In the Mayor's Parlour

During a moment's impressive silence the three men, standing side by side at Hawthwaite's desk, stared at the blood-stained memento of the crime. Each was thinking the same thou...

Hathelsborough market-place lies in the middle of the town--a long, somewhat narrow parallelogram, enclosed on its longer side by old gabled houses; shut in on its western end b...

Before ever Brent dropped into the chair to which Hawthwaite silently pointed him, he knew that he was about to hear revelations. He was conscious of an atmosphere in that drab,...

Brent, at that moment, was in a state of mind which made every fibre of his being particularly sensitive to suspicions and speculative ideas--he had no sooner slipped Mrs. Sauma...

Already interested in the Crood family because of what he had seen of Simon Crood and his niece on the previous evening, Brent looked closely at the man whom Peppermore pointed...

Brent went back to his hotel to find the Town Clerk of Hathelsborough waiting for him in his private sitting-room. His visitor, a sharp-eyed man whose profession was suggested i...

Everybody present, not excluding Brent, knew the man at whom the Superintendent of Police was staring, and who evidently wished to address the Coroner. He was Mr. Samuel John Ep...

By business time next morning Brent had cast aside all thought of the previous day's proceedings and of his defeat at the hands of the Old Gang, and had turned to affairs which...

Bunning knew the Mayor was dead before that cry of surprise had passed his lips. In his time he had seen many dead men--sometimes it was a bullet, sometimes a bayonet; he knew t...

The discovery of Wallingford's will, which lay uppermost amongst a small collection of private papers in a drawer of the dead man's desk, led Brent and Tansley into a new train...

Brent received this plain-spoken declaration with a curious tightening of lips and setting of jaw which Tansley, during their brief acquaintance, had come to know well enough. T...

Despite the admonitions of the presiding magistrate, and the stern voices of sundry officials, posted here and there about the court, a hubbub of excited comment and murmur brok...

When Brent came again to the centre of the town he found that Hathelsborough, instead of sinking to sleep within an hour of curfew, according to long-established custom, had awa...

From a certain amount of whispering and nodding that went on around him, Brent gathered that this ancient gentleman was not unknown to many of those present. But Tansley was tur...

Brent went to bed that night wondering what it was that Queenie Crood wanted. Since their first meeting in the Castle grounds they had met frequently. He was getting interested...

But if the barrister was satisfied with the possibilities suggested by this new evidence, the gist of which had apparently altered the whole aspect of the case, the Coroner obvi...

Brent heard what the superintendent said, nodded a silent reply, and five minutes later had put that particular thing clean out of his mind. During the progress of the Local Gov...

The tightly-wedged mass of spectators watched, open-mouthed and quivering with anticipation, while the attendant, at Meeking's whispered bidding, broke the seals and cut the str...

But as the day of the adjourned inquest drew near Brent became aware that there were rumours in the air--rumours of some sensational development, the particulars of which were e...

Carstairs, a red-haired, blue-eyed, stolid-faced young Scotsman, stepped into the witness-box with the air of a man who is being forced against his will to the performance of so...

Brent was out of his seat near the door, out of the court itself, out of the Moot Hall, and in the market-place before he realized what he was doing. It was a brilliant summer d...

In the midst of the commotion that followed and while Mrs. Saumarez, attended by the doctors, was being carried out of the Court-room, Tansley, at Brent's elbow, drew in his bre...

Meeking, who by long experience knew the value of dramatic effect in the examination of witnesses, took full advantage of Mrs. Mallett's strange and unexpected announcement. He...

That the appearance of Louisa Speck in the witness-box came as something more than an intense surprise to at any rate two particular persons in that court was evident at once to...

Interest was beginning to thicken: the people in court, from Simon Crood, pompous and aloof in his new grandeur of chief magistrate, to Spizey the bellman, equally pompous in hi...