§2
"That then was the position in the Levison household on the day of the mysterious tragedy," the Old Man in the Corner went on presently; "an armed truce between the two ladies—the lovely Rebecca sore and defiant, pining to gratify a whim which was being denied her, and old Mrs. Levison more bitter than usual against her, owing to Reuben's partisanship. Egged on by Rebecca, he was furious with his mother and vowed that he was sick of the family and meant to cut his stick in order to be free to lead his own life, and so on. It was all tall-talk, of course, as he was entirely dependent on his mother, but it went to show the ugliness of his temper and the domination which his brother's wife exercised over him. Aaron, on the other hand, took no part in the quarrel, but the servants remarked that he was unwontedly morose all day, and that his wife was very curt and disagreeable with him.
"Nothing, however, of any importance occurred during the day until dinner-time, which as usual was served in the parlour at the back of the shop at seven o'clock. It seems that as soon as the family sat down to their meal, there was another violent quarrel on some subject or other between the two ladies, Rebecca being hotly backed up by Reuben, and Aaron taking no part in the discussion; in the midst of the quarrel, and following certain highly offensive words spoken by Reuben, old Mrs. Levison got up abruptly from the table and went upstairs to her own room which was immediately overhead at the back of the house, next to the drawing-room, nor did she come downstairs again that evening.
"At half-past nine the three servants went up to bed according to the rule of the house. Old Mrs. Levison, who was a real autocrat in the management of the household, expected the girls to be down at six every morning, but they were free to go to bed as soon as their work was done, and half-past nine was their usual time.
"Two of the girls slept at the top of the house, and the housemaid, Ida Griggs by name, who also acted as a sort of maid to old Mrs. Levison, occupied a small slip room on the half-landing immediately above the old lady's bedroom. On the floor above this there was a large bedroom at the back, and a bathroom and dressing-room in front, all occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron, and over that the two maids' room, and one for Mr. Reuben, and a small spare room in which Mr. Aaron would sleep now and again when his wife was likely to be out late and he did not want to get his night's rest broken by her home-coming, or if he himself was going to be late home on a holiday night after one of those country excursions on his bicycle of which he was immensely fond and in which he indulged himself from time to time.
"On this fateful Saturday evening Aaron was kept late in the shop, but he finally went up to bed soon after ten, after he had seen to all the doors below being bolted and barred, with the exception of the front door which had to be left on the latch, Mrs. Aaron having the latchkey. Thus the house was shut up and every one in bed by half-past ten.
"In the meanwhile the lovely Rebecca and Reuben had dressed and gone to the ball.
"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 any man'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 anæmic 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 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 enquiries in the neighbourhood failed to bring forth the slightest indication of how the murderer 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.