Explore "The Great Skene Mystery" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep's under a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection, came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman's. The commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man's fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement with a crash.
And straightway, like a hooked fish's, the nose and flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick advantage of that momentary paralysis.