The Valley of the ShadowMcNeile, H. C. (Herman Cyril)
General
The Valley of the Shadow
McNeile, H. C. (Herman Cyril)
Attempted murder -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; Short stories; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction
And now dinner was over, and she was still as far as ever from getting
the answer to her question. Why had Hubert done it? All through the
afternoon he had been uniformly charming; he couldn’t suspect anything;
he couldn’t. He was talking now about the tower—a strange architectural
freak which stuck up from one corner of the house like a funnel on a
locomotive.
“It’s an old house,” he was saying in his cultured, rather gentle voice.
“And I can’t quite make out who erected that tower originally. It was
put up after the house itself was built, but for what purpose is a
little obscure. It certainly can’t have been entirely erected as a
tomb.”
“A tomb!” echoed Denver in surprise. “In what way a tomb?”
“Has my wife never told you the story?” said Garling. “It’s one of the
stock things about this place. I can just remember when my father made
the discovery. The tower, of course, is hollow, and it had been used as
a sort of box-room. There were some rough steps going spirally round it
which finished abruptly in the brick roof. And one day it struck my
father that it was somewhat peculiar to make steps right up to a
ceiling, and he took some measurements. And he found that there was a
space of about ten feet to be accounted for at the top of the tower. You
can understand, of course, that it was very rare indeed that any one
went there, or such an obvious thing would have been discovered before.
So he got in some workmen and proceeded to remove the bricks from the
roof. And the mystery was solved. The steps which apparently disappeared
into the ceiling were now found to communicate with a room. And in that
room the remnants of two skeletons were found. They had been there for
at least a hundred years, but there was enough to prove that one had
been a man and the other a woman.”
“How very interesting!” said Denver. “Did your father ever find out what
had happened?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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