Gilbert Larose Series

Tall, lithe and of great strength was Daunt, the grave-digger of the ancient church of St. Benedict, in the little village of Monks Arden, about three miles from Saffron Walden. His head was big and bullet-shaped and his hair was closely cropped, as if he had just come out of prison. He had dark and deeply sunken eyes, and, as if to hide their expression, he kept them nearly always half closed. His shoulders were broad, but his loins were narrow and his figure tapered down to bony legs and very long feet. His general appearance was certainly not a pleasing one, and holding himself, as he always did, with his shoulders hunched and his head bent forward, he gave to many who encountered him in the country lanes at night the suggestion of a prowling beast of prey.

Gilbert Larose is again called from retirement to solve a mystery—if anything, a mystery more baffling than those which have made his name in the past. Six murders in seven weeks and Scotland Yard is helpless. The crimes give no clue—not even a similarity of method to connect them. Just the whine of a bullet, the stab of a knife or the crash of a bludgeon, and the murderer has slunk back into the blackness of the night. Six times in seven weeks a coroner's jury returns the verdict “Murder by some person or persons unknown.”

If everything about me were known, I am quite aware the greater number of people would insist that I must be by nature an evil man. The thought of which amuses me, as in these latter years I appear to so conform to all the generally accepted ideas of solid British respectability. At only thirty-five I am a well-to-do landowner, the squire of our village and the youngest Justice of the Peace in my country. I open Flower Shows, I give away prizes at the local sports and I am on the Boards of Management of several public institutions. Also, coming of good stock—my father was the grandson of an earl—I am held to be a worthy example of that class which in Britain's glorious history has done so much to win for her her world-wide greatness.

A large sum of money was stolen from a London bank and hidden in an old mill in a lonely and unfrequented part of Essex. It is found by two men already deep in crime, and the dreadful murder of one of them follows. Gilbert Larose, the one-time great international detective, when discovery seems well-nigh impossible, nevertheless, picks up the trail—almost from what he hears in the whisperings of the wind—and it leads him to an important country gentleman living in an historic mansion in Norfolk. A story packed with thrills and surprises from cover to cover, featuring that most famous of all investigators Gilbert Larose at his brilliant best.  

PROFESSOR PARIS STARBANK, for so he called himself, had a long string of letters after his name, but they did not indicate diplomas which had been granted to him by any recognised university or college and were quite worthless as far as his ability in any walk of life was concerned. Their meaning was of course, unintelligible to most people, but they meant that he belonged to the Society of Natural Healers, was a member of the Dietetic Brotherhood, and had joined the Union of Universal Therapeutists.

An attractive and aristocratic-looking girl of apparently quite ordinary origin has always had good reason to believe she was not the daughter of her mother's husband. Losing both her parents, she seeks her fortune in London, makes her way into the social world and marries into a titled family. Then, through no fault of her own, she becomes involved in the death of a scoundrel who was attempting to blackmail her. Thanks to the help of the one-time great detective, Gilbert Larose, she at first eludes the law, though Scotland Yard is quite certain that she is the guilty woman.

One evening, just as dark was falling, in a many-windowed room of a long, low building standing within the shelter of a cliff high up on a lonely mountainside, were seated three men. The building was the only structure in that profound solitude, and was so high and so far removed that from the habitations in the village below it required a good pair of binoculars to pick up with any accuracy the beginning of the winding road which led up to it. The three men were talking earnestly and, although they must have been aware that by no possibility could they be overheard, their voices, as if from force of habit, were pitched in low tones.

“We may say what we will, Mr. Larose,” remarked the thin scholarly looking man in a rather regretful tone, “but evil in a jeweled setting is less repugnant to the human mind, than when met with in sordid surroundings, and crime among the well-to-do is more intriguing than breaches of the law among the lower classes.” “That is quite true, Mr. Jones,” replied the smiling young man opposite to him. “Wrong doing amongst educated and refined people seems always to have more element of adventure behind it”—he smiled—“and certainly the smells of Mayfair are much to be preferred to those of Bethnal Green.”

Dearest Mum and Dad,—I know you will have been anxious to hear from me and wondering why I haven't written at once, but, as you can well guess, things have been dreadfully upset here, and really, I don't seem to have had a moment to spare. These last three days have been a perfect nightmare for everyone. The place has been full of policemen and detectives, and now, to cap all, we hear that the terrible Gilbert Larose is coming, and that always means, so Mr. Slim says, a hanging for someone. Mr. Slim—he is the butler here—calls Gilbert Larose the 'Angel of Death,' and says he is the greatest detective in all the world, and that once he is on the spot they will find the murderer at once. Of course, you read in the newspapers that I was the first to find the body, and I shall never forget it.

Who will deny that all men have their secrets, and that deep down in every one of us the mind is scarred somewhere with the memories of unforgotten but never-mentioned acts? I know I have my secrets, and they must be heavier, too, than fall to the lot of most men, for I—have taken life. Ten years ago I secretly killed two men. One I shot with a rifle and to the other I dealt out death in a different way. And I was never found out. But I was no murderer, and I regret nothing, for their deaths were forced upon me, and they were bad men, and they both deserved to die. One himself had just violently taken life, and the other would have tortured me in a form of living death. He was a blackmailer. But they are both long since forgotten now, these men who died, and the manner of their passing even has never become known.

“Gentlemen,” barked out the small wizened man, “money talks.” Nine men were seated at a long table in a very large room, where, except for a small and carefully shaded light directly above the head of the man who had spoken, everything was in complete darkness. But although the hour was midnight, and the door was locked and the windows were closely shuttered and draped over with thick curtains, there was nothing in a way suspicious or sinister about the room itself. It was no bare unfurnished cellar, suggestive of secrecy and the plotting of evil deeds, no hole-and-corner meeting place, where criminals might be foregathering, and no lair certainly for the hiding away of human beasts of prey. Instead, the appointments of the chamber were in every way rich and sumptuous, speaking eloquently of refinement and of money judiciously, if lavishly, expended.

One beautiful summer's evening a young man was bicycling slowly along the Military Road that runs between the great Outer Harbour of South Australia and Glenelg. The road was one very seldom used and wound a lonely, sinuous way among the sandhills by the sea.   Dusk had just fallen and the young man was riding slowly and anxiously along. He was not anxious because the surface of the road was shockingly uneven and bad, but he was troubled because he was riding without a light.   He had not expected to be out so late and there was no oil in his lamp. He had ridden out from Adelaide early that afternoon fully intending to be back long before night had fallen, but twice he had had trouble with his tyres, and dusk had now caught him seven miles at least from the city and on a road that was quite unknown to him.

Dr. Methuen's beautifully appointed consulting-room, with, all evidence about it of how successful his practice must be, was not infrequently the stage upon which poignant tragedies of life were set, and the curtain had just been rung up upon one more.   A patient had been told he was suffering from the rather rare disease of myeloid leukaemia, a persistent increase of the white corpuscles of the blood, and that there was no hope for him. Medical science knew of no cure or, indeed, of any way of retarding the approaching death.

The detective had been watching for four days before he realised suddenly that the house was inhabited.   It was a sinister-looking house that stood alone upon a lonely shore in South Australia, and it lay by the margin of the waves in a little sandy cove between the dip of two high hills.   It was a place where few men came, for it was cut off from the distant townships by long, barren wastes of rock-strewn land.   There were no roads nor tracks within many miles of it, and its only highway was the dark and restless sea, forever teased and fretted by the winds that blew across the gulf.   And for four whole days he had watched it through his binoculars from the cliff less than two hundred yards away, and the whole time there had been no suggestion about it of any life within.  It was a silent house, as still and silent as the grave.  Its door had never opened, he had seen no faces from its window and no smoke had ever issued from its chimneys--yet in the falling light of dusk that evening it had flashed to him, as lightning flashes through the blackness of a midnight sky, that human beings were in hiding there.