The Trouble With Harry

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Book: The Trouble With Harry Read Online Free PDF
Author: Jack Trevor Story
Tags: Mystery, Humour
shrub the tramp had just completed the transfer of the shoes and socks. As soon as the couple made their appearance he had the good sense to lie back with the corpse and stare into the sky.
    ‘Tramps!’ said the blonde, disgusted.
    ‘Lying right across the path!’ said Mark Douglas.
    ‘We’ll carry on a bit up that other path,’ said the blonde.
    ‘You’re telling me!’ said Mark Douglas, slappingher again and moulding her with his fingers towards another secondary path in the bracken.
    Presently, while Captain Wiles was falling asleep under the rhododendron, the tramp got up and walked away, muttering to himself about the relief of Mafeking.

WIGGS’ EMPORIUM
    While these momentous things were happening on the heath, nothing was going on down amongst the trees and the bungalows. Nothing was happening, the way it happened every afternoon when the people who came home to lunch had gone back and the tradesmen had finished calling. It was an active, participative kind of nothing.
    Butterflies flew in little couplets amongst the bushes and into the gardens. White butterflies and brown, the small, valueless kind. Butterflies and cherry-eaters. Bees swam around the heads of gladioli, stopping to kiss and sample and thenswimming on, fatuously, contentedly. Wasps settled like buzzards on fallen fruit and dustbins, while double hollyhocks stood in groups catching the breeze and talking things over.
    So far as the world was concerned – the world which came along the road in motorcars and buses and cycles – the Sparrowswick Bungalow Estate was a thick wood which clung to the side of a hill, with here and there a roof or a chimney showing amongst the leaves. The entrance to the estate was a stony track with a bungalow on one side and an old, ivy-covered cottage on the other. This stony track was just wide enough to take a medium-sized motorcar. Higher up, out of sight of the road, other tracks dribbled away between the trees and these were just wide enough to take a small motorcar or a motorcycle combination. From these paths other little paths of dirt and leaf-mould wandered away to isolated bungalows in which lived, of necessity, people with feet or bicycles.
    In the old, ivy-covered cottage by the road lived the widow Wiggs, proprietress of the Wiggs’ Emporium. Mrs Wiggs sold groceries, lisle stockings, bacon and other provisions, toothache tincture on cards,beautifully coloured packets of seeds, stationery, shopping-bags and everything imaginable except the thing you wanted when it was early closing in the nearest town. Mrs Wiggs also sold original paintings, watercolours, oils, black and white sketches, half-tones; all with the artist’s name inscribed off-handedly yet unmistakably in one corner: Sam Marlow.
    Besides these examples of painting and drawing the widow Wiggs sold other forms of fine art. At least, she stocked other forms. She stocked little wisps of poetry written in fine Indian ink on white cards. She stocked flowers and ornaments fashioned from coloured wax and dull with the dust of months. She stocked little books bound in hand-patterned leather which could be used for contract bridge scoring or as a diary. And by some amazing feat of packing Mrs Wiggs stocked all these commodities in her front room, which was roughly two yards square and contained as well as a small bacon-slicing machine with a broken blade, a short counter and a brass till. In this small front room turned into a shop then, were stocked groceries, lisle stockings, baconand other provisions, toothache tincture on cards, beautifully coloured packets of seeds, stationery, shopping bags and fine art. All this plus the fixtures; one bacon-slicing machine, one till and one Mrs Wiggs. By careful manoeuvring it was also possible to get two customers in the shop, though it meant one had to be small and sit on a biscuit tin.
    The window of this shop was one pane wide, half being taken up with feminine and intimate drapery, and
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