The Daffodil Mystery. Wallace Edgar

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СКАЧАТЬ Tarling sarcastically, "are these intended as a loving gift from Mr. Lyne to Miss Rider?"

      The man was speechless with rage. If looks could kill, Tarling would have died.

      "A clumsy trick," said Tarling, shaking his head mournfully. "Now go back to your boss, Mr. Thornton Lyne, and tell him that I am ashamed of an intelligent man adopting so crude a method," and with a kick he dismissed Sam Stay to the outer darkness.

      The girl, who had been a frightened spectator of the scene, turned her eyes imploringly upon the detective.

      "What does it mean?" she pleaded. "I feel so frightened. What did that man want?"

      "You need not be afraid of that man, or any other man," said Tarling briskly. "I'm sorry you were scared."

      He succeeded in calming her by the time her servant had returned and then took his leave.

      "Remember, I have given you my telephone number and you will call me up if there is any trouble. Particularly," he said emphatically, "if there is any trouble to-morrow."

      But there was no trouble on the following day, though at three o'clock in the afternoon she called him up.

      "I am going away to stay in the country," she said. "I got scared last night."

      "Come and see me when you get back," said Tarling, who had found it difficult to dismiss the girl from his mind. "I am going to see Lyne to-morrow. By the way, the person who called last night is a protégé of Mr. Thornton Lyne's, a man who is devoted to him body and soul, and he's the fellow we've got to look after. By Jove! It almost gives me an interest in life!"

      He heard the faint laugh of the girl.

      "Must I be butchered to make a detective's holiday?" she mocked, and he grinned sympathetically.

      "Any way, I'll see Lyne to-morrow," he said.

      The interview which Jack Tarling projected was destined never to take place.

      On the following morning, an early worker taking a short cut through Hyde Park, found the body of a man lying by the side of a carriage drive. He was fully dressed save that his coat and waistcoat had been removed. Wound about his body was a woman's silk night-dress stained with blood. The hands of the figure were crossed on the breast and upon them lay a handful of daffodils.

      At eleven o'clock that morning the evening newspapers burst forth with the intelligence that the body had been identified as that of Thornton Lyne, and that he had been shot through the heart.

      CHAPTER V

      FOUND IN LYNE'S POCKET

      "The London police are confronted with a new mystery, which has features so remarkable, that it would not be an exaggeration to describe this crime as the Murder Mystery of the Century. A well-known figure in London Society, Mr. Thornton Lyne, head of an important commercial organisation, a poet of no mean quality, and a millionaire renowned for his philanthropic activities, was found dead in Hyde Park in the early hours of this morning, in circumstances which admit of no doubt that he was most brutally murdered.

      "At half-past five, Thomas Savage, a bricklayer's labourer employed by the Cubitt Town Construction Company, was making his way across Hyde Park en route to his work. He had crossed the main drive which runs parallel with the Bayswater Road, when his attention was attracted to a figure lying on the grass near to the sidewalk. He made his way to the spot and discovered a man, who had obviously been dead for some hours. The body had neither coat nor waistcoat, but about the breast, on which his two hands were laid, was a silk garment tightly wound about the body, and obviously designed to stanch a wound on the left side above the heart.

      "The extraordinary feature is that the murderer must not only have composed the body, but had laid upon its breast a handful of daffodils. The police were immediately summoned and the body was removed. The police theory is that the murder was not committed in Hyde Park, but the unfortunate gentleman was killed elsewhere and his body conveyed to the Park in his own motor-car, which was found abandoned a hundred yards from the scene of the discovery. We understand that the police are working upon a very important clue, and an arrest is imminent."

      Mr. J. O. Tarling, late of the Shanghai Detective Service, read the short account in the evening newspaper, and was unusually thoughtful.

      Lyne murdered! It was an extraordinary coincidence that he had been brought into touch with this young man only a few days before.

      Tarling knew nothing of Lyne's private life, though from his own knowledge of the man during his short stay in Shanghai, he guessed that that life was not wholly blameless. He had been too busy in China to bother his head about the vagaries of a tourist, but he remembered dimly some sort of scandal which had attached to the visitor's name, and puzzled his head to recall all the circumstances.

      He put down the newspaper with a little grimace indicative of regret. If he had only been attached to Scotland Yard, what a case this would have been for him! Here was a mystery which promised unusual interest.

      His mind wandered to the girl, Odette Rider. What would she think of it? She would be shocked, he thought—horrified. It hurt him to feel that she might be indirectly, even remotely associated with such a public scandal, and he realised with a sudden sense of dismay that nothing was less unlikely than that her name would be mentioned as one who had quarrelled with the dead man.

      "Pshaw!" he muttered, shrugging off the possibility as absurd, and, walking to the door, called his Chinese servant.

      Ling Chu came silently at his bidding.

      "Ling Chu," he said, "the white-faced man is dead."

      Ling Chu raised his imperturbable eyes to his master's face.

      "All men die some time," he said calmly. "This man quick die. That is better than long die."

      Tarling looked at him sharply.

      "How do you know that he quick die?" he demanded.

      "These things are talked about," said Ling Chu without hesitation.

      "But not in the Chinese language," replied Tarling, "and, Ling Chu, you speak no English."

      "I speak a little, master," said Ling Chu, "and I have heard these things in the streets."

      Tarling did not answer immediately, and the Chinaman waited.

      "Ling Chu," he said after awhile, "this man came to Shanghai whilst we were there, and there was trouble-trouble. Once he was thrown out from Wing Fu's tea-house, where he had been smoking opium. Also there was another trouble—do you remember?"

      The Chinaman looked him straight in the eyes.

      "I am forgetting," he said. "This white-face was a bad man. I am glad he is dead."

      "Humph!" said Tarling, and dismissed his retainer.

      Ling Chu was the cleverest of all his sleuths, a man who never lifted his nose from the trail once it was struck, and he had been the most loyal and faithful of Tarling's native trailers. But the detective never pretended that he understood Ling Chu's mind, or that he could pierce the veil which the native dropped between his own private thoughts and the curious foreigner. Even native criminals were baffled in their interpretation of Ling Chu's views, and many a man had gone to the scaffold puzzling the head, which was soon to be snicked from his body, over the method by which Ling Chu had detected СКАЧАТЬ