Sisters in Crime

by Mike Ashley

  He drank a cup of coffee and rose from the table to walk up and down the room.

  ‘Well, Frank, you would imagine that nothing could arise to interfere with our happiness after this. In worldly circumstances I was what would be considered an excellent match for Miss Daventry, and I had every reason to believe that she loved me. She was very young, not quite eighteen, and I was the first man who had ever proposed to her. I left her with the most entire confidence in her good faith, and to this hour I believe in her.’

  There was a pause, and then he went on again.

  ‘We corresponded, of course. Laura’s letters were charming, and I had no greater delight than in receiving and replying to them. I had promised her to work hard for my degree, and for her sake I kept my promise and won it. My first thought was to carry her the news of my success; and directly the examinations were over I ran down to Sussex. I found the cottage empty. Mr Daventry was in London; the two younger girls had gone to Devonshire, to an aunt who kept a school there. About Miss Daventry the neighbours could give me no positive information. She had left a few days before her father, but no one knew where she had gone. When I pressed them more closely they told me that it was rumoured in the village that she had gone away to be married. A gentleman from the Spanish colonies, a Mr Levison, had been staying at the cottage for some weeks and had disappeared about the same time as Miss Laura.’

  ‘And you believe that she had eloped with him?’

  ‘To this day I am ignorant as to the manner of her leaving. Her last letters were only a week old. She had told me of this Mr Levison’s residence in their household. He was a wealthy merchant, a distant relation of her father’s, and was staying in Sussex for his health. This was all she had said of him. Of their approaching departure she had not given me the slightest hint. No one in the village could tell me Mr Daventry’s London address. The cottage, a furnished one, had been given up to the landlord and every debt paid. I went to the post office, but the people there had received no directions as to the forwarding of letters, nor had any come as yet for Mr Daventry.’

  ‘The girls in Devonshire – you applied to them, I suppose?’

  ‘I did, but they could tell me nothing. I wrote to Emily, the elder girl, begging her to send me her sister’s address. She answered my letter immediately. Laura had left home with her father’s full knowledge and consent, she said, but had not told her sisters where she was going. She had seemed very unhappy. The whole affair had been sudden, and her father had also appeared much distressed in mind. This was all I could ascertain. I put an advertisement in The Times addressed to Mr Daventry, begging him to let me know his whereabouts, but nothing came of it. I employed a man to hunt London for him, and hunted myself, but without avail. I wasted months in this futile search, now on one false track, now on another.’

  ‘And you have long ago given up all hope, I suppose?’ Lorrimore said as Wynward paused, walking up and down the room with a moody face.

  ‘Given up all hope of seeing Laura Levison alive? Yes; but not of tracking her destroyer.’

  ‘Laura Levison! Then you think she married the Spanish merchant?’

  ‘I am sure of it. I had been more than six months on the look-out for Mr Daventry, and had begun to despair of finding him, when the man I employed came to me and told me that he had found the registry of a marriage between Michael Levison and Laura Daventry at an obscure church in the City, where he had occasion to make researches for another client. The date of the marriage was within a few days of Laura’s departure from Sussex.’

  ‘Strange!’

  ‘Yes, strange that a woman could be so fickle, you would say. I felt convinced that there had been something more than girlish inconstancy at work in this business – some motive power, strong enough to induce this girl to sacrifice herself in a loveless marriage. I was confirmed in this belief when, within a very short time of the discovery of the registry, I came suddenly upon old Daventry in the street. He would willingly have avoided me, but I insisted on a conversation with him, and he reluctantly allowed me to accompany him to his lodging, a wretched place in Southwark. He was very ill, with the stamp of death upon his face, and had a craven look that convinced me it was to him I was indebted for my sorrow. I told him that I knew of his daughter’s marriage, when and where it had taken place and boldly accused him of having brought it about.’

  ‘How did he take your accusation?’

  ‘Like a beaten hound. He whimpered piteously and told me that the marriage had been no wish of his. But Levison had possession of secrets which made him the veriest slave. Little by little I wrung from him the nature of these secrets. They related to forged bills of exchange in which the old man had made free with his kinsman’s name. It was a transaction of many years ago; but Levison had used this power in order to induce Laura to marry him, and the girl, to save her father from disgrace and ruin, as she believed, had consented to become his wife. Levison had promised to do great things for the old man but had left England immediately after his marriage without settling a shilling on his father-in-law. It was altogether a dastardly business: the girl had been sacrificed to her father’s weakness and folly. I asked him why he had not appealed to me, who could no doubt have extricated him from his difficulty, but he could give me no clear answer. He evidently had an overpowering dread of Michael Levison. I left him, utterly disgusted with his imbecility and selfishness; but, for Laura’s sake, I took care that he wanted for nothing during the remainder of his life. He did not trouble me long.’

  ‘And Mrs Levison?’

  ‘The old man told me that the Levisons had gone to Switzerland. I followed post-haste and traced them from place to place, closely questioning the people at all the hotels. The accounts I heard were by no means encouraging. The lady did not seem happy. The gentleman looked old enough to be her father and was peevish and fretful in his manner, never letting his wife out of his sight and evidently suffering agonies of jealousy on account of the admiration which her beauty won for her from every one they met. I traced them stage by stage, through Switzerland into Italy, and then suddenly lost the track. I concluded that they had returned to England by some other route, but all my attempts to discover traces of their return were useless. Neither by land nor by sea passage could I hear of the yellow-faced trader and his beautiful young wife. They were not a couple to be overlooked easily; and this puzzled me. Disheartened and dispirited, I halted in Paris where I spent a couple of months in hopeless idleness – a state of utter stagnation from which I was aroused abruptly by a communication from my agent, a private detective, a very clever fellow in his way and well in with the police of civilized Europe. He sent me a cutting from a German newspaper which described the discovery of a corpse in the Tyrol. It was supposed, from the style of the dress, to be the body of an Englishwoman, but no indication of a name or address had been found to give a clue to identity. Whether the dead woman had been the victim of foul play, or whether she had met her death from an accidental fall, no one had been able to decide. The body had been found at the bottom of a mountain gorge, the face disfigured by the fall from the height above. Had the victim been a native of the district it might have been easily supposed that she had lost her footing on the mountain path; but that a stranger should have travelled alone by so unfrequented a route seemed highly improbable. The spot at which the body was found lay within a mile of a small village; but it was a place rarely visited by travellers of any description.’

  ‘Had your agent any reason to identify this woman with Mrs Levison?’

  ‘None, except the fact that Mrs Levison was missing and his natural habit of suspecting the very worst. The paragraph was nearly a month old when it reached me. I set off at once for the place named, saw the village authorities and visited the Englishwoman’s grave. They showed me the dress she had worn: a black silk, very simply made. Her face had been too much disfigured by the fall and the passage of time that had occurred before the finding of the body for my informants to giv
e me any minute description of her appearance. They could only tell me that her hair was dark auburn, the colour of Laura’s, thick and long, and that her figure was that of a young woman.

  ‘After exhausting every possible enquiry, I pushed on to the next village and there received confirmation of my worst fears. A gentleman and his wife – the man of foreign appearance but talking English, the woman young and beautiful – had stopped for a night at the chief inn of the place and had left the next morning without a guide. The gentleman, who spoke German perfectly, told the landlady that his travelling carriage and servants were to meet him at the nearest stage on the home journey. He knew every inch of the country and wished to walk across the mountain in order to show his wife a prospect which had struck him particularly upon his last expedition a few years before. The landlady remembered that, just before setting out, he asked his wife some question about her watch, took it from her to regulate it and then, after some peevish exclamation about her carelessness in leaving it unwound, put it into his waistcoat pocket. The lady was very pale and quiet and seemed unhappy. The description which the landlady gave me was only too like the woman I was looking for.’

  ‘And you believe there had been foul play?’

  ‘As certainly as I believe in my own existence. This man Levison had grown tired of a wife whose affection had never been his; nay, more, I have reason to know that his unresting jealousy had intensified into a kind of hatred of her some time before the end. From the village in the Tyrol, which they left together on the bright October morning, I tracked their footsteps stage by stage back to the point at which I had lost them on the Italian frontier. In the course of my wanderings I met with a young Austrian officer who had seen them at Milan and had ventured to pay the lady some harmless attentions. He told me that he had never seen anything so appalling as Levison’s jealousy; not an open fury but a concentrated silent rage, which gave an almost devilish expression to the man’s parchment face. He watched his wife like a lynx and did not allow her a moment’s freedom from his presence. Everyone who met them pitied the beautiful girlish wife, whose misery was so evident; every one loathed her tyrant. I found that the story of the servants and the travelling carriage was a lie. The Levisons had been attended by no servants at any of the hotels where I heard of them and had travelled always in public or in hired vehicles. The ultimate result of my enquiries left me little doubt that the dead woman was Laura Levison; and from that hour to this I have been employed, more or less, in the endeavour to find the man who murdered her.’

  ‘And you have not been able to discover his whereabouts?’ asked Frank Lorrimore.

  ‘Not yet. I am looking for him.’

  ‘A useless quest, Horace. What would be the result of your finding him? You have no proof to offer of his guilt. You would not take the law into your own hands?’

  ‘By the Heaven above me, I would!’ answered the other, fiercely. ‘I would shoot that man down with as little compunction as I would kill a mad dog.’

  ‘I hope you may never meet him,’ said Frank solemnly.

  Horace Wynward gave a short impatient sigh and paced the room for some time in silence. His share in the breakfast had been a mere pretence. He had emptied his coffee-cup but had eaten nothing.

  ‘I am going back to London this afternoon, Frank.’

  ‘On the hunt for this man?’

  ‘Yes. My agent sent me a description of a man calling himself Lewis, a bill-discounter, who has lately set up an office in the City and whom I believe to be Michael Levison.’

  * * *

  The office occupied by Mr Lewis, the bill-discounter, was a dismal enough place, consisting of a second floor in a narrow alley called St Guinevere’s Lane. Horace Wynward presented himself at this office about a week after his arrival in London, in the character of a gentleman in difficulties.

  He found Mr Lewis exactly the kind of man he expected to see: a man of about fifty with small crafty black eyes shining out of a sallow visage that was as dull and lifeless as a parchment mask, thin lips and a heavy jaw and bony chin that betokened no small amount of power for evil.

  Mr Wynward presented himself under his own name. On hearing which the bill-discounter looked up at him suddenly with an exclamation of surprise.

  ‘You know my name?’ said Horace.

  ‘Yes. I have heard your name before. I thought you were a rich man.’

  ‘I have a good estate, but I have been rather imprudent and am short of ready money. Where and when did you hear my name, Mr Lewis?’

  ‘I don’t remember that. The name sounds familiar to me, that is all.’

  ‘But you have heard of me as a rich man, you say?’

  ‘I had an impression to that effect. But the circumstances under which I heard the name have quite escaped my memory.’

  Horace pushed the question no further. He played his cards very carefully, leading the usurer to believe that he had secured a profitable prey. The preliminaries of a loan were discussed but nothing fully settled. Before leaving the money-lender’s office Horace Wynward invited Mr Lewis to dine with him at his lodgings in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly on the following evening. After a few minutes’ reflection Lewis accepted the invitation.

  He made his appearance at the appointed hour, dressed in a suit of shabby black in which his sallow complexion looked more than usually parchment-like and ghastly. The door was opened by Horace Wynward in person, and the money-lender was surprised to find himself in an almost empty house.

  In the hall and on the staircase there were no signs of occupation whatever; but, in the dining-room, to which Horace immediately ushered his guest, there was a table ready laid for dinner, a couple of chairs and a dumb-waiter loaded with the appliances of the meal. The dishes and sauce tureens were on a hot plate in the fender. The room was dimly lighted by four wax candles in a tarnished candelabrum.

  Mr Lewis, the money-lender, looked around him with a shudder; there was something sinister in the aspect of the room.

  ‘It’s rather a dreary-looking place, I’m afraid,’ said Horace Wynward. ‘I’ve only just taken the house, you see, and have had in a few sticks of hired furniture to keep me going till I make arrangements with an upholsterer. But you’ll excuse all shortcomings, I’m sure – bachelor fare, you know.’

  ‘I thought you said you were in lodgings, Mr Wynward.’

  ‘Did I?’ asked the other, absently. ‘A mere slip of the tongue. I took this house on lease a week ago and am going to furnish it as soon as I am in funds.’

  ‘And are you positively alone here?’ enquired Mr Lewis, rather suspiciously.

  ‘Well, very nearly so. There is a charwoman somewhere in the depths below, as deaf as a post and almost as useless. But you needn’t be frightened about your dinner; I ordered it in from a confectioner in Piccadilly. We must wait upon ourselves, you know, in a free and easy way, for that dirty old woman would take away our appetites.’

  He lifted the cover of the soup tureen as he spoke. The visitor seated himself at the table with rather a nervous air and glanced more than once in the direction of the shutters, which were closely fastened with heavy bars. He began to think there was something alarmingly eccentric in the conduct and manner of his host, and was inclined to repent having accepted the invitation, profitable as his new client promised to be.

  The dinner was excellent, the wines of the finest quality; and, after drinking somewhat freely, Mr Lewis began to be better reconciled to his position. He was a little disconcerted, however, on perceiving that his host scarcely touched either the viands or the wine, and that those deep-set grey eyes were lifted every now and then to his face with a strangely observant look. When dinner was over, Mr Wynward heaped the dishes on the dumb-waiter, wheeled it into the next room with his own hands and came back to his seat at the table opposite the billdiscounter, who sat meditatively sipping his claret.

  Horace filled his glass but remained for some time silent, without once lifting it to his lips. His companio
n watched him nervously, every moment more impressed with the belief that there was something wrong in his new client’s mind and bent on making a speedy escape. He finished his claret, looked at his watch and rose hastily.

  ‘I think I must wish you good-night, Mr Wynward. I am a man of early habits and have some distance to go. My lodgings are at Brompton, nearly an hour’s ride from here.’

  ‘Stay,’ said Horace. ‘We have not begun business yet. It’s only nine o’clock. I want an hour’s quiet talk with you, Mr Levison.’

  The bill-discounter’s face changed. It was almost impossible for that pallid mask of parchment to grow paler, but a sudden ghastliness came over the man’s evil countenance.

  ‘My name is Lewis,’ he said, with an artificial grin.

  ‘Lewis, or Levison. Men of your trade have as many names as they please. When you were travelling in Switzerland two years ago your name was Levison; when you married Laura Daventry your name was Levison.’

  ‘You are under some absurd mistake, sir. The name of Levison is strange to me.’

  ‘Is the name of Daventry strange to you, too? You recognized my name yesterday. When you first heard it, I was a happy man, Michael Levison. The blight upon me is your work. Oh, I know you well enough and am provided with ample means for your identification. I have followed you step by step upon your travels – tracked you to the inn from which you set out one October morning nearly a year ago with a companion who was never seen alive by mortal eyes after that date. You are a good German scholar, Mr Levison. Read that.’

  Horace Wynward took out of his pocket-book the paragraph cut from the German paper and laid it before his visitor. The bill-discounter pushed it away after a hasty glance at its contents.

  ‘What has this to do with me?’ he asked.

  ‘A great deal, Mr Levison. The hapless woman described in that paragraph was once your wife: Laura Daventry, the girl I loved and who returned my love; the girl whom you basely stole from me by trading on her natural affection for a weak, unworthy father and whose life you made wretched until it was foully ended by your own cruel hand. If I had stood behind you upon that lonely mountain pathway in the Tyrol and had seen you hurl your victim to destruction I could not be more convinced than I am that your hand did the deed; but such crimes as these are difficult – in this case perhaps impossible – to prove, and I fear you will escape the gallows. There are other circumstances in your life, however, more easily brought to light; and by the aid of a clever detective I have made myself master of some curious secrets in your past existence. I know the name you bore some fifteen years ago, before you settled in Trinidad as a merchant. You were at that time called Michael Lucas, and you fled from this country with a large sum of money embezzled from your employers, Messrs Hardwell and Oliphant, sugar-brokers in Nicholas Lane. You have been “wanted” a long time, Mr Levison; but you would most likely have gone scot-free to the end had I not set my agent to hunt you and your antecedents.’