“‘There did not seem to you anything strange in that?’ the coroner asked her.
“‘No, sir,’ she replied, ‘there was nothing funny in Mrs. Levison opening her window. I remember that it was raining rather heavily, for I heard the patter against the window panes, and Mrs. Levison may have wanted to look at the weather. I went to sleep directly after that and thought no more about it.’
“‘And you don’t know what it was that woke you in the first instance?’
“‘No, sir, I don’t,’ the girl replied.
“‘And you did not happen to glance at the clock at the moment?’
“‘No, sir,’ she said, ‘I did not switch on the light.’
“But having disposed of that point, Ida Griggs had yet knottier to make, and one that proved more dramatic than anything that had gone before.
“‘While I was clearing away the dinner things,’ she said, ‘Mr. Reuben and Mrs. Aaron were sitting talking in the parlour. At half-past eight Mrs. Aaron rang for me to take up her hot water as she was going to dress. I took up the water for her and also for Mrs. Levison, as I always did. I was going to help Mrs. Levison to undress, but she said she was not going to bed yet as she had some accounts to go through. She kept me talking for a bit, then while I was with her there was a knock at the door and I heard Mr. Reuben asking if he might come in and say good night. Mrs. Levison called out “good night, my boy,” but she would not let Mr. Reuben come in, and I heard him go downstairs again.
“‘A quarter of an hour or so afterwards Mrs. Levison dismissed me and I heard her locking her door after me. I went downstairs on my way to the kitchen: Mrs. Aaron was in the parlour then, fully dressed and with her cloak on; and Mr. Reuben was there, too, talking to her. The door was wide open and I saw them both and I heard Mrs. Aaron say quite spiteful like: “So she would not even see you, the old cat! She must have felt bad.” And Mr. Reuben he laughed and said: “Oh—well, she will have to get over it.” Then they saw me and stopped talking, and soon afterwards Mr. Reuben went out to call a taxi, and we girls went up to bed.’
“‘It is all a wicked lie!’ here broke in a loud, high-pitched voice, and Mrs. Aaron, trembling with excitement, jumped to her feet. ‘A lie, I say. The woman is spiteful and wants to ruin me.’
“The coroner vainly demanded silence, and after a moment or two of confusion and of passionate resistance the lovely Rebecca was forcibly led out of the room. Her husband followed her, looking bigger and more meek and apologetic than ever before; and Ida Griggs was left to conclude her evidence in peace. She reaffirmed all that she had said and swore positively to the incident just as it had occurred in Mrs. Levison’s room. Asked somewhat sharply by the coroner why she had said nothing about all this before, she replied that she did not wish to make mischief, but that truth was truth, and whoever murdered her poor mistress must swing for it, and that’s all about it.
“Nor could any cross-examination upset her: she looked like a spiteful cat, but not like a woman who was lying.
“Reuben Levison had sat on, serene and jaunty, all the while that these damaging statements were being made against him. When he was recalled he contented himself with flatly denying Ida Griggs’ story, and reiterating his own.
“‘The girl is lying,’ he said airily, ‘why she does so I don’t know, but there was nothing in the world more unlikely than that my mother should at any time refuse to see me. Ask any impartial witnesses you like,’ he went on dramatically, ‘they will all tell you that my mother worshipped me: she was not likely to quarrel with me over a few bits of jewellery.’
“Of course Mrs. Aaron, when she was recalled, corroborated Reuben’s story. She could not make out why Ida should tell such lies about her.
“‘But there,’ she added, with tears in her beautiful dark eyes, ‘the girl always hated me.’
“Yet one more witness was heard that afternoon whose evidence proved of great interest. This was the assistant in the shop, Samuel Kutz. He could not throw much light on the tragedy, because he had not been out of the shop from six o’clock, when he finished his tea, to nine, when he put up the shutters and went away. But he did say that, while he was having his tea in the back parlour, old Mrs. Levison was helping in the front shop, and Mr. Reuben was there, too, doing nothing in particular, as was his custom. When witness went back to the shop Mrs. Levison went through into the back parlour, and, as soon as she had gone, he noticed that she had left her bag on the bureau behind the counter. Mr. Reuben saw it too; he picked up the bag and said with a laugh: ‘I’d best take it up at once, the old girl don’t like leaving this about.’ Kutz told him he thought Mrs. Levison was in the back parlour, but Mr. Reuben was sure she had since gone upstairs.
“‘Anyway,’ concluded witness, ‘he took the bag and went upstairs with it.’
“This may have been a valuable piece of evidence or it may not,” the Man in the Corner went on with a grin, “in view of the tragedy occurring so much later, it did not appear to at the time. But it brought in an altogether fresh element of conjecture, and while the police asked for an adjournment pending fresh inquiries, the public was left to ponder over the many puzzles and contradictions that the case presented. Whatever line of argument one followed, one quickly came to a dead stop. There was, first of all, the question whether Reuben Levison did cajole his mother into giving him the diamond stars, or whether he was peremptorily refused admittance to her room: but this was just a case of hard swearing between one party and the other, and here I must admit, that public opinion was inclined to take Reuben’s version of the story. Mrs. Levison’s passionate affection for her younger son was known to all her friends, and people thought that Ida Griggs had lied in order to incriminate Mrs. Aaron.
“But in this she entirely failed, and here was the first dead stop. You will remember that she said that, after she left Mrs. Levison, she went downstairs and saw Mrs. Aaron and Mr. Reuben fully dressed in the back parlour, and that afterwards she heard Mr. Reuben call a taxi: obviously, therefore, Mrs, Aaron had the diamonds in her possession then, since she was wearing them at the ball, and it is not conceivable that either of those two would have gone off in the taxi, leaving the other to force an entrance into Mrs. Levison’s room, strangle her, and steal the diamonds. As Mrs. Aaron could not possibly have done all that in her evening dress, making her way afterwards from a first-floor window down into the yard by clinging to a creeper in the pouring rain, the hideous task must have devolved on Reuben, and even the police, wildly in search of a criminal, could not put the theory forward that a man would murder his mother in order that his sister-in-law might wear a few diamond stars at a ball.
“It was, in fact, the motive of the crime that seemed so utterly inadequate, and therefore public argument fell back on the theory that Reuben had stolen the diamond stars, just before dinner after he had found his mother’s handbag in the shop, and that the subsequent murder was the result of ordinary burglary, the miscreant having during the night entered Mrs. Levison’s room by the window while she was asleep. It was suggested that he had found the key of the safe by the bedside and was in the act of ransacking the place when Mrs. Levison woke, and the inevitable struggle ensued resulting in the old lady’s death. The chief argument, however, against this theory was the fact that the unfortunate woman was still dressed when she was attacked, and no one who knew her for the careful, thrifty woman she was could conceive that she would go fast asleep leaving the safe door wide open. This, coupled with the fact that not the slightest trace could be found anywhere in the backyard of the house, or the adjoining yards and walls of the passage, of a miscreant armed with a ladder, constituted another dead stop on the road of public conjecture.
“Finally, when at the adjourned inquest Reuben Levison was able to bring forward more than one witness who could swear that he arrived at the ball at the Kensington Town Hall in the company of his sister-in-law somewhere about ten o’clock, and others who spoke to him from time to time during the evening, it
seemed clear that he, at any rate, was innocent of the murder. Mr. Aaron had not gone up to bed until ten o’clock, and if Reuben had planned to return and murder his mother he could only have done so at a later hour, when he was seen by several people at the Kensington Town Hall.
“Subsequently the jury returned an open verdict and that abominable crime has remained unpunished until now. Though it appeared so simple and crude at first, it proved a terribly hard nut for the police to crack. We may say that they never did crack it. They are absolutely convinced that Reuben Levison and Mrs. Aaron planned to murder the old lady, but how they did it no one has been able to establish. As for proofs of their guilt, there are none and never will be, for, though they are perhaps a pair of rascals, they are not criminals. It is not they who murdered Mrs. Levison.”
“You think it was Ida Griggs?” I put in quickly, as the Man in the Corner momentarily ceased talking.
“Ah!” he retorted with his funny, dry cackle, “you favour that theory, do you?”
“No, I do not,” I replied. “But I don’t see—”
“It is a foolish theory,” he went on, “not only because there was absolutely no reason why Ida Griggs should kill her mistress—she did not rob her, nor had she anything to gain by old Mrs. Levison’s death—but as she was neither a cat, nor a night moth, she could not possibly have ascended from a firstfloor window to another window on the half landing above, and entered her own room that way, for we must not lose sight of the fact that her bedroom door was the next morning found locked on the outside, and the key left in the lock.”
“Then,” I argued, “it must have been a case of ordinary burglary.”
“That has been proved impossible,” he riposted—“proved to the hilt. No man could have climbed up the wall of the house without a ladder, and no man could have brought a ladder into the backyard without leaving some trace of his passage, however slight: against the walls, around the yard, there were creepers and shrubs—it would be impossible to drag a heavy ladder over those walls without breaking some of them.”
“But someone killed old Mrs. Levison,” I went on, with some exasperation—“she did not strangle herself with her own fingers.”
“No, she did not do that,” he admitted with a dry laugh.
“And if the murderer escaped through the window, he could not vanish into thin air.”
“No,” he admitted again, “he could not do that.”
“Well then?” I retorted.
“Well then, the murder must have been committed by one of the inmates of the house,” he said; and now I knew that I was on the point of hearing the solution of the mystery of the five diamond stars, because his thin claw-like fingers were working with feverish rapidity upon his beloved bit of string.
“But neither Mrs. Aaron,” I argued, “nor Reuben Levison—”
“Neither,” he broke in decisively. “We all know that. It was not conceivable that a woman could commit such a murder, nor that Reuben would kill his mother in order to gratify his sister-in-law’s whim. That, of course, was nonsense, and every proof, both of time and circumstance, both of motive and opportunity, was entirely in their favour. No. We must look for a deeper motive for the hideous crime, a stronger determination, and above all a more powerful physique and easier opportunity for carrying the plot through. Personally, I do not believe that there was a plot to murder; on the other hand I do believe in the man who idolised his young wife and had witnessed a deadly quarrel between her and his mother, and I do believe in his going presently to the latter in order to try and soothe her anger against the woman he loved.”
“You mean,” I gasped, incredulous and scornful, “that it was Aaron Levison?”
“Of course I mean that,” he replied placidly; “and if you think over all the circumstances of the case you will readily agree with me. We know that Aaron Levison loved and admired his wife; we know that he was very athletic, and altogether an outdoor man. Bear these two facts in mind and let your thoughts follow the man after the terrible quarrel at the dinner-table. For a while he is busy in the shop, probably brooding over his mother’s anger and the unpleasant consequences it might have for the lovely Rebecca. But presently he goes upstairs determined to speak with his mother, to plead with her. Dreading that Ida Griggs, with the habit of her kind, might sneak out of her room, and perhaps glue her ear to the keyhole, he turns the key in the lock of the girl’s bedroom door. He knows that the interview with his mother will be unpleasant, that hard words will be spoken against Rebecca, and these he does not wish Ida Griggs to hear.
“Then he knocks at his mother’s door, and asks admittance on the pretext that he has something of value to remit to her for keeping in her safe. She would have no reason to refuse. He goes in, talks to his mother; she does not mince her words. By now she knows that the diamond stars have been extracted from the safe, stolen by her beloved Reuben for the adornment of the hated daughter-in-law.
“Can’t you see those two arguing over the woman whom the man loves and whom the older woman hates? Can’t you see the latter using words which outrage the husband’s pride and rouses his wrath till it gets beyond his control? Can’t you see him in an access of unreasoning passion gripping his mother by the throat, to smother the insults hurled at his wife?—and can you see the old woman losing her balance, and hitting her head against the corner of the marble washstand and falling—falling—whilst the son gazes down, frantic and horrorstruck at what he has done?
“Then the instinct of self-preservation is roused. Oh, the man was cleverer than he was given credit for! He remembers with satisfaction locking Ida Griggs’ door from the outside; and now to give the horrible accident the appearance of ordinary burglary! He locks his mother’s door on the inside, switches out the light, then throws open the window. For a youngish man who is active and athletic the drop from a first-floor window, with the aid of a creeper on the wall, presents but little difficulty, and when a man is faced with a deadly peril, minor dangers do not deter him. Fortunately everything has occurred before he has bolted and barred the downstairs doors for the night. This, of course, greatly facilitates matters. He lets himself down through the window, jumps down into the yard, lets himself into the house through the back door, then closes up everything, and quietly goes upstairs to bed.
“There has not been much noise, even his mother’s fall was practically soundless, and—poor thing!—she had not the time to scream; the only sound was the opening of the window; it certainly would not bring Ida Griggs out of her bed—girls of her class are more likely to smother their heads under their bedclothes if any alarming noise is heard. And so the unfortunate man is able to sneak up to his room unseen and unheard. Whoever would dream of casting suspicion on him? He was never mixed up in any quarrel with his mother, and he had nothing much to gain by her death. At the inquest everyone was sorry for him; but I could not repress a feeling of admiration for the coolness and cleverness with which he obliterated every trace of his crime. I imagine him carefully wiping his boots before he went upstairs, and brushing and folding up his clothes before he went to bed. Cannot you?
“A clever criminal, what?” the whimsical creature concluded, as he put his piece of string in the pocket of his funny tweed coat. “Think of it—you will see that I am right. As you say, Mrs. Levison did not strangle herself, and a burglar from the outside could not have vanished into thin air.”
VI
The Mystery of the Dog’s Tooth Cliff
The Man in the Corner was more than usually loquacious that day; he had a great deal to say on the subject of the strictures which a learned judge levelled against the police in a recent murder case.
“Well deserved,” he concluded with his usual self-opinionated emphasis, “but not more so in this case than in many others, where blunder after blunder is committed and the time of the courts wasted without either judge or magistrate, let alone the police, knowing where the hitch lies.”
“Of course you always know,” I remarke
d drily.
“Nearly always,” he replied with ludicrous self-complacence. “Have I not proved to you over and over again that with a little reasonable common sense and a minimum of logic there is no such thing as an impenetrable mystery in criminology. Criminology is an exact science to which certain rules of reasoning invariably apply. The trouble is that so few are masters of logic and that fewer still know how to apply its rules. Now take the case of that poor girl, Janet Smith. We are likely to see some startling developments in it within the next two or three days. You’ll see if we don’t, and they will open the eyes of the police and public alike to what has been clear as daylight to me ever since the first day of the inquest.”
I hastened to assure the whimsical creature that, though I was acquainted with the main circumstances of the tragedy, I was very vague as to detail, and that nothing would give me more pleasure than that he should enlighten my mind on the subject—which he immediately proceeded to do.
“You know Broxmouth, don’t you?” he began after a while—“on the Wessex coast. It is a growing place, for the scenery is superb and the air acts on jaded spirits like sparkling wine. The only drawback—that is, from an artistic point of view—to the place, is that hideous barrack-like building on the West Cliff. It is a huge industrial school recently erected and endowed by the trustees of the Woodforde bequest for the benefit of sons of temporary officers killed in the War, and is under the presidency of no less a personage than General Sir Arkwright Jones who has a whole alphabet after his name.
Unravelled Knots Page 11
