The Old Man in the Corner quotes

“Mysteries!” he commented. “

There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation.

”

he replied with perfect good-humour. “Well, you know, for one thing I doubt if they would accept them; and in the second place my inclinations and my duty would—were I to become an active member of the detective force—nearly always be in direct conflict.

As often as not my sympathies go to the criminal who is clever and astute enough to lead our entire police force by the nose.

“I don’t know how much of the case you remember,” he went on quietly. “It certainly, at first, began even to puzzle me.

“It was as if a bombshell had exploded in the court.

Even his Honour was aghast, and I am sure the lady next to me only recovered from the shock of the surprise in order to wonder whether she need put off her dinner party after all.

“As for me,” added the man in the corner, with that strange mixture of nervousness and self-complacency which had set Miss Polly Burton wondering, “well, you see, I had made up my mind long ago where the hitch lay in this particular case, and I …

“The searching of servants’ belongings is invariably a useless proceeding,” added the man in the corner, with a shrug of the shoulders. “

No one, not even a latter-day domestic, would be fool enough to keep stolen property in the house.

However, the usual farce was gone through, with more or less protest on the part of Mr. Shipman’s servants, and with the usual result.

“

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.

“ ‘Well, not exactly strange,’ said the Colonel, a fine, manly, soldierly figure who looked curiously out of his element in the witness-box. ‘

I don’t think that it is a very rare occurrence for racing men to have certain acquaintances whom they would not wish their wives to know anything about.

’

“In order to go into the smoking-room she must have crossed the hall; she must have seen Lavender. In that brief interval she must have realized that the man was persistent, and therefore a living danger to her husband.

Remember, women have done strange things; they are a far greater puzzle to the student of human nature than the sterner, less complex sex has ever been.

As I argued before—as the police should have argued all along—why did Lord Arthur deliberately accuse an innocent man of murder if not to shield the guilty one?

Italians, French, Spaniards do it, if you will, and women of most nations.

An Englishman’s instinct is to strike and not to stab.

George Higgins or Lord Arthur Skelmerton would have knocked their victim down; the woman only would lie in wait till the enemy’s back was turned. She knows her weakness, and she does not mean to miss.

It was all very well for Mr. Richard Frobisher (of the London Mail) to cut up rough about it. Polly did not altogether blame him.

She liked him all the better for that frank outburst of manlike ill-temper which, after all said and done, was only a very flattering form of masculine jealousy.

Moreover, Polly distinctly felt guilty about the whole thing. She had promised to meet Dickie—that is Mr. Richard Frobisher—at two o’clock sharp outside the Palace Theatre, because she wanted to go to a Maud Allan matinée, and because he naturally wished to go with her.

“There was no doubt that the sensation in court was almost unprecedented. Never since the days of the Fenchurch Street mystery, and the trial of Smethurst, had I seen so much excitement. Mind you, I was not excited—

I knew by now every detail of that crime as if I had committed it myself.

In fact, I could not have done it better, although I have been a student of crime for many years now. Many people there—his friends, mostly—believed that Errington was doomed.

The frivolous young wife, the flirtation with the friend?—all a blind, all pretence. I took the trouble which the police should have taken immediately, of finding out something about the finances of the Hazeldene ménage.

Money is in nine cases out of ten the keynote to a crime.

“I found that the will of Mary Beatrice Hazeldene had been proved by the husband, her sole executor, the estate being sworn at £15,000. I found out, moreover, that Mr.

I found that he kept a fine house in Albert Terrace. Now, the rents of those houses are £250 a year. Therefore speculation, horse-racing or some sort of gambling, must help to keep up that establishment.

Speculation and most forms of gambling are synonymous with debt and ruin. It is only a question of time.

Whether Mr.

“

No, no, the execution was not difficult; it was the planning of it all, the daring that was so fine.

Schwarz, of course, was a foreigner; he had only been in England a little over a fortnight. Vassall’s broken English misled him; probably he did not know the junior partner very intimately.

“Well, that may be so in most cases, but my experience has proved to me that there is one factor in this world of ours which is the mainspring of human actions, and that factor is human passions.

For good or evil passions rule this poor humanity of ours.

Remember, there are the women! French detectives, who are acknowledged masters in their craft, never proceed till after they have discovered the feminine element in a crime; whether in theft, murder, or fraud, according to their theory, there is always a woman.

“You are altogether on the wrong track,” sounded a sharp voice in direct answer to Polly’s thoughts—“altogether wrong. If you want to acquire my method of induction, and improve your reasoning power, you must follow my system.

First think of the one absolutely undisputed, positive fact. You must have a starting-point, and not go wandering about in the realms of suppositions.

”

“I know,” he said blandly, “you have been most kind in that way, but I am only an amateur.

Crime interests me only when it resembles a clever game of chess, with many intricate moves which all tend to one solution, the checkmating of the antagonist⁠—the detective force of the country.

Now, confess that, in the Dublin mystery, the clever police there were absolutely checkmated.”

He told me to send at once for Mr. Wethered, or else for Mr. Hibbert, if Mr. Wethered could not come. “I haven’t many hours to live, John,” he says to me—“my heart is broke, the doctor says my heart is broke.

A man shouldn’t marry and have children, John, for they will sooner or later break his heart.

” I was so upset I couldn’t speak; but I sent round at once for Mr. Wethered, who came himself just about three o’clock that afternoon.

and she had married Mr. Francis Morton a few years ago and brought him her quarter of a million, for no other reason but that she fell in love with him.

He was neither good-looking nor distinguished, in fact, he was one of those men who seem to have city stamped all over their person.

“He was a gentleman of very regular habits, going up to London every morning on business and returning every afternoon by the ‘husband’s train.’

“

What followed was the usual course of events when there is a blackguard and a fool of a woman.

She was terrorised and did not dare to tell her husband for some time; she corresponded with the Comte de la Tremouille, begging him for her sake and in memory of the past not to attempt to see her.

“The public and the magistrate had hung breathless upon her words.

There was nothing but sympathy felt for this handsome woman, who throughout had been more sinned against than sinning, and whose gravest fault seems to have been a total lack of intelligence in dealing with her own life.

But I can assure you of one thing, that in no case within my recollection was there ever such a sensation in a court as when the magistrate, after a few minutes’ silence, said gently to Mrs. Morton:

“That was a point which, to my mind, the police never made the most of. Now, my experience in criminal cases has invariably been that when a typewritten letter figures in one, that letter is a forgery.

It is not very difficult to imitate a signature, but it is a jolly sight more difficult to imitate a handwriting throughout an entire letter.

”

“That was a point which, to my mind, the police never made the most of.

Now, my experience in criminal cases has invariably been that when a typewritten letter figures in one, that letter is a forgery.

It is not very difficult to imitate a signature, but it is a jolly sight more difficult to imitate a handwriting throughout an entire letter.”

“

As a matter of fact, you know, experience has invariably taught me that when a murderer seems particularly foolish and clumsy, and proofs against him seem particularly damning, that is the time when the police should be most guarded against pitfalls.

“Now in this case, if John Ashley had indeed committed the murder in Regent’s Park in the manner suggested by the police, he would have been a criminal in more senses than one, for idiocy of that kind is to my mind worse than many …

“

The loss of the revolver was one of those unforeseen accidents which a retributive Providence places in the path of the miscreant, delivering him by his own act of folly into the hands of human justice.

“Mr. John Ashley, however, did not appear the least bit impressed by the recital of his crime. He had not engaged the services of one of the most eminent lawyers, expert at extracting contradictions from witnesses by skilful cross-examinations—oh, dear me, no!

… upheavals which would annihilate a self-supporting tomcat, and today I read in the morning papers the account of a noble lord’s bankruptcy, and in the society ones that of his visit at the house of a Cabinet minister, where he is the most honoured guest.

As for lawyers, when Providence had exhausted all other means of securing their welfare, it brought forth the peerage cases.

”

“Isn’t there? Perhaps I am misquoting; anyway, there should be.

Kittens, it seems, live and thrive through social and domestic upheavals which would annihilate a self-supporting tomcat, and today I read in the morning papers the account of a noble lord’s bankruptcy, and in the society ones that of his visit at the house of a Cabinet minister, where he is the most honoured guest.

As for lawyers, when Providence had exhausted all other means of securing their welfare, it brought forth the peerage cases.”

“

Then you must always reckon with the practically invariable rule that a murderer always revisits, if only once, the scene of his crime.

“Two years have elapsed since the crime; no trace of Timothy Beddingfield, the lawyer, has ever been found, and I can assure you that it will never be, for his plebeian body lies buried in the aristocratic family vault of the Earl of Brockelsby.”

“Confess that that murder was one of the cleverest bits of work accomplished outside Russian diplomacy,” he said with a nervous laugh. “

I must say that were I the judge, called upon to pronounce sentence of death on the man who conceived that murder, I could not bring myself to do it. I would politely request the gentleman to enter our Foreign Office⁠—we have need of such men.

The whole mise-en-scène was truly artistic, worthy of its milieu—the Rubens Studios in Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road.