Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/100

78 It has long been a habit of mine, when any particularly abstruse criminal mystery is before the public, to pin my faith to the Record. Its other features I do not admire, but I knew that Jim Godfrey was its expert in crime, and ever since my encounter with him in the Holladay case, I have entertained the liveliest admiration of his acumen and audacity. If a mystery was possible of solution, I believed that he would solve it, so it was to the Record I turned now, and read carefully every word he wrote about the tragedy.

It is difficult for me to explain, even to myself, the interest with which I followed the case. I suppose most of us have a fondness, more or less unrealised, for the unique and mysterious, and we all of us revolt sometimes against the commonplaceness of every-day existence. We had been having a protracted siege of unusually hard work at the office, and I was a little run down in consequence; I felt that I needed a tonic, a distraction, and I found it in “The Tragedy in Suite Fourteen,” as Godfrey had christened it.

I was sitting in my room on the evening of the second day after the affair, smoking a post-prandial pipe and reading the Record’s stenographic report of the coroner’s inquest, when there came a knock at my door and my landlady entered. She held in her hand a paper which had a formidable legal appearance.

“Have you found another apartment yet, Mr. Lester?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t, Mrs. Fitch,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve not been as diligent in looking for one as I should have been.”

“Well, I’ve just got another notice,” and she sighed