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
Mrs. Frewin paused awhile, undecided and still defiant. Then her
attitude softened; she turned and looked full at the beautiful, kind
eyes turned eagerly up to hers, and pressing Lady Molly’s tiny hand in
both her own she whispered:
“I will take your advice. God bless you.”
She was gone, and Lady Molly called Hankin to her side.
“Until we have that confession, Hankin,” she said, with the quiet
manner she always adopted where matters connected with her work were
concerned, “Mum’s the word.”
“Ay, and after that, too, my lady,” replied Hankin, earnestly.
You see, she could do anything she liked with the men, and I, of
course, was her slave.
Now we have got the confession, Mrs. Frewin is on the best of terms
with Mr. James Hyam, who has behaved very well about the whole thing,
and the public has forgotten all about the mystery of the Frewin
miniatures.
III.
THE IRISH-TWEED COAT
It all began with the murder of Mr. Andrew Carrthwaite, at Palermo.
He had been found dead in the garden of his villa just outside the
town, with a stiletto between his shoulder blades and a piece of rough
Irish tweed, obviously torn from his assailant’s coat, clutched
tightly in his hand.
All that was known of Mr. Carrthwaite over here was that he was a
Yorkshireman, owner of some marble works in Sicily, a man who employed
a great many hands; and that, unlike most employers of labour over
there, he had a perfect horror of the many secret societies and
Socialist clubs which abound in that part of the world. He would not
become a slave to the ever-growing tyranny of the Mafia and its
kindred associations, and therefore he made it a hard and fast rule
that no workman employed by him, from the foremost to the meanest
hand, should belong to any society, club, or trade union of any sort
or kind.
At first, robbery was thought to have been the sole object of the
crime, for Mr. Carrthwaite’s gold watch, marked with his initials
“A. C.,” and his chain were missing, but the Sicilian police were soon
inclined to the belief that this was merely a blind, and that personal
spite and revenge were at the bottom of that dastardly outrage.
One clue, remember, had remained in the possession of the authorities.
This was the piece of rough Irish tweed, found in the murdered man’s
hand.
Within twenty-four hours a dozen witnesses were prepared to swear that
that fragment of cloth was part of a coat habitually worn by Mr.
Carrthwaite’s English overseer, Mr. Cecil Shuttleworth. It appears
that this young man had lately, in defiance of the rigid rules
prescribed by his employer, joined a local society--semi-social,
semi-religious--which came under the ban of the old Yorkshireman’s
prejudices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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