The Adventure of the Plated Spoon and Other Tales of Sherlock Holmes by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page B

uncanny happening clearly had frightened, seemed puzzled for a suitable description.
    â€œA sort of wail, sir,” he said at last. “I never heard anything like it before, and don’t want to again.”
    â€œLike this?” inquired Smith, and he uttered a low, wailing cry, impossible to describe. Wills perceptibly shuddered; and, indeed, it was an eerie sound.
    â€œThe same, sir, I think,” he said, “but much louder.”
    â€œThat will do,” said Smith, and I thought I detected a note of triumph in his voice. “But stay! Take us through to the back of the house.”
    The man bowed and led the way, so that shortly we found ourselves in a small, paved courtyard. It was a perfect summer’s night, and the deep blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points. How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies, which that night had loosed a soul upon the infinite.
    â€œUp yonder are the study windows, sir. Over that wall on your left is the back lane from which the cry came, and beyond is Regent’s Park.”
    â€œAre the study windows visible from there?”
    â€œOh, yes, sir.”
    â€œWho occupies the adjoining house?”
    â€œMajor-General Platt-Houston, sir; but the family is out of town.”
    â€œThose iron stairs are a means of communication between the domestic offices and the servants’ quarters, I take it?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œThen send someone to make my business known to the Major-General’s housekeeper; I want to examine those stairs.”
    Singular though my friend’s proceedings appeared to me, I had ceased to wonder at anything. Since Nayland Smith’s arrival at my rooms, I seemed to have been moving through the fitful phases of a nightmare. My friend’s account of how he came by the wound in his arm; the scene on our arrival at the house of Sir Crichton Davey; the secretary’s story of the dying man’s cry, “The red hand!”; the hidden perils of the study; the wail in the lane—all were fitter incidents of delirium than of sane reality. So, when a white-faced butler made us known to a nervous old lady who proved to be the housekeeper of the next-door residence, I was not surprised at Smith’s saying:
    â€œLounge up and down outside, Petrie. Everyone has cleared off now. It is getting late. Keep your eyes open and be on your guard. I thought I had the start, but he is here before me, and, what is worse, he probably knows by now that I am here, too.”
    With which he entered the house and left me out in the square, with leisure to think, to try to understand.
    The crowd that usually haunts the scene of a sensational crime had been cleared away, and it had been circulated that Sir Crichton had died from natural causes. The intense heat having driven most of the residents out of town, I practically had the square to myself, and I gave myself up to a brief consideration of the mystery in which I so suddenly had found myself involved.
    By what agency had Sir Crichton met his death? Did Nayland Smith know? I rather suspected that he did. What was the hidden significance of the perfumed envelope? Who was that mysterious personage whom Smith so evidently dreaded, who had attempted to take his life, who—presumably—had murdered Sir Crichton? Sir Crichton Davey, during the time that he had held office in India, and during his long term of service at home, had earned the good will of all, British and native alike. Who was his secret enemy?
    Something touched me lightly on the shoulder.
    I turned, my heart fluttering like a child’s. This night’s work had imposed a severe strain even upon my callous nerves.
    A girl wrapped in a hooded opera-cloak stood at my elbow, and, as she glanced up at me, I thought that I never had seen a face so seductively lovely nor of so unusual a type. With the skin of a perfect