β Scribed by David Carter
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Towards the end of a busy day, Inspector Walter Darriteau returns to his workstation. There's a neatly written pink notelet on his desk. Please ring Mrs Susan Woodhams, and a local number. He picks up the phone and pokes in the digits. After three rings, a woman answers.
'There's something preying on my mind,' she says, 'and it has been for more than twenty years.'
'Go on,' says Walter, imagining it was something and nothing.
'Almost a quarter of a century ago, I murdered my husband.'
There was a brief silence before she spoke again.
She wants Walter to call at her apartment at 10am the following morning when she'll tell him all about it.
But gives him a warning. 'Come alone or I won't say a thing.'
He warns her of the consequences of wasting police time, but seems satisfied and curious, and agrees to call.
Susan coughs up the address and abruptly rings off.
Could the woman be serious? Or maybe she's lonely and wants male company. Or could she be setting him up?
Either way, Walter will call by, and can't stop himself imagining how she might have done the deed.
Poison in the tea? Knife in the back? Pushed him down the stairs. Run him over in the garage? Eaten him? It had happened before.
There were plenty of choices, and it would be fun finding out
The case of "The Missing Man" was open, an Inspector Walter Darriteau novella and like all the others, set in and around the ancient city of Chester in the north-west of England...M.F
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
New OCR, formatted, proofed, v1.5. The murder victim was a girl and her slayer a man. That much Police Chief Fred C. Fellows and his Detective Sergeant, Sidney Wilks, knew from the beginning. The deeper they dug, however, the harder it wentβand the more they found out about the killer the more he d