by Michael Sims
“But what are we doing here!” exclaimed Hollyer, starting to his feet, pale and horrified.
“It is past ten now and anything may happen.”
“Quite natural, Mr. Hollyer,” said Carrados reassuringly, “but you need have no anxiety. Creake is being watched, the house is being watched, and your sister is as safe as if she slept to-night in Windsor Castle. Be assured that whatever happens he will not be allowed to complete his scheme; but it is desirable to let him implicate himself to the fullest limit. Your brother-in-law, Mr. Hollyer, is a man with a peculiar capacity for taking pains.”
“He is a damned cold-blooded scoundrel!” exclaimed the young officer fiercely. “When I think of Millicent five years ago—”
“Well, for that matter, an enlightened nation has decided that electrocution is the most humane way of removing its superfluous citizens,” suggested Carrados mildly. “He is certainly an ingenious-minded gentleman. It is his misfortune that in Mr. Carlyle he was fated to be opposed by an even subtler brain—”
“No, no! Really, Max!” protested the embarrassed gentleman.
“Mr. Hollyer will be able to judge for himself when I tell him that it was Mr. Carlyle who first drew attention to the significance of the abandoned kite,” insisted Carrados firmly. “Then, of course, its object became plain to me—as indeed to anyone. For ten minutes, perhaps, a wire must be carried from the overhead line to the chestnut-tree. Creake has everything in his favour, but it is just within possibility that the driver of an inopportune train might notice the appendage. What of that? Why, for more than a week he has seen a derelict kite with its yards of trailing string hanging in the tree. A very calculating mind, Mr. Hollyer. It would be interesting to know what line of action Mr. Creake has mapped out for himself afterwards. I expect he has half-a-dozen artistic little touches up his sleeve. Possibly he would merely singe his wife’s hair, burn her feet with a red-hot poker, shiver the glass of the French window, and be content with that to let well alone. You see, lightning is so varied in its effects that whatever he did or did not do would be right. He is in the impregnable position of the body showing all the symptoms of death by lightning shock and nothing else but lightning to account for it—a dilated eye, heart contracted in systole, bloodless lungs shrunk to a third the normal weight, and all the rest of it. When he has removed a few outward traces of his work Creake might quite safely ‘discover’ his dead wife and rush off for the nearest doctor. Or he may have decided to arrange a convincing alibi, and creep away, leaving the discovery to another. We shall never know; he will make no confession.”
“I wish it was well over,” admitted Hollyer, “I’m not particularly jumpy, but this gives me a touch of the creeps.”
“Three more hours at the worst, lieutenant,” said Carrados cheerfully. “Ah-ha, something is coming through now.”
He went to the telephone and received a message from one quarter; then made another connection and talked for a few minutes with someone else.
“Everything working smoothly,” he remarked between times over his shoulder. “Your sister has gone to bed, Mr. Hollyer.”
Then he turned to the house telephone and distributed his orders. “So we,” he concluded, “must get up.” By the time they were ready a large closed motor car was waiting.
The lieutenant thought he recognised Parkinson in the well-swathed form beside the driver, but there was no temptation to linger for a second on the steps. Already the stinging rain had lashed the drive into the semblance of a frothy estuary; all round the lightning jagged its course through the incessant tremulous glow of more distant lightning, while the thunder only ceased its muttering to turn at close quarters and crackle viciously.
“One of the few things I regret missing,” remarked Carrados tranquilly; “but I hear a good deal of colour in it.”
The car slushed its way down to the gate, lurched a little heavily across the dip into the road, and, steadying as it came upon the straight, began to hum contentedly along the deserted highway.
“We are not going direct?” suddenly inquired Hollyer, after they had travelled perhaps half-a-dozen miles. The night was bewildering enough but he had the sailor’s gift for location.
“No; through Hunscott Green and then by a field-path to the orchard at the back,” replied Carrados. “Keep a sharp look out for the man with the lantern about here, Harris,” he called through the tube.
“Something flashing just ahead, sir,” came the reply, and the car slowed down and stopped. Carrados dropped the near window as a man in glistening waterproof stepped from the shelter of a lich-gate and approached.
“Inspector Beedel, sir,” said the stranger, looking into the car. “Quite right, Inspector,” said Carrados. “Get in.”
“I have a man with me, sir.”
“We can find room for him as well.”
“We are very wet.”
“So shall we all be soon.”
The lieutenant changed his seat and the two burly forms took places side by side. In less than five minutes the car stopped again, this time in a grassy country lane.
“Now we have to face it,” announced Carrados. “The inspector will show us the way.”
The car slid round and disappeared into the night, while Beedel led the party to a stile in the hedge. A couple of fields brought them to the Brookbend boundary. There a figure stood out of the black foliage, exchanged a few words with their guide and piloted them along the shadows of the orchard to the back door of the house.
“You will find a broken pane near the catch of the scullery window,” said the blind man.
“Right, sir,” replied the inspector. “I have it. Now who goes through?”
“Mr. Hollyer will open the door for us. I’m afraid you must take off your boots and all wet things, Lieutenant. We cannot risk a single spot inside.”
They waited until the back door opened, then each one divested himself in a similar manner and passed into the kitchen, where the remains of a fire still burned. The man from the orchard gathered together the discarded garments and disappeared again.
Carrados turned to the lieutenant.
“A rather delicate job for you now, Mr. Hollyer. I want you to go up to your sister, wake her, and get her into another room with as little fuss as possible. Tell her as much as you think fit and let her understand that her very life depends on absolute stillness when she is alone. Don’t be unduly hurried, but not a glimmer of a light, please.”
Ten minutes passed by the measure of the battered old alarum on the dresser shelf before the young man returned.
“I’ve had rather a time of it,” he reported, with a nervous laugh, “but I think it will be all right now. She is in the spare room.”
“Then we will take our places. You and Parkinson come with me to the bedroom. Inspector, you have your own arrangements. Mr. Carlyle will be with you.”
They dispersed silently about the house. Hollyer glanced apprehensively at the door of the spare room as they passed it, but within was as quiet as the grave. Their room lay at the other end of the passage.
“You may as well take your place in the bed now, Hollyer,” directed Carrados when they were inside and the door closed. “Keep well down among the clothes. Creake has to get up on the balcony, you know, and he will probably peep through the window, but he dare come no farther. Then when he begins to throw up stones slip on this dressing-gown of your sister’s. I’ll tell you what to do after.”
The next sixty minutes drew out into the longest hour that the lieutenant had ever known. Occasionally he heard a whisper pass between the two men who stood behind the window curtains, but he could see nothing. Then Carrados threw a guarded remark in his direction.
“He is in the garden now.”
Something scraped slightly against the outer wall. But the night was full of wilder sounds, and in the house the furniture and the boards creaked and sprung between the yawling of the wind among the chimneys, the rattle of the thunder and the pelting o
f the rain. It was a time to quicken the steadiest pulse, and when the crucial moment came, when a pebble suddenly rang against the pane with a sound that the tense waiting magnified into a shivering crash, Hollyer leapt from the bed on the instant.
“Easy, easy,” warned Carrados feelingly. “We will wait for another knock.” He passed something across. “Here is a rubber glove. I have cut the wire but you had better put it on. Stand just for a moment at the window, move the catch so that it can blow open a little, and drop immediately. Now.”
Another stone had rattled against the glass. For Hollyer to go through his part was the work merely of seconds, and with a few touches Carrados spread the dressing-gown to more effective disguise about the extended form. But an unforeseen and in the circumstances rather horrible interval followed, for Creake, in accordance with some detail of his never-revealed plan, continued to shower missile after missile against the panes until even the unimpressionable Parkinson shivered.
“The last act,” whispered Carrados, a moment after the throwing had ceased. “He has gone round to the back. Keep as you are. We take cover now.” He pressed behind the arras of an extemporized wardrobe, and the spirit of emptiness and desolation seemed once more to reign over the lonely house.
From half-a-dozen places of concealment ears were straining to catch the first guiding sound. He moved very stealthily, burdened, perhaps, by some strange scruple in the presence of the tragedy that he had not feared to contrive, paused for a moment at the bedroom door, then opened it very quietly, and in the fickle light read the consummation of his hopes.
“At last!” they heard the sharp whisper drawn from his relief. “At last!”
He took another step and two shadows seemed to fall upon him from behind, one on either side. With primitive instinct a cry of terror and surprise escaped him as he made a desperate movement to wrench himself free, and for a short second he almost succeeded in dragging one hand into a pocket. Then his wrists slowly came together and the handcuffs closed.
“I am Inspector Beedel,” said the man on his right side. “You are charged with the attempted murder of your wife, Millicent Creake.”
“You are mad,” retorted the miserable creature, falling into a desperate calmness. “She has been struck by lightning.”
“No, you blackguard, she hasn’t,” wrathfully exclaimed his brother-in-law, jumping up. “Would you like to see her?”
“I also have to warn you,” continued the inspector impassively, “that anything you say may be used as evidence against you.”
A startled cry from the farther end of the passage arrested their attention.
“Mr. Carrados,” called Hollyer, “oh, come at once.”
At the open door of the other bedroom stood the lieutenant, his eyes still turned towards something in the room beyond, a little empty bottle in his hand.
“Dead!” he exclaimed tragically, with a sob, “with this beside her. Dead just when she would have been free of the brute.”
The blind man passed into the room, sniffed the air, and laid a gentle hand on the pulseless heart.
“Yes,” he replied. “That, Hollyer, does not always appeal to the woman, strange to say.”
Harvey O’Higgins
(1876–1929)
One of the more realistic detectives in this anthology is also one of the youngest.
Journalist Harvey O’Higgins, who was also a playwright and fiction writer, worked hard and didn’t like to waste material. Born in London, Ontario, he began his career writing for newspapers such as the Toronto Star and the New York Globe. In the early years of the twentieth century he wrote a series of articles about a real-life investigator, William J. Burns, nicknamed “America’s Sherlock Holmes.” Burns was head of the Burns Detective Agency in New York. Later he would become director of the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor of the FBI, until J. Edgar Hoover took over in 1924—after Burns was ousted for assigning BOI agents to various illegal tasks, including the intimidation of critical journalists. After his articles, O’Higgins recycled some of his factual material on the Burns agency as background for a series in Collier’s about a sixteen-year-old boy named Barney Cook, who, in the first story, gets a job working for a famous New York detective, Walter Babbing.
Eight years ago Barney’s father, patrolman Robert Cook, was killed. Barney lives now with his mother and sister, on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and delivers telegrams and does other small jobs until he is hired as an assistant detective. Streetwise but youthfully reckless, alternately cocky and timid, Barney is a more convincing character than most of his descendants, including the Hardy Boys or, later, the boys of the Three Investigators. Barney’s mental image of detectives was formed, naturally, by the fictional adventures of characters such as Nick Carter—which mind-destroying trash his new employer warns him against, while also forbidding cigarettes. The series is also realistic in that Barney isn’t usually involved in murder cases. In the following story he helps find a wily con man—and cons him in turn. A less happy touch of realism is the casual use of an offensive racist term.
With Harriet Ford, O’Higgins co-wrote several plays, including a popular four-act comedy, The Dummy, which featured Barney Cook but wasn’t based upon the stories. The play was soon adapted as a silent film and then as an early talkie. O’Higgins liked variety. His collection The Smoke-Eaters is about New York City’s firefighters; his critical analysis of how urban children are socialized was entitled The Beast. During World War I he became associate chairman of the Committee on Public Information. For a few months in 1918 he wrote “The Daily German Lie,” which provided a forum for U.S. government officials to refute anti-American propaganda and promote the United States’ own propaganda machine. In 1914, the same year that he launched the Barney Cook stories, O’Higgins’s play about Mormon marriage, Polygamy, was first staged; earlier he had written an undercover exposé of the Mormon church. In reviewing one of his more serious plays, the New York Times called O’Higgins “a reporter, an investigator, a social diagnostician.”
Somehow he also managed to write another volume of crime stories, Detective Duff Unravels It, but he is remembered now for the Barney Cook series. The opening pages below, about how Barney discovered the job opening and sought the position, are from the first story, “The Blackmailers”; “The Case of Padages Palmer” actually begins after the row of asterisks.
The Case of Padages Palmer
The want ad—after the manner of want ads—had read simply: “Boy, over 14, intelligent, trustworthy, for confidential office work, references. Address B-67 Evening Express.”
Several scores of boys, who were neither very intelligent nor peculiarly trustworthy, exposed their disqualifications—after the manner of boys—in the written applications that they made. Of these scores, a dozen boys received typewritten requests to call next morning at room 1056, in the Cranmer Building, on Broadway, for a personal interview with “H. M. Archibald.” But of the dozen, only one knew what sort of confidential office work might be waiting for him in room 1056.
He was little Barney Cook. And he kept his information to himself.
The directory, on the wall of the building’s entrance, did not assign 1056 to any of the names on its list. The elevator boys did not know who occupied 1056. The door of 1056 had nothing on its glass panel but the painted number; and the neighboring doors were equally discreet. The “Babbing Bureau” was the nearest name in the corridor, but its doors were marked “Private. Entrance at 1070.”
Nor was there anything in the interior aspect of 1056 to enlighten any of Barney Cook’s competitors when they came there to be interviewed. It was an ordinary outer office of the golden-oak variety, with a railing of spindles separating a telephone switchboard and two typewriter desks from two public settles and a brass cuspidor. There were girls at the desks and the switchboard. The boys were on the settles or at the railing. The girls were busy, indifferent, chatty (among themselves) and very much at home. The boys, of cours
e, were quite otherwise. They might have been suspected of having assumed a common expression of inert and anxious stupidity in order that each might conceal from all the others the required intelligence with which he hoped to win the “job.”
Barney Cook alone betrayed the workings of mind. He sat erect—stretching his neck—at the end of a settle nearest the gate of the railing, watching the door of an inner room and scrutinizing every one who came out of it. He paid no heed to the girls; he knew that they were merely clerks. But when he saw a rough-looking man appear, with a red handkerchief around his neck, he stared excitedly. Surely the bandana was a disguise! Perhaps the black mustache was false!
Forty-eight hours earlier, in the uniform of a telegraph boy, Barney had been in the public office of the Babbing Detective Bureau, and he had been asked to deliver an envelope to the advertising department of the Evening Express as he went back. The envelope was not sealed. It did stick slightly in places—but it was not sealed. And it contained the want ad. “Confidential office work”! For the famous Walter Babbing!
Young Barney had been delivering telegrams to the Babbing Bureau for months, without ever getting past the outer office at 1070, and without so much as suspecting the existence of these operatives’ rooms and inner chambers down the hall. He had seen Babbing only once; “the great detective” came out with one of his men while Barney was getting his book signed. Babbing stood in the doorway long enough to say: “I’ll meet you at the station. Get the tickets. I’ll send Jim down with my suit-case.” The operative replied: “All right, Chief.” And Barney knew that this was Walter Babbing.
He was a brisk-looking, clean-shaven, little fat man—rather “a dude” to Barney—with a mild expression and vague eyes.
Barney knew nothing of the scientific theory of “protective coloring” in detectives; he did not know that the most successful among them naturally look least like anything that might be expected of their kind. He went out with his book open in his hand, absorbed in study of the picture of Babbing that had been photographed on his instantaneous young mind.