The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories Read Online Free PDF

door to the firebox he opened the vents so wide he could see the flickering light and hear the roar of the flames being sucked around the elbow of the stovepipe, their gasps in the chimney’s throat. With the stove alight he boiled a kettle and put hot water bottles in the double bed; he found the electric fires and plugged them in and turned them on high, making them ping like egg-timers. Later, remembering the cost, he adjusted them to warm.
    Munday smiled at his fires and rubbed his hands before them. He went outside and was delighted to see smoke billowing from his chimneys—that signal, so poignant and reassuring, of active habitation; like winter breath, swirling from a man’s face. Emma cheered up in the warm house. She made tea and swept the floors, she put sheets and towels in the airing cupboards and discovered the view from the bedroom window that gave a glimpse of the sea. Munday joined her at the window; seeing that she had stopped crying he had paused in his brisk movements and shuffled and stooped to reassure her.
    He said, “No need to cry.”
    “It was that carpet in the kitchen,” she said. “It looked so worn and horrid. I couldn’t help myself. God, whose feet—”
    “I’ll take it into the shed,” said Munday.
    “No—your heart. Please.”
    “It does look depressing,” he said in the kitchen. What he had taken for a floral pattern were dark tulip-shaped stains and spots like blossoms in the gray tattered nap.
    “Let me help you,” said Emma.
    The husband and wife knelt on the kitchen floor, side by side, and rolled up the carpet. The activity, seemingly so abrupt and insignificant, was important to them as an illustration of their marriage, what was best in it—and what both would remember when the apprehension they felt, the suspicion of the strange place, the fear of an unwelcome surprise which neither wished to call death, was answered by proof, so that in the end only one of them would be able to recall that rainy morning, the rolling carpet, and that movement, bumping forward on their knees.
    They carried it to the shed and left it with other discarded things, the garden tools, the summer chairs which all appeared to be broken, a dog’s dish, a pitchfork, a scythe, paint cans and enamel basins and two porcelain chamberpots nesting on the worktable. Munday lifted the top one out. It was ornate and had flowers on it, still brightly colored. Its handle was whole.
    “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said.
    “When I was a girl,” Emma said, “I used to stay with my aunt and uncle in Eastbourne—”
    Munday listened to the story; she was happy, he laughed appreciatively. She had told him the story before, but this telling of it was hopeful evidence that he had her support, that she was calmed and would share the solitude of the village with him as she did this memory.
    With the fires going and the lamps blazing in the windows the house was alive, its personality was established with the heat and light; the dark late-aftemoon helped, and the gusts of wind blew gouts of raindrops against the side windows and then seemed to push at the glass with a pressure like spread fingers that strained every inch of it and then released it. The dark and the weather which was growing wild outside and perhaps threatening the slates made the house seem a good shelter: the exaggerated storm outside, the warmth inside, maintained in Munday’s imagination the illusion of the place as a refuge. And the husband and wife moved more freely knowing that the room they were about to enter would be warm.
    But still the suggestion of a menacing presence, a half-formed fear, like a small creature of liquid, swayed and seemed to yawn in whatever room was adjacent to the one Munday happened to be in. He trusted the room he occupied; he was uncertain about the other rooms and could only verify his safety by entering them. Each time he stretched his arm to switch on a light in a darkened room he dared