I am, I believe, the only person who is in a position to record the full facts about Philip Bartels. One other person thinks he knows them, but he doesn’t. For one thing, he doesn’t know that I am, I suppose, a murderer, and one who carried out his crime under the nose of a police officer who, to this day, is quite unaware of the fact.
I know the facts because I was so intimately acquainted with all the people in the affair. I still am, for that matter, but for obvious reasons I have used fictitious names for everybody, including myself. Indeed, especially for myself, for I am nothing if not prudent.
The reconstruction of the story, then, is simple enough, but I may, I suppose, be attacked for daring to portray the thoughts which went on in the mind of Philip Bartels. How, I may be asked, do I know what went on in his mind?
I might defend myself by saying that I knew Bartels better than anybody else ever knew him; that I knew his mind better than I knew the mind of any of my other friends; that twenty-eight years is a long time to know anybody.
But I must record, with respect, and without in any way wishing to appear rude, that I am largely indifferent as to whether I am attacked or not.
That is because-and here again I state the fact with the utmost diffidence-I am recording this business mostly for my own benefit; for my own peace of mind, perhaps. I myself did not play a noble role, and I want to get it all down on paper.
I, Peter Harding, am a proprietor of hotels, comparatively young, but comparatively successful, and I am used to having things down on paper. I like it that way. I don’t like carrying things in my head.
One other thing I know, now that the visit to the chateau is past: although I went there at first from nostalgic and other reasons, I hadn’t been there long before I realized that I was edging closer and closer to a solution to the one problem which had always baffled me: why a man of Bartels’ nature acted as he did.
I shall never forget my feeling of rising excitement as, little by little, I drew nearer to the answer to the last riddle surrounding the strange personality of Philip Bartels.