Lady Molly of Scotland YardOrczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
General
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
Detective and mystery stories; Police -- Great Britain -- Fiction
What Detective Inspector Hankin had gathered was this: While John
Chipps saw his mistress into the motor, the front door of the house
had, of necessity, been left wide open. The motor then made a start,
but after a few paces it stopped, and Mrs. Frewin put her head out of
the window and shouted to Chipps some instructions with regard to the
nurses’ evening collation, which, in view of Mr. Frewin’s state, she
feared might be forgotten. Chipps, being an elderly man and a little
deaf, did not hear her voice distinctly, so he ran up to the motor,
and she repeated her instructions to him. In Inspector Hankin’s mind
there was no doubt that the thief, who must have been hanging about
the shrubbery that evening, took that opportunity to sneak into the
house, then to hide himself in a convenient spot until he could find
an opportunity for the robbery which he had in view.
The butler declared that, when he returned, he saw nothing unusual. He
had only been gone a little over a minute; he then fastened and bolted
the front door, and, according to his usual custom, he put up all the
shutters of the ground-floor windows, including, of course, those in
the library. He had no light with him when he did this accustomed
round, for, of course, he knew his way well enough in the dark, and
the electric chandelier in the hall gave him what light he wanted.
While he was putting up the shutters, Chipps was giving no particular
thought to the miniatures, but, strangely enough, he seems to have
thought of them about an hour later, when most of the servants had
gone to bed and he was waiting up for his mistress. He then, quite
casually and almost absent-mindedly, when crossing the hall, turned
the key of the library door, thus locking it from the outside.
Of course, throughout all this we must remember that Blatchley House
was not in its normal state that night, since its master was actually
dying in a room on the floor above the library. The two nurses and
Kennet, the valet, were all awake, and with him during the whole of
that night. Kennet certainly was in and out of the room several times,
having to run down and fetch various things required by the doctor or
the nurses. In order to do this he did not use the principal
staircase, nor did he have to cross the hall, but, as far as the upper
landing and the secondary stairs were concerned, he certainly had not
noticed anything unusual or suspicious; whilst when Mrs. Frewin came
home, she went straight up to the first floor, and certainly noticed
nothing in any way to arouse her suspicions. But, of course, this
meant very little, as she certainly must have been too upset and
agitated to see anything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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