Dead Man’s Shoes Read Online Free PDF

it did not seem a very festive meal.
    â€œWhat sort of a trip did you have?” asked Kutz’s English wife when she had brought him the strong black coffee which she knew he liked.
    â€œAll right,” said Kutz.
    â€œNo trouble?”
    â€œTrouble?”
    â€œYou know what I mean. There’s usually something. The crew or the weather or that.”
    â€œNo. Not trouble. A passenger was lost overboard last night.”
    â€œThere! Well! Who was it?”
    To the surprise of his attentive audience a slow smile spread over Kutz’s face.
    â€œA man called Larkin,” he said.
    Mrs Roper was the last passenger to leave the ship and she went, like Prosper, to her club, the Badmington Ladies’Club. She threw a few bass greetings to her friends, ordered a Guinness and asked for a telephone directory. It took her some time to find the number she wanted, but she had it at last.
    â€œMr Deene, please,” she said when she got through, and after a few moments, “Carolus?”
    Anyone lingering near the box could have heard her splendid voice as she continued heartily:
    â€œName’s Kate Roper. Remember me? Was Fitchley when we met. Got married. What do you mean, you don’t believe it? A parson. Little pet. Yes, very happy. No, he doesn’t call me Bugs. Had to drop the name when I left the Service. That’s not what I rang you up about. Something in your line. Just done a trip on a ship called the
Saragossa.
Yes. Character called Larkin on board. Suspect in the Willick murder case. Lost overboard last night. Yes, Larkin. Thought it would interest you.” She gave him her telephone number. “Call me when you’ve got a minute,” she said. “Staying here a few days. Tell you one or two things if you want. Frightful character. Yes, Larkin.
Why
should it interest you? Because I don’t believe it was suicide. What? No. Murder. Cheer-o.”

4
    T HE COUNTRY town of Newminster is entitled to be called a city and municipal and parliamentary borough. It is on the river Middler and is thirty-six miles from London. It is a pleasant place with many historical buildings, the remains of a Norman castle and an ancient school.
    This—the Queen’s School, Newminster—ranks proudly if somewhat obscurely as a public school. It has a hundred and sixty-odd day-boys, three dozen boarders and a staff of eighteen. But its distinction in recent years is to have on its staff as Senior History Master a certain Carolus Deene.
    Carolus Deene has become doubly celebrated. He made his first reputation by applying the methods of modern detection to the classic murder cases of the past in a brilliant book called
Who Killed William Rufus? And Other Mysteries of History.
For this his large private income allowed him to use all the paraphernalia of detection—microscope, camera, chemical analysis and so on—while he could employ several keen researchers to ferret out details he required.
    But it was when he began to apply his talents to contemporary crime and solved a number of baffling murder cases that he entered the world of headlines. This was very far from gaining him approval from the headmaster of the Queen’s School, a large and rather pompous man named Gorringer who wanted, he said, none of this kind of notoriety for his school.
    â€œI have no objection, my dear Deene,” he expatiated, “to your giving the benefit of your expert advice to the police if they are in need of it, a contingency which I beg leave to doubt. But that should be done with as much anonymity as possible. It ill befits the Senior History Master of theQueen’s School Newminster to appear in sensation-seeking newspapers as a private detective or anything of that sort.”
    However, the summer term had passed without any anxiety for Mr Gorringer and the school was to break up tomorrow without having had its reputation imperilled by Carolus Deene’s liking for