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
"At this point the police proposed to call a witness, James Terry by
name and a bookmaker by profession, who had been chiefly instrumental in
identifying the deceased, a 'pal' of his. It was his evidence which
first introduced that element of sensation into the case which
culminated in the wildly exciting arrest of a Duke's son upon a capital
charge.
"It appears that on the evening after the Ebor, Terry and Lavender were
in the bar of the Black Swan Hotel having drinks.
"'I had done pretty well over Peppercorn's fiasco,' he explained, 'but
poor old Lavender was very much down in the dumps; he had held only a
few very small bets against the favourite, and the rest of the day had
been a poor one with him. I asked him if he had any bets with the owner
of Peppercorn, and he told me that he only held one for less than £500.
"'I laughed and said that if he held one for £5000 it would make no
difference, as from what I had heard from the other fellows, Lord Arthur
Skelmerton must be about stumped. Lavender seemed terribly put out at
this, and swore he would get that £500 out of Lord Arthur, if no one
else got another penny from him.
"'It's the only money I've made to-day,' he says to me. 'I mean to get
it.'
"'You won't,' I says.
"'I will,' he says.
"'You will have to look pretty sharp about it then,' I says, 'for every
one will be wanting to get something, and first come first served.'
"'Oh! He'll serve me right enough, never you mind!' says Lavender to me
with a laugh. 'If he don't pay up willingly, I've got that in my pocket
which will make him sit up and open my lady's eyes and Sir John Etty's
too about their precious noble lord.'
"'Then he seemed to think he had gone too far, and wouldn't say anything
more to me about that affair. I saw him on the course the next day. I
asked him if he had got his £500. He said: "No, but I shall get it
to-day."'
"Lord Arthur Skelmerton, after having given his own evidence, had left
the court; it was therefore impossible to know how he would take this
account, which threw so serious a light upon an association with the
dead man, of which he himself had said nothing.
"Nothing could shake James Terry's account of the facts he had placed
before the jury, and when the police informed the coroner that they
proposed to place George Higgins himself in the witness-box, as his
evidence would prove, as it were, a complement and corollary of that of
Terry, the jury very eagerly assented.
"If James Terry, the bookmaker, loud, florid, vulgar, was an
unprepossessing individual, certainly George Higgins, who was still
under the accusation of murder, was ten thousand times more so.
"None too clean, slouchy, obsequious yet insolent, he was the very
personification of the cad who haunts the racecourse and who lives not
so much by his own wits as by the lack of them in others. He described
himself as a turf commission agent, whatever that may be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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