§4

The Old Man in the Corner paused in his narrative. He drank half a glass of milk, smacked his lips, and for a few moments appeared intent on examining one of the complicated knots which he had made in his bit of string. Then after a while he resumed.

"The one member of the Levison family," he said, "for whom every one felt sorry was the eldest son Aaron. Like most men of his race he had been very fond of his mother, not because of any affection she may have shown him but just because she was his mother. He had worked hard for her all his life, and now through her death he found himself very much left out in the cold. It seems that by her will the old lady left all her savings, which, it seems, were considerable, and a certain share in the business, to Reuben, whilst to Aaron she only left the business nominally, with a great many charges on it in the way of pensions and charitable bequests and whatever was due to Reuben.

"But here I am digressing, as the matter of the will was not touched upon until later on, but there is no doubt that Aaron knew from the first that it would be Reuben who would primarily benefit by their mother's death. Nevertheless, he did not speak bitterly about his brother, and nothing that he said could be construed into possible suspicion of Reuben. He looked just a big lump of good nature, splendidly built, with the shoulders and gait of an athlete, but with an expression of settled melancholy in his face, and a dull, rather depressing voice. Seeing him there, gentle, almost apologetic, trying to explain away everything that might in any way cast a reflection upon his wife's conduct, one realised easily enough the man's position in the family—a kind of good-natured beast of burden, who would do all the work and never receive a 'thank you' in return.

"He was not able to throw much light on the horrible tragedy. He, too, had been at the dinner-table when the quarrel occurred, but directly after dinner he had been obliged to return to the shop, it being Saturday night and business very brisk. He had only one assistant to help him, who left at nine o'clock, after putting up the shutters: but he himself remained in the shop until ten o'clock to put things away and make up the books. He heard the taxi being called, and his wife and brother going off to the ball; he was not quite sure as to when that was, but he dared say it was somewhere near half-past nine.

"As nothing of special value had been pledged that day in the course of business, he had no occasion to go and speak with his mother before going up to bed and, on the whole he thought that, as she might still be rather sore and irritable, it would be best not to disturb her again, he did just knock at her door and called out 'good-night, mother.' But hearing no reply he thought she must already have been asleep.

"In answer to the coroner Aaron Levison further said that he had slept in the spare room at the top of the house for some time, as his wife was often very late coming home, and he did not like to have his night's rest broken. He had gone up to bed at ten o'clock and had neither seen nor heard anything in the house until six o'clock in the morning when the screams of the maid down below had roused him from his sleep and made him jump out of bed in double-quick time.

"Although Aaron's evidence was more or less of a formal character, and he spoke very quietly without any show either of swagger or of spite, one could not help feeling that the elements of drama and of mystery connected with this remarkable case were rather accentuated than diminished by what he said. Thus one was more or less prepared for those further developments which brought one's excitement and interest in the case to their highest point.

"Recalled, and pressed by the coroner to try and memorise every event, however trifling, that occurred on that Saturday evening, Ida Griggs, the maid, said that, soon after that she had dropped to sleep, she woke with the feeling that she had heard some kind of noise, but what it was she could not define: it might have been a bang, or a thud, or a scream. At the time she thought nothing of it, whatever it was, because while she lay awake for a few minutes afterwards, the house was absolutely still; but a moment or two later she certainly heard the window of Mrs. Levison's room being thrown open.

"'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 another 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's 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 witness 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 Old Man in the Corner went on with a grin, "in view of the tragedy occurring so much later, it did not appear so at the time. But it brought in an altogether fresh element of conjecture, and while the police asked for an adjournment pending fresh enquiries, the public was left to ponder over the many puzzles and contradictions that the case presented. Whichever 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 afterward 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 Old 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 Mrs. Levison's death—but as she was neither a cat, nor a night moth, she could not possibly have ascended from a first floor 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 that 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 some one 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 to 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 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 wash-stand and falling—falling—whilst the son gazes down, frantic and horror-struck 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's 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 door 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 every one 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."