Read Online Cynthia Manson (ed) by Merry Murder - Free Book Online

and I could never tell them apart.‘
    “Well, then, of course I saw it all,
and I ran off as hard as my feet would carry me to this man Breckinridge; but
he had sold the lot at once, and not one word would he tell me as to where they
had gone. You heard him yourselves tonight. Well, he has always answered me
like that. My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am
myself. And now—and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having
touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He
burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
    There was a long silence, broken
only by his heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’s
finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the
door.
    “Get out!” said he.
    “What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”
    “No more words. Get out!”
    And no more words were needed. There
was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle
of running footfalls from the street.
    “After all, Watson,” said Holmes,
reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to
supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing;
but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I
suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving
a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened.
Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the
season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical
problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to
touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also, a
bird will be the chief feature.”
     

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH - Georges Simenon
    “At home we always
used to go to Midnight Mass. I can’t remember a Christmas when we missed it,
though it meant a good half hour’s drive from the farm to the village.”
    The speaker, Sommer, was making some coffee on a little
electric stove.
    “There were five of
us,” he went on. “Five boys, that is. The winters were colder in those days.
Sometimes we had to go by sledge.”
    Lecœur, on the
switchboard, had taken off his earphones to listen. “In what part of the
country was that?”
    “Lorraine.”
    “The winters in
Lorraine were no colder thirty or forty years ago than they are now—only, of
course, in those days the peasant had no cars. How many times did you go to
Midnight Mass by sledge?”
    “Couldn’t say,
exactly.”
    “Three times?
Twice? Perhaps no more than once. Only it made a great impression on you, as
you were a child.”
    “Anyhow, when we
got back, we’d all have black pudding, and I’m not exaggerating when I tell you
I’ve never had anything like it since. I don’t know what my mother used to put
in them, but her boudins were quite different from anyone else’s. My
wife’s tried, but it wasn’t the same thing, though she had the exact recipe
from my eldest sister—at least, my sister swore it was.”
    He walked over to
one of the huge, uncurtained windows, through which was nothing but blackness,
and scratched the pane with a fingernail.
    “Hallo, there’s
frost forming. That again reminds me of when I was little. The water used to
freeze in our rooms and we’d have to break the ice in the morning when we
wanted to wash.”
    “People didn’t have
central heating in those days.” answered Lecœur coolly.
    There were three of them on night duty. Les nuiteux ,
they were called. They had been in that vast room since eleven o’clock, and
now, at six on that Christmas morning, all three were looking a bit jaded.
Three or four empty bottles were lying about, with the remains of the
sandwiches they had brought with them.
    A lamp no bigger
than an aspirin tablet lit up on one of the walls. Its position told Lecœur at
once