The Cottage on the Fells

They were standing on the pier at Boulogne, the Folkstone boat was just departing, the east wind was blowing, and over the cold, early spring day the clouds drifted, grey as the...

Hellier would meet them there. It was a sort of tacit appointment. No person, unless they were curiously blind, could fail to see that it was a rendezvous. The women came and th...

He followed her to a door on the first floor landing; she opened it, and led him into a sitting-room, where in an armchair beside a blazing wood fire sat old Madame de Warens mu...

A family may be likened to a thistle; plant it here or there, and, if left, it grows and flourishes, it casts its spores, like thistle-down on the wind of chance, and the spores...

STANDING on Gamblesby Fell you can see Throstle Hall away to the right, its gables and the smoke of its chimneys above the tall elm trees, and the great sweep of park surroundin...

A frost had set in with the evening, the road was like metal, and the sound of the horse’s hoofs rang upon the air like the sound of a trip-hammer on anvil.

He sorted them by the simple process of casting them upon the floor, some on the right, some on the left. The ones on the right went to the waste-paper basket, the ones on the l...

The fells, as I have before indicated, are one great sweep of low hills facing the west; they are continuous and almost unbroken yet by the local custom they are divided into se...

He was lucky to-day, for on these roads of Cumberland it is nothing to meet with a flock of five hundred sheep or so, or a string of farm carts, each drawn by a horse terrified...

“He looked startled and white,” ran his deposition, “looked like a man who had seen a ghost. I’ve known him a year, met him first on the run to Carlisle, then I met him in town...

IT was after ten the next morning that Raymond, the butler, made the discovery. Knocking at the door of Sir Anthony’s room and receiving no answer, he opened it, and found the b...

BOB LEWTHWAITE, the child who had watched Sir Anthony Gyde entering and leaving Skirle Cottage, was of a venturesome disposition. He feared few things except “boggles.” He feare...

“SO,” said Freyberger, when this detailed description of the affair had been given to him by his Chief, “it is briefly this: Gyde was being blackmailed by this man; he called on...

FREYBERGER once told me that he often admired the fictional detective, because of the ingenuity of his maker; but that the method of Lecocq, Sherlock Holmes and Co., had a great...

He knew the advantage of allowing a problem to cool itself, and he had the power of detaching his mind from any business on hand and attaching it to another affair; especially w...

THE cab drew up at the address in Old Compton Street given by Freyberger to the driver. It was a small shop, filled with antiques, old china, statuettes, renovated pictures.

DR GUSTAVUS MURRELL lived in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. He was a man of private means, and he possessed a medical practice that brought him in about a thousand a year. One of...

FREYBERGER was up betimes next morning, and having called at the Yard and found his chief not yet arrived, and no further news concerning the Gyde case, he betook himself to Old...

Again he felt himself a step nearer this mysterious personage, whose subtle and sinister processes he was slowly exposing to the light of day, or rather to the light of reason....

He had forty-eight hours before him. He felt about the case just as an engineer feels about some delicate piece of mechanism, which has not yet been put in position, and which a...

HE returned the big volume of press cuttings to their shelf, put on his hat and overcoat, lit a cigar, and left the house, taking his way to the Yard.

Generations of lawyers and rats and the fogs of two hundred or so Novembers had left their traces on wall and ceiling, on floors that sagged, and stairs that groaned, and doors...

Mrs Hussey, the old woman who stole Hellier’s tea and whisky and coal, made his bed, lit his fire, and attended generally to his wants and discomforts, had set the breakfast thi...

“You can take the case entirely into your own hands, Freyberger,” he said. “You have certainly done well in it heretofore, the connexion between the two crimes seems to me almos...

The man who would command events must be able to command sleep. This, at least, Freyberger was able to do. He cast himself upon his bed, closed his eyes and was immediately lost...

An old lady with white hair, a young woman whom he recognized by instinct as Mademoiselle Lefarge, and a man of about thirty or perhaps thirty-five, clean-shaved, English-lookin...

Then he buttoned his overcoat and prepared to depart. He felt jubilant. The whole of the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into their places under the influence of his intellect,...

IF Hellier could only have seen into the consciousness of our friend Freyberger, he would have admitted that the latter, although a professional detective, had an open mind, and...

Klein was clean-shaven and of middle height; but the disguise of a beard was the commonest disguise of all; and as for the height, the assassin was seen in semi-darkness, which...

He had as complete a list as could be obtained of the lodging-houses in the neighbourhood, every early morning coffee stall in Kensington and Bayswater had been kept under surve...

THERE was some coal in the coal-box and a bundle of wood in the grate. The weather was chilly and a fire would have been very acceptable, but the flicker of it when dusk was dra...

For a moment he was too angry for speech. Certain in his own mind that he was dealing with Klein, triumphant at having captured him, his feelings may be imagined when he found b...

Assured in his own mind that Klein inhabited the house in St Ann’s Road, hopeless of any help from Freyberger, whom he had put down as a self-conceited man of not very luminous...

Without food, without fire, without light, half worn out from his struggle with Hellier and depressed by the result, the chance of the capture of Klein reduced to the barest pos...

TIME passed, and April came to London, lighting the crocuses like little lamps along the borders of the parks. Nothing could have been kindlier than her coming or more cruel tha...

That is perhaps the most exasperating thing about detective work. You have your case complete; the whole thing is reasoned out, plotted and planned; you have built round your ma...

“I am not jubilant, sir; I would swear not to laugh again until I have this man by the shoulder, only the oath would be unnecessary. I am not jubilant, but I am glad. May I have...

“It is a most extraordinary case,” said that gentleman. “Of course, it can be nothing else but the work of a lunatic. The body was found at three o’clock yesterday in a turnip f...

“When I was talking to you in the bar, I fancied that some one was listening to me, and so I told you of my aunt—in Bremen was it? and of my sister in Düsseldorf.”

WHEN he awoke it was with a sensation of pain extending all over his body. He was lying on the tiled floor of a small room, which was evidently the kitchen and living room of a...

THAT night in London the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department sat in his office. It required ten minutes to midnight, and he had just laid down his pen after several h...

“It is done,” said Hellier. “To-morrow your father’s name will be cleared in the sight of all men. You have suffered and waited a long, long time, but yesterday you were avenged.”