayed, with occasional absences in London, till nearly a month later, shortly after the time when, as I shall tell, Trethewy was committed for trial at the Assizes.Vane-Cartwright, who remained quiet and reserved, thanked me very much the night after the murder for having him at the Rectory, saying, with a feeling that I had not quite expected, that either to hurry away on that day of agitation or to stay a night longer in Peters’ house, would have been a trial for him. He added that he purposed returning to London immediately after the funeral, and after an important City meeting, for which he must stay in England, he was going out to meet his young lady on the Riviera. I suppose that without intending I betrayed before the funeral the fact that I was a little worried by my impending duties as executor, duties which strangely enough I had never had to perform before, and in which I was now a little embarrassed by the absence from England of my fellow-executor and the principal legatees, and by the prospect of having to carry out a charitable bequest which left me a large discretion and might possibly involve litigation. Vane-Cartwright very unobtrusively put me in the way of doing whatever was immediately incumbent on me. I suppose I appeared as grateful as I felt; anyhow, it ended with a delicate suggestion from Vane-Cartwright that he would be very glad to stay at the hotel for a day or two and make himself useful to me in any way that he could. Of course I pressed him to stay at the Rectory, and, in spite of an apparent preference for staying at the hotel, he after a while agreed. I was expecting that I might soon be leaving home for some time, as it might be necessary to take my little daughter for a month abroad in a warmer climate, and after that I knew I should be very busy with Confirmation classes and other matters, so that I was anxious to make immediate progress, if I could, with winding up Peters’ estate, and was very glad that Vane-Cartwright would stay, as he did stay, at the Rectory. On the Saturday however (a week after the murder) he received a telegram which compelled him to leave that afternoon. I had by this time begun to like him, which I confess I did not at first; men of his stamp, who have long relied on themselves alone and been justified in their reliance, often do not show their attractive qualities till the emergency occurs in which we find them useful.Trethewy was arrested the day that Vane-Cartwright left. I wondered why he was not arrested earlier (for there did not seem to be any real room for doubt that he had made those footmarks), but I have never ascertained, and can only guess that the police felt sure of securing him if he attempted to escape, and hoped that, if left alone, he might betray himself by such an attempt or otherwise. He never did. He sat in his cottage, as I gathered, constantly reading the Bible, but once or twice a day pacing thoughtfully and alone up and down the drive. He did the few necessary jobs for the house with punctuality, but he never lingered in it, never visited the field or the lane, and hardly spoke to any one, except on the day before his arrest, when, to my astonishment (for he was known to be hostile to the Church), he sent for me, and we had the memorable interview to which I have already referred.During the days before his arrest, as well as after, all sorts of enquiry, of which I knew little, were going on. Thalberg’s movements after the murder were traced. Some attempt was made, I believe, to find the man who, according to Trethewy, had passed him with two horses in the lane. But there seems to have been some bungling about this, and the man, about whom there was no real mystery (he was a farm servant who had started off early to take a horse, which his master had sold, to its new owner), was not then found. Two important discoveries were made about Trethewy. After his arrest his cottage was searched, and he was found to be the possessor of inconceivably miscellaneous articles. Among them were several weapons which he might naturally have picked up on his travels, but among them (which was more to the point) was a small case of surgical instruments. Two instruments were missing from that case, and the instrument used by the murderer might, though not very neatly, have fitted into one of the vacant places. The case was found, as Callaghan, who contrived to be present, told me, at the back of a shelf in a cupboard filled with all sorts of lumber and litter that had lain there who can say how long. Callaghan, however, professed to have observed, from marks on the dust of the shelf, that the contents of the cupboard had been recently disturbed, in order, he had no doubt, to hide the instrument case at the back of everything.The other new discovery had occurred two days before. Trethewy’s uncle and the guests who had been at his party on that ill-omened night were of course sought and questioned. They all corroborated Trethewy’s own account of his movements, but they added something more. Trethewy it seemed had been normal and cheerful enough as the evening began, but, as the night and the drinking went on, fell first into melancholy, then into sullenness, lastly and a little before he went home into voluble ferocity. He recurred to the topic, to which his uncle said he had more than once alluded on previous days when he had met him, of his quarrel with Peters, against whom he had conceived an irrational resentment, and he actually, though those who heard him did not take him seriously at the time, uttered threats against his life.
On Wednesday, the 2nd of February, Candlemas Day, I read the burial service over my friend’s body. I will not dwell upon what that service was to me, but like many funerals of my friends it is associated in my mind with the singing of birds. The inquest had taken place on the Monday and Tuesday, and while it clearly established the fact that the death had been caused by murder, not suicide, nothing was laid before the jury which would have justified a verdict against any particular person. I believe that some doubt had arisen as to the identification of the boots. The village shoemaker, whose expert opinion was asked, had said that though he never arranged hobnails in that way himself, he had seen the same arrangement in boots that had been brought to him to be repaired, by some man who was not Trethewy. Later on, however, it was ascertained, I fancy through Callaghan’s ingenuity, that Trethewy, who liked dabbling in various handicrafts, had cobbled and nailed some boots for a friend, that this friend was the man whose hobnails had been noticed by the shoemaker, and that he had been safe out of the way at the time of the murder. Moreover—perhaps I forgot it, perhaps I assumed that they would find it out for themselves and preferred that they should—anyhow I had not mentioned to the police that I heard Trethewy alone had had access to the ladder (they found it out later).
Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright stayed with me for the funeral. A large crowd of merely impertinent people, as I confess I regarded them, collected from the neighbourhood and even from far away for the occasion. Two only of Peters’ family were there, or could have been there. He had two nephews in the Army, but they were then in India. The rest of his near belongings were an old gentleman (a cousin of his father’s, whom I had heard Peters himself describe as a relative whom he had only met at burials, but whom he regarded as an essential part of the funeral ceremony) and a maiden aunt, his mother’s sister. Both of them came; both insisted on staying at the hotel, instead of at the Rectory, for the night before, but they had luncheon and tea at the Rectory after the funeral, and departed by the evening train. The old gentleman was, I believe, a retired stipendiary magistrate. Vane-Cartwright very obligingly devoted himself to entertaining him and took him for a walk after luncheon, while Callaghan roamed about, observing the people who had come for the funeral, expecting, as he told me, that there might be something to discover by watching them. I was thus left alone for a while with Peters’ aunt, who, by the way, appeared to have known Vane-Cartwright as a boy.
Having with some difficulty overcome her formidable reserve and shyness, I learnt from her much that I had not known about my friend, her nephew, how really remarkable had been the promise of his early days, though he had idled a little at Oxford; and how he had left Oxford prematurely and taken up an appointment abroad, because he felt that his parents could not well afford to keep him at the university until he could earn his living in a profession at home. Of his later life too, including his latest projects of study, she had much to tell me, for she had followed him and his pursuits with an affectionate interest. This contrasted strangely both with her evident indifference on her own account to books and such matters as delighted him, and with the strange calmness with which she seemed to regard his death and the manner of his death. I was becoming greatly attracted by this quiet, lonely old lady, when the return of the cousin and Vane-Cartwright and of Callaghan at the same time put an end to our conversation. Probably it was only that she did not feel equal to the company of such a number of gentlemen, but I half-fancied that some one of the number—I could not guess which, but I suspected it was the old cousin—was antipathetic to her.
I went to London myself that night, returning next afternoon. I had to go and see my wife and children. They had gone soon after Christmas to stay with my wife’s father, and she had taken the children for a night to London on their way home. She was compelled to stop there because my daughter, who was delicate, caught a bad chill. It was now so cold for travelling that I urged her to remain in London yet a little longer.
I am not sure why I am being so precise in recording our movements at that time. Perhaps it is merely from an impulse to try and live over again a period of my life which was one of great and of increasing, not diminishing, agitation. But having begun, I will proceed.
I returned to my rectory the day after the funeral hoping to be free from any share in a kind of investigation which consorted ill with the ordinary tenour of my work. But of course I could not remove myself from the atmosphere of the crime. To begin with, I had an important interview with Trethewy (which I will relate later) the day after my return. But, besides, rumours of this clue or that, which had been discovered, came to me in the common talk of my parish, for every supposed step towards the discovery of the criminal seemed to be matter of general knowledge. So the crime went with me in my parish rounds, and in the privacy of my house I was still less able to escape from it, for Callaghan was with me, and Callaghan’s mind was on fire with the subject.
I discovered very soon that Callaghan, whom I had asked to stay for the funeral, was bent upon staying in the village as long as he could. He conceived that, with the knowledge he possessed and his experience in India, he might, if on the spot, be able to contribute to the ends of justice; and he seemed to find a morbid satisfaction, most unlike my own feeling, in being near to the scene of crime and the scene of detection. Moreover, he exhibited an esteem and love for Peters and a desolate grief at his loss which, though I had not known that the two men were quite such friends, I was almost forced to think unaffected. So I readily invited him to stay at the Rectory, and he stayed there some ten days altogether, when he declared that he would put himself upon me no more and would move to the hotel. At the last moment he changed his mind, and said he had taken a fancy to stay at Peters’ house if he might. I was persuaded to acquiesce in this, and there he stayed, with occasional absences in London, till nearly a month later, shortly after the time when, as I shall tell, Trethewy was committed for trial at the Assizes.
Vane-Cartwright, who remained quiet and reserved, thanked me very much the night after the murder for having him at the Rectory, saying, with a feeling that I had not quite expected, that either to hurry away on that day of agitation or to stay a night longer in Peters’ house, would have been a trial for him. He added that he purposed returning to London immediately after the funeral, and after an important City meeting, for which he must stay in England, he was going out to meet his young lady on the Riviera. I suppose that without intending I betrayed before the funeral the fact that I was a little worried by my impending duties as executor, duties which strangely enough I had never had to perform before, and in which I was now a little embarrassed by the absence from England of my fellow-executor and the principal legatees, and by the prospect of having to carry out a charitable bequest which left me a large discretion and might possibly involve litigation. Vane-Cartwright very unobtrusively put me in the way of doing whatever was immediately incumbent on me. I suppose I appeared as grateful as I felt; anyhow, it ended with a delicate suggestion from Vane-Cartwright that he would be very glad to stay at the hotel for a day or two and make himself useful to me in any way that he could. Of course I pressed him to stay at the Rectory, and, in spite of an apparent preference for staying at the hotel, he after a while agreed. I was expecting that I might soon be leaving home for some time, as it might be necessary to take my little daughter for a month abroad in a warmer climate, and after that I knew I should be very busy with Confirmation classes and other matters, so that I was anxious to make immediate progress, if I could, with winding up Peters’ estate, and was very glad that Vane-Cartwright would stay, as he did stay, at the Rectory. On the Saturday however (a week after the murder) he received a telegram which compelled him to leave that afternoon. I had by this time begun to like him, which I confess I did not at first; men of his stamp, who have long relied on themselves alone and been justified in their reliance, often do not show their attractive qualities till the emergency occurs in which we find them useful.
Trethewy was arrested the day that Vane-Cartwright left. I wondered why he was not arrested earlier (for there did not seem to be any real room for doubt that he had made those footmarks), but I have never ascertained, and can only guess that the police felt sure of securing him if he attempted to escape, and hoped that, if left alone, he might betray himself by such an attempt or otherwise. He never did. He sat in his cottage, as I gathered, constantly reading the Bible, but once or twice a day pacing thoughtfully and alone up and down the drive. He did the few necessary jobs for the house with punctuality, but he never lingered in it, never visited the field or the lane, and hardly spoke to any one, except on the day before his arrest, when, to my astonishment (for he was known to be hostile to the Church), he sent for me, and we had the memorable interview to which I have already referred.
During the days before his arrest, as well as after, all sorts of enquiry, of which I knew little, were going on. Thalberg’s movements after the murder were traced. Some attempt was made, I believe, to find the man who, according to Trethewy, had passed him with two horses in the lane. But there seems to have been some bungling about this, and the man, about whom there was no real mystery (he was a farm servant who had started off early to take a horse, which his master had sold, to its new owner), was not then found. Two important discoveries were made about Trethewy. After his arrest his cottage was searched, and he was found to be the possessor of inconceivably miscellaneous articles. Among them were several weapons which he might naturally have picked up on his travels, but among them (which was more to the point) was a small case of surgical instruments. Two instruments were missing from that case, and the instrument used by the murderer might, though not very neatly, have fitted into one of the vacant places. The case was found, as Callaghan, who contrived to be present, told me, at the back of a shelf in a cupboard filled with all sorts of lumber and litter that had lain there who can say how long. Callaghan, however, professed to have observed, from marks on the dust of the shelf, that the contents of the cupboard had been recently disturbed, in order, he had no doubt, to hide the instrument case at the back of everything.
The other new discovery had occurred two days before. Trethewy’s uncle and the guests who had been at his party on that ill-omened night were of course sought and questioned. They all corroborated Trethewy’s own account of his movements, but they added something more. Trethewy it seemed had been normal and cheerful enough as the evening began, but, as the night and the drinking went on, fell first into melancholy, then into sullenness, lastly and a little before he went home into voluble ferocity. He recurred to the topic, to which his uncle said he had more than once alluded on previous days when he had met him, of his quarrel with Peters, against whom he had conceived an irrational resentment, and he actually, though those who heard him did not take him seriously at the time, uttered threats against his life.