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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Kate Plus Ten," Edgar Wallace crafts a captivating narrative that intertwines elements of mystery, suspense, and social commentary. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Britain, the novel explores the life of a resourceful woman, Kate, whose existence is marked by her enigmatic relationship with ten diverse characters that shape her journey. Wallace's dynamic prose is characterized by sharp dialogue and vivid imagery, immersing readers in a fast-paced storyline that frequently reflects the prevailing themes of class disparity and gender roles during this period, making it an insightful commentary on the societal norms of his time. Edgar Wallace, renowned for his prolific output and mastery of the thriller genre, utilized his own tumultuous experiences in life'—from journalism to screenwriting'—to inform his storytelling. His background in reporting provided him with a keen sense of observation, allowing him to create multifaceted characters and intricate plots that resonate with readers. This novel is emblematic of his ability to blend entertainment with a critical lens on contemporary society, positioning Wallace as a significant voice in early 20th-century literature. "Kate Plus Ten" is essential reading for those who appreciate a blend of thrilling escapades and thoughtful reflection on human relationships and societal constraints. Wallace's unique narrative style and compelling character development invite readers to not only question the era's conventions but also to engage deeply with the complex tapestry of human emotions, making this book a timeless addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Kate Plus Ten
Table of Contents
Introduction
Kate Plus Ten pits audacious intelligence against the machinery of the law, testing how far brilliance can outpace authority. Edgar Wallace’s novel revolves around a central strategist whose cool nerve and logistical genius set in motion a sequence of high-stakes operations. Readers enter a world where planning is performance, risk is currency, and every move provokes a countermove. The atmosphere is brisk and purposeful, driven less by brooding psychology than by the sheer acceleration of events. Without leaning on gore or gothic dread, the book builds its grip from dilemmas of timing, trust, and concealment, inviting the audience to relish ingenuity as much as suspense.
Often grouped with early twentieth-century British crime fiction, the book blends the caper and the chase, situating its action in Britain in the 1910s. Wallace, a prolific London-based author of thrillers, shapes a narrative that privileges speed, surprise, and the mechanics of criminal enterprise. The milieu draws on the modern infrastructure of the period, where movement, messaging, and bureaucracy create both obstacles and opportunities. Rather than the sealed-country-house puzzle that would dominate the following decade, this work moves through public spaces and working systems, showing how order can be exploited by those who understand it. The result is a kinetic, urban-minded adventure.
At its core is a young woman whose command of planning and people sets the tone for everything that follows. The title points to her leadership of a closely coordinated circle, and the story unfolds as a contest of wits between this compact organization and the agents of law charged with stopping it. Wallace orchestrates escalating operations and countermoves, each testing timing, nerve, and the limits of concealment. The reading experience is swift and clear, with scenes that emphasize motion and consequence. Rather than a locked enigma to be deciphered from an armchair, it offers a dynamic pursuit rich in tactics and reversals.
Several themes interlock. The novel explores the charisma of competence—how intricate logistics, delegated trust, and steady nerve can feel almost heroic even when applied to outlaw ends. It examines power as a matter of information, timing, and coordination more than brute force. The presence of a woman at the center destabilizes contemporary expectations, inviting readers to consider how leadership, strategy, and ambition cross the boundaries of gender and class. Loyalty and calculation intersect, as relationships must be weighed against risk. Throughout, the narrative asks what kind of admiration is permissible for transgression, and whether ingenuity can be separated from the uses it serves.
Stylistically, this is characteristic Wallace: a clarity of incident, a preference for momentum over ornamental description, and an emphasis on what people do under pressure. The narrative focuses on planning, execution, and the aftershocks of action, drawing suspense from shifting advantages rather than from obscure riddles. While contemporaries would soon codify the fair-play whodunit, Wallace’s approach here feels closer to the modern caper and the procedural chase. Dialogue and incident carry the weight, while background detail stays functional and unobtrusive. The effect is accessible and energetic, ideal for readers who prize pace, cunning, and the snap of cause and effect.
Its appeal endures because it speaks to perennial curiosities: how complex systems can be gamed, how leadership marshals disparate talents, and how institutions adapt when challenged by nimble opponents. Contemporary readers, accustomed to cinematic heists and high-concept thrillers, will recognize the blueprint—tight planning, bold execution, rapid fallout—rendered here with early twentieth-century crispness. The book also prompts reflection on admiration and complicity: what draws us to the architect of a scheme, and where should our sympathies stop? In a world still organized by schedules, networks, and rules, the novel’s fascination with leverage, timing, and misdirection remains both lively and relevant.
Approached on its own terms, Kate Plus Ten is best enjoyed for its propulsion and its precision: a sequence of clever designs meeting equally determined resistance. It offers a window onto the energies of early twentieth-century popular fiction, where plot is a laboratory for testing nerve, ingenuity, and the reach of institutions. Readers who favor capers, manhunts, and tightly wound stratagems will find much to admire in Wallace’s construction. At the same time, the book invites a measured distance, encouraging reflection on why transgression can charm. That balance—thrill and thought—makes this novel a durable entry in Edgar Wallace’s crime repertoire.
Synopsis
Kate Plus Ten opens with the emergence of a singular figure in England’s criminal underworld: Kate, a remarkably young strategist who directs a compact team of specialists. Her operations are marked by precision, minimal risk, and a strict avoidance of violence. Newspapers turn her into a sensation, while embarrassed officials struggle to keep pace. An experienced investigator, methodical and fair, becomes her principal adversary. Early chapters sketch the contrast between public alarm and the calm efficiency of Kate’s schemes, setting a tone of measured pursuit and counterpursuit. The narrative frames their contest as a disciplined game of wits that steadily raises the stakes.
Kate’s background is glimpsed through quiet scenes of orderly domestic life and proper connections, hinting at education, confidence, and self-possession uncommon for her age. She recruits ten reliable associates—drivers, clerks, mechanics, and other technicians—each bound by a strict code. The group targets institutions and secured consignments rather than individuals, using knowledge of schedules, documentation, and infrastructure. Wallace shows how planning, patience, and specialized skills outmatch brute force. The gang’s anonymity depends on convincing disguises and legitimate-seeming paperwork. Throughout, Kate’s leadership is firm but measured, emphasizing timing, loyalty, and the smallest operational detail, which becomes the hallmark of their remarkable consistency.
The first major operation demonstrates the pattern that will define the book: a valuable shipment vanishes without alarms, accomplished by forged authorizations, subtle diversions, and perfectly placed vehicles. The authorities recognize a recurring signature—silence, speed, and clean exits—and the investigator begins to map the logic behind the thefts. Rather than prolonged violence or brazen break-ins, the gang exploits administrative blind spots and precise coordination. Kate’s signals, rehearsals, and layered backups turn apparent risks into controlled routines. This success draws official scrutiny, as transport firms, insurers, and police units compare notes, and a dedicated task force quietly takes shape around the investigator’s growing dossier.
Subsequent chapters broaden the scope of Kate’s operations. A swapped consignment on a railway siding, a vanished mailbag redirected at a critical junction, and a financial maneuver that leverages insurance rules all showcase the group’s versatility. Wallace alternates perspectives, moving from Kate’s cool planning rooms to official strategy meetings, letting readers watch each side anticipate the other. A near-miss hints at the system’s limits: a late signal and an impatient subcontractor almost expose the ruse. Internally, the code is reinforced and a minor breach is disciplined, underscoring Kate’s insistence on order. Externally, the investigator refines a pattern that points toward a single guiding mind.
The midpoint introduces a plan whose scale exceeds prior heists, touching national interests and drawing senior officials into the chase. Security protocols tighten across depots and rail lines, and the investigator receives broader authority and resources. Kate studies the new landscape and recalibrates, consulting timetables, customs regulations, and local knowledge. Glimpses of her private motives surface—loyalty to a small circle, a belief in controlled risk, and an insistence on nonviolence—without yielding a full backstory. At the same time, surveillance edges closer to her outwardly unremarkable life, and the possibility of exposure creates a new tension: maintaining composure while pressure mounts on every front.
Preparation for the audacious attempt unfolds over multiple fronts: decoy vehicles, rehearsed identities, and carefully staggered movements across country roads, side platforms, and wharves. Communication relies on simple, untraceable signals and fixed windows of action. Wallace underscores how many independent elements must strike in sequence for the design to hold. The investigator, anticipating the broad outline, concentrates on timing and bottlenecks, placing quiet watchers where systems converge. As the night of action arrives, small uncertainties creep in—a delayed cart, an unexpected patrol—testing the gang’s contingency plans. The chapter rhythm quickens, tracking a timetable that promises either a perfect lift or unraveling exposure.
A drawn-out pursuit follows, marked by roadblocks, shadowed platforms, and a narrowing perimeter that brings the two principals within arm’s length. Improvisation replaces rehearsal as Kate adapts to shifting obstacles, determined to shield her team and preserve the code. An encounter between Kate and the investigator emphasizes respect and restraint, allowing each to gauge the other’s resolve without melodrama. Hints about Kate’s personal position—her grasp of class codes, her access to places others cannot go—suggest the sources of her advantage without fully disclosing them. The sequence ends with both sides having learned crucial lessons that will shape their next moves.
Public reaction swells after the near-capture: newspapers speculate about the mastermind, industry groups demand results, and officials stress unity and discretion. Inside the gang, fatigue and pride mix uneasily; a final, carefully chosen enterprise is proposed to close accounts decisively. The investigator, now fully convinced of a single orchestrator, knits together statements, schedules, and inconsistencies into a focused plan. Secondary figures face choices about risk, loyalty, and self-preservation. The story compacts its threads, balancing quiet preparations against rising pressure. By withholding a definitive reveal, Wallace keeps attention on method, timing, and character rather than spectacle, steering toward a measured endgame.
The climax resolves the long contest with a decisive maneuver that honors the book’s emphasis on intellect, timing, and restraint. Without detailing outcomes, the conclusion balances accountability with humanity, reflecting the mutual regard that has developed between hunter and hunted. Themes cohere: the power of organization over force, the uses and limits of social position, and the thin line between lawful order and ingenious transgression. Kate’s disciplined code proves central to the final turn, bringing coherence to her choices and the gang’s conduct. The story closes with a sense of completion and lingering enigma, leaving the mastermind’s legend intact while answering the narrative’s essential questions.
Historical Context
Edgar Wallace’s Kate Plus Ten is set in early twentieth-century Britain, largely in London and the Home Counties, and published in 1917 with a contemporaneous feel. The novel’s locales—city streets, country estates, railway sidings, and docklands—anchor it in a nation modernizing at speed yet still defined by rigid class structures. Telephones, motorcars, and dense railway timetables enable swift movement and elaborate planning, while Scotland Yard’s centralized authority looms over metropolitan life. The temporal horizon straddles the late Edwardian years and the pressures of wartime Britain, when official vigilance intensified and private wealth remained concentrated in great houses vulnerable to daring, well-planned thefts.
The modernization of British policing around 1900–1918 forms a crucial backdrop. The Metropolitan Police adopted the Henry Classification System of fingerprinting in 1901, and under Commissioner Sir Edward Henry (1903–1918), detective work became increasingly systematic. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID), later headed by Basil Thomson (Assistant Commissioner, 1913–1921), professionalized surveillance and inter-agency coordination. New Scotland Yard, on the Victoria Embankment since 1890, symbolized centralized, bureaucratic authority. In the novel, the contest between a resourceful criminal organization and relentless detectives mirrors this era’s confidence in scientific policing and administrative reach, while exposing its procedural blind spots that a nimble adversary could exploit.
World War I transformed the British home front after August 1914. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), enacted on 8 August 1914, expanded state powers over transport, communications, and censorship; the Railway Executive Committee took control of Britain’s railways from 4 August 1914 to prioritize troop and munitions movements. The Ministry of Munitions, created in June 1915 under David Lloyd George, coordinated vast supply chains, guarded depots, and sensitive shipments. Zeppelin raids over London (1915–1917) prompted blackouts and heightened security, while rationing pressures peaked by 1918. Kate Plus Ten, with its meticulous plots involving timetables, guarded cargo, and official secrecy, reflects this militarized logistics environment, dramatizing the vulnerabilities of regulated movement and wartime bureaucracy to audacious, organized theft.
The women’s suffrage movement and wartime gender shifts reshaped public life. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903, escalated militancy by 1908–1914, including window-smashing campaigns (notably 1912) and hunger strikes that led to the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act.” During the war, women entered munitions factories and clerical posts at unprecedented scale; afterward, the Representation of the People Act (6 February 1918) enfranchised many women over 30, and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (1919) opened professions. A female strategist leading men in Kate Plus Ten echoes these upheavals: the novel leverages a capable woman’s command to challenge assumptions about authority, competence, and the gendered boundaries of criminal and investigative labor.
The Second Boer War (1899–1902) influenced Wallace’s sensibility and the public appetite for operational intrigue. The conflict’s guerrilla phase (1900–1902), overseen by Field Marshal Lord Roberts and later Lord Kitchener, depended on rail protection, blockhouse lines, and intelligence networks to secure supply routes across the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Wallace, reporting from South Africa for Reuters and the Daily Mail under Lord Northcliffe’s expanding press empire, observed logistics, censorship, and military deception firsthand. This experience fed a British readership attuned to stratagems, decoys, and coded communications. In the novel, the planning precision, feints, and disciplined chain-of-command within the criminal enterprise resonate with wartime operational thinking familiar from imperial campaigns.
Fiscal and constitutional upheavals before the war destabilized the old order. The 1909 People’s Budget, crafted by Chancellor David Lloyd George, proposed progressive taxation and higher death duties, provoking the House of Lords’ rejection and precipitating the constitutional crisis of 1909–1911. Two general elections in 1910 and the Parliament Act 1911 curtailed the Lords’ veto, while estate taxes and rising costs forced retrenchment in country houses. War then exacerbated servant shortages and liquidations of art and jewels. Kate Plus Ten repeatedly turns elite residences—and their movable wealth—into targets, dramatizing the precariousness of aristocratic display in an age of taxation, reduced domestic staff, and newly permeable boundaries between private opulence and public scrutiny.
Urban violence and radical scares shaped policing and public fears. The Houndsditch murders (16 December 1910), involving Latvian anarchists, and the Siege of Sidney Street (3 January 1911), where Home Secretary Winston Churchill appeared on-site, crystallized anxieties about armed conspiracies and transnational gangs in London’s East End. The Aliens Act 1905 formalized monitoring of migrants amid xenophobic currents, especially around docks and warehousing districts. Kate Plus Ten reflects the period’s obsession with tightly organized conspirators, safe houses, and rapid exfiltration through rail and river routes, while its disciplined gang structure evokes the era’s belief that modern crime could mirror military organization and exploit the city’s dense, multiethnic commercial landscapes.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the brittleness of Britain’s hierarchical order under the strain of modernity and war. By pitting a highly competent woman and her coordinated team against wealthy households and procedural policing, it questions the legitimacy of inherited privilege, the adequacy of bureaucratic safeguards, and the gendered allocation of authority. Its focus on trains, depots, and guarded cargo highlights how a centralized wartime state produced new chokepoints and opportunities for exploitation. The narrative thus interrogates class security, official secrecy, and performative respectability, revealing a society in which technological progress and administrative power fail to resolve inequity, vulnerability, and moral ambiguity.
Kate Plus Ten
PROLOGUE
'STRATEGY,' growled the General, 'is the comfort of heroes.'
'And the science of Generals,' piped the little girl sitting crossed-legged at his feet.
The old man looked down at her suspiciously under his white shaggy brows and chuckled.
'I wish you were a boy,' he complained. The little girl laughed shrilly and looked up at her grandfather with big shining eyes, for if Katharine Westhanger adored any human being in the world, it was the grim old man, white-maned and eagle-faced, whose constant companion she was.
They sat under a big elm on a hot day in June.
From where they sat there was as cheerful a view as County Galway could offer. On their left was the ancient home of the Masserfields[1], of which General Sir Shaun Masserfield, that great strategist, was the last representative in the tail male. Beyond the house lay a big black field where leisurely labourers were digging and stacking the peat. In a smaller field with broken stone walls grazed four cows which formed the last of the Masserfield stock.
It was a poor house and a poor estate. Poverty showed in the broken windows of the east wing—visible from where they sat—which had been long since abandoned to rats and mice and lumber, in the peeling plaster work, in the unkempt garden, even in the General's own shiny attire.
He looked down at the girl and smiled.
'Faith,' he said, 'ye've been reading strategy, have ye?'
Katharine nodded.
'Tis a wonderful science,[1q]' said Sir Shaun with a sigh. 'I've written six books on the subject, and I've been robbed on every one of 'em!'
An old man with bowed shoulders came out of the house, and without hurrying made his way through the garden to pick those dead leaves which caught and offended his eye. He came up to the two and knuckled his forehead.
'The dinner is sarved, ye'r honour's lordship.'
The General got up with the aid of his stick.
'The dinner is sarved, Kate,' he repeated solemnly and hand in hand they went back to the house, and over a leg of pork—most untempting meal for a hot day, yet the General and his granddaughter did it full justice—they resumed their discussion on what was to the General the profoundest subject that civilization offered.
It is unnecessary to say that General Sir Shaun Masserfield was an authority. His books, particularly his Modern Artillery as Applied to the Principles of Strategy, have been translated into every language. He was for many years at the head of a department at the War Office, and at least two of his works have been adopted as text-books for the Italian army.
The girl listened in silence as the old man waxed more and more eloquent on his favourite subject, 'Napoleon's defeat of Schwarzenberg' and those wonderful battles which led to the armistice of 1814, and then—
'It seems such a waste,' she said.
He stared at her.
'Waste,' he roared, '—waste of what?'
'Of life and money and everything,' she said.
'Ye're a silly little donkey,' he growled. 'What can you know about it, a child of thirteen!'
'Colonel Westhanger says—'
'Colonel Westhanger,' snapped the old man, 'is a fool and a rascal! He is a bigger fool, and a bigger rascal, than your father,' he added violently. 'The Westhangers are all fools, and Molly Maguires[2]. Bad luck to them! If teeth were diamonds, ye'd have to live on pap!'
The little girl listened unmoved to this tirade against her nearest relations.
'Colonel Westhanger says,' she continued, 'that if all the genius which was put into war—'
'It's little he has put in,' sneered the old man, 'the bould militiaman!'
'He is in the regular army,' corrected the girl.
'It's nothing for the army to be proud of,' countered the General, thumping the table with the handle of his knife; 'and did he talk about strategy? The poor stupid man!'
Katharine shook her head laughingly. 'Oh, General,' she said (she never called him by any other term), 'of course he didn't talk about strategy. He only said what a waste it was of money, and life, and everything.'
'And he put money first, I'll swear.'
'Of life and everything,' said the girl, not noticing the interruption, 'when all the science and cleverness could be applied to making money.'
'To making money!' repeated the General triumphantly. 'That is the sort of fool he is. He couldn't make money by strategy or anything else. God knows what is going to happen to you when I die, for this estate goes to my own brother's son, a miserable reptile of an Orangeman, and your father is no more capable of keeping you than I am of being dishonest.'
He cut himself another thick slice of pork before he spoke again, and then he asked a little curiously, as though he had been turning the matter over in his mind—'And how would a knowledge of strategy help a man to make money?' he asked.
The girl rolled up her serviette before she replied.
'There are many ways,' she said quietly, 'but I don't think that Colonel Westhanger or father could make it. They aren't great strategists like us,' she said calmly.
The old man chuckled.
'Us!' he repeated; 'and how would you make money?'
Katharine Westhanger shook her head. 'I cannot tell you right off,' she said; 'there are so many ways.'
'Give me one,' asked the General, pushing back his chair.
'Well,' she said slowly, 'suppose we sent Terence down to the railway station and took the grease cap off his wheel, and when he got to the road past the O'Gormans' the wheel came off. What would Terence do?'
She looked up at the ceiling and worked out each development of the situation in slow, even tones.
'First of all Terence would go up to the O'Gormans' house, and the Major's agent would lend him his grand new chaise.'
'Well, we could borrow it anyway,' said the General, 'so what's the good of that foolery?'
'All the world would know we had borrowed the chaise to impress the gentleman who is coming down from Dublin to buy your pictures.'
'How did you know I was selling the pictures?' asked the General sharply. It was a subject on which he was rather sore. The two Vandykes which hung in the gaunt entrance hall of the house represented the last of his valuable possessions, and only the eccentric behaviour of certain Mexican stocks in which he had invested many years before, and the consequent stoppage of his income—he had long since mortgaged his pension—would have induced him to part with these relics of Masserfield prosperity.
'How did I know?' she answered; 'how does a General know what is happening out of sight?'
'You have been spying,' he accused, but she shook her head.
'Never mind how I know, dear,' she said; 'let me go on with the story. Terence brings the fine stranger back, and we meet him near the O'Gormans'. We go up to the O'Gormans' grand house and we ask for the Major, who, being a good Irish landlord, is now in London with Mrs. O'Gorman and the children.'
'The Major said I could use the house while he was away. He has a fine library,' said the General.
'Take him to the library and show him the books. Have the pictures waiting for him there—it's the surroundings that count. Mrs. O'Shea, the Major's housekeeper, will do anything for me.'
'Where's the strategy?' asked the old man.
The girl laughed.
'“To compel the enemy to fight on chosen ground secures for the attacker an advantage—”'
'She's quoting my own book at me,' said the General in despair; 'but why make a mystery of it? Why not go straight away to Mrs. O'Shea, and tell her what you want to do?'
'We should then be there by design. Otherwise we shall be there by accident,' said the girl decisively. 'If by design, the enemy will know, for we shall be at the mercy of any chance word which Mrs. O'Shea might drop. If by accident, our presence at the Hall will be understood by both parties.'
'A tricky business,' growled the General. 'Kate, there's either a great strategist, or a great criminal, lost in you.'
She got up and pulled her skirts down over her thin legs.
'I don't think anything is lost yet,' she said complacently.
* * * * *
THIS is one little glimpse of Katharine Westhanger's childhood. It was a childhood spent almost entirely in the company of old Shaun Masserfield, for the visits to her disreputable father and her no less questionable uncle were few and far between.
They were legally her trustees for the small property which her mother had left, but which the General suspected, and the girl knew, had long since been dissipated by her 'guardians,' and it was necessary from time to time that they should make some show of conferring with her. In the main she was alone, 'completing her education in Ireland,' as her father would glibly explain.
She read much, thought a great deal, and she had the vast experience of her grandfather to draw upon.
A year before his death, when she was nearing fifteen, an event occurred which probably did more to shape the after-course of her remarkable life than any other. There was a jack-of-all-trades employed about the house who was variously gardener, coachman, valet and general factotum to Sir Shaun.
Terence (he seems to have had no other name) was a townsman. He had been born, and lived the earlier years of his life, in the city of Dublin. Whatever might be his faults, he was devoted to the girl, and there was no service which mortal man could render that he hesitated to give.
One afternoon Kate was waited upon by an inspector of police. Her grandfather had gone to bed with an attack of rheumatism, and she received the officer of the law in the poverty-stricken drawing-room with its framed photographs and mahogany furniture.
'Good afternoon, Miss Westhanger,' said the inspector with a cheery smile. 'I am sorry to bother you, but we are having a little trouble in this neighbourhood, and I thought you might help me.'
She knew well enough what the trouble was, before he began to speak.
'In three weeks there have been three burglaries in this neighbourhood, and it is very clear that the work is being done by a local man. Major O'Gorman's, Lord Pretherston's and Mr. Castlereigh's houses have been broken into and property has been taken. All the stations have been watched and the roads have been patrolled, and no strangers have been seen here or hereabouts.'
'And do you think it is grandfather?' she asked innocently.
He laughed.
'No, miss,' he said; 'but it is very possible that it is somebody in this house.'
'Me?' she asked with affected alarm.
'I put all my cards on the table, Miss. I think it is your man Terence. He has had a conviction in Dublin, as I suppose you know.'
'For burglary?'
'For petty larceny,' said the inspector. 'Can you tell me where he was last night?'
She nodded. 'I can tell you almost all his movements between six o'clock and eleven,' she said readily.
'The burglary was committed at ten, if you will excuse the interruption, so that if you can account for Terence between nine and ten that will satisfy me.'
'Won't you sit down, inspector?' She seated herself. 'At nine o'clock, or perhaps it was ten minutes to nine, because the dining-room clock is ten minutes fast, Terence came in with my supper. The General was in bed, and Cassidy and his wife had gone to see his mother, who is ill.'
'So that there were only you and Terence in the house?'
'And the General,' she smiled; 'but the General was in bed. At half-past nine Terence cleared away, and at a quarter to ten I rang the bell for my coffee. Then I remembered that the bell was out of order, and went to the kitchen. When Terence brought the coffee I was writing a letter, and I asked him to wait till I had finished it because the bell not being in good working order I didn't want to go down into the kitchen again as I did for my coffee. The clock had struck ten before I had finished my letter, and I then began another letter to Mullins the grocer, which was finished by ten minutes past ten. Terence left the house—'
'That's all right,' interrupted the inspector, obviously disappointed; 'it cannot be Terence, because the burglar was seen to leave from the balcony of Lord Pretherston's house at five minutes to ten. He was shot at when he was crossing the lawn. I am sorry to have bothered you. By the way, where is he now?' he asked.
'He is in the stable. Shall I call him?'
The inspector hesitated.
'No, it is not necessary. May I ask you not to mention the fact that I called?'
She waited until she saw the police officer mount his horse and, riding through the drive, go galloping along the ugly road that led to the village, and then she rang the bell. The old servitor appeared.
'Tell Terence I want him,' she said.
Terence came in a little apprehensively, a lank young man with a smiling eye and with well-plastered hair. Terence had the reputation of being a local dandy.
'Close the door, Terence,' said the girl quietly. 'What is the matter with your hand?'
'I cut it, m'lady,' said Terence, putting the bandaged hand behind him.
