The Old Man in the CornerOrczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
General
The Old Man in the Corner
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
Detective and mystery stories, English
"The cashier's evidence was certainly startling in the extreme, since in
the widow's room no trace of any kind was found of any money; against
that, two of the notes handed over by the bank to Mrs. Owen on that day
were cashed by young Greenhill on the very morning of her mysterious
death. One was handed in by him to the West End Clothiers Company, in
payment for a suit of clothes, and the other he changed at the Post
Office in Oxford Street.
"After that all the evidence had of necessity to be gone through again
on the subject of young Greenhill's intimacy with Mrs. Owen. He listened
to it all with an air of the most painful nervousness, his cheeks were
positively green, his lips seemed dry and parched, for he repeatedly
passed his tongue over them, and when Constable E 18 deposed that at 2
a.m. on the morning of February 2nd he had seen the accused and spoken
to him at the corner of Percy Street and Tottenham Court Road, young
Greenhill all but fainted.
"The contention of the police was that the caretaker had been murdered
and robbed during that night before she went to bed, that young
Greenhill had done the murder, seeing that he was the only person known
to have been intimate with the woman, and that it was, moreover, proved
unquestionably that he was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Rubens
Studios at an extraordinarily late hour of the night.
"His own account of himself, and of that same night, could certainly not
be called very satisfactory. Mrs. Owen was a relative of his late
mother's, he declared. He himself was a lithographer by trade, with a
good deal of time and leisure on his hands. He certainly had employed
some of that time in taking the old woman to various places of
amusement. He had on more than one occasion suggested that she should
give up menial work, and come and live with him, but, unfortunately, she
was a great deal imposed upon by her nephew, a man of the name of Owen,
who exploited the good-natured woman in every possible way, and who had
on more than one occasion made severe attacks upon her savings at the
Birkbeck Bank.
"Severely cross-examined by the prosecuting counsel about this supposed
relative of Mrs. Owen, Greenhill admitted that he did not know him--had,
in fact, never seen him. He knew that his name was Owen and that was
all. His chief occupation consisted in sponging on the kind-hearted old
woman, but he only went to see her in the evenings, when he presumably
knew that she would be alone, and invariably after all the tenants of
the Rubens Studios had left for the day.
"I don't know whether at this point it strikes you at all, as it did
both magistrate and counsel, that there was a direct contradiction in
this statement and the one made by the cashier of the Birkbeck on the
subject of his last conversation with Mrs. Owen. 'I am going abroad to
join my nephew, for whom I am going to keep house,' was what the
unfortunate woman had said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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