London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mystery fiction
"You addressed in cipher a message in an advertisement to someone whom
you called `Nello,'" I said. "Who was he?"
"The man John Parham. He had always expressed pity for me. To the
others he was known as Nello, his real name being Lionel. I was
mistaken, however. He was no better than the others. The cipher they
had given to me in order that I could communicate with them in secret if
occasion demanded."
At six o'clock that same evening, after Sybil had returned to her
mother's house in Grosvenor Street, I entered the Tottenham Court Road
Police Station, and there found Pickering anxiously awaiting me.
"I wasn't far wrong, Mr Hughes," he exclaimed quickly. "Parham came to
Clipstone Street just before noon, and dropped into Nicholls' hands.
Winsloe somehow got wind of the affair, and has bolted--on his way to
the Continent, probably. We've circulated his description and hope to
get him. But he's a wily bird, it seems, from all accounts. Your
friend Domville was a pretty tough customer, too," he added.
"Why? I don't quite follow you."
"Well, when I got back here and went to his cell I found him stone dead.
He'd poisoned himself! Swallowed a strychnine pill."
"Because he was the murderer of Arthur Rumbold," I answered. "Miss
Burnet will later on explain everything."
"H'm," he grunted. "A pretty complicated bit of business, when all the
threads are gathered up."
There were still a few other matters to investigate, I pointed out, and
an hour later we went out to Sydenham Hill, and there saw Mrs Parham
and Miss O'Hara. When we told the poor lady of her husband's arrest,
and the charge against him, she fainted. Then, presently, when she came
to, she confessed that soon after her marriage she had had certain
suspicions aroused, for she discovered that her husband was wanted by
the French police for some offence committed in Bordeaux. The secret
cavity had been made in the drawing-room floor by him, and in it he kept
his private papers. Her own opinion was that the agents of French
police wanted to search there for certain evidence, the evidence of that
gruesome eye, no doubt, but knowing that no English magistrate would
grant them a search-warrant they resolved to make a raid on the place,
as though they were thieves. Though they overlooked the strange eye
which, with some ulterior motive Parham had preserved, they nevertheless
secured sufficient evidence to warrant them in applying for the man's
extradition for the murder of a banker at Bordeaux, which indeed the
French Consulate-General had done three weeks previously. Miss O'Hara,
it appeared, had accidentally discovered the cipher hidden behind a
heavy wardrobe in one of the bedrooms, and by its means had read my
messages and gone to Baker Street and to Dean's Yard out of sheer
curiosity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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