“‘It was then about one o’clock,’ he stated.  ’Mrs. Owen called and presented a cheque to self for L827, the amount of her balance.  She seemed exceedingly happy and cheerful, and talked about needing plenty of cash, as she was going abroad to join her nephew, for whom she would in future keep house.  I warned her about being sufficiently careful with so large a sum, and parting from it injudiciously, as women of her class are very apt to do.  She laughingly declared that not only was she careful of it in the present, but meant to be so for the far-off future, for she intended to go that very day to a lawyer’s office and to make a will.’

“The cashier’s evidence was certainly startling in the extreme, since in the widow’s room no trace of any kind was found of any money; against that, two of the notes handed over by the bank to Mrs. Owen on that day were cashed by young Greenhill on the very morning of her mysterious death.  One was handed in by him to the West End Clothiers Company, in payment for a suit of clothes, and the other he changed at the Post Office in Oxford Street.

“After that all the evidence had of necessity to be gone through again on the subject of young Greenhill’s intimacy with Mrs. Owen.  He listened to it all with an air of the most painful nervousness, his cheeks were positively green, his lips seemed dry and parched, for he repeatedly passed his tongue over them, and when Constable E 18 deposed that at 2 a.m. on the morning of February 2nd he had seen the accused and spoken to him at the corner of Percy Street and Tottenham Court Road, young Greenhill all but fainted.

“The contention of the police was that the caretaker had been murdered and robbed during that night before she went to bed, that young Greenhill had done the murder, seeing that he was the only person known to have been intimate with the woman, and that it was, moreover, proved unquestionably that he was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Rubens Studios at an extraordinarily late hour of the night.

“His own account of himself, and of that same night, could certainly not be called very satisfactory.  Mrs. Owen was a relative of his late mother’s, he declared.  He himself was a lithographer by trade, with a good deal of time and leisure on his hands.  He certainly had employed some of that time in taking the old woman to various places of amusement.  He had on more than one occasion suggested that she should give up menial work, and come and live with him, but, unfortunately, she was a great deal imposed upon by her nephew, a man of the name of Owen, who exploited the good-natured woman in every possible way, and who had on more than one occasion made severe attacks upon her savings at the Birkbeck Bank.

“Severely cross-examined by the prosecuting counsel about this supposed relative of Mrs. Owen, Greenhill admitted that he did not know him—­had, in fact, never seen him.  He knew that his name was Owen and that was all.  His chief occupation consisted in sponging on the kind-hearted old woman, but he only went to see her in the evenings, when he presumably knew that she would be alone, and invariably after all the tenants of the Rubens Studios had left for the day.