§3
"The day fixed for the happy event was now approaching. The large circle of acquaintances, friends, and hangers-on which the Smithsons had gathered around them were all agog with excitement, wedding presents were pouring in by every post. A kind of network of romance had been woven around the personalities of the future bride, her mother, and the Russian Prince. The wealth of the Smithsons had been magnified an hundredfold, and Prince Orsoff was reputed to be a brother of the late Czar who had made good his escape out of Russia, bringing away with him most of the Crown jewels, which he would presently bestow upon his wife. And so on, ad infinitum.
"And upon the top of all that excitement and that gossip, and marvellous tales akin to the Arabian Nights, came the wedding-day with its awful culminating tragedy.
"The Russian Prince had been murdered and his body so cleverly disposed of that in spite of the most strenuous efforts on the part of the police, not a trace of it could be found.
"That robbery had been the main motive of the crime was quickly enough established. The Smithsons—mother and daughter—had at once supplied the detective in charge of the case with proofs as to that.
"It seems that as soon as the unfortunate Prince had become engaged to Louisa, he asked that the marriage should take place without delay. He explained that his dearest friend, Mr. Schumann, the great international financier, had offered him shares in one of the greatest post-war undertakings which had ever been floated in Europe, and which would bring in to the fortunate shareholders a net income of not less than ten thousand pounds yearly for every ten thousand pounds invested; Mr. Schumann himself owned one-half of all the shares, and had, by a most wonderful act of disinterested generosity, allowed his bosom friend, Prince Orsoff, to have a few—a concession, by the way, which he had only granted to two other favoured personages, one being the Prince of Wales and the other the President of the French Republic. Of course to receive ten thousand pounds yearly for every ten thousand pounds invested, was too wonderful for words; the President of the French Republic had been so delighted with this chance of securing a fortune that he had put two million francs into the concern, and the Prince of Wales had put in five hundred thousand pounds.
"And it was so wonderfully secure, as otherwise the British Government would not have allowed the Prince of Wales to invest such a sum of money if the business was only speculative. Security and fortune beyond the dreams of thrift! It was positively dazzling.
"No wonder that this vision of untold riches made poor Mrs. Smithson's mouth water, the more so as she was quite shrewd enough to realise that, at the rate she was going, her share in the fifteen thousand pounds left by the late worthy grocer would soon fade into nothingness. In the past few months she and Louisa had spent considerably over four thousand pounds between them, and once her daughter was married to a quasi-royal personage, good old Mrs. Smithson did not see herself retiring into comparative obscurity on a few hundreds a year to be jeered at by all her friends.
"So she and Louisa talked the matter over together, and then they talked it over with Prince Orsoff on the occasion of his visit about ten days before the wedding. The Prince at first was very doubtful if the great Mr. Schumann would be willing to make a further sacrifice in the cause of friendship. He was an international financier accustomed to deal in millions; he would not look favourably—the Prince feared—at a few thousands. Mrs. Smithson's entire fortune now only consisted of about five thousand pounds; this she was unwilling to admit to the wealthy and aristocratic future son-in-law. So the two ladies decided to pool their capital and then they begged that Prince Orsoff should ask the great Mr. Schumann whether he would condescend to receive ten thousand pounds for investment in Mrs. Smithson's name in his great undertaking.
"Fortunately the great financier did condescend to do this—he really was more a philanthropist than a business man—but, of course, he could not be kept waiting, the money must reach him in Paris not later than May twentieth, which was the very day fixed for the wedding.
"It was all terribly difficult; and Mrs. Smithson was at first in despair as she feared she could not arrange to sell out her securities in time, and the difficulties were increased an hundredfold because, as Prince Orsoff explained to her, Mr. Schumann would even at the eleventh hour refuse to allow her to participate in the huge fortune if he found that she had talked about the affair over in England. The business had to be kept a profound secret for international reasons, in fact, if any detail relating to the business and to Mr. Schumann's participation in it were to become known, the whole of Europe would once more be plunged into war.
"To make a long story short, Mrs. Smithson and Louisa sold out all their securities, amounting between them to ten thousand pounds. Then they went up to London, drew the money out of their bank, changed it themselves into French money—so as to make it more convenient for Mr. Schumann—and handed the entire sum over to Prince Orsoff on the eve of the wedding.
"Of course such fatuous imbecility would be unbelievable if it did not occur so frequently: vain, silly women, who have never moved outside their own restricted circle, are always the ready prey of plausible rascals.
"Anyway, in this case the Smithsons returned to Folkestone that day, perfectly happy and with never a thought of anything but contentment for the present and prosperity in the future. The wedding was to be the next day; the bridegroom-elect was coming down by the midday train with his best man, whom he vaguely described as secretary to the Russian Embassy, and the bridal pair would start for Paris by the afternoon boat.
"All this the Smithsons related to the police inspector in charge of the case and subsequently to the Scotland Yard detective, with a wealth of detail and a profusion of lamentations not unmixed with expletives directed against the unknown assassin and thief. For indeed there was no doubt in the minds of Louisa and her mother that the unfortunate Prince, on whom the girl still lavished the wealth of her trustful love, had been murdered for the sake of the money which he had upon his person.
"It must have amounted to millions of francs, Mrs. Smithson declared, for he had the Prince of Wales's money upon him also, and probably that of the President of the French Republic, and at first she and Louisa fastened their suspicions upon the anonymous best man, the so-called secretary of the Russian Embassy. Even when they were presently made to realise that there was no such thing as a Russian Embassy in London these days, and that minute enquiries both at home and abroad regarding the identity of a Prince Orsoff led to no result whatever, they repudiated with scorn the suggestion put forth by the police that their beloved Russian Prince was nothing more or less than a clever crook who had led them by the nose, and that in all probability he had not been murdered in the train but had succeeded in jumping out of it and making good his escape across country.
"This the Smithson ladies would not admit for a moment, and with commendable logic they argued that if Prince Orsoff had been a crook and had intended to make away with their money he could have done that easily enough without getting into a train at Victoria and jumping out of it at Sydenham Hill.
"Pressed with questions, however, the ladies were forced to admit that they knew absolutely nothing about Prince Orsoff, they had never been introduced to any of his relations, nor had they met any of his friends. They did not even know where he had been staying in London. He was in the habit of telephoning to Louisa every morning, and any arrangements for his visits down to The Towers or the ladies' trips up to town were made in that manner. As a matter of fact Louisa and her future husband had not met more than a dozen times altogether, on some five or six occasions in Monte Carlo, and not more than six in England. It had been a case of love at first sight.
"The question of Mr. Schumann's vast undertaking was first discussed at The Towers. After that the ladies wrote to their bank to sell out their securities, and subsequently went up to town for a couple of days to draw out their money, change it into French currency, and finally hand it over to Prince Orsoff. On that occasion he had met them at Victoria Station and taken them to a quiet hotel in Kensington, where he had engaged a suite of rooms for them. All financial matters were then settled in their private sitting-room.
"In answer to enquiries at that hotel, one or two of the employees distinctly remembered the foreign-looking gentleman who had called on Mrs. and Miss Smithson, lunched with them in their sitting-room that day, and saw them into their cab when they went away the following afternoon. One or two of the station porters at Victoria also vaguely remembered a man who answered to the description given of Prince Orsoff by the Smithson ladies: tall, with a slight stoop, wearing pince-nez, and with a profusion of dark, curly hair, bushy eyebrows, long, dark moustache, and old-fashioned imperial, which made him distinctly noticeable, he could not very well have passed unperceived.
"Unfortunately, on the actual day of the murder, not one man employed at Victoria Station could swear positively to having seen him, either alone or in the company of another foreigner; and the latter has remained a problematical personage to this day.
"But the Smithson ladies remained firm in their loyalty to their Russian Prince. Had they dared they would openly have accused Henry Carter of the murder; as it was they threw out weird hints and insinuations about Henry who had more than once sworn that he would be even with his hated rival, and who had actually travelled down in the same train as the Prince on that fateful wedding morning, together with his brother John, who no doubt helped him in his nefarious deed. I believe that the unfortunate ladies actually spent some of the money which now they could ill spare in employing a private detective to collect proofs of Henry Carter's guilt.
"But not a tittle of evidence could be brought against him. To begin with, the train in which the murder was supposed to have been committed was a non-stop to Swanley. Then how could the Carters have disposed of the body? The Smithsons suggested a third miscreant as a possible confederate; but the same objection against that theory subsisted in the shape of the disposal of the body. The murder—if murder there was—occurred in broad daylight in a part of the country that certainly was not lonely. It was not possible to suppose that a man would stand waiting on the line close to Sydenham Hill station until a body was flung out to him from the passing train, and then drag that body about until he found a suitable place in which to bury it: and all that without being seen by the workmen on the line or employees on the railway, or in fact any passer-by. Therefore the hypothesis that Henry Carter or his brother murdered the Russian Prince with or without the help of a confederate was as untenable as that the Prince had travelled from Victoria to Sydenham Hill and there jumped out of the train, at risk of being discovered in the act, rather than disappear quietly in London, shave off his luxuriant hair, or assume any other convenient disguise, until he found an opportunity for slipping back to the Continent.
"But the Smithsons remained firm in their belief in the genuineness of their Prince and in their conviction that he had been murdered—if not by the Carters, then by the mysterious secretary to the Russian Embassy or any other Russian or German emissary, for political reasons.
"And thus the public was confronted with the two hypotheses, both of which led to a deadlock. No sensible person doubted that the so-called Russian Prince was a crook, and that he had a confederate to help him in his clever plot, but the mystery remained as to how the rascal or rascals disappeared so completely as to checkmate every investigation. The travelling by train that morning and setting the scene for a supposed murder was, of course, part of the plan, but it was the plan that was so baffling, because to an ordinary mind that disappearance could have been effected so much more easily and with far less risk without the train journey.
"Of course there was not a single passenger on that train who was not the subject of the closest watchfulness on the part of the police, but there was not one—not excluding the Carters—who could by any possible chance have known that the Prince carried a large sum of money upon his person. He was not likely to have confided the fact to a stranger, and the mystery of the vanished body was always there to refute the theory of an ordinary murderous attack for motives of robbery."