The very beginning of this affair, which involved me, before I was aware
of it, in as much villainy and wickedness as ever man heard of, was, of
course, that spring evening, now ten years ago, whereon I looked out of
my mother's front parlour window in the main street of Berwick-upon-Tweed ...
On that particular November evening, Viner, a young gentleman of means
and leisure, who lived in a comfortable old house in Markendale Square,
Bayswater, in company with his maiden aunt Miss Bethia Penkridge, had
spent his after-dinner hours in a fashion which had become a habit. Miss
Pen ...
As a rule, Spargo left the Watchman office at two o'clock. The paper
had then gone to press. There was nothing for him, recently promoted to
a sub-editorship, to do after he had passed the column for which he was
responsible; as a matter of fact he could have gone home before the
m ...
On the southern edge of the populous parish of Paddington, in a
parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed
Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on
the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which
forms ...
American tourists, sure appreciators of all that is ancient
and picturesque in England, invariably come to a halt, holding
their breath in a sudden catch of wonder, as they pass through
the half-ruinous gateway which admits to the Close of
Wrychester. Nowhere else in England is there a f ...
About eleven o'clock on the night of Monday, May 12, 1914, Marshall
Allerdyke, a bachelor of forty, a man of great mental and physical
activity, well known in Bradford as a highly successful manufacturer of
dress goods, alighted at the Central Station in that city from an
express which ha ...
Jerramy, thirty years' stage-door keeper at the Theatre Royal, Norcaster,
had come to regard each successive Monday morning as a time for the
renewal of old acquaintance. For at any rate forty-six weeks of the
fifty-two, theatrical companies came and went at Norcaster with unfailing
regul ...
Linford Pratt, senior clerk to Eldrick & Pascoe, solicitors, of Barford,
a young man who earnestly desired to get on in life, by hook or by
crook, with no objection whatever to crookedness, so long as it could be
performed in safety and secrecy, had once during one of his periodical
visit ...