United States or Bolivia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She turned around and glanced hurriedly back into the restaurant. At that moment she met the steady, questioning scrutiny of Francis' eyes. She stood as though transfixed. Then came the sound which every one talked of for months afterwards, the sound which no one who heard it ever forgot the death cry of Victor Bidlake, followed a second afterwards by a muffled report.
Afterwards, I'll take the body to the mortuary when the ambulance arrives." An attendant pushed his way through the crowd of people on the inner side of the door. "Miss Daisy Hyslop, young lady who was with Mr. Bidlake, has just fainted in the ladies' room, sir," he announced. "Could you come?" "I'll be there immediately," the doctor promised. The rest of the proceedings followed a normal course.
"You saw me at Soto's, the night that Victor Bidlake was murdered," he reminded her. "I stood quite close to you both while you were waiting for your taxi." The animation evoked by this call from a presumably new admirer, suddenly left her. She became nervous and constrained. She glanced again at his card. "Don't tell me," she begged, "that you have come to ask me any questions about that night!
"I wonder," he said, after a slight pause, "whether it ever occurred to you to interview Miss Daisy Hyslop, the young lady who was with Bidlake on the night of his murder?" "I called upon her the day afterwards," the detective answered. "She had nothing to say?" "Nothing whatever." "Indirectly, of course," Francis continued, "the poor girl was the cause of his death.
The two young men concerned, Bidlake and Fairfax, were both guests of mine recently at my country house. They had discovered for one another a very fierce and reasonable antipathy. With that recurrence to primitivism with which I have always been a hearty sympathiser, they agreed, instead of going round their little world making sneering remarks about each other, to fight it out."
Four men were discussing the verdict at the adjourned inquest upon Victor Bidlake, at Soto's American Bar about a fortnight later.
There is an impression abroad that I was interested in the two young men, Victor Bidlake and Fairfax, and that I knew something of their quarrel. You were an intimate friend of young Bidlake's and presumably in his confidence. It occurs to me, therefore, that Mr. Shopland might very well have visited you in search of information, linking me up with that unfortunate affair.
At any rate, he held out a challenge. 'If you are a man who hates crime, he said, or something like it, 'I am one who loves it. He then went on to prophesy that a crime would be committed close to where we were, within an hour or so, and he challenged me to discover the assassin. That night Victor Bidlake was murdered just outside Soto's." "I remember!
Word Of The Day