The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  Within that shadow a black shape crouched silent and motionless and somehow feral. A gloved hand held a small round diaphragm against the wood and from this two slender, hollow rubber tubes curved to shell-like ears covered by hair that light would have revealed as tightly curled and tawny.

  Fulton Zander’s eyes moved to the dapper little man, blue lids folding vulture-like over their pale gaze. “Would you like to refuse your share, Harris, and let me split it up among the rest of us?”

  “No. I’ll be damned if I will. In for a calf, in for an ox.”

  “Then I shall proceed.” The lawyer’s smile was a humorless, vinegary twitch of pallid lips. “I shall not bore you with the manipulations by which it was accomplished, but, as I have already said, while the books of Union Light and Power show it to have run this year at a terrific loss, I have here, in this box, the round sum of fifty thousand dollars in cash. I am reserving ten thousand for myself and distributing eight thousand to each of you. A pretty little Christmas gift from the people of Laneville, gentlemen, I think you will agree.”

  * * *

  —

  “Not bad,” Simpson rubbed pudgey hands. “Not bad,” his buttery accents repeated.

  “I take it you are satisfied,” Zander murmured. One of his claws moved to his vest pocket, came out with a small key that it fitted into the cash box’s lock, clicked over…

  A dull detonation, the crash of splintering glass, sounded from somewhere outside the room, “What’s that,” Harris squealed. “What was that?”

  The attorney’s head jerked up and his beak pointed at the closed door. “An explosion. It sounded like an explosion somewhere at the back of the house.”

  “Damned right it was,” Reynolds shoved himself up out of his seat. “Look. Look at that.” His hand pointed to the threshold of the door. Something grey, slender, curled from under it, stretched a lazy tendril into the room. “That’s smoke. The house is on fire.”

  Zander leaped to his feet, a moment behind the others because he took time to relock the money box and shove it under his arm. “Fire,” he gasped. “There’s no one back there. I gave the servants a night off. We’ve got to…”

  He didn’t need to finish. Wayne had flung the door open on swirling grey smoke, the others were crowding through it behind him. In that moment darkness smashed down on them, stygian, complete.

  Someone shouted incoherently. Someone coughed. Then Fred Harris’s cry was a thin squeal in the dark smoke-pall that flickered with a wavering, lurid glow. “The door is wedged.”

  “Good thing.” Zander’s voice was cool, collected. “If the bunch of you poured out that way it would be a dead giveaway. Go through the back, the way you came.” Feet thudded, obeying.

  In the deserted room a window scraped open, scraped closed again, the sound unnoticed.

  Snow-glimmer came in through a smashed window, outlining the gleaming kitchen into which the rout burst. The smoke was fading, here, thinner with a strange swiftness.

  “What’s this?” Dr. Wayne exclaimed, pouncing on a round, black object that lay in the center of the kitchen floor. “Well, I’ll be damned. A smoke pot.”

  He came up with it, and the others crowded around him. Someone struck flame from a cigarette lighter and astonished eyes widened, staring at that which he held.

  It was one of the bomb-like road flares that lined East Drive. Its wick was wrapped around with a grease-smeared rag that still smouldered acridly!

  “What the hell, Zander?” Lawton grunted. “What kind of trick is this you’re pulling on us?”

  There was no answer.

  “Hey, Zander!” The men peered at one another. There were only five of them. Their host was missing.

  “Skipped!” Wayne snarled. “The—that’s why he had the front door locked. He got us in here and skipped with the cash.”

  “You’re nuts!” Reynolds, holding the lighter, protested. “Something’s happened to him.” He turned, shoved through the white-faced knot, went through the kitchen doorway into the narrow passageway from the front of the house. Then he spoke again, his ejaculation a throaty gasp. “Here he is!”

  The others, crowding out behind him, saw Zander too. He was a crumpled, grotesquely awkward heap across the threshold of the room in which the interrupted meeting had been held. A blue bruise on his forehead told what it was that had stunned him.

  The cash box was nowhere in sight.

  CHAPTER V

  Caught

  Anne Marsh’s little heels thudded into the soft ground where she had crouched, listening in on the men who had killed her father as surely as though they had held the poison cup to his lips. She huddled in the ebon shadow that had served her so well, and worked at the boy’s jacket she wore, trying to button it over a black metal cash box that held fifty thousand dollars in untraceable cash.

  The wide street was a river of eerie light dotted by the mufflered, overcoated forms of laborers. But to her right there was a thick hedge that drowned the radiance, and between her and that shelter there was only ten feet of open ground.

  Her muscles tensed, as a sprinter’s would, waiting for the starter’s gun. Then she was off, a flitting shadow across the white snow blanket.

  Strong arms clamped around her, pinning her arms to her side, holding her helpless. “Got you!” a toneless voice exclaimed. “Got you at last! And dead to rights.”

  Anne moaned, and slumped, knowing it was useless to struggle. Bulldog Ryan’s pinched visage glimmered out of the darkness, his thin lips pulling away from his teeth in a grimace of gloating triumph.

  “I figured the only way you could get in and out of that damn room of yours was if there was a tunnel through the bank underneath, and I camped out in the bushes across the creek, where I could keep watch. I followed you, and I let you have plenty of rope, and by jingo, you sure have hung yourself with it.”

  “All right,” the girl said, her tones flat, dreary but very steady. “You’ve got me, and it’s all over. Put the handcuffs on me and take me off to jail.”

  “I’ll put the cuffs on you all right,” the detective grunted, suiting the action to the word, “but we’re not goin’ to the station yet. We’re goin’ back there an’ see just what it is you’ve been up to.

  * * *

  —

  The electric light wires had been clipped outside the house, could not be repaired till a linesman was called, but someone had found candles and the room with the long table was illuminated once more. Fulton Zander was back in his chair, the bruise livid on his forehead.

  “Look here, officer.” The words slid from his thin, scarcely moving lips. “You’ve recovered my cash box and that satisfies me. This is the Christmas season and I’m disposed to be charitable. Let the boy go.”

  A twisted steel chain linked Anne’s slender wrist to Ryan’s burly one. “Let him go, is it?” The detective’s eyes were slitted, dangerous. “Him—” His free hand jerked the cap from his prisoner’s head and her hair sprang from confinement, a russet nimbus in the wavering candlelight. “Her, you mean. You don’t know what you’re askin’. This is Anne Marsh, gentlemen, the slipperiest crook that ever prowled Laneville. You ought to know it. There ain’t one of you here she ain’t rooked. I been pluggin’ after her for a year an’ I got her at last, an’ you say let her go. Not if I have to pull you all in for compoundin’ a felony.”

  “You can’t do that,” Zander snarled. “We’ll swear you’re lying. A cop’s word against six of the most reputable men in Laneville! Which do you think a jury will believe?”

  “I’ve got the cash box and I’ve got the tracks under the window. That’s evidence enough to bear me out, and by God I’ll put it over.”

  “Maybe you will,” Simpson wheezed. “But if you try it, we’ll break you. There’s enough influence in this crowd to break a c
ommissioner, let alone a flatfoot.”

  Ryan’s big hand fisted at his side. “Break and be damned,” he growled. “This wench goes behind the bars if I have to turn in my badge the next day.”

  Anne flung her head back. “You won’t have to turn in your badge, Ryan. It’s been a clean fight between us, an honest fight. Take me in to prison. I’ll sign a confession. And I’ll go on the witness stand and tell the world exactly why the directors of Union Light and Power were here, exactly why they’re threatening you to keep the fact quiet that they were here.”

  “And that, gents, is the payoff,” Ryan flung at them. “So long. I’ll see you in court.”

  He turned, and there was a curious gentleness in that growl of his. “Come along, Miss Marsh. Come…”

  “Not so fast!” A lithe, dark-haired figure confronted him in the doorway, a figure whose slender hand thrust the muzzle of a vicious little automatic point-blank at him. “Back up, Ryan. Let go of that chain and grab air. One peep out of any of you, one move, and I’ll blast you!”

  The detective’s thick arms went ceiling-ward. Three voices tangled, each gasping a name.

  “Slippery Joe,” Ryan whispered.

  “Peter!” Anne exclaimed.

  And from Fulton Zander, his face livid as the bruise on his brow, gasped: “Peter Corbin!”

  It was this last to which the intruder responded. “Yes, Zander. Peter Corbin.” His mouth twitched, bitterly. “You didn’t know I escaped from the steel-barred hell to which you sent me. You and your boss, Webster Marsh, framing me for sabotage—that you hired done on the Apple Street dynamo to drive the Company stocks down so you could buy it cheap.”

  * * *

  —

  “No!” Anne’s cry was a low throb, pain torn. “No, Peter. Dad never did anything like that. He couldn’t.”

  “The hell he couldn’t.” The youth’s laugh was icy. “He packed me away in the pen for twenty years, but I crushed out, and I’ve been skulking in the woods ever since. That’s what Webster Marsh did to me. That’s why I hate his memory, hate everyone who belongs to him.”

  “No.” the girl moaned, and was across the room in a flash, was leaning over Zander. “Tell him. If there’s any good in you at all, tell him Dad didn’t do that terrible thing to him.”

  Her grey eyes held the lawyer’s vulpine ones, and there was a breath-bated, tense silence in the room. Silence, utter stillness, the only motion that of the barrel of Peter’s automatic flicking from one to another of the group.

  “Tell him,” Anne’s tear-filled voice broke that silence. “You must!”

  Zander’s fleshless lips moved. “Marsh didn’t know anything about it. I rigged the whole thing, and I bought in the stock.”

  The girl spun to the man she loved. “You heard that, Peter,” she cried. “You heard him.”

  “I heard him.” The grim lines of the youth’s darkly handsome face broke, and it was boyishly appealing. “I heard him, my darling.” And then it was stern again.

  “There’s a roll of wire in my pocket, Anne, cut into short lengths. Get it out and tie it around their ankles and their wrists. Their handkerchiefs will do for gags.”

  It was done. Peter and Anne were gone. The six directors who had stolen and milked and wrecked the Union Light and Power Company sat around their leader’s long table, unable to move or speak.

  In another chair sat Bulldog Ryan, gagged and bound like the rest. Peculiarly enough, there was the faint shadow of a smile on his face, as though he found some secret satisfaction even in defeat.

  * * *

  —

  The scraping of snow shovels were almost inaudible now, as their wielders worked away from the Zander house. A candle guttered, went out. From an infinite distance the howl of the night express came deepthroated and melancholy into the room.

  Bulldog Ryan stirred. His shoulders heaved. His wrists came free of the wires that clamped them. It could be seen now that he had used an old trick, swelling them as the girl lashed them, so that they had actually not been bound at all. He bent, unfastened his feet, rose and thumbed the gagging handkerchief from his mouth.

  “I got an awful short memory,” he grunted, “and I think you birds got the same. Nothin’ happened here tonight. Nothin’ at all. Only, I reckon you birds will want to be certain my memory stays bad—so supposin’ you ante up about fifty grand for that Christmas Fund.”

  Starting to work on Fulton Zander’s lashings, he sighed. “I’m puttin’ in for retirement in the mornin’,” he muttered. “I’m gettin’ too soft to be on the cops.” He paused. “And anyway, there won’t be no fun in the job, with only common, ordinary crooks to chase.”

  Two extracts from the Laneville Daily Courier of Dec. 23rd, 1936. The first:

  The COURIER’S CHRISTMAS FUND, that had not filled its quota this year, was put far over the top this morning by two anonymous contributions of fifty thousand dollars. One was delivered by Western Union Messenger. No information as to its source could be obtained except that the package in which the currency was wrapped was left at the depot office by two young men who dashed for the midnight express just as the gates were closing. The other fifty thousand was found in the morning mail at the Fund’s headquarters. There are absolutely no clues as to its source.

  The second:

  The popular Tavern on Bolton Turnpike closed its hospitable doors forever today. Miss Faith Parker, one of the co-owners, cashed the condemnation award and immediately left for parts unknown. She refused to confirm or deny the rumor that she was to join Miss Anne Marsh, who, it will be remembered, is the daughter of the late Webster Marsh.

  Bulldog Ryan sipped his breakfast coffee as he read the two items with his eyes that held a strange light. The tight-lipped mouth quirked faintly. “Hope the old gal don’t have as much trouble findin’ her as I did,” he muttered.

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  DETECTIVES: TUPPENCE COWLEY AND TOMMY

  THE SECRET ADVERSARY

  Agatha Christie

  ASK ANY READER OF DETECTIVE STORIES to name the author they love most or the author they read when they were young and you will be sure to be given the one name on everybody’s list: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie (1890–1976), the most popular writer of detective fiction who ever lived (her sales in all languages are reported to have surpassed four billion copies).

  Christie’s remarkably proficient first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), is generally credited as the volume that initiated what is known as the Golden Age of mystery fiction. This era, bracketed by the two world wars, saw the rise of the fair-play puzzle story and the series detective, whether an official member of the police department (such as Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French), a private detective (like Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who made his debut in her first novel), or an amateur sleuth (like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey).

  But it was Christie who towered above the others, outselling, outproducing, and outliving the rest. The manuscript of her first novel had been rejected by several publishing houses, and John Lane, the eventual publisher, held it for more than a year before offering only £25 for it. Encouraged by the sale, Christie went on to write more than a hundred books and plays, including the longest continuously running play of all time, The Mousetrap (since it opened in 1952, there have been more than 27,000 performances—with no closing in sight), as well as one of the best, Witness for the Prosecution (1953).

  Less famous than Poirot and Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence (actually Prudence) were described in the London Telegraph as Christie’s greatest creation. They meet in this book, Christie’s second novel, as longtime friends who fall in love and (not to give away too much) marry. Seeking a life of fun and excitement, they become detectives when they start their own business, The Young Adventurers. Tuppence is the brains of the team while T
ommy is the realist. They also appeared in a short story collection, Partners in Crime (1929), and four novels, including Postern of Fate (1973), the last novel Christie ever wrote, though not the last published, which was Sleeping Murder (1976).

  The Secret Adversary was originally published in London by The Bodley Head in 1922.

  The Secret Adversary

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I The Young Adventurers, Ltd.

  II Mr. Whittington’s Offer

  III A Set Back

  IV Who Is Jane Finn?

  V Mr. Julius P. Hersheimmer

  VI A Plan of Campaign

  VII The House in Soho

  VIII The Adventures of Tommy

  IX Tuppence Enters Domestic Service

  X Enter Sir James Peel Edgerton

  XI Julius Tells a Story

  XII A Friend in Need

  XIII The Vigil

  XIV A Consultation

  XV Tuppence Receives a Proposal

  XVI Further Adventures of Tommy

  XVII Annette

  XVIII The Telegram

  XIX Jane Finn

  XX Too Late

  XXI Tommy Makes a Discovery

  XXII In Downing Street

  XXIII A Race Against Time

  XXIV Julius Takes a Hand

  XXV Jane’s Story

  XXVI Mr. Brown

  XXVII A Supper Party at the Savoy

  XXVIII And After