Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926
- Автор: Bailey H. C., Bechdolt Jack
- Год: 1926
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926». Краткое содержание книги:
Alice Sutton’s lips moved, but she uttered no sound. Nem went on:
“I can show how it happened to be in here — the weapon. You keep your pencils sharpened real nice, don’t you? All of them—” he nodded to the trayful of delicately pointed leads upon her desk — “were sharpened just lately — probably Wednesday. And you didn’t take the knife back to the kitchen.” His eyes left the betraying litter of sharpenings in the shallow waste basket, returned to the invalid. “Too bad you didn’t; for I don’t believe you planned to murder Rose. It was just a wild impulse, wasn’t it?”
Alice Sutton inclined her head.
“It came over me suddenly; I heard her answering the phone, after he — my husband — had gone out. I thought she was promising to meet him. I knew, God help me, that she had won him; her look — the very tones of her voice — betrayed her! And I — chained here to this chair — had to see it all; had to submit to her treachery; his suffering. He did suffer, for he loved me. And I... I loved him more than he can ever know. That was why I sat here that dreadful evening, nursing that sharp, deadly little knife. And then, as she bent over me, young and lovely and alive — as I can never be again—”
Her tragic voice died away; her waxen hands covered her face.
Nem cleared his throat, blinked out at the golden afternoon that had suddenly blurred.
“I’m mighty sorry for you, Mis’ Sutton. But the law—”
The cripple sucked in her breath.
“I know. I know. But my husband? He did what he did to save me; in expiation for his own sin. He must not suffer for mine!”
“I understand!” said Nem gently. “It won’t go hard with him, Mis’ — Sutton. Your confession ’ll clear him, right enough.”
“I’m glad you know the truth,” she whispered at last. “It was too terrible for me to keep — for him. Now — they’ll come and take me away, won’t they?”
Nem bent his head.
“I’m part of the law, Mis’ Sutton.”
She smiled faintly.
“Before you do your duty, will you hand me that little pasteboard box of pellets? My heart is very weak—”
She pointed with an unwavering forefinger to the stand beside her bed. Nem picked up the little round box, shook the tiny pellets.
“Strychnine?”
She breathed short assent, leaned forward to draw his eyes with the magnet of her own.
“I am not strong,” she told him. “I... I cannot face all that is coming. I have suffered so much already.”
She might have been referring to the actual arrest; to the legal procedure she faced. But Nem, reading her piteous look, her stricken face, knew that her words meant infinitely more than that. His big hands closed convulsively upon the heart stimulant she asked for.
“What is the dose?” he wanted to know.
Those tragic, asking eyes!
“Six pellets — crushed in a little water.”
To most people Nem looked like a shabby unwieldy old fellow, distinguished only by a kindly mouth, incredibly innocent eyes. To the woman in the wheel-chair he was suddenly transfigured; he was no longer a bald old man who saw everything; he was justice and mercy incarnate. For without looking at the legend on the box, he spilled six tiny pellets into his enormous palm and reached for the glass of water.
“Here. Reckon these will see you through.”
Then he strode to the door, called the master of the house sharply.
Sutton was close at hand; at the sound of his hurrying footsteps the woman in the chair stirred, lifted her ashen face.
“She wants you,” Nem told him as he brushed past, and watched him bend over his wife in an agony of love and tenderness.
“Alice, you’re ill! Your medicine—”
She seemed to grow smaller, younger; to relax utterly in her husband’s arms.
“Alice... Alice—” he mourned in the prescience of love. But he could not warm her wasted hands, hold off death. He could only kneel beside her, in penitence, as she died.
And Nem, with hushed step, went from the room, tearing to bits the cover of a pasteboard box, on which was printed: Dose one pellet in water.
The Missing Husband
by H. C. Bailey
Each voice was raised against the interloper when crime stained the last inheritors of the great house
I
In an orchard where the apple blossom rose out of a flood of bluebells a hammock was slung. In the hammock lay a creature the same size all the way along, like a slug, a slug wearing gray tweed and fair hair.
To this scene of peace entered with sprightly grace, like an actor manager to his love scene, the chief of the criminal investigation department, the Hon. Sidney Lomas. He approached the hammock, put up his eyeglass, and gazed tenderly at the still body.
In it one blue eye opened. “Reginald, my dear fellow,” said Lomas with affection and patted him. “How goes it?”
Reggie Fortune squirmed, revealing a face of delicate complexion and brushed back his tumbled hair. “Can aught atone?” he murmured. “Lomas, you have waked me up. That was my after-lunch sleep. And it isn’t time for tea.” He sighed deeply and looked at Lomas with large, reproachful eyes. “You have no heart, Lomas. I believe you actually want me to work.”
“Oh, no. We’re doing splendidly without you. There’s nothing to do. I only came over to see how you were getting on.”
“The patient is going on as well as can be expected, but cannot yet sleep more than twenty-four hours in the day.”
Mr. Fortune was, in fact, recovering his strength after the blood poisoning which he acquired in his work as medical expert for the crown upon the historic crime of the abominable Armenian, Comnenus. For his convalescence that majestic woman novelist, Mrs. Hamilton Chapone, lent him her cottage on the Wessex downs and there you behold him living the simple life in beautiful isolation — with his own cook!
At tea in the sun lounge, which looks across five miles of smiling fields to the sea, he ate cream cakes pensively while Lomas dallied with an anchovy sandwich and explained how he came. The chief constable of Wessex had asked him for advice, so he combined business with pleasure, the chief constable with Reggie Fortune.
Mr. Fortune looked at the empty plate, Mr. Fortune sucked cream from a finger and sighed. “Is there a constable in Wessex?” said Mr. Fortune, dreamily. “Why?”
“He hasn’t much to do or he wouldn’t have bothered me with this. A husband has left his wife, Reginald. That’s all.”
“In Wessex?” said Mr. Fortune. “Nasty fellow.”
“I don’t know the local rules, but it’s not a crime.”
“Depends on the wife. Who are they?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Julian Brase.”
“Brase? One of our good old county families, what? Genuine antique, aren’t they?”
“Oh, prehistoric. So’s the estate. Julian Brase, heir of all the ages and a lot of land mortgaged up to the treetops, married an Australian heiress two years ago. She paid off the debt and they’ve been living down here putting the place to rights. The county didn’t take to Mrs. Brase.
“They think she’s rather free and a good deal too easy. Julian Brase is a limp fellow — the sort of stuff these old families finish in. A week ago the Brases were due to dine at the rectory. Mrs. Brase sent a note to say her husband was ill. The rector’s wife called at Brase Hall next day with kind inquiries.