Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

“That’s the finest whiskey in the world,” said O’Rourke. “Have a shot?”

“After you,” said Campbell.

“Go on and drink,” said O’Rourke.

Campbell poured some into a glass. He said: “I was just waking up. I felt somebody pulling the wallet out of my coat pocket and I was just waking up. And then I. flashed on the light and only saw...”

“Quit it, will you?” said O’Rourke.

Campbell swallowed his drink. It burned his throat and cast a smoky mist across his eyes. O’Rourke was not using a glass. He had lifted the bottle to his lips, and Campbell dimly saw bolus after bolus of the liquid gliding down his gullet.

O’Rourke lowered the bottle from his mouth and leaned forward, panting.

The sweat on his forehead looked as big as glass beads. He tilted the bottle and looked at the amount of the whiskey that was left.

“Whatcha think?” asked O’Rourke.

Campbell stared at him and began to penetrate to the mind.

“You mean about the two of them?”

“Yeah. What else would I mean?”

“I guess it’s Salt Creek,” said Campbell.

“Yeah, that’s what you’d guess,” said O’Rourke.

Campbell said: “I gotta hand it to you all the way. You guessed it was Chatham all the time.”

O’Rourke raised savage eyes, started to speak, and suddenly sat down. He rested his elbow on the edge of the table and put his hand across his face. Some of the sweat trickled from his forehead and ran over his fingers. It made Campbell think of tears. O’Rourke was thinking;

Campbell said: “I can’t help wishing, though — I mean, the way she was looking at him. You take her, she was a kind of a hard, cool girl. The kind that you could of suspected of doing anything she thought was necessary to do. But there on the bed looking at Chatham, she was like a baby, wasn’t she?”

“Shut up, will you?” said O’Rourke.

Campbell stared. There was something in that voice which he never had heard before. The hand of O’Rourke was clasped hard across his face, masking the eyes.

Campbell said: “We’ve gotta go and talk to the Tydings girl.”

O’Rourke said nothing.

“We oughta get her,” said Campbell, “while she’s still near crazy with jealousy.”

“Get the hell out of here, will you?” said O’Rourke. “I gotta think.”

Campbell gaped. Then he went out of the room.

You never can tell about an Irishman. When they get stirred up and emotional, they’re funny. That’s all they are. Funny.

Campbell went up to the room of Vivian Tydings and tapped at the door.

* * *

The more minor mysteries O’Rourke and Campbell solve, the more the major mystery grows. Who killed Henry Tydings? Who killed Dr. Hamblin? What part does the purloined Raphael play? What did Charlotte Reid mean when she asked Chatham: “Will they hang us?” What will Vivian Tydings, frantic with jealousy, reveal? The answers to these questions will be found in next week’s smashing, thrilling conclusion.

The 68 Portions Crime by Robert W. Sneddon

Two corpses were mutilated beyond identification — yet the English police could put their finger on the map and say with certainty, “Look here for the murderer!”

I

The list of doctors who have willfully been false to the Hippocratic oath of the medical profession to heal, and not to kill, is a long one. Scores in every country on the globe have used their professional knowledge for greedy gain or so that they might taste the sweet savor of revenge. Others have used that knowledge so that they might rid themselves of wives with whom they could no longer live. Wives they hated, wives who bored them, wives who drove them to exasperated madness.

Dr. Buck Ruxton was now about to add himself to this last class. When his wife Belle came home from her jaunt, her death certificate would be ready for her.

Though it was Saturday night, September 14, 1935, and there was fun going on — moving picture houses crowded, music halls jammed, public houses buzzing with football and racing talk to the clatter of glasses and the blare of the radio — in this busy English manufacturing town of Lancaster, there was not a sound at Number 2, Dalton Square.

Behind the façade of the gray three-storied house across from the Town Hall and Courthouse, nothing stirred. The doctor’s three children were in bed, so was their nurse, pretty Mary Rogerson.

In his office the doctor sat at his desk, twiddling a pencil in his fingers, looking at the dock, waiting for the sound of that opening door to signal the return of the doomed woman.