Detective and mystery stories; Police -- Great Britain -- Fiction
Katherine Moon, a cashier at the Royal Services Club, Waterloo Place,
proved more interesting. She had waited for a minute or two in
Waterloo Place for a friend to join her; half-past six was the time
arranged; during that time she had noticed a man in a light overcoat
waiting at the corner of Carlton House Terrace, to one side of the
Steps; she had noticed him because for a second she had thought he
might be the friend for whom she was waiting, though she had quickly
seen that he was taller than her friend and wore a moustache, which
her friend did not. That was all that she had seen; she had no real
reason for connecting him with the tragedy and had not at first done
so, but on hearing of the exhumation and having previously read Miss
Fratten’s advertisement, she had put two and two together and wondered
whether they could possibly make four. Poole thought her a
particularly smart girl; there had been so very little really to
connect the two incidents in her mind, and yet the detective felt that
she might well be right.
Four more names remained on the Inspector’s list—three from the
Haymarket neighbourhood, and one from Paddington Square. Poole was
puzzled for a moment to find practically all the witnesses coming from
such a conscribed area, till he realized that the number of people who
would use the Duke of York’s Steps as a homeward route after the day’s
work must be closely limited—it was a distinctly long way to Victoria
or Waterloo and not too close even to St. James’s Park Underground
Station.
Mr. Raffelli, owner of a small antique shop in Haymarket Passage, had
not, it transpired, seen the accident at all, but had been present
when Sir Garth’s body was carried to the car, arriving on the scene
probably five minutes after he fell. More wasted time, thought Poole.
After a hurried luncheon at Appenrodt’s, the detective called on Mr.
Julian Wagglebow, employed in the London Library. Mr. Wagglebow, a
precise old gentleman who disliked being hurried, described how, after
finishing his day’s work, which consisted of indexing a number of
newly-purchased books, at 6 p. m., he had proceeded to Hugh Rees’s
shop in Lower Regent Street, to buy a copy of _The Fond Heart_ for his
daughter, whose birthday it was. Leaving Hugh Rees’s he had walked
down past the Guards Crimean Memorial and the new King Edward statue—a
misleading representation, Mr. Wagglebow thought—to the Duke of York’s
Steps. Being rather short-sighted he was descending the Steps slowly
and carefully when he was startled by someone rushing down past him.
“That man will have an accident if he isn’t careful,” he had thought
to himself, and sure enough, at that very moment, the man had stumbled
and lurched against a gentleman in a top-hat who was walking with
another gentleman, similarly attired, just in front of him, Mr.
Wagglebow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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