Detective and mystery stories, English; English fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, English
"It was a logical theory enough, but here came the evidence of the
hat. The man who walked away from Fulton Gardens at nine o'clock,
whom the point policeman saw changing his hat in the street at that
hour, could not possibly have gone all the way to Walthamstow, either
by bus or even part of the way in a taxi, and back again to
Piccadilly Circus all in the space of forty-five minutes. And
Leighton, mind you, stepped out of a bus when his friend met him, and
I can tell you that the police worked their hardest to find a
taxi-man who may have picked up a fare that night in the
neighbourhood of Clerkenwell and driven out to Walthamstow and then
back to Holborn. That search proved entirely fruitless. On the
other hand, Leighton had paid his bus fare from Holborn, and the
conductor vaguely recollected that he had got in at the corner of
Clerkenwell Road. Well, that being proved, the man couldn't have
done in the time all that the prosecution declared that he did.
"After he was discharged, the Press started violently abusing the
police for not having directed their attention to the second visitor
who called at Fulton Gardens ten minutes or so after the first one
had left. But this person appeared as elusive and intangible as the
mysterious wearer of Mr. Jessup's hat and coat. The point policeman
saw him in the distance, and Ann Weber admitted him into the house
and chatted with him for over twenty minutes. She didn't know him,
but she declared that she could easily recognise him if she saw him
again. For some time after that the poor girl was constantly called
upon by the police to see, and if possible identify, the mysterious
visitor. Half the shady characters in London passed, I believe,
before her eyes during the next three months. But this search proved
as fruitless as the other. The murder of Mr. Seton Jessup has
remained as complete and as baffling a mystery as any in the annals
of crime. Many there are--you amongst the number--who firmly believe
that Arthur Leighton had, at any rate, something to do with it. I
know that the family of the deceased were convinced that he did. Mr.
Aubrey Jessup, the eldest son of the deceased, who was one of the
executors under his father's will, and who had gone through the
accounts of the business, had noted certain irregularities in
Leighton's books; he also declared that various sums which had come
in on the sixteenth after banking hours were missing from the safe.
Moreover, young Leighton himself had admitted that 'the guv'nor was
waxy with him because a few pounds were missing from the till.' All
these facts no doubt had influenced the police when they applied for
a warrant for his arrest, but there was no getting away from the
evidence of that hat and coat found ten miles and more away from the
scene of the crime, and of the bus conductor who could swear that out
of forty-five minutes which the accused had to account for he had
spent twenty in a bus."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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