命案目睹记38
时间：2025-10-20 07:27:09
（单词翻译:单击）
II
“Inspector Craddock!”
The eager whisper made the inspector jump.
He had been just on the point of ringing the front doorbell. Alexander
and his friend Stoddart-West emerged cautiously from the shadows.
“We heard your car, and we wanted to get hold of you.”
“Well, let’s come inside.” Craddock’s hand went out to the door bell
again, but Alexander pulled at his coat with the eagerness of a pawing
dog.
“We’ve found a clue,” he breathed.
“Yes, we’ve found a clue,” Stoddart-West echoed.
“Damn that girl,” thought Craddock unamiably.
“Splendid,” he said in a perfunctory manner. “Let’s go inside the house
and look at it.”
“No,” Alexander was insistent. “Someone’s sure to interrupt. Come to
the harness room. We’ll guide you.”
Somewhat unwillingly, Craddock allowed himself to be guided round
the corner of the house and along to the stableyard. Stoddart-West pushed
open a heavy door, stretched up, and turned on a rather feeble electric
light. The harness room, once the acme of Victorian spit and polish, was
now the sad repository of everything that no one wanted. Broken garden
chairs, rusted old garden implements, a vast decrepit mowing-machine,
rusted spring mattresses, hammocks, and disintegrated tennis nets.
“We come here a good deal,” said Alexander. “One can really be private
here.”
There were certain tokens of occupancy about. The decayed mattresses
had been piled up to make a kind of divan, there was an old rusted table
on which reposed a large tin of chocolate biscuits, there was a hoard of
apples, a tin of toffees, and a jig-saw puzzle.
“It really is a clue, sir,” said Stoddart-West eagerly, his eyes gleaming be-
hind his spectacles. “We found it this afternoon.”
“We’ve been hunting for days. In the bushes—”
“And inside hollow trees—”
“And we went through the ash bins—”
“There were some jolly interesting things there, as a matter of fact—”
“And then we went into the boiler house—”
“Old Hillman keeps a great galvanized tub there full of waste paper—”
“For when the boiler goes out and he wants to start it again—”
“Any odd paper that’s blowing about. He picks it up and shoves it in
there—”
“And that’s where we found it—”
“Found WHAT?” Craddock interrupted the duet.
“The clue. Careful, Stodders, get your gloves on.”
Importantly, Stoddart-West, in the best detective story tradition, drew
on a pair of rather dirty gloves and took from his pocket a Kodak photo-
graphic folder. From this he extracted in his gloved fingers with the ut-
most care a soiled and crumpled envelope which he handed importantly
to the inspector.
Both boys held their breath in excitement.
Craddock took it with due solemnity. He liked the boys and he was
ready to enter into the spirit of the thing.
The letter had been through the post, there was no enclosure inside, it
was just a torn envelope—addressed to Mrs. Martine Crackenthorpe, 126
Elvers Crescent, N.10.
“You see?” said Alexander breathlessly. “It shows she was here— Uncle
Edmund’s French wife, I mean—the one there’s all the fuss about. She
must have actually been here and dropped out somewhere. So it looks,
doesn’t it—”
Stoddart-West broke in:
“It looks as though she was the one who got murdered— I mean, don’t
you think, sir, that it simply must have been her in the sarcophagus?”
They waited anxiously.
Craddock played up.
“Possible, very possible,” he said.
“This is important, isn’t it?”
“You’ll test it for fingerprints, won’t you, sir?”
“Of course,” said Craddock.
Stoddart-West gave a deep sigh.
“Smashing luck for us, wasn’t it?” he said. “On our last day, too.”
“Last day?”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I’m going to Stodders’ place tomorrow for the
last few days of the holidays. Stodders’ people have got a smashing house
— Queen Anne, isn’t it?”
“William and Mary,” said Stoddart-West.
“I thought your mother said—”
“Mum’s French. She doesn’t really know about English architecture.”
“But your father said it was built—”
Craddock was examining the envelope.
Clever of Lucy Eyelesbarrow. How had she managed to fake the post
mark? He peered closely, but the light was too feeble. Great fun for the
boys, of course, but rather awkward for him. Lucy, drat her, hadn’t con-
sidered that angle. If this were genuine, it would enforce a course of ac-
tion. There….
Beside him a learned architectural argument was being hotly pursued.
He was deaf to it.
“Come on, boys,” he said, “we’ll go into the house. You’ve been very
helpful.”
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