American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

As Lawson and Osgood half tumbled into a sitting room, they stopped short before Signora Ascoli, tall, imperious, in a diaphanous morning gown.

It needed no word from any of them to tell her that she was cornered. There was Jacot himself cringing in the rear. Facing her was the woman she had seen at the Ritz who had caused her hasty departure and had aroused suspicion that after all Dr Grimm might have spoken with the hated polizia.

Quickly she glided, almost like a serpent, to a stand and seized a bottle of acid. Before she could pour it into a long brass tube, Lawson with his heavy cane had dashed the bottle to the floor where the acid ate into and blackened the wood.

Another moment and Clare had seized the tube itself. From it she drew a long strip of canvas. As it unwound Osgood cried in delight, ‘At last! My lost Ginevra Benci safe!’

‘Subito… Giorgio… Urgenzia…’ cried the woman, dashing into a bedroom, through another door.

They followed. There stood Vaccaro – his escape cut off. With a hasty sentence or two in low Italian, she flung her arms about his neck. For one long moment they held each other in a passionate embrace.

‘He is the thief,’ cried Jacot who had heard and translated the words. ‘He planned it from his knowledge of art: he did it under the spell of those eyes – eyes like those in the painting itself – for which a man would risk all – honor, life. I see it. This meant money for both – love.’

Jacot paused, horrified. The faces of the lovers had changed even as he was speaking. Together, locked in an unrelaxing grasp they sank back on the divan.

Staring at the intruders lay Vaccaro unable to move a muscle, hearing but powerless to speak, as if ebbing away. Lawson looked quickly from one to the other of the pair. The already hardening features of Giulia Ascoli told the story.

‘Ricinus again,’ he muttered. ‘The poison by which they killed others.’

Clare had reached down and withdrawn carefully from the jewelled hand of the Ascoli woman a little ring which she held out to Osgood.

‘The poison ring of the Borgias,’ he cried in amazement, ‘taken from my own collection. See, it has a hollow in the part that encircles the stone, with a point and a little concealed spring. It is a formidable and easy weapon – see – the fatal scratch could be given while shaking hands while blinded by the passion of the embrace.’

‘It was that poisoned fang that sent your faithful curator to his death,’ remarked Clare, quietly regarding the awesome ring. ‘It would have sent others, too, who knew too much about the stolen picture, the money, the murder.’

Jacot was in a palsy.

‘Another day and I should have followed Grimm,’ he shivered, turning to Clare with a new respect that even the susceptible little art dealer had never felt for the sex. ‘Mademoiselle, I owe you my life.’

CRAIG KENNEDY

Created by Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)

Known as ‘The Scientific Detective’, Craig Kennedy is barely remembered today but he was once enormously popular, particularly in the USA. He appeared not only in short stories and novels but silent film serials and comic strips. As late as 1952, there was a 26-episode TV series entitled Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. A professor of chemistry who applied his knowledge of science and an array of technological inventions to the solution of baffling crimes, Kennedy was the brainchild of Arthur B Reeve. Born in New York State and educated at Princeton, Reeve originally intended to be a lawyer but turned instead to journalism. After writing a series of articles about the use of cutting-edge science in detective work, he was inspired to create Kennedy who made his debut in a short story published in the magazine Cosmopolitan in December 1910. More than eighty further stories and over a dozen novels followed. The Kennedy stories, narrated by the scientific detective’s admiring sidekick, the journalist Walter Jameson, can often seem dated today. The technology that Reeve proclaims as close to miraculous is often very old hat (X-rays, lie detectors, Dictaphones) but the tales themselves remain entertaining and lively.

THE AZURE RING

Files of newspapers and innumerable clippings from the press bureaus littered Kennedy’s desk in rank profusion. Kennedy himself was so deeply absorbed that I had merely said good evening as I came in and had started to open my mail. With an impatient sweep of his hand, however, he brushed the whole mass of newspapers into the waste-basket.

‘It seems to me, Walter,’ he exclaimed in disgust, ‘that this mystery is considered insoluble for the very reason which should make it easy to solve – the extraordinary character of its features.’

Inasmuch as he had opened the subject, I laid down the letter I was reading. ‘I’ll wager I can tell you just why you made that remark, Craig,’ I ventured. ‘You’re reading up on that Wainwright-Templeton affair.’

‘You are on the road to becoming a detective yourself, Walter,’ he answered with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Your ability to add two units to two other units and obtain four units is almost worthy of Inspector O’Connor. You are right and within a quarter of an hour the district attorney of Westchester County will be here. He telephoned me this afternoon and sent an assistant with this mass of dope. I suppose he’ll want it back,’ he added, fishing the newspapers out of the basket again. ‘But, with all due respect to your profession, I’ll say that no one would ever get on speaking terms with the solution of this case if he had to depend solely on the newspaper writers.’

‘No?’ I queried, rather nettled at his tone.

‘No,’ he repeated emphatically. ‘Here one of the most popular girls in the fashionable suburb of Williston, and one of the leading younger members of the bar