The Illustrious PrinceOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
General
The Illustrious Prince
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories; Princes -- Fiction
There followed a few days of pleasurable interest to all Englishmen
who travelled in the tube and read their halfpenny papers. A great
and enlightened Press had already solved the problem of creating the
sensational without the aid of facts. This sudden deluge, therefore, of
undoubtedly tragical happenings became almost an embarrassment to
them. Black headlines, notes of exclamation, the use of superlative
adjectives, scarcely met the case. The murder of Mr. Hamilton Fynes was
strange enough. Here was an unknown man, holding a small position in his
own country,--a man apparently without friends or social position. He
travelled over from America, merely a unit amongst the host of other
passengers; yet his first action, on arriving at Liverpool, was to make
use of privileges which belonged to an altogether different class of
person, and culminated in his arrival at Euston in a special train with
a dagger driven through his heart! Here was material enough for a least
a fortnight of sensations and countersensations, of rumored arrests and
strange theories. Yet within the space of twenty-four hours the affair
of Mr. Hamilton Fynes had become a small thing, had shrunk almost into
insignificance by the side of the other still more dramatic, still more
wonderful happening. Somewhere between the Savoy Hotel and Melbourne
Square, Kensington, a young American gentleman of great strength, of
undoubted position, the nephew of a Minister, and himself secretary to
the Ambassador of his country in London, had met with his death in a
still more mysterious, still more amazing fashion. He had left the hotel
in an ordinary taxicab, which had stopped on the way to pick up no
other passenger. He had left the Savoy alone, and he was discovered
in Melbourne Square alone. Yet, somewhere between these two points,
notwithstanding the fact that the aggressor must have entered the cab
either with or without his consent, Mr. Richard Vanderpole, without
a struggle, without any cry sufficiently loud to reach the driver or
attract the attention of any passer-by, had been strangled to death by
a person who had disappeared as though from the face of the earth. The
facts seemed almost unbelievable, and yet they were facts. The driver
of the taxi knew only that three times during the course of his drive he
had been caught in a block and had had to wait for a few seconds--once
at the entrance to Trafalgar Square, again at the junction of Haymarket
and Pall Mall, and, for a third time, opposite the Hyde Park Hotel. At
neither of these halting places had he heard any one enter or leave the
taxi. He had heard no summons from his fare, even though a tube, which
was in perfect working order, was fixed close to the back of his head.
He had known nothing, in fact, until a policeman had stopped him, having
caught a glimpse of the ghastly face inside. There was no evidence which
served to throw a single gleam of light upon the affair. Mr. Vanderpole
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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