Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

“My dear Dr. Hailey,” she cried, “surely it can’t be possible that you have been converted to a belief in crystal gazing? You!”

“I am not speaking of crystal gazing.”

“But I told you that it was the crystal which put me to sleep. Everything you have described appeared before my eyes in the crystal.” She caught her breath in a gasp. “It was really most amazing.

“I saw poor Orme quite distinctly, standing dressed in his hunting pink in the great hall. He had his crop in his hands. Then I saw myself come to him, and I must say I looked terribly frightened. He lashed me across the face. The next moment Dick Lovelace had him by the throat and sent him crashing down on the floor. I thought he was dead.”

She paused. Her eyes challenged him.

“And then, I suppose, I fell asleep and dreamed it all over again for your special benefit.”

“I see.”

Dr. Hailey’s expression had become rather vacant. His right hand moved to the pocket of his coat and remained there. Sacha observed the gesture. She sighed.

“I was told,” she exclaimed, “that you were an amateur detective. I didn’t guess that you were quite so keen on riding your hobby as you appear to be.”

Her voice was full of scorn. She added:

“Not even psycho-analysts dare to twist dreams into the shapes of reality in so grotesque a fashion.”

“I do not think that it was a dream, in the strict sense.” The doctor rose again. “Your uncle, as I happen to know, heard the sounds of a horse’s hooves at the door of The Black Tower on the night on which your husband met his death.”

“Not really? It is so very seldom that he hears that sound, isn’t it?”

Her lips mocked him. But her eyes had not ceased their vigilance. She found her handkerchief and pressed it lightly to her forehead. He stood for a moment looking at her in silence.

“If you could only realize it,” he said, “I am trying to help you. I am deeply sorry for you.”

“But why? When there is nothing to be sorry for.”

He contracted his brows.

“Because those things which I have mentioned are not the only evidence in my possession bearing on your husband’s death. There is this also.”

Dr. Hailey withdrew his hand from his pocket, as he spoke. He opened his hand, revealing to her Orme Malone’s cigarette case.

To Be Continued

The Drayton Square Murder by Valentine

“The yankees say,” murmured Miss Wrayne, the adjusters’ secretary, “that when there ain’t no risk they double the insurance.”

I

In a small, plainly furnished room in the heart of the city of London, a room whose door bore the prosaic name of the North Western Trading Syndicate, Daphne Wrayne and the four Adjusters sat round a table and talked.

Any reporter in London would have paid fabulous money to have been present at that interview, for Daphne Wrayne was at that moment the center of public interest, and though the man in the street still knew next to nothing actually about the Adjusters, he knew that Daphne, who gave herself out as the secretary of this strange concern, had been held up to the closest possible microscopic scrutiny and had been announced to be flawless.

And therefore the man in the street, usually so suspicious of private inquiry agencies, had shed his suspicions of the Adjusters as rapidly as a tree sheds its leaves before an October gale.

Daphne’s portrait had appeared by now in every paper of note. She was not only young and beautiful, but fabulously wealthy as well. Her luxurious offices in Conduit Street were open to rich and poor alike — and, more amazing still, she charged no fees!

The fact that she declined to divulge the name of her associates mattered little. For Sir Geoffrey Pender, the commissioner of police, had only recently written to the press admitting that the Adjusters had rendered him “invaluable assistance” over the Great Northern Trust affair.

So, from that moment, Daphne Wrayne had become something like a public idol. To the man in the street she was the Adjusters. He loved to think that the slender, lovely, wide-eyed English girl whose photo met him so often in the magazines was giving up half her life and a good deal of her money for the benefit of others less fortunate than herself.

He loved, too, her frank avowal to the Daily Monitor that she had always wanted to do something with a “kick in it.” And even more her statement that “our raison d’etre is to help, without charge, those whom the law is unable to assist.”

Peter Pan, her four colleagues called her... her four colleagues of whose association with her the public never dreamed. There was Lord “Jimmy” Trevitter — her lover — the most popular young peer in England; Sir Hugh Williamson, famous explorer; Alan Sylvester, best worshiped actor manager in London; Martin Everest, the great criminal lawyer who was already, at forty, reputed to have refused a judgeship twice over.