Tracks in the Snow · Chapter 14 (2/2)

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 that he had hardly begun to see or think distinctly till after we had all left the room of death; but as the reader may remember, this was the very book (and it was bound in the same way) which was found in that room dropped from the dead man’s hand with torn and crumpled leaves. Who but Vane-Cartwright could have brought it there?

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.