2
Of course, everyone expected that the inquest would reveal something of the murdered man’s inner life – would, in fact, allow the over-eager public to get a peep into Mr Mark Culledon’s secret orchard, wherein walked a lady who wore abnormally large velvet hats, and who nourished in her heart one of those terrible grudges against a man which can only find satisfaction in crime.
Equally, of course, the inquest revealed nothing that the public did not already know. The young widow was extremely reticent on the subject of her late husband’s life, and the servants had all been fresh arrivals when the young couple, just home from their honeymoon, organised their new household at Lorbury House.
There was an old aunt of the deceased – a Mrs Steinberg – who lived with the Culledons, but who at the present moment was very ill. Someone in the house – one of the younger servants, probably – very foolishly had told her every detail of the awful tragedy. With positively amazing strength, the invalid thereupon insisted on making a sworn statement, which she desired should be placed before the coroner’s jury. She wished to bear solemn testimony to the integrity of her late nephew, Mark Culledon, in case the personality of the mysterious woman in the big hat suggested to evilly disposed minds any thought of scandal.
‘Mark Culledon was the one nephew whom I loved,’ she stated with solemn emphasis. ‘I have shown my love for him by bequeathing to him the large fortune which I inherited from the late Mr Steinberg. Mark was the soul of honour, or I should have cut him out of my will as I did my other nephews and nieces. I was brought up in a Scotch home, and I hate all this modern fastness and smartness, which are only other words for what I call profligacy.’
Needless to say, the old lady’s statement, solemn though it was, was of no use whatever for the elucidation of the mystery which surrounded the death of Mr Mark Culledon. But as Mrs Steinberg had talked of ‘other nephews’, whom she had cut out of her will in favour of the murdered man, the police directed inquiries in those various quarters.
Mr Mark Culledon certainly had several brothers and sisters, also cousins, who at different times – usually for some peccadillo or other – seemed to have incurred the wrath of the strait-laced old lady. But there did not appear to have been any ill-feeling in the family owing to this. Mrs Steinberg was sole mistress of her fortune. She might just as well have bequeathed it in toto to some hospital as to one particular nephew whom she favoured, and the various relations were glad, on the whole, that the money was going to remain in the family rather than be cast abroad.
The mystery surrounding the woman in the big hat deepened as the days went by. As you know, the longer the period of time which elapses between a crime and the identification of the criminal, the greater chance the latter has of remaining at large.
In spite of strenuous efforts and close questionings of every one of the employees at Mathis’, no one could give a very accurate description of the lady who had tea with the deceased on that fateful afternoon.
The first glimmer of light on the mysterious occurrence was thrown, about three weeks later, by a young woman named Katherine Harris, who had been parlour-maid at Lorbury House when first Mr and Lady Irene Culledon returned from their honeymoon.
I must tell you that Mrs Steinberg had died a few days after the inquest. The excitement had been too much for her enfeebled heart. Just before her death she had deposited £250 with her banker, which sum was to be paid over to any person giving information which would lead to the apprehension and conviction of the murderer of Mr Mark Culledon.
This offer had stimulated everyone’s zeal, and, I presume, had aroused Katherine Harris to a realisation of what had all the while been her obvious duty.
Lady Molly saw her in the chief’s private office, and had much ado to disentangle the threads of the girl’s confused narrative. But the main point of Harris’s story was that a foreign lady had once called at Lorbury House, about a week after the master and mistress had returned from their honeymoon. Lady Irene was out at the time, and Mr Culledon saw the lady in his smoking-room.
‘She was a very handsome lady,’ explained Harris, ‘and was beautifully dressed.’
‘Did she wear a large hat?’ asked the chief.
‘I don’t remember if it was particularly large,’ replied the girl.
‘But you remember what the lady was like?’ suggested Lady Molly.
‘Yes, pretty well. She was very, very tall, and very good-looking.’
‘Would you know her again if you saw her?’ rejoined my dear lady.
‘Oh, yes; I think so,’ was Katherine Harris’s reply.
Unfortunately, beyond this assurance the girl could say nothing very definite. The foreign lady seems to have been closeted with Mr Culledon for about an hour, at the end of which time Lady Irene came home.
The butler being out that afternoon it was Harris who let her mistress in, and as the latter asked no questions, the girl did not volunteer the information that her master had a visitor. She went back to the servants’ hall, but five minutes later the smoking-room bell rang, and she had to run up again. The foreign lady was then in the hall alone, and obviously waiting to be shown out. This Harris did, after which Mr Culledon came out of his room, and, in the girl’s own graphic words, ‘he went on dreadful’.
‘I didn’t know I ’ad done anything so very wrong,’ she explained, ‘but the master seemed quite furious, and said I wasn’t a proper parlour-maid, or I’d have known that visitors must not be shown in straight away like that. I ought to have said that I didn’t know if Mr Culledon was in; that I would go and see. Oh, he did go on at me!’ continued Katherine Harris, volubly. ‘And I suppose he complained to the mistress, for she give me notice the next day.’
‘And you have never seen the foreign lady since?’ concluded Lady Molly.
‘No; she never come while I was there.’
‘By the way, how did you know she was foreign? Did she speak like a foreigner?’
‘Oh, no,’ replied the girl. ‘She did not say much – only asked for Mr Culledon – but she looked French like.’
This unanswerable bit of logic concluded Katherine’s statement. She was very anxious to know whether, if the foreign lady was hanged for murder, she herself would get the £250.
On Lady Molly’s assurance that she certainly would, she departed in apparent content.
3
‘Well! we are no nearer than we were before,’ said the chief, with an impatient sigh, when the door had closed behind Katherine Harris.
‘Don’t you think so?’ rejoined Lady Molly, blandly.
‘Do you consider that what we have heard just now has helped us to discover who was the woman in the big hat?’ retorted the chief, somewhat testily.
‘Perhaps not,’ replied my dear lady, with her sweet smile; ‘but it may help us to discover who murdered Mr Culledon.’
With which enigmatical statement she effectually silenced the chief, and finally walked out of his office, followed by her faithful Mary.
Following Katherine Harris’s indications, a description of the lady who was wanted in connection with the murder of Mr Culledon was very widely circulated, and within two days of the interview with the ex-parlour-maid another very momentous one took place in the same office.
Lady Molly was at work with the chief over some reports, whilst I was taking shorthand notes at a side desk, when a card was brought in by one of the men, and the next moment, without waiting either for permission to enter or to be more formally announced, a magnificent apparition literally sailed into the dust-covered little back office, filling it with an atmosphere of Parma violets and Russia leather.
I don’t think that I had ever seen a more beautiful woman in my life. Tall, with a splendid figure and perfect carriage, she vaguely reminded me of the portraits one sees of the late Empress of Austria. This lady was, moreover, dressed to perfection,
and wore a large hat adorned with a quantity of plumes.
The chief had instinctively risen to greet her, whilst Lady Molly, still and placid, was eyeing her with a quizzical smile.
‘You know who I am, sir,’ began the visitor as soon as she had sunk gracefully into a chair; ‘my name is on that card. My appearance, I understand, tallies exactly with that of a woman who is supposed to have murdered Mark Culledon.’
She said this so calmly, with such perfect self-possession, that I literally gasped. The chief, too, seemed to have been metaphorically lifted off his feet. He tried to mutter a reply.
‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself, sir!’ she interrupted him, with a smile. ‘My landlady, my servant, my friends have all read the description of the woman who murdered Mr Culledon. For the past twenty-four hours I have been watched by your police, therefore I have come to you of my own accord, before they came to arrest me in my flat. I am not too soon, am I?’ she asked, with that same cool indifference which was so startling, considering the subject of her conversation.
She spoke English with a scarcely perceptible foreign accent, but I quite understood what Katherine Harris had meant when she said that the lady looked ‘French like’. She certainly did not look English, and when I caught sight of her name on the card, which the chief had handed to Lady Molly, I put her down at once as Viennese. Miss Elizabeth Löwenthal had all the charm, the grace, the elegance, which one associates with Austrian women more than with those of any other nation.
No wonder the chief found it difficult to tell her that, as a matter of fact, the police were about to apply for a warrant that very morning for her arrest on a charge of wilful murder .
‘I know – I know,’ she said, seeming to divine his thoughts; ‘but let me tell you at once, sir, that I did not murder Mark Culledon. He treated me shamefully, and I would willingly have made a scandal just to spite him; he had become so respectable and strait-laced. But between scandal and murder there is a wide gulf. Don’t you think so, madam?’ she added, turning for the first time towards Lady Molly.
‘Undoubtedly,’ replied my dear lady, with the same quizzical smile.
‘A wide gulf which, no doubt, Miss Elizabeth Löwenthal will best be able to demonstrate to the magistrate tomorrow,’ rejoined the chief, with official sternness of manner.
I thought that, for the space of a few seconds, the lady lost her self-assurance at this obvious suggestion – the bloom on her cheeks seemed to vanish, and two hard lines appeared between her fine eyes. But, frightened or not, she quickly recovered herself, and said quietly:
‘Now, my dear sir, let us understand one another. I came here for that express purpose. I take it that you don’t want your police to look ridiculous any more than I want a scandal. I don’t want detectives to hang about round my flat, questioning my neighbours and my servants. They would soon find out that I did not murder Mark Culledon, of course; but the atmosphere of the police would hang round me, and I – I prefer Parma violets,’ she added, raising a daintily perfumed handkerchief to her nose.
‘Then you have come to make a statement?’ asked the chief.
‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘I’ll tell you all I know. Mr Culledon was engaged to marry me; then he met the daughter of an earl, and thought he would like her better as a wife than a simple Miss Löwenthal. I suppose I should be considered an undesirable match for a young man who has a highly respectable and snobbish aunt, who would leave him all her money only on the condition that he made a suitable marriage. I have a voice, and I came over to England two years ago to study English, so that I might sing in oratorio at the Albert Hall. I met Mark on the Calais-Dover boat, when he was returning from a holiday abroad. He fell in love with me, and presently he asked me to be his wife. After some demur, I accepted him; we became engaged, but he told me that our engagement must remain a secret, for he had an old aunt from whom he had great expectations, and who might not approve of his marrying a foreign girl, who was without connections and a professional singer. From that moment I mistrusted him, nor was I very astonished when gradually his affection for me seemed to cool. Soon after, he informed me, quite callously, that he had changed his mind, and was going to marry some swell English lady. I didn’t care much, but I wanted to punish him by making a scandal, you understand. I went to his house just to worry him, and finally I decided to bring an action for breach of promise against him. It would have upset him, I know; no doubt his aunt would have cut him out of her will. That is all I wanted, but I did not care enough about him to murder him.’
Somehow her tale carried conviction. We were all of us obviously impressed. The chief alone looked visibly disturbed, and I could read what was going on in his mind.
‘As you say, Miss Löwenthal,’ he rejoined, ‘the police would have found all this out within the next few hours. Once your connection with the murdered man was known to us, the record of your past and his becomes an easy one to peruse. No doubt, too,’ he added insinuatingly, ‘our men would soon have been placed in possession of the one undisputable proof of your complete innocence with regard to that fateful afternoon spent at Mathis’ café.’
‘What is that?’ she queried blandly.
‘An alibi.’
‘You mean, where I was during the time that Mark was being murdered in a teashop?’
‘Yes,’ said the chief.
‘I was out for a walk,’ she replied quietly.
‘Shopping, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘You met someone who would remember the circumstance – or your servants could say at what time you came in?’
‘No,’ she repeated dryly; ‘I met no one, for I took a brisk walk on Primrose Hill. My two servants could only say that I went out at three o’clock that afternoon and returned after five.’
There was silence in the little office for a moment or two. I could hear the scraping of the pen with which the chief was idly scribbling geometrical figures on his blotting pad.
Lady Molly was quite still. Her large, luminous eyes were fixed on the beautiful woman who had just told us her strange story, with its unaccountable sequel, its mystery which had deepened with the last phrase which she had uttered. Miss Löwenthal, I felt sure, was conscious of her peril. I am not sufficiently a psychologist to know whether it was guilt or merely fear which was distorting the handsome features now, hardening the face and causing the lips to tremble.
Lady Molly scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper, which she then passed over to the chief. Miss Löwenthal was making visible efforts to steady her nerves.
‘That is all I have to tell you,’ she said, in a voice which sounded dry and harsh. ‘I think I will go home now.’
But she did not rise from her chair, and seemed to hesitate as if fearful lest permission to go were not granted her.
To her obvious astonishment – and, I must add, to my own – the chief immediately rose and said, quite urbanely:
‘I thank you very much for the helpful information which you have given me. Of course, we may rely on your presence in town for the next few days, may we not?’
She seemed greatly relieved, and all at once resumed her former charm of manner and elegance of attitude. The beautiful face was lit up by a smile.
The chief was bowing to her in quite a foreign fashion, and in spite of her visible reassurance she eyed him very intently. Then she went up to Lady Molly and held out her hand.
My dear lady took it without an instant’s hesitation. I, who knew that it was the few words hastily scribbled by Lady Molly which had dictated the chief’s conduct with regard to Miss Löwenthal, was left wondering whether the woman I loved best in all the world had been shaking hands with a murderess.
4
No doubt you will remember the sensation which was caused by the arrest of Miss Löwenthal, on a charge of having murdered Mr Mark Culledon, by administering morphia to him in a cup of choco
late at Mathis’ café in Regent Street.
The beauty of the accused, her undeniable charm of manner, the hitherto blameless character of her life, all tended to make the public take violent sides either for or against her, and the usual budget of amateur correspondence, suggestions, recriminations and advice poured into the chief’s office in titanic proportions.
I must say that, personally, all my sympathies went out to Miss Löwenthal. As I have said before, I am no psychologist, but I had seen her in the original interview at the office, and I could not get rid of an absolutely unreasoning certitude that the beautiful Viennese singer was innocent.
The magistrate’s court was packed, as you may well imagine, on that first day of the inquiry; and, of course, sympathy with the accused went up to fever pitch when she staggered into the dock, beautiful still, despite the ravages caused by horror, anxiety, fear, in face of the deadly peril in which she stood.
The magistrate was most kind to her; her solicitor was unimpeachably assiduous; even our fellows, who had to give evidence against her, did no more than their duty, and were as lenient in their statements as possible.
Miss Löwenthal had been arrested in her flat by Danvers, accompanied by two constables. She had loudly protested her innocence all along, and did so still, pleading ‘Not guilty’ in a firm voice.
The great points in favour of the arrest were, firstly, the undoubted motive of disappointment and revenge against a faithless sweetheart, then the total inability to prove any kind of alibi, which, under the circumstances, certainly added to the appearance of guilt.
The question of where the fatal drug was obtained was more difficult to prove. It was stated that Mr Mark Culledon was director of several important companies, one of which carried on business as wholesale druggists.
Therefore it was argued that the accused, at different times and under some pretext or other, had obtained drugs from Mr Culledon himself. She had admitted to having visited the deceased at his office in the City, both before and after his marriage.
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