Unravelled Knots

by Baroness Orczy

  “The next morning at a little before six, Ida Griggs, the housemaid, having got up and dressed, prepared to go downstairs: but when she went to open her bedroom door she found it locked—locked on the outside. At first she thought that the other girls were playing her a silly trick, and, presently hearing the patter of their feet on the stairs, she pounded against the door with her fists. It took the others some time to understand what was amiss, but at last they did try the lock on the outside, and found that the key had been turned and that Ida was indeed locked in.

  “They let her out, and then consulted what had best be done, but for the moment it did not seem to strike any of the girls that this locking of a door from the outside had a sinister significance. Anyway, they all went down into the kitchen and Ida prepared old Mrs. Levison’s early cup of tea. This she had to take up every morning at half-past six; on this occasion she went up as usual, knocked at her mistress’s door, and waited to be let in, as the old lady always slept behind locked doors. But no sound came from within, though Ida knocked repeatedly and loudly called her mistress by name. Soon she started screaming and her screams brought the household together: the two girls came up from the kitchen, Mr. Aaron came down from the top floor brandishing a poker, and presently Mrs. Aaron opened her door and peeped out clad in a filmy and exquisite nightgown, her eyes still heavy with sleep and her beautiful hair streaming down her back. But of old Mrs. Levison there was no sign. Mr. Aaron, genuinely alarmed, glued his ear to the keyhole, but not a sound could he hear. Behind that locked door absolute silence reigned.

  “Fearing the worst, he set himself the task of breaking open the door, which after some effort, and the use of a jemmy, he succeeded in doing: and here the sight that met his eyes filled his soul with horror, for he saw his mother lying on the floor of her bedroom in a pool of blood. Evidently an awful crime had been committed. The unfortunate woman was fully dressed, as she had been on the evening before; the door of the safe was open with the key still in the lock, but no other piece of furniture appeared to be disturbed; the one window of the room was wide open and the one door had been locked on the inside; the other door, the one which gave on the front drawing-room, being permanently blocked by a heavy wardrobe; and below the open window the bunch of creepers against the wall was all broken and torn, showing plainly the way that the miscreant had escaped.

  “After a few moments of awe-stricken silence Aaron Levison regained control of himself and at once telephoned—first for the police and then for the doctor, but he would not allow anything in the room to be touched, not even his mother’s dead body.

  “For this precaution he was highly commended by the police inspector who presently appeared upon the scene, accompanied by a constable and the divisional surgeon; the latter proceeded to examine the body. He stated that the unfortunate woman had been attacked from behind, the marks of fingers being clearly visible round her throat: in her struggle for freedom she must have fallen backwards and in so doing struck her head against the corner of the marble washstand, which caused her death.

  “In the meanwhile the inspector had been examining the premises: he found that the back door which gave on the yard and the one that gave on the front area were barred and locked just as Mr. Aaron had left them before he went up to bed the previous night; on the other hand the front door was still on the latch, young Mrs. Levison having apparently failed to bolt it when she came home from the ball. In the backyard the creeper against the wall below the window of Mrs. Levison’s room was certainly torn, and the miscreant undoubtedly made his escape that way, but he could not have got up to the window save with the aid of a ladder, the creeper was too slender to have supported many men’s weight, and the brick wall of the house offered no kind of foothold even to a cat. The yard itself was surrounded on every side by the backyards of contiguous houses, and against the dividing walls there were clumps of Virginia creeper and anaemic shrubs such as are usually found in London backyards. Now neither on those walls nor on the creepers and shrubs was there the slightest trace of a ladder being dragged across, or even of a man having climbed the walls or slung a rope over: there was not a twig of shrub broken or a leaf of creeper disturbed.

  “With regard to the safe, it must either have been open at the time that the murderer attacked Mrs. Levison, or he had found the key and opened the safe after he had committed that awful crime. Certainly the contents did not appear to have been greatly disturbed, no jewellery or other pledged goods of value were missing: Mr. Aaron could verify this by his books, but whether his mother had any money in the safe he was not in a position to say.

  “There was no doubt that at first glance the crime did not seem to have been an ordinary one; whether robbery had been its motive, or its corollary, only subsequent investigation would reveal: for the moment the inspector contented himself with putting a few leading questions to the various members of the household, and subsequently questioning the neighbours. The public, of course, was not to know what the result of these preliminary investigations was, but the midday papers were in a position to assert that no one, with perhaps the exception of Ida Griggs, had seen or heard anything alarming during the night, and that the most minute inquiries in the neighbourhood failed to bring forth the slightest indication of how the miscreants effected an entrance into the house.

  “The papers were also able to state that young Mrs. Levison returned from the ball in the small hours of the morning, but that Mr. Reuben Levison did not sleep in the house at all that night.”

  III

  “Fortunately for me,” my eccentric friend went on glibly, “I was up betimes that morning when the papers came out with an early account of the mysterious crime in Bishop’s Road, I say fortunately, because, as you know, mysteries of that sort interest me beyond everything, and for me there is no theatre in the world to equal in excitement the preliminary investigations of a well-conceived and cleverly executed crime. I should indeed have been bitterly disappointed had circumstances prevented me from attending that particular inquest. From the first, one was conscious of an atmosphere of mystery that hung over the events of that night in the Bishop’s Road household: here indeed was no ordinary crime; the motive for it was still obscure, and one instinctively felt that somewhere, in this vast city of London, there lurked a criminal of no mean intelligence who would probably remain unpunished.

  “Even the evidence of the police was not as uninteresting as it usually is, because it established beyond a doubt that this was not a case of common burglary and housebreaking. Certainly the open window and the torn creeper suggested that the miscreant had made his escape that way, but how he effected an entrance into Mrs. Levison’s room remained an unsolved riddle. The absence of any trace of a man’s passage on the surrounding walls of the backyard was very mysterious, and it was firmly established that the back door and the area door were secured, barred and bolted from the inside. A burglar might, of course, have entered the house by the front door, which was on the latch, using a skeleton key, but it still remained inconceivable how he gained access into Mrs. Levison’s room.

  “From the first the public had felt that there was a background of domestic drama behind the seemingly purposeless crime, for it did appear purposeless, seeing that so much portable jewellery had been left untouched in the safe. But it was when Ida Griggs, the housemaid, stood up in response to her name being called that one seemed to see the curtain going up on the first act of a terrible tragedy.

  “Griggs was a colourless, youngish woman, with thin, sallow face, round blue eyes, and thin lips, and directly she began to speak one felt that underneath her placid, old-maidish manner there was an undercurrent of bitter spite, and even of passion.

  “For some reason which probably would come to light later on, she appeared to have conceived a hatred for Mrs. Aaron; on the other hand she had obviously been doggedly attached to her late mistress, and in the evidence she dwelt at length on the quarrels between the two ladies, especially on the scene of violen
ce that occurred at the dinner-table on Saturday and which culminated in old Mrs. Levison flouncing out of the room.

  “‘Mrs. Levison was that upset,’ the girl went on, in answer to a question put to her by the coroner, ‘that I thought she was going to be ill, and she says to me that women like Mrs. Aaron were worse than—as they would stick at nothing to get a new gown or a bit of jewellery. She also says to me…’

  “But at this point the coroner checked her flow of eloquence as, of course, what the dead woman had said could not be admitted as evidence. But nevertheless the impression remained vividly upon the public that there had been a terrible quarrel between those two, and of course we all knew that young Mrs. Levison had been seen at the ball wearing those five diamond stars; we did not need the sworn testimony of several witnesses that were called and interrogated on that point. We knew that Rebecca Levison had worn the diamond stars at the ball, and that Police Inspector Blackshire found them on her dressing-table the morning after the murder.

  “Nor did she deny having worn them. At the inquest she renewed the statement which she had already made to the police.

  “‘My brother-in-law, Reuben,’ she said, ‘was a great favourite with his mother, and when we were both of us ready dressed he went into Mrs. Levison’s room to say good night to her. He cajoled her into letting me wear the diamond stars that night. In fact he always could make her do anything he really wanted, and they parted the best of friends.’

  “‘At what time did you go to the ball, Mrs. Levison?’ the coroner asked.

  “‘My brother-in-law,’ she replied, ‘went out to call a taxi at half-past nine, and he and I got into it the moment one drew up.’

  “‘And Mr. Reuben Levison had been in to say good night to his mother just before that?’

  “‘Yes, about ten minutes before.’

  “‘And he brought you the stars then,’ the coroner insisted, ‘and you put them on before he went out to call the taxi?’

  “For the fraction of a second Rebecca Levison hesitated, but I do not think that anyone in the audience except myself noted that little fact. Then she said quite firmly:

  “‘Yes, Mr. Reuben Levison told me that he had persuaded his mother to let me wear the stars, he handed them to me and I put them on.’

  “‘And that was at half-past nine?’

  “Again Rebecca Levison hesitated, this time more markedly; her face was very pale and she passed her tongue once or twice across her lips before she gave answer.

  “‘At about half-past nine,’ she said, quite steadily.

  “‘And about what time did you come home, Mrs. Levison?’ the coroner asked her blandly.

  “‘It must have been close on one o’clock,’ she replied. ‘The dance was a Cinderella, but we walked part of the way home.’

  “‘What! In the rain?’

  “‘It had ceased raining when we came out of the Town Hall.’

  “‘Mr. Reuben Levison did not accompany you all the way?’

  “‘He walked with me across the Park, then he put me into a taxicab and I drove home alone. I had my latch-key.’

  “‘But you failed to bolt the door after you when you returned. How was that?’

  “‘I forgot, I suppose,’ the lovely Rebecca replied, with a defiant air. ‘I often forget to bolt the door.’

  “‘And did you not see or hear anything strange when you came in?’

  “‘I heard nothing. I was rather sleepy and went straight up to my room. I was in bed within ten minutes of coming in.’

  “She was speaking quite firmly now, in a clear though rather harsh voice: but that she was nervous, not to say frightened, was very obvious. She had a handkerchief in her hand, with which she fidgeted until it was nothing but a small, wet ball, and she had a habit of standing first on one foot then on the other, and of shifting the position of her hat. I do not think that there was a single member of the jury who did not think that she was lying, and she knew that they thought so, for now and again her fine dark eyes would scrutinise their faces and dart glances at them either of scorn or of anxiety. After a while she appeared very tired, and when pressed by the coroner over some trifling matters she broke down and began to cry. After which she was allowed to stand down and Mr. Reuben Levison was called.

  “I must say that I took an instinctive dislike to him as he stood before the jury with a jaunty air of complete self-possession. He had a keen, yet shifty eye, and sharp features, very like a rodent. To me it appeared at once that he was reciting a lesson rather than giving independent evidence. He stated that he had been present at dinner during the bitter quarrel between his mother and sister-in-law, and his mother was certainly very angry at the moment, but later on he went upstairs to bid her good night. She cried a little and said a few hard things, but in the end she gave way to him as she always did: she opened the safe, got out the diamond stars and gave them to him, making him promise to return them the very first thing in the morning.

  “‘I told her,’ Reuben went on glibly, ‘that I would not be home until the Monday morning. I would see Rebecca into a taxi after the ball, but I had the intention of spending a couple of nights and the intervening Sunday with a pal who had a flat at Haverstock Hill. I thought then that my mother would lock the stars up again, however—she was always a woman of her word—once she had said a thing she would stick to it—and so, as I say, she gave me the stars and Mrs. Aaron wore them that night.’

  “‘And you handed the stars to Mrs. Aaron at half-past nine?’ The coroner asked the question with the same earnest emphasis which he had displayed when he put it to young Mrs. Levison. I saw Reuben’s shifty eye flash across at her, and I know that she answered that flash with a slight drop of her eyelids. Whereupon he replied as readily as she had done:

  “‘Yes, sir, it must have been about half-past nine.’

  “And I assure you that every intelligent person in that room must have felt certain that Reuben was lying just as Rebecca had done before him. The inquest was developing on dramatic lines, and the chief actors in the play had come to a point of cerebral excitement that was plainly visible on their pale, set faces, and there were beads of moisture around their tightly-compressed lips which were not entirely attributable to the heat.”

  The 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 everyone 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. H
e, 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 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 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.