The Mandarin's Fan by Fergus Hume — Read

The murder of Miss Sophia Wharf at the Bristol Hotel ball made a great sensation. She had been well-known in Marport, and her many friends were enormously excited that each and everyone of them had been acquainted with a person who had been -- as one of them put it -- done to death. Also the circumstances of the murder were most extraordinary. It seemed almost incredible that a popular lady should be murdered in so public a place; though many said, that the safety of the assassin lay in the very fact that he had chosen to commit his crime a few yards away from a spot where many people were congregated. But who had killed Miss Wharf and why she was killed in so brutal a manner, no one could understand.

When the local police heard of the assassination, an Inspector with two subordinates took possession of the hotel, and obtained from the manager a list of the guests present at the ball. As these amounted to something like two hundred, it seemed like looking for a needle in a haystack to search for the criminal amongst them. And many of them did not know Miss Wharf even by sight, so it was certain that the task of identifying the assassin would be one of enormous difficulty. And the question was asked on all hands. "What had taken the deceased lady down the little-frequented steps? " The fan was missing -- Miss Pewsey noticed that, when she bent over the dead, but the story of the fan was not yet public property.