‘It’s all right,’ said Miss Van Snoop, quickly, as the searcher looked up at her after reading the note. ‘Show that to the boss – right away.’
The searcher opened the door. After whispered consultation the inspector appeared, holding the note in his hand.
‘Now then, be spry,’ said Miss Van Snoop. ‘Oh, you needn’t worry! I’ve got my credentials right here,’ and she dived into another pocket.
‘But do you know – can you be sure,’ said the inspector, ‘that this is the man who shot the Detroit bank manager?’
‘Great heavens! Didn’t I see him shoot Will Stevens with my own eyes! And didn’t I take service with the police to hunt him out?’
The girl stamped her foot, and the inspector left. For two, three, four minutes, she stood listening intently. Then a muffled shout reached her ears. Two minutes later the inspector returned.
‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘We have found enough evidence on him to identify him. But why didn’t you give him in charge before to the police?’
‘I wanted to arrest him myself,’ said Miss Van Snoop, ‘and I have. Oh, Will! Will!’
Miss Van Snoop sank into a cane-bottomed chair, laid her head upon the table, and cried. She had earned the luxury of hysterics. In half an hour she left the station, and, proceeding to a post office, cabled her resignation to the head of the detective force in New York.
HILDA WADE
Created by Grant Allen (1848-1899)
Although largely forgotten today, Grant Allen was a popular and versatile writer who published books, both non-fiction and fiction, on a wide variety of subjects and in a number of different genres. His best known and most notorious book, The Woman Who Did, appeared in 1895 and attracted controversy because of its portrait of an independent woman who defies convention to live as a single mother. Allen’s feminist sympathies were also in evidence in many of his short stories. For The Strand Magazine he created Lois Cayley, a Cambridge-educated ‘New Woman’ who is left almost penniless after the deaths of her mother and her stepfather. Undeterred, she sets out on a series of adventures which take her halfway round the world and involve her in the solution of crimes which she needs all her wit and intelligence to expose. Hilda Wade is another young woman of brilliant gifts. Her almost photographic memory is astonishing and her powers of deduction remarkable. She works as a nurse at the same hospital as her admirer, Dr Cumberledge, who is the narrator of the stories in which she features. Nursing is not her vocation. It is the means by which she can get close to the man she believes to be responsible for the death of her father. Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose is a novel, or (more accurately) a collection of interlinked stories, which takes Allen’s heroine and her would-be lover from their London hospital to the remoter regions of southern Africa in her quest for justice. Grant Allen died before he could finish it and the last chapter was completed by his friend and neighbour Arthur Conan Doyle.
THE EPISODE OF THE NEEDLE THAT DID NOT MATCH
‘Sebastian is a great man,’ I said to Hilda Wade, as I sat one afternoon over a cup of tea she had brewed for me in her own little sitting-room. It is one of the alleviations of a hospital doctor’s lot that he may drink tea now and again with the Sister of his ward. ‘Whatever else you choose to think of him, you must admit he is a very great man.’
I admired our famous Professor, and I admired Hilda Wade: ’twas a matter of regret to me that my two admirations did not seem in return sufficiently to admire one another. ‘Oh, yes,’ Hilda answered, pouring out my second cup; ‘he is a very great man. I never denied that. The greatest man, on the whole, I think, that I have ever come across.’
‘And he has done splendid work for humanity,’ I went on, growing enthusiastic.
‘Splendid work! Yes, splendid! (Two lumps, I believe?) He has done more, I admit, for medical science than any other man I ever met.’
I gazed at her with a curious glance. ‘Then why, dear lady, do you keep telling me he is cruel?’ I inquired, toasting my feet on the fender. ‘It seems contradictory.’
She passed me the muffins, and smiled her restrained smile.
‘Does the desire to do good to humanity in itself imply a benevolent disposition?’ she answered, obliquely.
‘Now you are talking in paradox. Surely, if a man works all his life long for the good of mankind, that shows he is devoured by sympathy for his species.’
‘And when your friend Mr Bates works all his life long at observing, and classifying ladybirds, I suppose that shows he is devoured by sympathy for the race of beetles!’
I laughed at her comical face, she looked at me so quizzically. ‘But then,’ I objected, ‘the cases are not parallel. Bates kills and collects his ladybirds; Sebastian cures and benefits humanity.’
Hilda smiled her wise smile once more, and fingered her apron. ‘Are the cases so different as you suppose?’ she went on, with her quick glance. ‘Is it not partly accident? A man of science, you see, early in life, takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form of study. But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it? Surely it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells: the temperament that is or is not scientific.’
‘How do you mean? You are so enigmatic!’
‘Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one brother may happen to go in for butterflies – may he not? – and another for geology, or for submarine telegraphs. Now, the man who
