With a sudden movement she threw open the door before her. From the adjoining ante-room lurched the figure of Peters, the butler. He stared at us with a face grey with terror, and then crumpled to his knees. Madelyn drew away sharply as he tried to catch her skirts.
‘You may arrest the murderer of Wendell Marsh, Sheriff!’ she said gravely. ‘And I think perhaps you had better take him outside.’
She faced our bewildered stares as the drawing-room door closed behind Mr Peddicord and his prisoner. From her stand she again took Raleigh’s sandstone pipe, and with it two sheets of paper, smudged with the prints of a human thumb and fingers.
‘It was the pipe in the end which led me to the truth, not only as to the method but the identity of the assassin,’ she explained. ‘The hand, which placed the fatal charge in the concealed chamber, left its imprint on the surface of the bowl. The fingers, grimed with the dust of the drug, made an impression which I would have at once detected had I not been so occupied with what I might find inside that I forgot what I might find outside! I am very much afraid that I permitted myself the great blunder of the modern detective – lack of thoroughness.
‘Comparison with the fingerprints of the various agents in the case, of course, made the next step a mere detail of mathematical comparison. To make my identity sure, I found that my suspect possessed not only the opportunity and the knowledge for the crime, but the motive.
‘In his younger days Peters was a chemist’s apprentice; a fact which he utilised in his master’s behalf in obtaining the drugs which had become so necessary a part of Mr Marsh’s life. Had Wendell Marsh appeared in person for so continuous a supply, his identity would soon have made the fact a matter of common gossip. He relied on his servant for his agent, a detail which he mentions several times in his diary, promising Peters a generous bequest in his will as a reward. I fancy that it was the dream of this bequest, which would have meant a small fortune to a man in his position, that set the butler’s brain to work on his treacherous plan of murder.’
* * * * * *
Miss Mack’s dull gold hair covered the shoulders of her white peignoir in a great, thick braid. She was propped in a nest of pillows, with her favourite romance, The Three Musketeers, open at the historic siege of Porthos in the wine cellar. We had elected to spend the night at the Marsh house.
Madelyn glanced up as I appeared in the doorway of our room.
‘Allow me to present a problem to your analytical skill, Miss Mack,’ I said humbly. ‘Which man does your knowledge of feminine psychology say Muriel Jansen will reward – the gravely protecting physician, or the boyishly admiring Truxton?’
‘If she were thirty,’ retorted Madelyn, yawning, ‘she would be wise enough to choose Dr Dench. But, as she is only twenty-two, it will be Truxton.’
With a sigh, she turned again to the swashbuckling exploits of the gallant Porthos.
VIOLET STRANGE
Created by Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)
First published in 1878, The Leavenworth Case was one of the earliest of all American detective novels. Its author was Anna Katharine Green, a Brooklyn-born writer who turned to fiction after failing to make much of a mark as a poet. Her story of a rich man’s murder and its investigation by a detective from the New York Metropolitan Police Force named Ebenezer Gryce proved popular and significant in the later development of crime fiction. (Agatha Christie was later to cite it as an influence on her when she was beginning her career.) In the course of a long life, Green went on to write more than thirty other mystery novels including such titles as A Strange Disappearance, Behind Closed Doors and The Step on the Stair. A number of these featured Ebenezer Gryce, who thus became one of the first series characters in detective fiction, and Green also created a prototype Miss Marple in Amelia Butterworth, a nosy spinster with an eye for crime. In 1915, in her late sixties, Green published a volume of short stories, The Golden Slipper and Other Stories, which introduced another character to her readers. Violet Strange is an attractive young woman, a debutante who is at home amongst the upper echelons of New York society. She also leads a secret life as a professional sleuth, investigating crimes of all kinds to provide herself with an income of which her father knows nothing. The Violet Strange stories may not be as pioneering as the longer fiction Green wrote decades earlier but they are all well-written and entertaining reads.
AN INTANGIBLE CLUE
‘Not I.’
‘Not studied the case which for the last few days has provided the papers with such conspicuous headlines?’
‘I do not read the papers. I have not looked at one in a whole week.’
‘Miss Strange, your social engagements must be of a very pressing nature just now?’
‘They are.’
‘And your business sense in abeyance?’
‘How so?’
‘You would not ask if you had read the papers.’
To this she made no reply save by a slight toss of her pretty head. If her employer felt nettled by this show of indifference, he did not betray it save by the rapidity of his tones as, without further preamble and possibly without real excuse, he proceeded to lay before her the case in question. ‘Last Tuesday night a woman was murdered in this city; an old woman, in a lonely house where she has lived for years. Perhaps you remember this house? It occupies a not inconspicuous site in Seventeenth Street – a house of the olden time?’
‘No, I do not remember.’
The extreme carelessness of Miss Strange’s tone would have been fatal to her socially; but then, she would never have used it socially. This they both knew, yet
