The Caravan Crime by Fergus Hume — Read

For the next four and twenty hours Dick had ample food for thought. The more he considered the circumstances of his visit to the city the more tangled did his thoughts become. So far as he could gather there was some secret connected with Audrey, which Randolph knew, which Randolph had made use of to compel the girl to engage herself to him. But as Bollard, in some known way, had forced the scoundrel to break the engagement, why should he fear any revenge on the part of the rejected suitor? If this shady friend of the late Lady Hamber had a hold over the girl, undoubtedly--so it would appear--the stockbroker had a hold over him. And one hold, or the other--perhaps both--had to do with the murder in Sarley Wood. It was impossible that Audrey could be guilty; equally impossible that Randolph was implicated. What, then, was the meaning of Bollard's hints? Dick gave up the riddle in despair, not even having Jossy at hand to help him to solve it.

For Mrs. Tremby had disappeared again, and again the notice of her absence for two or three days was fixed to her office door. Where she had gone to, or what she was doing, Dick could not guess, save that her action had something to do with the case. The crime in which the young man was so strangely involved had been complicated at the outset, but it seemed to him that it was even more complicated now. Dick thought and thought and thought, in the hope of arriving at some conclusion, so that this nightmare existence--to others as well as to himself--should come to an end, but only succeeded in worrying himself to fiddle strings.