Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master Detective — John Shaqi
Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master DetectiveBrebner, Percy James
General
Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master Detective
Brebner, Percy James
College teachers -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
From our new point of view I looked again. The man's face was
familiar, but just then I could not remember who he was. It was the
bundle hanging over the fire which fascinated me.
Tied together, and secured in a network of string, were five or six
human heads, blackened, shriveled faces, which seemed to grin horribly
as they swung deeply from side to side, lit up by the flicker of the
flames.
"Do you see, Wigan?" Quarles asked again.
"Yes."
"And the man?"
"Who is he?"
"On the bench yesterday. Sir Henry Buckingham. Don't you remember?"
For an hour--two, three, I don't know how long--that horrible bundle
swung over the fire, and the man sat on his block of wood, staring
straight before him. I had a great desire to rush from my hiding-place
and seize him, and I waited, expecting some further revelation,
listening for other footsteps. None came. The fire flickered lower and
went out. The moon had set, and the cold of the early morning got into
my bones.
In the darkness before the dawn the man moved about the shed again,
and presently I heard him go.
"Patience!" whispered Quarles, as I started up to go after him. "He
will not run away."
His calmness almost exasperated me, but he would answer no questions
until we had returned to our hotel and had breakfast.
"My dear Wigan," he said, when at last he condescended to talk, "it
was Zena who first set me on the right road, when she remarked that a
man who had walked in a ditch carrying a bag would arrest attention.
Two points were suggested--first, that the man might not have far to
go to reach a place of safety; secondly, that he had come prepared to
take a head away with him. A mere speculation, you may say, but it set
me putting questions to myself. Why should a head be required? What
kind of man would be likely to want a head? A theory took shape in my
brain, and I hunted up the history of the well-to-do people who lived
in the neighborhood of Withan. My theory required a man who had
traveled, who was elderly, who could be connected with the case in
France two years ago. I found such a man in Sir Henry Buckingham. I
told you I was not certain of my theory. I was doubtful about it after
I had watched Sir Henry for a whole morning on the bench. I sought for
some peculiarity in his manner, and found none. Yet his history
coincided with my theory. You know nothing about him, I suppose?"
"Nothing."
"Rather an interesting career, but with an hereditary taint in it,"
Quarles went on. "His mother was eccentric. Her husband was rich
enough to have her looked after at home; had she been a poorer person
she would have died in a madhouse. Religious mania hers was, and her
son has inherited it in a curious fashion. In the year intervening
between the Normandy crime and this one Sir Henry was in Rome, where
he was very ill, delirious, and not expected to live, so there was no
similar crime that year. But he was in Normandy at the time of the
murder there, motoring, and usually alone."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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