Page:The Lisson Grove Mystery.pdf/6

Rh £4000 to his only brother, James Arthur Dyke, a mining engineer, who in 1890 was residing at Lisson Grove Crescent. The Melbourne solicitors in their communication asked for Messrs. Snow and Patterson's kind assistance in helping them to find the legatee.

"The search was easy enough, since James Arthur Dyke, mining engineer, had never ceased to reside at Lisson Grove Crescent. Armed, therefore, with full instructions from their Melbourne correspondent, Messrs. Snow and Patterson communicated with Dyke, and after a little preliminary correspondence, the sum of £4000 in Bank of Australia notes and various securities were handed over by Mr. Parlett to the old cripple.

"The money and securities were—so Mr. Parlett understood—subsequently deposited by Mr. Dyke at the Portland Road Branch of the London and South Western Bank; as the old man apparently died intestate, the whole of the £4000 would naturally devolve upon his only daughter and natural legatee.

"Mind you, all through the proceedings, the public had instinctively felt that money was somewhere at the bottom of this gruesome and mysterious crime. There is not much object in murdering an old cripple except for purposes of gain, but now Mr. Parlett's evidence had indeed furnished a damning motive for the appalling murder.

"What more likely than that Alfred Wyatt wanting to finger that £4000 had done away with the old man? And if Amelia Dyke did not turn away from him in horror, after such a cowardly crime, then she must have known of it and had perhaps connived in it.

"As for Nicholson, the charwoman, her evidence had certainly done more to puzzle everybody all round than any other detail in this strange and mysterious crime.

"She deposed that on Friday, November 13th, in answer to an advertisement in the Marylebone Star she had called on Miss Dyke at Lisson Grove, when it was arranged that she should do a week's work at the flat, beginning Thursday, the 19th, from seven in the morning until six in the afternoon. She was to keep the place clean, get Mr. Dyke—who, she understood, was an invalid—all his meals, and make herself generally useful to him.

"Accordingly, Nicholson turned up on the Thursday morning. She let herself into the flat, as Miss Dyke had entrusted the latch-key to her, and went on with the work. Mr. Dyke was in bed, and she got him all his