Appleby Talking Read Online Free PDF

for Miss Pinhorn’s niece, Jane. Old women over their teacups would have credited the poor girl with the most masterly crime of the age.”
    The Vicar looked disturbed. “This is not really a crime story, I hope?”
    “It certainly is – but whether masterly or not, you must judge. The initial facts were perfectly simple, and fell within the observation of a number of people who were about here at the time.
    “Miss Pinhorn emerged from her cottage, locked the door behind her, and set out on what appeared to be one of her normal solitary rambles. She came in the direction of this pub, and as she neared it she was seen to be hurrying – like a seasoned toper, somebody said, who is afraid of being beaten to it by closing time.
    “But she wasn’t known to drink, and she had certainly never been in this very comfortable private bar before.
    “Well, in she came, talking to herself as usual and looking quite alarmingly wild. She called for two pints of beer in quick succession, floored them, planked down half a crown, and bolted out again. By this time she was singing and throwing her arms about.
    “It was only when she had gone some way that she appeared to lose direction and wheel round towards the brow of the cliff.
    “By that time she was in a thorough-going state of mania, and she went straight to her death.
    “Perhaps, you may say, she had a repressed tendency to suicide, and the need for that took charge when her inhibitions were destroyed by the poison. For this is a story of poisoning – as you, Doctor, have no doubt realised.
    “My aunt was the first person to suspect foul play. That needs qualifying, maybe.
    “For the notion of poisoning seems to have arisen almost at once at what you might call a folk-level. Everybody was whispering it.
    “What my aunt certainly spotted was the significance of the beer. It indicated, she said, a sudden pathological thirst. Together with the very rapid onset of a violent mania or delirium, it should give us a very good guide to the sort of poison at work.
    “When I say ‘us’, I mean, of course, the local police and myself. It’s a queer thing that I seldom quit Scotland Yard to spend a week in Sheercliffe with my eminently respectable kinswoman without her involving me in something of a busman’s holiday. But I felt bound to peer about.
    “For a very little thought suggested to me that my aunt – in this instance at least – was talking sense. Had the body been recoverable I’d never have bothered my head.
    “Miss Pinhorn’s cottage was not a difficult place to search thoroughly.
    “There was a tremendous store of patent medicines – something quite out of the way even with a maiden lady – all put up in very small packs. But each was more utterly harmless than the last.
    “They were, in fact, almost without exception, free samples which had been stored away for a long time.
    “A related inquiry to this was that into the dead woman’s recent medical history.
    “We learned from her maids in town that a few months previously she had been having trouble with her eyes, and that for some unknown reason she had to be hurried off to a nursing-home.
    “But now I must tell you about the chocolates.
    “You see, it really comes down to a sort of sealed-room mystery. Miss Pinhorn is poisoned – and yet nothing has gone into her cottage for days.
    “Or so we thought until I happened, during the search, to take a second look at this half-pound box of chocolates. It was lying in the sitting-room, with the top layer gone.
    “It wasn’t anything about the chocolates themselves that struck me. It was the lid.
    “You know that slightly padded sort of lid that confectioners go in for? It was of that kind. And just visible on it was the impress of three or four parallel wavy lines. That box had been through the post, lightly wrapped, and here was a faint trace of the postmark.”
    “Most astonishing!” The Vicar was enthusiastic. “My dear Appleby, a fine feat of