Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story by Mrs. Charles Bryce
page 38 of 301 (12%)


CHAPTER IV


On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through
which she had been conversing with Lord Ashiel, hurried out to see what
Bond Street could provide her with, a little man was sitting writing in a
luxuriously furnished room in a flat in Whitehall. He was small and thin,
and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown
eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps
any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in
other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more
remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a
criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder
uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of
clues as he imagined, when he heard that the celebrated detective,
Gimblet, had visited the spot in pursuit of his investigations.

For this was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently
insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive
scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The
name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his
forbidden craft, or a blackmailer concocted his cowardly plans; burglars
and forgers cursed freely when he was mentioned, and there was hardly an
illicit trade in the country which had not suffered at one time or
another from his inquisitive habit of interesting himself in other
people's affairs. Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call
upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of,
though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal
DigitalOcean Referral Badge