The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  But I am forgetting that all this time I have not even now introduced my witch to you.

  Hilda Wade, when I first saw her, was one of the prettiest, cheeriest, and most graceful girls I have ever met—a dusky blonde, brown-eyed, brown-haired, with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling—a gleam of sunshine. She laid no claim to supernatural powers; she held no dealings with familiar spirits; she was simply a girl of strong personal charm, endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine intuition. Her memory, she told me, she shared with her father and all her father’s family; they were famous for their prodigious faculty in that respect. Her impulsive temperament and quick instincts, on the other hand, descended to her, she thought, from her mother and her Welsh ancestry.

  Externally, she seemed thus at first sight little more than the ordinary pretty, light-hearted English girl, with a taste for field sports (especially riding), and a native love of the country. But at times one caught in the brightened colour of her lustrous brown eyes certain curious undercurrents of depth, of reserve, and of a questioning wistfulness which made you suspect the presence of profounder elements in her nature. From the earliest moment of our acquaintance, indeed, I can say with truth that Hilda Wade interested me immensely. I felt drawn. Her face had that strange quality of compelling attention for which we have as yet no English name, but which everybody recognises. You could not ignore her. She stood out. She was the sort of girl one was constrained to notice.

  It was Le Geyts first luncheon-party since his second marriage. Big-bearded, genial, he beamed round on us jubilant. He was proud of his wife and proud of his recent Q.C.-ship. The new Mrs. Le Geyt sat at the head of the table, handsome, capable, self-possessed; a vivid, vigorous woman and a model hostess. Though still quite young, she was large and commanding. Everybody was impressed by her. “Such a good mother to those poor motherless children!” all the ladies declared in a chorus of applause. And, indeed, she had the face of a splendid manager.

  I said as much in an undertone over the ices to Miss Wade, who sat beside me—though I ought not to have discussed them at their own table. “Hugo Le Geyt seems to have made an excellent choice,” I murmured. “Maisie and Ettie will be lucky, indeed, to be taken care of by such a competent stepmother. Don’t you think so?”

  My witch glanced up at her hostess with a piercing dart of the keen brown eyes, held her wine-glass half raised, and then electrified me by uttering, in the same low voice, audible to me alone, but quite clearly and unhesitatingly, these astounding words:

  “I think, before twelve mouths are out, Mr. Le Geyt will have murdered her!”

  For a minute I could not answer, so startling was the effect of this confident prediction. One does not expect to be told such things at lunch, over the port and peaches, about one’s dearest friends, beside their own mahogany. And the assured air of unfaltering conviction with which Hilda Wade said it to a complete stranger took my breath away. Why did she think so at all? And if she thought so why choose me as the recipient of her singular confidences?

  I gasped and wondered.

  “What makes you fancy anything so unlikely?” I asked aside at last, behind the babel of voices. “You quite alarm me.”

  She rolled a mouthful of apricot ice reflectively on her tongue, and then murmured, in a similar aside, “Don’t ask me now. Some other time will do. But I mean what I say. Believe me; I do not speak at random.”

  She was quite right, of course. To continue would have been equally rude and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and wait till my sibyl was in the mood for interpreting.

  After lunch we adjourned to the drawing-room. Almost at once, Hilda Wade flitted up with her brisk step to the corner where I was sitting. “Oh, Dr. Cumberledge,” she began, as if nothing odd had occurred before, “I was so glad to meet you and have a chance of talking to you, because I do so want to get a nurse’s place at St. Nathaniel’s.”

  “A nurse’s place!” I exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much of a butterfly for such serious work. “Do you really mean it; or are you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I can tell you, is not all crimped cap and becoming uniform.”

  “I know that,” she answered, growing grave. “I ought to know it. I am a nurse already at St. George’s Hospital.”

  “You are a nurse! And at St. George’s! Yet you want to change to Nathaniel’s? Why? St. George’s is in a much nicer part of London, and the patients there come on an average from a much better class than ours in Smithfield.”

  “I know that too; but…Sebastian is at St. Nathaniel’s—and I want to be near Sebastian.”

  “Professor Sebastian!” I cried, my face lighting up with a gleam of enthusiasm at our great teacher’s name. “Ah, if it is to be under Sebastian that you desire, I can see you mean business. I know now you are in earnest.”

  “In earnest?” she echoed, that strange deeper shade coming over her face as she spoke, while her tone altered. “Yes, I think I am in earnest! It is my object in life to be near Sebastian—to watch him and observe him. I mean to succeed.… But I have given you my confidence, perhaps too hastily, and I must implore you not to mention my wish to him.”

  “You may trust me implicitly,” I answered.

  “Oh, yes; I saw that,” she put in, with a quick gesture. “Of course, I saw by your face you were a man of honour—a man one could trust or I would not have spoken to you. But—you promise me?”

  “I promise you,” I replied, naturally flattered. She was delicately pretty, and her quaint, oracular air, so incongruous with the dainty face and the fluffy brown hair, piqued me not a little. That special mysterious commodity of charm seemed to pervade all she did and said. So I added: “And I will mention to Sebastian that you wish for a nurse’s place at Nathaniel’s. As you have had experience, and can be recommended, I suppose, by Le Geyt’s sister,” with whom she had come, “no doubt you can secure an early vacancy.”

  “Thanks so much,” she answered, with that delicious smile. It had an infantile simplicity about it which contrasted most piquantly with her prophetic manner.

  “Only,” I went on, assuming a confidential tone, “you really must tell me why you said that just now about Hugo Le Geyt. Recollect, your Delphian utterances have gravely astonished and disquieted me. Hugo is one of my oldest and dearest friends; and I want to know why you have formed this sudden bad opinion of him.”

  “Not of him, but of her,” she answered, to my surprise, taking a small Norwegian dagger from the what-not and playing with it to distract attention.

  “Come, come, now,” I cried, drawing back. “You are trying to mystify me. This is deliberate seer-mongery. You are presuming on your powers. But I am not the sort of man to be caught by horoscopes. I decline to believe it.”

  She turned on me with a meaning glance. Those truthful eyes fixed me. “I am going from here straight to my hospital,” she murmured, with a quiet air of knowledge—talking, I mean to say, like one who really knows. “This room is not the place to discuss this matter, is it? If you will walk back to St. George’s with me, I think I can make you see and feel that I am speaking, not at haphazard, but from observation and experience.”

  Her confidence roused my most vivid curiosity. When she left I left with her
. The Le Geyts lived in one of those new streets of large houses on Campden Hill, so that our way eastward lay naturally through Kensington Gardens.

  It was a sunny June day, when light pierced even through the smoke of London, and the shrubberies breathed the breath of white lilacs. “Now, what did you mean by that enigmatical saying?” I asked my new Cassandra, as we strolled down the scent-laden path. “Woman’s intuition is all very well in its way; but a mere man may be excused if he asks for evidence.”

  She stopped short as I spoke, and gazed full into my eyes. Her hand fingered her parasol handle. “I meant what I said,” she answered, with emphasis. “Within one year, Mr. Le Geyt will have murdered his wife. You may take my word, for it.”

  “Le Geyt!” I cried. “Never! I know the man so well! A big, good-natured, kindly schoolboy! He is the gentlest and best of mortals. Le Geyt a murderer! Im—possible!”

  Her eyes were far away. “Has it never occurred to you,” she asked, slowly, with her pythoness air, “that there are murders and murders?—murders which depend in the main upon the murderer…and also murders which depend in the main upon the victim?”

  “The victim? What do you mean?”

  “Well, there are brutal men who commit murder out of sheer brutality—the ruffians of the slums; and there are sordid men who commit murder for sordid money—the insurers who want to forestall their policies, the poisoners who want to inherit property; but have you ever realised that there are also murderers who become so by accident, through their victims’ idiosyncrasy? I thought all the time while I was watching Mrs. Le Geyt, ‘That woman is of the sort predestined to be murdered.’… And when you asked me, I told you so. I may have been imprudent; still, I saw it, and I said it.”

  “But this is second sight!” I cried, drawing away. “Do you pretend to prevision?”

  “No, not second sight; nothing uncanny, nothing supernatural. But prevision, yes; prevision based, not on omens or auguries, but on solid fact—on what I have seen and noticed.”

  “Explain yourself, oh, prophetess!”

  She let the point of her parasol make a curved trail on the gravel, and followed its serpentine wavings with her eyes. “You know our house surgeon?” she asked at last, looking up of a sudden.

  “What, Travers? Oh, intimately.”

  “Then come to my ward and see. After you have seen, you will perhaps believe me.”

  Nothing that I could say would get any further explanation out of her just then. “You would laugh at me if I told you,” she persisted; “you won’t laugh when you have seen it.”

  We walked on in silence as far as Hyde Park Corner. There my Sphinx tripped lightly up the steps of St. George’s Hospital. “Get Mr. Travers’s leave,” she said, with a nod, and a bright smile, “to visit Nurse Wade’s ward. Then come up to me there in five minutes.”

  I explained to my friend the house surgeon that I wished to see certain cases in the accident ward of which I had heard; he smiled a restrained smile—“Nurse Wade, no doubt!” but, of course, gave me permission to go up and look at them. “Stop a minute,” he added, “and I’ll come with you.” When we got there, my witch had already changed her dress, and was waiting for us demurely in the neat dove-coloured gown and smooth white apron of the hospital nurses. She looked even prettier and more meaningful so than in her ethereal outside summer-cloud muslin.

  “Come over to this bed,” she said at once to Travers and myself, without the least air of mystery. “I will show you what I mean by it.”

  “Nurse Wade has remarkable insight,” Travers whispered to me as we went.

  “I can believe it,” I answered.

  “Look at this woman,” she went on, aside, in a low voice—“no, not the first bed; the one beyond it; Number 60. I don’t want the patient to know you are watching her. Do you observe anything odd about her appearance?”

  “She is somewhat the same type,” I began, “as Mrs.—”

  Before I could get out the words “Le Geyt,” her warning eye and puckering forehead had stopped me. “As the lady we were discussing,” she interposed, with a quiet wave of one hand. “Yes, in some points very much so. You notice in particular her scanty hair—so thin and poor—though she is young and good-looking?”

  “It is certainly rather a feeble crop for a woman of her age,” I admitted. “And pale at that, and washy.”

  “Precisely. It’s done up behind about as big as a nutmeg.… Now, observe the contour of her back as she sits up there; it is curiously curved, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” I replied. “Not exactly a stoop, nor yet quite a hunch, but certainly an odd spinal configuration.”

  “Like our friend’s, once more?”

  “Like our friend’s, exactly!”

  Hilda Wade looked away, lest she should attract the patient’s attention. “Well, that woman was brought in here, half-dead, assaulted by her husband,” she went on, with a note of unobtrusive demonstration.

  “We get a great many such cases,” Travers put in, with true medical unconcern, “very interesting cases; and Nurse Wade has pointed out to me the singular fact that in almost all instances the patients resemble one another physically.”

  “Incredible!” I cried. “I can understand that there might well be a type of men who assault their wives, but not, surely, a type of women who get assaulted.”

  “That is because you know less about it than Nurse Wade,” Travers answered, with an annoying smile of superior knowledge.

  Our instructress moved on to another bed, laying one gentle hand as she passed on a patient’s forehead. The patient glanced gratitude. “That one again,” she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance: “Number 74. She has much the same thin hair—sparse, weak, and colourless. She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features. Looks capable, doesn’t she? A born housewife!… Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the other night by her husband.”

  “It is certainly odd,” I answered, “how very much they both recall—”

  “Our friend at lunch! Yes, extraordinary. See here”; she pulled out a pencil and drew the quick outline of a face in her note-book. “That is what is central and essential to the type. They have this sort of profile. Women with faces like that always get assaulted.”

  Travers glanced over her shoulder. “Quite true,” he assented, with his bourgeois nod. “Nurse Wade in her time has shown me dozens of them. Round dozens: bakers’ dozens! They all belong to that species. In fact, when a woman of this type is brought in to us wounded now, I ask at once, ‘Husband?’ and the invariable answer comes pat: ‘Well, yes, sir; we had some words together.’ The effect of words, my dear fellow, is something truly surprising.”

  “They can pierce like a dagger,” I mused.

  “And leave an open wound behind that requires dressing,” Travers added, unsuspecting. Practical man, Travers!

  “But why do they get assaulted—the women of this type?” I asked, still bewildered.

  “Number 87 has her mother just come to see her,” my sorceress interposed. “She’s an assault case; brought in last night; badly kicked and bruised about the head and shoulders. Speak to the mother. She’ll explain it all to you.”

  Travers and I moved over to the cot her hand scarcely indicated. “Well, your daughter looks pretty comfortable this afternoon, in spite of the little fuss,” Travers began, tentatively.

  “Yus, she’s a bit tidy, thanky,” the mother answered, smoothing her soiled black gown, grown green with long service. “She’ll git on naow, please Gord. But Joe most did for ’er.”

  “How did it all happen?” Travers asked, in a jaunty tone, to draw her out.

  “Well, it was like this, sir, yer see. My daughter, she’s a lidy as keeps ’erself to ’erself, as the sayin’ is, a
n’ ’olds ’er ’ead up. She keeps up a proper pride, an’ minds ’er ’ouse an’ ’er little uns. She ain’t no gadabaht. But she ’ave a tongue, she ’ave”; the mother lowered her voice cautiously, lest the “lidy” should hear. “I don’t deny it that she ’ave a tongue, at times, through myself ’avin’ suffered from it. And when she do go on, Lord bless you, why, there ain’t no stoppin’ of ’er.”

  “Oh, she has a tongue, has she?” Travers replied, surveying the “case” critically. “Well, you know, she looks like it.”

  “So she do, sir; so she do. An’ Joe, ’e’s a man as wouldn’t ’urt a biby—not when ’e’s sober, Joe wouldn’t. But ’e’d bin aht; that’s where it is; an’ ’e cum ’ome lite, a bit fresh, through ’avin’ bin at the friendly lead; an’ my daughter, yer see, she up an’ give it to ’im. My word, she did give it to ’im! An’ Joe, ’e’s a peaceable man when ’e ain’t a bit fresh; ’e’s more like a friend to ’er than an ’usband, Joe is; but ’e lost ’is temper that time, as yer may say, by reason o’ bein’ fresh, an’ ’e knocked ’er abaht a little, an’ knocked ’er teeth aht. So we brought ’er to the orspital.”

  The injured woman raised herself up in bed with a vindictive scowl, displaying as she did so the same whale-like curved back as in the other “cases.”

  “But we’ve sent ’im to the lockup,” she continued, the scowl giving way fast to a radiant joy of victory as she contemplated her triumph “an’ wot’s more, I ’ad the last word of ’im. ’An ’e’ll git six month for this, the neighbours says; an’ when he comes aht again, my Gord, won’t ’e ketch it!”