Unravelled Knots

by Baroness Orczy

  “He wanted Winnie—badly—to come away with him, and I believe that he was just the sort of man who would think that he could bribe the Italian to stand aside for him, by offering him money. I believe those half-bred Spaniards and Portuguese out in Argentina are a most corrupt and venal lot, and Gerald Moville classed Vissio amongst that lot. I have no doubt whatever in my mind that Moville was walking across the moor to see if he couldn’t find Vissio in Topcoat’s cottage. It was obviously not for me to tell the police that the Poacher’s Leap is in a direct line between that cottage and the place where the two-seater was seen at a standstill on the roadside. But Dodsworth had to admit that I was right on that point.”

  “Then you think,” I rejoined, “that Mr. Moville, after he parted from Winnie Gooden, set out to seek an interview with Antonio Vissio with a view to enter into an arrangement with him about the girl.”

  “Yes!” my eccentric friend assented with a nod.

  “He wanted to bribe Vissio to stand aside for him?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then,” I went on, “he met Vissio on the moor?”

  “Yes!”

  “Came out with his proposition?”

  “Yes!”

  “Which so enraged the Italian that he knocked the other man down and finally knifed him in accordance with the amiable custom of his country.”

  “No,” the Man in the Corner retorted drily, “I didn’t say that.”

  “But we know that the two men met and that—”

  “And that one of them was killed,” he broke in quickly. “But that man was not Gerald Moville.”

  “He was seen,” I argued, “at Falconblane, at Beith and at Glasgow. The man with the dirty face, the motor-coat, and the goggles.”

  “Exactly,” he broke in once more. “The man in the cap with the flap-ears, and wearing motor goggles; the man whose face and hair were in addition covered with grime. An excellent disguise, as it indeed proved to be.”

  “But the foreign accent. The man spoke broken English.”

  “There are few things,” he said, with a sarcastic smile, “that are easier to assume than broken English, especially when only uneducated ears are there to hear.”

  “Then you think—?”

  “I don’t think,” he replied curtly, “I know. I know that Gerald Moville met the Italian on the moor, that he quarrelled with him over Winnie Gooden, that he knocked him down, and that Vissio was killed in the fall. I can see the whole scene as plainly as if I had been there. Can’t you see Moville realising that he had killed the man? That inevitably suspicion would fall on him? Topcoat had seen him, witnesses had seen his car in the road, he was known to be the Italian’s rival in Winnie’s affections! Already he could feel the hangman’s rope round his neck. But we must look on Gerald Moville as a man of resource, a man, above all, up to many tricks; for drawing a red herring across the trail of his own delinquencies.

  “I will spare you the details of what I can see in my own mind as having happened after Moville had realised that Vissio was dead: the stripping of the body, the exchange of clothes down to the vest and shirt, the mutilation of the corpse with the victim’s own knife, and the dragging of the body to a distant ‘gruff’ where it must inevitably remain hidden for days, until advanced decomposition had set in to efface all identification marks.

  “Fear no doubt lent ingenuity and strength to the miscreant; and, as a matter of fact, Gerald Moville is one of the few criminals who committed no appreciable blunder when he set to work to obliterate all traces of his crime; he left the knife with its tell-tale stains on the spot, and that knife was identified as the property of the Italian, and the head which alone might have betrayed him, even if the body were not found for weeks, he took away with him to bury somewhere far away—goodness only knows where, but somewhere between Yorkshire and Scotland.

  “I can see Gerald Moville after he had accomplished his grim task making his way back to his car. The loneliness of this stretch of country would be entirely in his favour, more especially as it had begun to rain; I can see him driving along putting mile upon mile between himself and the scene of his crime. At one place he stopped—a lonely spot it must have been—where he disposed of his gruesome burden; then on and on, past the borders of Yorkshire, of Westmoreland and Cumberland and into Scotland, till he came close to the network of railway round about Paisley and Glasgow. Falconblane, a village tucked away on a lonely bit of country but boasting of a garage, must have seemed an ideal spot wherein to abandon the car altogether and take to the road, and this Moville did, trusting to the long night, and also to luck, to further efface his traces. Again I can see him wandering restlessly through the dark hours of that night, not daring to enter a house and ask for a bed, determined at all costs to obliterate every vestige of his movements since the crime.

  “Then in the morning he takes a train for Glasgow, the busiest centre wherein a man can disappear in a crowd; in the train he takes the precaution of divesting himself of the motor-coat, the goggles and the cap, but not of the grime that covers his face and hair. We know how he provided himself with a more suitable hat and coat; we know how all through his wanderings he kept up his broken English. At Glasgow all traces of him vanish; he has become a very ordinary-looking man, wearing quite ordinary clothes, and in Glasgow people are far too busy to take much notice of passers-by.

  “We can easily conjecture how easy it was for Moville to leave the country altogether. He had plenty of money and it is never difficult for a man of resource to leave a British port for any destination he pleases, especially if he is of obviously British nationality. Money we all know will accomplish anything, and rogues will slip through a cordon of officials where the respectable citizens will be chivvied about and harassed with regulations. Moreover, we must always bear this in mind that the police were not on his track, nor on that of the Italian for that matter. Moville was free to come and go, and you may be sure that he was quite clever enough not to behave in any way that might create suspicion.”

  The Man in the Corner paused quite abruptly. A complicated knot was absorbing his whole attention. I felt thoughtful, meditative, and after a few minutes’ silence I put my meditations into words.

  “That is all very well,” I said, “but, personally, I don’t see that you have anything definite this time on which to base your theory. Both the men have disappeared; the police say that Vissio killed Moville; you assert the reverse and declare that Moville deliberately dressed up the body of the Italian in his own clothes, but you have nothing more to go on for your assertion than the police have for theirs.”

  “I was waiting for that,” he rejoined with a dry chuckle. “But let me assure you that I have at least three psychological facts to go on for my assertion, whereas the police only go on two very superficial matters for theirs; they base their whole argument firstly on the clothes, watch, jewellery and so on found on a body that was otherwise unidentifiable, and secondly on a blood-stained knife known to have belonged to the Italian. Now I have demonstrated to you have I not, how easy it was for Moville to manufacture both these pieces of evidence. So mark the force of my argument,” the funny creature went on, gesticulating with his thin hands like a scarecrow blown by the wind. “First of all, why did Moville suddenly declare his intention of leaving England? In order to look after his partner’s affairs? Not a bit of it. He left England because of some shady transaction out there in Argentina which was coming to light, and because of which he thought it best to disappear altogether for a time.

  “My proof for this? you will ask. The simple proof that his parents accepted his disappearance for a whole week without making any enquiries about him either in Richmond, or London or the Shipping Company that controls the steamers to Buenos Aires. Can you imagine that Sir Timothy Moville, having seen the last of his son on the Tuesday evening, would say and do nothing, when he was left eight days without news; he would have enquired in London; he knew to which hotel his son intended to go; someone
would have enquired at Richmond whether the car had been left there. But no! There was not a single enquiry made for Gerald Moville by his parents, or his brothers and sisters, until after Topcoat had mentioned his name to the police and the latter had started their investigations.

  “And why? Because his people knew where he was; that is to say they knew—or some of them knew—that Gerald had to lie low, at any rate for a time. Of course his supposed death, under such tragic circumstances, must have been a terrible shock to them, but it is a remarkable fact you will admit that the offer of a substantial reward for the apprehension of the murderer did not come from Sir Timothy Moville; it came from one of the big dailies out for publicity.

  “My whole argument rests on psychological grounds, and in criminal cases psychology is by far the surest guide. Now there was not a single detail in connection with the Moorland Tragedy that in any way suggested the hand of a man like Antonio Vissio. Can you see an Italian peasant, who, moreover, has lived all his life with a gun in his hand, solemnly laying that gun down before embarking on a quarrel with his rival? And yet the gun was found undischarged, lying in a gully. Vissio was much more likely to have shouldered it at sight of the man he hated and shot him dead, more especially as the Englishman would have an enormous advantage in a hand to hand fight, even if the other man had suddenly whisked out a knife.

  “Vissio was not the type of man who would think of the consequences of his crime. Maddened by jealousy, he would kill his man at sight, but in his own country and also in France, there would be no disgrace attached to such a deed—no disgrace and very little punishment. The man who last year shot the English dancing girl on the Riviera because he thought that she was carrying on with another man, only got five years’ imprisonment; Vissio would not realise that he would be amenable to English law, which does not look on homicide quite so leniently.

  “Having killed his rival, the Italian would, in all probability, have swanked as far as the nearest village, had a good drink to steady his nerves, and then have boasted loudly of what he had done, certain that he would be leniently dealt with by a judge, and sympathised with by a jury, because of the torments of jealousy which he had endured until he could do so no longer. You can’t imagine such a man sawing off his victim’s head and wrapping it up in a newspaper taken out of the dead man’s pocket.

  “And this brings me to the final point in my argument, and one which ought to have struck the police from the first: the question of the car. How would Vissio know that he would find Moville’s car conveniently stationed by the roadside? He would have to know that before he could dare walk across the moor, carrying his gruesome parcel. Now Vissio couldn’t possibly know all that, and what’s more, though he might not have been altogether ignorant of driving, he certainly was not expert enough to drive a car, all by himself for over a hundred miles, at top speed and for several hours in the dark.

  “To my mind, if this fact had been driven home to the jury by a motoring expert they never would have brought in a verdict against Vissio, and if you think the whole matter over you will be bound to admit that there is not a single flaw in my argument. From the point of view of possibility as well as of psychology, only one man could have committed that crime and that was Gerald Moville. I suppose his unfortunate parents will know the truth one day. Soon, probably, when the young miscreant is short of money and writes home for funds.

  “Or else he may return to Argentina and under an assumed name start life anew. They are not over-particular there as to a man’s antecedents. They will, perhaps, think all the more of him, when they know that where a girl is concerned he will stand no nonsense from a rival. Think it all over, you’ll come to the conclusion that I’m right.”

  He gathered up his bit of string and took the spectacles from off his nose. For the first time I saw his pale, shrewd eyes looking down straight at me.

  “I shan’t see you again for some time,” he said with a wry smile. “Won’t you shake hands and wish me luck?”

  “Indeed I will,” I replied, “but you are not going away, are you?”

  He gave a curious, short, dry chuckle:

  “I am going out of England for the benefit of my health,” he said coolly.

  I hadn’t shaken hands with him, because the very next moment he had turned his back on me as if he thought better of it. The next morning I read in the papers a curious account of some extensive robberies committed in the neighbourhood of Hatton Garden. The burglar had managed to escape, but the police were said to hold an important clue. A curious feature about those robberies was the way in which a knotted cord had been used to effect an entrance through a skylight. The newspaper reporters gave a very full description of this cord: it was photographed and reproduced in the illustrated papers. The knots in it were of a wonderful and intricate pattern.

  They set me thinking—and wondering!

  I have often been to that blameless teashop in Fleet Street since.

  But the Man in the Corner is never there now, and the police have never been able to trace the large consignment of diamonds stolen from that shop in Hatton Garden and which has been valued at £80,000.

  I wonder if I shall ever see my eccentric friend again.

  Somehow I think that I shall. And if I do shall I see him sitting in his accustomed corner, with his spectacles on his nose, and his long, thin fingers working away at a bit of string—fashioning knots—many knots—complicated knots—like those in the cord by the aid of which an entrance was effected into that shop in Hatton Garden and diamonds worth £80,000 were stolen.

  I wonder!!

  THE END

  Jonathan Ames

  You Were Never Really Here

  Augusto De Angelis

  The Murdered Banker

  The Mystery of the Three Orchids

  The Hotel of the Three Roses

  Olivier Barde-Cabuçon

  Casanova and the Faceless Woman

  María Angélica Bosco

  Death Going Down

  Piero Chiara

  The Disappearance of Signora Giulia

  Frédéric Dard

  Bird in a Cage

  The Wicked Go to Hell

  Crush

  The Executioner Weeps

  The King of Fools

  The Gravediggers’ Bread

  Friedrich Dürrenmatt

  The Pledge

  The Execution of Justice

  Suspicion

  The Judge and His Hangman

  Martin Holmén

  Clinch

  Down for the Count

  Slugger

  Alexander Lernet-Holenia

  I Was Jack Mortimer

  Margaret Millar

  Vanish in an Instant

  A Stranger in My Grave

  The Listening Walls

  Boileau-Narcejac

  Vertigo

  She Who Was No More

  Baroness Orczy

  The Old Man in the Corner

  The Case of Miss Elliott

  Unravelled Knots

  Leo Perutz

  Master of the Day of Judgment

  Little Apple

  St Peter’s Snow

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Paris Mysteries

  Soji Shimada

  The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

  Murder in the Crooked House

  Masako Togawa

  The Master Key

  The Lady Killer

  Emma Viskic

  Resurrection Bay

  And Fire Came Down

  Darkness for Light

  Seishi Yokomizo

  The Honjin Murders

  The Inugami Curse

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BARONESS ORCZY (1865–1947) was a Hungarian-born British author, best known for the Scarlet Pimpernel novels. Her Teahouse Detective, who features in Unravelled Knots, was one of the first fictional sleuths created in response to the Sherlock Holmes stories’ huge success. Initially serialised in magazines, the stories in this collecti
on were first published in book form in 1908 and have since been adapted for radio, television and film. Three collections of Teahouse Detective mysteries are available from Pushkin Vertigo: The Old Man in the Corner, The Case of Miss Elliott and Unravelled Knots.

  COPYRIGHT

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street

  London WC2H 9JQ

  These stories were first published as Unravelled Knots by T. Hutchinson & Co in 1925

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2019

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  ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–589–3

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