Part 7

"That robbery had been the main motive of the crime was quickly enough established. The Smithsons--mother and daughter--had at once supplied the detective in charge of the case with proofs as to that.

"It seems that as soon as the unfortunate Prince had become engaged to Louisa, he asked that the marriage should take place without delay. He explained that his dearest friend, Mr. Schumann, the great international financier, had offered him shares in one of the greatest post-war undertakings which had ever been floated in Europe, and which would bring in to the fortunate shareholders a net income of not less than ten thousand pounds yearly for every ten thousand pounds invested; Mr. Schumann himself owned one-half of all the shares, and had, by a most wonderful act of disinterested generosity, allowed his bosom friend, Prince Orsoff, to have a few--a concession, by the way, which he had only granted to two other favoured personages, one being the Prince of Wales and the other the President of the French Republic. Of course to receive ten thousand pounds yearly for every ten thousand pounds invested, was too wonderful for words; the President of the French Republic had been so delighted with this chance of securing a fortune that he had put two million francs into the concern, and the Prince of Wales had put in five hundred thousand pounds.

"And it was so wonderfully secure, as otherwise the British Government would not have allowed the Prince of Wales to invest such a sum of money if the business was only speculative. Security and fortune beyond the dreams of thrift! It was positively dazzling.

"No wonder that this vision of untold riches made poor Mrs. Smithson's mouth water, the more so as she was quite shrewd enough to realise that, at the rate she was going, her share in the fifteen thousand pounds left by the late worthy grocer would soon fade into nothingness. In the past few months she and Louisa had spent considerably over four thousand pounds between them, and once her daughter was married to a quasi-royal personage, good old Mrs. Smithson did not see herself retiring into comparative obscurity on a few hundreds a year to be jeered at by all her friends.

"So she and Louisa talked the matter over together, and then they talked it over with Prince Orsoff on the occasion of his visit about ten days before the wedding. The Prince at first was very doubtful if the great Mr. Schumann would be willing to make a further sacrifice in the cause of friendship. He was an international financier accustomed to deal in millions; he would not look favourably--the Prince feared--at a few thousands. Mrs. Smithson's entire fortune now only consisted of about five thousand pounds; this she was unwilling to admit to the wealthy and aristocratic future son-in-law. So the two ladies decided to pool their capital and then they begged that Prince Orsoff should ask the great Mr. Schumann whether he would condescend to receive ten thousand pounds for investment in Mrs. Smithson's name in his great undertaking.

"Fortunately the great financier did condescend to do this--he really was more a philanthropist than a business man--but, of course, he could not be kept waiting, the money must reach him in Paris not later than May twentieth, which was the very day fixed for the wedding.

"It was all terribly difficult; and Mrs. Smithson was at first in despair as she feared she could not arrange to sell out her securities in time, and the difficulties were increased an hundredfold because, as Prince Orsoff explained to her, Mr. Schumann would even at the eleventh hour refuse to allow her to participate in the huge fortune if he found that she had talked about the affair over in England. The business had to be kept a profound secret for international reasons, in fact, if any detail relating to the business and to Mr. Schumann's participation in it were to become known, the whole of Europe would once more be plunged into war.

"To make a long story short, Mrs. Smithson and Louisa sold out all their securities, amounting between them to ten thousand pounds. Then they went up to London, drew the money out of their bank, changed it themselves into French money--so as to make it more convenient for Mr. Schumann--and handed the entire sum over to Prince Orsoff on the eve of the wedding.

"Of course such fatuous imbecility would be unbelievable if it did not occur so frequently: vain, silly women, who have never moved outside their own restricted circle, are always the ready prey of plausible rascals.

"Anyway, in this case the Smithsons returned to Folkestone that day, perfectly happy and with never a thought of anything but contentment for the present and prosperity in the future. The wedding was to be the next day; the bridegroom-elect was coming down by the midday train with his best man, whom he vaguely described as secretary to the Russian Embassy, and the bridal pair would start for Paris by the afternoon boat.

"All this the Smithsons related to the police inspector in charge of the case and subsequently to the Scotland Yard detective, with a wealth of detail and a profusion of lamentations not unmixed with expletives directed against the unknown assassin and thief. For indeed there was no doubt in the minds of Louisa and her mother that the unfortunate Prince, on whom the girl still lavished the wealth of her trustful love, had been murdered for the sake of the money which he had upon his person.

"It must have amounted to millions of francs, Mrs. Smithson declared, for he had the Prince of Wales's money upon him also, and probably that of the President of the French Republic, and at first she and Louisa fastened their suspicions upon the anonymous best man, the so-called secretary of the Russian Embassy. Even when they were presently made to realise that there was no such thing as a Russian Embassy in London these days, and that minute enquiries both at home and abroad regarding the identity of a Prince Orsoff led to no result whatever, they repudiated with scorn the suggestion put forth by the police that their beloved Russian Prince was nothing more or less than a clever crook who had led them by the nose, and that in all probability he had not been murdered in the train but had succeeded in jumping out of it and making good his escape across country.

"This the Smithson ladies would not admit for a moment, and with commendable logic they argued that if Prince Orsoff had been a crook and had intended to make away with their money he could have done that easily enough without getting into a train at Victoria and jumping out of it at Sydenham Hill.

"Pressed with questions, however, the ladies were forced to admit that they knew absolutely nothing about Prince Orsoff, they had never been introduced to any of his relations, nor had they met any of his friends. They did not even know where he had been staying in London. He was in the habit of telephoning to Louisa every morning, and any arrangements for his visits down to The Towers or the ladies' trips up to town were made in that manner. As a matter of fact Louisa and her future husband had not met more than a dozen times altogether, on some five or six occasions in Monte Carlo, and not more than six in England. It had been a case of love at first sight.

"The question of Mr. Schumann's vast undertaking was first discussed at The Towers. After that the ladies wrote to their bank to sell out their securities, and subsequently went up to town for a couple of days to draw out their money, change it into French currency, and finally hand it over to Prince Orsoff. On that occasion he had met them at Victoria Station and taken them to a quiet hotel in Kensington, where he had engaged a suite of rooms for them. All financial matters were then settled in their private sitting-room.

"In answer to enquiries at that hotel, one or two of the employees distinctly remembered the foreign-looking gentleman who had called on Mrs. and Miss Smithson, lunched with them in their sitting-room that day, and saw them into their cab when they went away the following afternoon. One or two of the station porters at Victoria also vaguely remembered a man who answered to the description given of Prince Orsoff by the Smithson ladies: tall, with a slight stoop, wearing pince-nez, and with a profusion of dark, curly hair, bushy eyebrows, long, dark moustache, and old-fashioned imperial, which made him distinctly noticeable, he could not very well have passed unperceived.

"Unfortunately, on the actual day of the murder, not one man employed at Victoria Station could swear positively to having seen him, either alone or in the company of another foreigner; and the latter has remained a problematical personage to this day.

"But the Smithson ladies remained firm in their loyalty to their Russian Prince. Had they dared they would openly have accused Henry Carter of the murder; as it was they threw out weird hints and insinuations about Henry who had more than once sworn that he would be even with his hated rival, and who had actually travelled down in the same train as the Prince on that fateful wedding morning, together with his brother John, who no doubt helped him in his nefarious deed. I believe that the unfortunate ladies actually spent some of the money which now they could ill spare in employing a private detective to collect proofs of Henry Carter's guilt.

"But not a tittle of evidence could be brought against him. To begin with, the train in which the murder was supposed to have been committed was a non-stop to Swanley. Then how could the Carters have disposed of the body? The Smithsons suggested a third miscreant as a possible confederate; but the same objection against that theory subsisted in the shape of the disposal of the body. The murder--if murder there was--occurred in broad daylight in a part of the country that certainly was not lonely. It was not possible to suppose that a man would stand waiting on the line close to Sydenham Hill station until a body was flung out to him from the passing train, and then drag that body about until he found a suitable place in which to bury it: and all that without being seen by the workmen on the line or employees on the railway, or in fact any passer-by. Therefore the hypothesis that Henry Carter or his brother murdered the Russian Prince with or without the help of a confederate was as untenable as that the Prince had travelled from Victoria to Sydenham Hill and there jumped out of the train, at risk of being discovered in the act, rather than disappear quietly in London, shave off his luxuriant hair, or assume any other convenient disguise, until he found an opportunity for slipping back to the Continent.

"But the Smithsons remained firm in their belief in the genuineness of their Prince and in their conviction that he had been murdered--if not by the Carters, then by the mysterious secretary to the Russian Embassy or any other Russian or German emissary, for political reasons.

"And thus the public was confronted with the two hypotheses, both of which led to a deadlock. No sensible person doubted that the so-called Russian Prince was a crook, and that he had a confederate to help him in his clever plot, but the mystery remained as to how the rascal or rascals disappeared so completely as to checkmate every investigation. The travelling by train that morning and setting the scene for a supposed murder was, of course, part of the plan, but it was the plan that was so baffling, because to an ordinary mind that disappearance could have been effected so much more easily and with far less risk without the train journey.

"Of course there was not a single passenger on that train who was not the subject of the closest watchfulness on the part of the police, but there was not one--not excluding the Carters--who could by any possible chance have known that the Prince carried a large sum of money upon his person. He was not likely to have confided the fact to a stranger, and the mystery of the vanished body was always there to refute the theory of an ordinary murderous attack for motives of robbery."

§4

The Old Man in the Corner ceased talking, and became once more absorbed in his favourite task of making knots in a bit of string.

"I see in the papers," I now put in thoughtfully, "that Miss Louisa Smithson has overcome her grief for the loss of her aristocratic lover by returning to the plebeian one."

"Yes," the funny creature replied dryly, "she is marrying Henry Carter. Funny, isn't it? But women are queer fish! One moment she looked on the man as a murderer, now, by marrying him, she actually proclaims her belief in his innocence."

"It certainly was abundantly proved," I rejoined, "that Henry Carter could not possibly have murdered Prince Orsoff."

"It was also abundantly proved," he retorted, "that no one else murdered the so-called Prince."

"You think, of course, that he was an ordinary impostor?" I asked.

"An impostor, yes," he replied, "but not an ordinary one. In fact I take off my hat to as clever a pair of scamps as I have ever come across."

"A pair?"

"Why, yes! It could not have been done alone!"

"But the police..."

"The police," the spook-like creature broke in with a sharp cackle, "know more in this case than you give them credit for. They know well enough the solution of the puzzle which appears so baffling to the public, but they have not sufficient proof to effect an arrest. At one time they hoped that the scoundrels would presently make a false move and give themselves away, in which case they could be prosecuted for defrauding the Smithsons of ten thousand pounds, but this eventuality has become complicated through the master-stroke of genius which made Henry Carter marry Louisa Smithson."

"Henry Carter?" I exclaimed. "Then you do think the Carters had something to do with the case?"

"They had everything to do with the case. In fact, they planned the whole thing in a masterly manner."

"But the Russian Prince at Monte Carlo?" I argued. "Who was he? If he was a confederate, where has he disappeared to?"

"He is still engaged in free-lance journalism," the Old Man in the Corner replied drily, "and in his spare moments changes parcels of French currency back into English notes."

"You mean the brother!" I ejaculated with a gasp.

"Of course I mean the brother," he retorted dryly, "who else could have been so efficient a collaborator in the plot? John Carter was comparatively his own master. He lived with Henry in the small house in Chelsea, waited on by a charwoman who came by the day. It was generally given out that his reporting work took him frequently and for lengthened stays out of London. The brothers, remember, had inherited a few hundreds from their father, while the Smithsons had inherited a few thousands. We must suppose that the idea of relieving the ladies of those thousands occurred to them as soon as they realised that Louisa, egged on by her mother, would cold-shoulder her fiancé.

"John Carter, mind you, must be a very clever man, else he could not have carried out all the details of the plot with so much sang-froid. We have been told, if you remember, that he had early in life cut his stick and gone to seek fortune in London, therefore the Smithsons, who had never been out of Folkestone, did not know him intimately. His make-up as the Prince must have been very good, and his histrionic powers not to be despised: his profession and life in London no doubt helped him in these matters. Then, remember also that he took very good care not to be a great deal in the Smithsons' company--even in Monte Carlo he only let them see him less than half a dozen times, and as soon as he came to England he hurried on the wedding as much as he could.

"Another fine stroke was Henry's apparent despair at being cut out of Louisa's affections, and his threats against his successful rival: it helped to draw suspicion on himself--suspicion which the scoundrels took good care could easily be disproved. Then take a pair of vain, credulous, unintelligent women and a smart rascal who knows how to flatter them, and you will see how easily the whole plot could be worked. Finally, when John Carter had obtained possession of the money, he and Henry arranged the supposed tragedy in the train and the Russian Prince's disappearance from the world as suddenly as he had entered it."

I thought the matter over for a moment or two. The solution of the mystery certainly appealed to my dramatic sense.

"But," I said at last, "one wonders why the Carters took the trouble to arrange a scene of a supposed murder in the train: they might quite well have been caught in the act, and in any case it was an additional unnecessary risk. John Carter might quite well have been content to shed his role of Russian Prince, without such an elaborate setting."

"Well," he admitted, "in some ways you are right there, but it is always difficult to gauge accurately the mentality of a clever scoundrel. In this case I don't suppose that the Carters had quite made up their minds about what they would do when they left London, but that the plan was in their heads is proved by the hat, pince-nez, and railway ticket which they took with them when they started, and which, if you remember, were found on the line: but it was probably only because the train was comparatively empty, and they had both time and opportunity in the non-stop train, that they decided to carry their clever comedy through.

"Then think what an immense advantage in their future plans would be the Smithsons' belief in the death of their Prince. Probably Louisa would never have dreamed of marrying if she thought her aristocratic lover was an impostor and still alive: she would never have let the matter rest; her mind would for ever have been busy with trying to trace him, and bring him back, repentant, to her feet. You know what women are when they are in love with that type of scoundrel, they cling to them with the tenacity of a leech. But once she believed the man to be dead, Louisa Smithson gradually got over her grief and Henry Carter wooed and won her on the rebound. She was poor now, and her friends had quickly enough deserted her: she was touched by the fidelity of her simple lover, and he thus consolidated his position and made the future secure.

"Anyway," the Old Man in the Corner concluded, "I believe that it was with a view to making a future marriage possible between Louisa and Henry that the two brothers organised the supposed murder. Probably if the train had been full and they had seen danger in the undertaking they would not have done it. But the _mise en scène_ was easily enough set and it certainly was an additional safeguard. Now in another week or so Louisa Smithson will be Henry Carter's wife, and presently you will find that John in London, and Henry and his wife, will be quite comfortably off. And after that, whatever suspicions Mrs. Smithson may have of the truth, her lips would have to remain sealed. She could not very well prosecute her only child's husband.

"And so the matter will always remain a mystery to the public: but the police know more than they are able to admit because they have no proof.

"And now they never will have. But as to the murder in the train, well!--the murdered man never existed."

V

THE MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY IN BISHOP'S ROAD

§1

The Old Man in the Corner was in a philosophising mood that afternoon, and all the while that his thin, claw-like fingers fidgeted with the inevitable piece of string, he gave vent to various, disjointed, always sententious remarks.

Suddenly he said:

"We know, of course, that the world has gone dancing mad! But I doubt if the fashionable craze has ever been responsible before for so dark a tragedy as the death of old Sarah Levison. What do you think?"

"Well," I replied guardedly, for I knew that, whatever I might say, I should draw an avalanche of ironical remarks upon my innocent head, "I never have known what to think, and all the accounts of that brutal murder as they appeared in the cheaper Press only made the obscurity all the more obscure."

"That was a wise and well-thought-out reply," the aggravating creature retorted with a dry chuckle, "and a non-committal one at that. Obscurity is indeed obscure for those who won't take the trouble to think."

"I suppose it is all quite clear to you?" I said, with what I meant to be withering sarcasm.

"As clear as the proverbial daylight," he replied undaunted.

"You know how old Mrs. Levison came by her death?"

"Of course I do. I will tell you, if you like."

"By all means. But I am not prepared to be convinced," I added cautiously.

"No," he admitted, "but you soon will be. However, before we reach that happy conclusion, I shall have to marshal the facts before you, because a good many of these must have escaped your attention. Shall I proceed?"

"If you please."

"Well, then, do you remember all the personages in the drama?" he began.

"I think so."

"There were, of course, young Aaron Levison and his wife, Rebecca--the latter young, pretty, fond of pleasure, and above all of dancing, and he, a few years older, but still in the prime of life, more of an athlete than a business man, and yet tied to the shop in which he carried on the trade of pawnbroking for his mother. The latter, an old Jewess, shrewd and dictatorial, was the owner of the business: her son was not even her partner, only a well-paid clerk in her employ, and this fact we must suppose rankled in the mind of her smart daughter-in-law. At any rate, we know that there was no love lost between the two ladies; but the young couple and old Mrs. Levison and another unmarried son lived together in the substantial house over the shop in Bishop's Road.

"They had three servants and we are told that they lived well, old Mrs. Levison bearing the bulk of the cost of housekeeping. The younger son, Reuben, seems to have been something of a bad egg; he held at one time a clerkship in a bank, but was dismissed for insobriety and laziness; then after the war he was supposed to have bad health consequent on exposure in the trenches, and had not done a day's work since he was demobilised. But in spite, or perhaps because, of this, he was very markedly his mother's favourite; where the old woman would stint her hard-working, steady elder son, she would prove generous, even lavish, toward the loafer, Reuben; and young Mrs. Levison and he were thick as thieves.

"What money Reuben extracted out of his mother he would spend on amusements, and his sister-in-law was always ready to accompany him. It was either the cinema or dancing--oh, dancing above all! Rebecca Levison was, it seems, a beautiful dancer, and night after night she and Reuben would go to one or other of the halls or hotels where dancing was going on, and often they would not return until the small hours of the morning.

"Aaron Levison was indulgent and easy-going enough where his young wife was concerned: he thought that she could come to no harm while Reuben was there to look after her. But old Mrs. Levison, with the mistrust of her race for everything that is frivolous and thriftless, thought otherwise. She was convinced in her own mind that her beloved Reuben was being led astray from the path of virtue by his brother's wife, and she appears to have taken every opportunity to impress her thoughts and her fears upon the indulgent husband.