Tracks in the Snow by Godfrey R. Benson — Read

With some doubt as to whether it was what I ought to do, but with no doubt that it was what I wanted to do, I sought out Callaghan next morning for a final talk with him before he left; for he was at last to tear himself away from the scene which he haunted. I tried on him, I do not know why, the effects of Edith's disclosure without telling him what I now knew about the tracks. I could see that he accepted the truth of the girl's statement, and had grasped, much more quickly than I had, what it imported. It was therefore wearisome to me, and, in my then state of mind, most jarring, that for some time he persisted in playing with the idea that Trethewy might still be guilty. He supported it, as he went on, with more and more farfetched arguments, so that my patience was nearly at an end, when, to my amazement, I found my friend off at full speed again upon a fresh track, that of Thalberg. I listened, and this time seriously, to several things which he told me about Thalberg, which were new to me and threw an unpleasant light upon him. Then I interposed. Thalberg had left the house with me, and it had been made all but certain that he went straight to his hotel and never left it until many hours after the murder had been discovered. In any case it was not he who had made those tracks, for he had certainly kept in his hotel from early morning on the 29th till he left. And I then told Callaghan my reason for believing that those tracks were made in the middle of the day on the 29th. "My dear friend," he exclaimed, this time with all the appearance of earnestness, "I no more really believe than you do that Thalberg actually did the deed. He is not man enough. But I have a method, I have a method. I am used to these things. I am off to Town now; I shall be there some time; you know my address. I mean," he added grandiloquently, "to work through all the outside circumstances and possibilities of the case, and narrow down gradually to the real heart of the problem; it is my method."

Well, there may have been some method in his madness, for there was certainly some madness in his method. I took leave of him (after he had called, that afternoon, to renew acquaintance with my wife) little foreseeing what his two next steps would be. He stopped on his way to London at the county town, where he went to the county police office to communicate some information or theory about Thalberg. He went on to London, as he had said he would, but, instead of remaining there as he had said, he suddenly departed next day for the Continent, leaving no address behind.