Short Fiction P. G. Wodehouse (good books to read in english .txt) 📖

Her face was expressionless, but inwardly she was tormented and alarmed. It was the first time such a thing as this had happened at the Excelsior, and, as Constable Grogan had hinted, it was not likely to increase the attractiveness of the house in the eyes of possible boarders. It was not the threatened pecuniary loss which was troubling her. As far as money was concerned, she could have lived comfortably on her savings, for she was richer than most of her friends supposed. It was the blot on the escutcheon of the Excelsior⁠—the stain on its reputation⁠—which was tormenting her.

The Excelsior was her life. Starting many years before, beyond the memory of the oldest boarder, she had built up the model establishment, the fame of which had been carried to every corner of the world. Men spoke of it as a place where you were fed well, cleanly housed, and where petty robbery was unknown.

Such was the chorus of praise that it is not likely that much harm could come to the Excelsior from a single mysterious death but Mother Pickett was not consoling herself with such reflections.

She looked at the dead man with pale, grim eyes. Out in the hallway the doctor’s voice further increased her despair. He was talking to the police on the telephone, and she could distinctly hear his every word.

II

The offices of Mr. Paul Snyder’s Detective Agency in New Oxford Street had grown in the course of a dozen years from a single room to an impressive suite bright with polished wood, clicking typewriters, and other evidences of success. Where once Mr. Snyder had sat and waited for clients and attended to them himself, he now sat in his private office and directed eight assistants.

He had just accepted a case⁠—a case that might be nothing at all or something exceedingly big. It was on the latter possibility that he had gambled. The fee offered was, judged by his present standards of prosperity, small. But the bizarre facts, coupled with something in the personality of the client, had won him over. He briskly touched the bell and requested that Mr. Oakes should be sent in to him.

Elliot Oakes was a young man who both amused and interested Mr. Snyder, for though he had only recently joined the staff, he made no secret of his intention of revolutionizing the methods of the agency. Mr. Snyder himself, in common with most of his assistants, relied for results on hard work and plenty of common sense. He had never been a detective of the showy type. Results had justified his methods, but he was perfectly aware that young Mr. Oakes looked on him as a dull old man who had been miraculously favored by luck.

Mr. Snyder had selected Oakes for the case in hand principally because it was one where inexperience could do no harm, and where the brilliant guesswork which Oakes preferred to call his inductive reasoning might achieve an unexpected success.

Another motive actuated Mr. Snyder in his choice. He had a strong suspicion that the conduct of this case was going to have the beneficial result of lowering Oakes’ self-esteem. If failure achieved this end, Mr. Snyder felt that failure, though it would not help the Agency, would not be an unmixed ill.

The door opened and Oakes entered tensely. He did everything tensely, partly from a natural nervous energy, and partly as a pose. He was a lean young man, with dark eyes and a thin-lipped mouth, and he looked quite as much like a typical detective as Mr. Snyder looked like a comfortable and prosperous stock broker.

“Sit down, Oakes,” said Mr. Snyder. “I’ve got a job for you.”

Oakes sank into a chair like a crouching leopard, and placed the tips of his fingers together. He nodded curtly. It was part of his pose to be keen and silent.

“I want you to go to this address”⁠—Mr. Snyder handed him an envelope⁠—“and look around. The address on that envelope is of a sailors’ boardinghouse down in Southampton. You know the sort of place⁠—retired sea captains and so on live there. All most respectable. In all its history nothing more sensational has ever happened than a case of suspected cheating at halfpenny nap. Well, a man had died there.”

“Murdered?” Oakes asked.

“I don’t know. That’s for you to find out. The coroner left it open. ‘Death by Misadventure’ was the verdict, and I don’t blame him. I don’t see how it could have been murder. The door was locked on the inside, so nobody could have got in.”

“The window?”

“The window was open, granted. But the room is on the second floor. Anyway, you may dismiss the window. I remember the old lady saying there was a bar across it, and that nobody could have squeezed through.”

Oakes’ eyes glistened. He was interested. “What was the cause of death?” he asked.

Mr. Snyder coughed. “Snake bite,” he said.

Oakes’ careful calm deserted him. He uttered a cry of astonishment. “Why, that’s incredible!”

“It’s the literal truth. The medical examination proved that the fellow had been killed by snake poison⁠—cobra, to be exact, which is found principally in India.”

“Cobra!”

“Just so. In a Southampton boardinghouse, in a room with a locked door, this man was stung by a cobra. To add a little mystification to the limpid simplicity of the affair, when the door was opened there was no sign of any cobra. It couldn’t have got out through the door, because the door was locked. It couldn’t have got out of the window, because the window was too high up, and snakes can’t jump. And it couldn’t have gotten up the chimney, because there was no chimney. So there you have it.”

He looked at Oakes with a certain quiet satisfaction. It had come to his ears that Oakes had been heard to complain of the infantile nature and unworthiness of the last two cases to which he had been assigned. He had even said that he hoped some day to be given a problem which should be beyond the reasoning powers of a