Detective White & Furneaux: 5 Novels in One Volume. Louis Tracy. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Louis Tracy
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9788027246038
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       Louis Tracy

      Detective White & Furneaux: 5 Novels in One Volume

      Published by

      Books

      - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

       [email protected]

      2018 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-272-4603-8

      Table of Contents

       The Postmaster's Daughter

       Number Seventeen

       The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley

       The De Bercy Affair

       What Would You Have Done?

      The Postmaster's Daughter

       Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I The Face at the Window

       CHAPTER II P. C. Robinson "Takes a Line"

       CHAPTER III The Gathering Clouds

       CHAPTER IV A Cabal

       CHAPTER V The Seeds of Mischief

       CHAPTER VI Scotland Yard Takes a Hand

       CHAPTER VII "Alarums and Excursions

       CHAPTER VIII An Interrupted Symposium

       CHAPTER IX How Whom the Cap Fits—

       CHAPTER X The Case Against Grant

       CHAPTER XI P. C. Robinson Takes Another Line

       CHAPTER XII Wherein Winter Gets to Work

       CHAPTER XIII Concerning Theodore Siddle

       CHAPTER XIV On Both Sides of the River

       CHAPTER XV A Matter of Heredity

       CHAPTER XVI Furneaux Makes a Successful Bid

       CHAPTER XVII An Official Housebreaker

       CHAPTER XVIII The Truth at Last

      CHAPTER I

      The Face at the Window

       Table of Contents

      John Menzies Grant, having breakfasted, filled his pipe, lit it, and strolled out bare-headed into the garden. The month was June, that glorious rose-month which gladdened England before war-clouds darkened the summer sky. As the hour was nine o'clock, it is highly probable that many thousands of men were then strolling out into many thousands of gardens in precisely similar conditions; but, given youth, good health, leisure, and a fair amount of money, it is even more probable that few among the smaller number thus roundly favored by fortune looked so perplexed as Grant.

      Moreover, his actions were eloquent as words. A spacious French window had been cut bodily out of the wall of an old-fashioned room, and was now thrown wide to admit the flower-scented breeze. Between this window and the right-hand angle of the room was a smaller window, square-paned, high above the ground level, and deeply recessed—in fact just the sort of window which one might expect to find in a farm-house built two centuries ago, when light and air were rigorously excluded from interiors. The two windows told the history of The Hollies at a glance. The little one had served the needs of a "best" room for several generations of Sussex yeomen. Then had come some iconoclast who hewed a big rectangle through the solid stone-work, converted the oak-panelled apartment into a most comfortable dining-room, built a new wing with a gable, changed a farm-yard into a flower-bordered lawn, and generally played havoc with Georgian utility while carrying out a determined scheme of landscape gardening.

      Happily, the wrecker was content to let well enough alone after enlarging the house, laying turf, and planting shrubs and flowers. He found The Hollies a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping lawn bounded by a river-pool. The bank on the other side of the stream rose sharply and was well wooded. Above the crest showed the thatched roofs or red tiles of Steynholme, which was a village in the time of William the Conqueror, and has remained a village ever since. Frame this picture in flowering shrubs, evergreens, a few choice firs, a copper beech, and some sturdy oaks shadowing the lawn, and the prospect on a June morning might well have led out into the open any young man with a pipe.

      But John Menzies Grant seemed to have no eye for a scene that would have delighted a painter. He turned to the light, scrutinized so closely a strip of turf which ran close to the wall that he might have been searching for a lost diamond, and then peered through the lowermost left-hand pane of the small window into the room he had just quitted.

      The result of this peeping was remarkable in more ways than one.

      A stout, elderly, red-faced woman, who had entered the room soon after she heard Grant's chair being moved, caught sight of the intent face. She screamed loudly, and dropped a cup and saucer with a clatter on to a Japanese tray.

      Grant hurried back to the French window. In his haste he did not notice a long shoot of a Dorothy Perkins rose which trailed across his path, and it struck him smartly on the cheek.

      "I'm afraid I startled you, Mrs. Bates," he said, smiling so pleasantly that no woman or child could fail to put trust in him.

      "You did that, sir," agreed Mrs. Bates, collapsing into the chair Grant had just vacated.

      Like most red-faced people, Mrs. Bates turned a bluish purple when alarmed, and her aspect was so distressing