The Old Man in the Corner | Page 4

trap, in any case it was a curious
one; why, she argued, did not Smethurst elect to see Kershaw at his
hotel the following day? A thousand whys and wherefores made her
anxious, but the fat German had been won over by Kershaw's visions of
untold gold, held tantalisingly before his eyes. He had lent the
necessary £2, with which his friend intended to tidy himself up a bit
before he went to meet his friend the millionaire. Half an hour
afterwards Kershaw had left his lodgings, and that was the last the
unfortunate woman saw of her husband, or Müller, the German, of his
friend.
"Anxiously his wife waited that night, but he did not return; the next
day she seems to have spent in making purposeless and futile inquiries
about the neighbourhood of Fenchurch Street; and on the 12th she went
to Scotland Yard, gave what particulars she knew, and placed in the
hands of the police the two letters written by Smethurst."
CHAPTER II
A MILLIONAIRE IN THE DOCK
The man in the corner had finished his glass of milk. His watery blue
eyes looked across at Miss Polly Burton's eager little face, from which
all traces of severity had now been chased away by an obvious and
intense excitement.

"It was only on the 31st," he resumed after a while, "that a body,
decomposed past all recognition, was found by two lightermen in the
bottom of a disused barge. She had been moored at one time at the foot
of one of those dark flights of steps which lead down between tall
warehouses to the river in the East End of London. I have a photograph
of the place here," he added, selecting one out of his pocket, and
placing it before Polly.
"The actual barge, you see, had already been removed when I took this
snapshot, but you will realize what a perfect place this alley is for the
purpose of one man cutting another's throat in comfort, and without
fear of detection. The body, as I said, was decomposed beyond all
recognition; it had probably been there eleven days, but sundry articles,
such as a silver ring and a tie pin, were recognizable, and were
identified by Mrs. Kershaw as belonging to her husband.
"She, of course, was loud in denouncing Smethurst, and the police had
no doubt a very strong case against him, for two days after the
discovery of the body in the barge, the Siberian millionaire, as he was
already popularly called by enterprising interviewers, was arrested in
his luxurious suite of rooms at the Hotel Cecil.
"To confess the truth, at this point I was not a little puzzled. Mrs.
Kershaw's story and Smethurst's letters had both found their way into
the papers, and following my usual method--mind you, I am only an
amateur, I try to reason out a case for the love of the thing--I sought
about for a motive for the crime, which the police declared Smethurst
had committed. To effectually get rid of a dangerous blackmailer was
the generally accepted theory. Well! did it ever strike you how paltry
that motive really was?"
Miss Polly had to confess, however, that it had never struck her in that
light.
"Surely a man who had succeeded in building up an immense fortune
by his own individual efforts, was not the sort of fool to believe that he
had anything to fear from a man like Kershaw. He must have known
that Kershaw held no damning proofs against him--not enough to hang

him, anyway. Have you ever seen Smethurst?" he added, as he once
more fumbled in his pocket-book.
Polly replied that she had seen Smethurst's picture in the illustrated
papers at the time. Then he added, placing a small photograph before
her:
"What strikes you most about the face?"
"Well, I think its strange, astonished expression, due to the total
absence of eyebrows, and the funny foreign cut of the hair."
"So close that it almost looks as if it had been shaved. Exactly. That is
what struck me most when I elbowed my way into the court that
morning and first caught sight of the millionaire in the dock. He was a
tall, soldierly-looking man, upright in stature, his face very bronzed and
tanned. He wore neither moustache nor beard, his hair was cropped
quite close to his head, like a Frenchman's; but, of course, what was so
very remarkable about him was that total absence of eyebrows and even
eyelashes, which gave the face such a peculiar appearance--as you say,
a perpetually astonished look.
"He seemed, however, wonderfully calm; he had been accommodated
with a chair in the dock--being a millionaire--and chatted pleasantly
with his lawyer, Sir Arthur Inglewood, in the intervals between the
calling of the several