Mystery at Geneva
January 04, 2012 • 2 responses
She proceeded with her efficient, rapid, and noisy labours. She did not need to look at the keyboard, she was like that type of knitter who knits the while she gazes into space; she had learnt “Now is the time for all good men to come to the help of the party.”
The Assembly met again at four o'clock, and proceeded under the Deputy President with the order of the day. But it was a half-hearted business. No one was really interested in anything except the fate of Dr. Svensen, who, it had transpired from inquiry among the boat-keepers, had not taken a boat on the lake last night.
“Foul play,” said the journalist Grattan, hopefully. “Obviously foul play.”
“Ask the Bolshevist refugees,” the Times correspondent said with a shrug. For he had no opinion of these people, and believed them to be engaged in a continuous plot against the peace of the world, in combination with the Germans.
The Morning Post was inclined to agree, but held that O'Shane, the delegate from the Irish Free State, was in it too. Whenever any unpleasant incident occurred, at home or abroad (such as murders, robberies, bank failures, higher income tax, Balkan wars, strikes, troubles in Ireland, or cocaine orgies), the Times said, “Ask the Bolshevists and the Germans,” and the Morning Post said, “Ask the Bolshevists and the Germans by all means, but more particularly ask Sinn Fein,” just as the Daily Herald said, “Ask the capitalists and Scotland Yard,” and some eminent littérateurs, “Ask the Jews.”
We must all have our whipping-boys, our criminal suspects; without them sin and disaster would be too tragically diffused for our comfort. Henry Beechtree's suspect was Charles Wilbraham.
He knew that he suspected Charles Wilbraham too readily; Wilbraham could not conceivably have committed all the sins of which Henry was fain to believe him guilty.
Henry knew this, and kept a guard on his own over-readiness, lest it should betray him into rash accusation. Information; evidence; that was what he had to collect.
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Far-reaching was the line of the gentility, to whose flanks clung the rabble of trade. Back upon the white road came yet other carriages, saluted by those departing.
Low hedges of English green reached out into the distance, blending ultimately at the edge of the pleasant sky.
Merry enough it was, and gladsome, this spring day; for be sure the really ill did not brave the long morning ride to test the virtue of the waters of Sadler’s Wells.
It was for the most part the young, the lively, the full-blooded, perhaps the wearied, but none the less the vital and stirring natures which met in the decreed assemblage.
There entered an undersized, sparely-built man, probably between forty and fifty years of age. He was clean-shaven, nearly bald—what little hair he had was iron grey—and was plainly but neatly dressed in black. He spoke with an air of nervous deprecation, as if conscious that he was taking what might be regarded as a liberty, and was anxious to show cause why it should not be resented.
“As I said just now, I occupy the dining-rooms and my name is Gardner. I am a solicitor’s clerk. My employers are Messrs Stacey, Morris & Binns, of Bedford Row. Perhaps you are acquainted with the firm?”