she was immensely flattered and thrilled by this romantic adventure,
until something he said, or didn't say, some expression or some
gesture--Winnie couldn't say what it was--but something seemed to
drag her back. Probably it was just sound Yorkshire common sense.
Anyway, she took fright, turned a deaf ear to Gerald Moville's
blandishments, and insisted on being taken back to her father's
cottage at once. Still to the accompaniment of a flood of tears
Winnie went on to say that Mr. Gerald 'carried on terribly' when she
finally refused to go away with him, and he reproached her bitterly
for having played with him, all the while that she was in love with
that 'dirty dago.' But Winnie was firm, and in the end the
disappointed lover had to turn the car back and take the girl home
again. It was then close upon nine o'clock. Mr. Gerald drove her to
within half a mile of her father's cottage; here she got out and
walked the rest of the way home. She had not seen Mr. Moville since;
on the other hand, one of the neighbours told her that soon after she
went off in the car that morning, Antonio Vissio had called at the
cottage, and seemed in a terrible way when he was told that she had
gone out with Mr. Moville.
"As you see the mystery was deepening. Instead of the one missing
man, there were now two who had disappeared, and the question was
what had become of Mr. Gerald Moville and his car. Enquiries at the
garage where it belonged brought no light upon the subject. The car
had not been returned, and nothing had been seen in Richmond of Mr.
Moville or the car. Enquiries were then telegraphed all over the
place, and twenty-four hours later the car was traced to a small
place called Falconblane, which is about twelve miles from Paisley,
where it was left at a garage late on the Wednesday night by a man
who had never since been to claim it. The people at the garage could
only give a vague description of this man. It was about eleven
o'clock, a very dark night, and just upon closing time. The man wore
a big motor coat and a cap with flaps over the ears; he had on a pair
of goggles, and the lower part of his face looked coated with grime.
It would be next to impossible to swear to his identity, but the
assistant who took charge of the car said that the man spoke broken
English.
"The police searched the car and found a hand-bag containing a number
of effects, such as a man would take with him if he was going on a
long train journey: brush and comb, a novel, a couple of
handkerchiefs, and so on. Some of these effects bore the initials
'G.M.'
"Pursuing their investigations further, the police discovered that a
man wearing a big motor coat, goggles, and a cap with flap ears had
taken a first-class ticket for Glasgow at Beith, which is a small
place on a local branch line, in the early morning of Thursday, and
had travelled to Glasgow by the 7.05 a.m. Glasgow being a very busy
terminus, no one appears to have noticed him there, but one of the
porters found a motor coat, a cap, and a pair of goggles in one of
the first-class carriages on the local from Beith, and a certain Mr.
Etty, who was a gentleman's outfitter in the Station Road, stated
that he had a customer in his shop early on Thursday morning who
purchased a tweed cap and an overcoat off the peg. He had come in
without either hat or coat, his face and hands were black with grime,
and his hair looked covered with coal dust. He explained that he was
an engineer who had been engaged all night on some salvage work down
the line where there had been a breakdown, and that he had somehow
lost his coat and his cap. He paid for the goods with a five-pound
note, which he took from a case out of his pocket, and the case
appeared to be bulging over with notes. Mr. Etty thought that he
might possibly be able to identify the man if he saw him again; one
thing he did note about him, and that was that he spoke broken
English.
"But from that moment, in spite of strenuous efforts on the part of
the police, all traces of the man with the dirty face, who spoke
broken English, vanished completely. And what's more, all trace of
Mr. Gerald Moville had also vanished. He did not go up to London,
and all this while his luggage was at the Carlton Hotel waiting to be
claimed. Nor was it ever claimed by him, because about a month after
that tragic Wednesday in September the body of Mr. Gerald Moville was
found in a 'gruff' or gully about three-quarters of a mile from the
Poacher's Leap. When I say that the body was found, I am wrong, for
it was only a part of the body, and that, of course, was completely
decomposed. The head was missing, and it was never found, in spite
of the most strenuous efforts on the part of professional and amateur
detectives, and lavish expenditure of money, thought, and trouble on
the part of Sir Timothy Moville. It lies buried, I imagine,
somewhere on the moor. The clothes, though sodden, were, however,
still recognisable, also the unfortunate man's wrist watch which had
stopped at five minutes past eleven, his cuff-links, and his signet
ring, which had fallen from his fleshless finger and lay beside it in
the 'gruff.'
"And about seventy yards higher up the gully a search party found a
knife of obviously foreign make, which still bore certain stains,
which scientific analysis proved to be human blood. That knife was
identified by Topcoat as the property of Vissio."
§4
The Old Man in the Corner had been silent for a little while, as was
his habit when he reached a certain stage of his narrative. At such
moments it always seemed as if nothing in the world interested him,
except the fashioning of innumerable and complicated knots in a bit
of string. It was my business to set him talking again.
"Of course, there was an inquest after that," I said casually.
"Yes, there was," he replied dryly, "but it revealed nothing that the
public did not already know. A few minor details--that was all. For
instance, it came to light that when Mr. Moville left home on that
fateful morning he was wearing the coat, cap, and goggles which were
subsequently found in the train at Glasgow Station. It was easy to
suppose that the murderer had stolen these from his victim; the cap
and goggles being especially useful for purposes of disguise. The
same supposition applies to money. Vissio, it was argued, had
probably only a few shillings in his pocket when in a moment of mad
jealousy he killed Gerald Moville. That, of course, was the
universally accepted theory; it was only desperate necessity that
pushed him on to robbing the dead. Topcoat and others who knew
Antonio well declared that he was quite harmless except where Winnie
Gooden was concerned; but it was more than likely that that morning
he was tortured by one of his jealous fits. He had hated Gerald
Moville from the first, and, according to the girl's own admissions,
she must have given him definite cause for jealousy. That very
morning he had called at her cottage and found that she had gone out
with his rival. Perhaps he knew that Moville was going away for
good. Perhaps he guessed that he would try and induce Winnie to go
with him. With such torturing fears in his heart, what wonder that
when he met his rival on the lonely moor he 'saw red' and used his
knife, as Southerners, unfortunately, are only too apt to do?
"The coroner's jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against
Antonio Vissio, and the police hold a warrant for his arrest. But
more than two years have gone by since then, and Vissio has succeeded
in eluding the police. For many weeks the public were deeply
interested in the mystery; the evening papers used to come out with
the headlines: 'Where is Antonio Vissio?' and one great daily offered
a reward of five hundred pounds for information that would lead to
his apprehension. But, as you know, it has all been in vain. The
public want to know how a man of unusual personality and speaking
broken English could possibly lie _perdu_ so long in this tight
little island.
"And if he did leave the country, then how did he do it? He hadn't
his passport with him, as that remained with his effects at Topcoat's
cottage. How then did he evade the passport officials at Glasgow or
any other port of embarkation? It is done sometimes, we all know
that, and in this case Vissio had four days' start before Topcoat
gave information to the police, but somehow the newspaper-reading
public felt that if Vissio got out of the country, something would
have betrayed him, some one would have seen him and furnished the
first clue that would lead to discovery.
"And so the disappearance of the Italian has been classed as one of
the unsolved mysteries in the annals of crime. But to me the only
point on which I am not absolutely clear (although even there I hold
a theory), is why Gerald Moville should have gone wandering about the
moor after he had parted from Winnie Gooden, and when he hadn't very
much time left to catch his train, if he didn't want to miss his
connection at Dalton. That point did strike Inspector Dodsworth of
the C.I.D., who had been sent down from London to assist the local
police in the investigation of the crime. I know Dodsworth very
well, and he and I discussed that point once or twice. Of course, I
was not going to give him the key to the whole mystery--a key, mind
you, which I had discovered for myself--but I didn't object to
talking over one or two of the minor details with the man, and I told
him that in my opinion Moville undoubtedly went out on the moor in
order to meet Vissio, and have it out with him on the subject of
Winnie.
"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 crowd, 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 entering 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 Old Man in the Corner retorted dryly, "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 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 chivied 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 Old 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 Ayres. 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; some one 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 consequence 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 at 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 would perhaps think all the more of him, when they
knew 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 his 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 Old 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