The Mystery of the Semi-detached

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Mystery of the Semi Detached by e Nesbitt, recorded by

(00:22):
Adrian Pretzellus. He was waiting for her. He had been
waiting an hour and a half in a dusty suburban
lane with a row of big elms on one side
and some eligible building sites on the other, and far
away to the southwest the twinkling yellow lights of the
Crystal Palace. It was not quite like a country lane,

(00:46):
for it had a pavement and lamp posts, but it
was not a bad place for a meeting all the same.
And farther up towards the cemetery it was really quite
rural and almost pretty, especially in twilight. But twilight had
long deepened into the night, and still he waited. He

(01:06):
loved her, and he was engaged to be married to her,
with the complete disapproval of every reasonable person who had
been consulted. And this half clandestine meeting was to night
to take the place of the grudgingly sanctioned weekly interview.
Because a certain rich uncle was visiting at her house,
and her mother was not the woman to acknowledge to

(01:28):
a moneyed uncle who might go off any day a
match so deeply ineligible as hers with him. So he
waited for her, and the chill of an unusually severe
May evening entered into his bones. The policeman passed him
with a surly response to his good night. The bicyclists

(01:52):
went by him like gray ghosts with fog horns. And
it was nearly ten o'clock and she had not come.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned toward his lodgings. His
road led him by her house, desirable, commodious, semi detached,
and he walked slowly as he neared it. She might

(02:13):
even now be coming out, but she was not. There
was no sign of movement about the house, no sign
of life, no lights even in the windows, and her
people were not early people. He paused by the gate, wondering.
Then he noticed that the front door was open, wide open,

(02:35):
and the street lamp shone a little way into the
dark hall. There was something about all this that did
not please him, that scared him a little. Indeed, the
house had a gloomy and deserted air, it was obviously
impossible that it harbored a rich uncle. The old man
must have left early, in which case he walked up

(02:58):
the path of patten glazed tiles and listened. No sign
of life. He passed into the hall. There was no
light anywhere. Where was everybody? And why was the front
door open? There was no one in the drawing room
and the dining room. In the study nine feet by

(03:19):
seven were equally blank. Everybody was out, evidently, But the
unpleasant sense that he was perhaps not the first casual
visitor to walk through that open door impelled him to
look through the house before he went away and close
it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the

(03:40):
door of the first bedroom he came to, he struck
a wax match, as he had done in the sitting rooms.
Even as he did so, he felt that he was
not alone, and he was prepared to see something. But
for what he saw, he was not prepared for what

(04:01):
he saw lay on the bed in a white, loose gown,
and it was his sweetheart, and its throat was cut
from ear to ear. He doesn't know what happened then,
nor how he got downstairs and into the street, but
he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in

(04:21):
a fit under the lamp post at the corner of
the street. He couldn't speak when they picked him up,
and he passed the night in the police cells, because
the policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but
never won in a fit. The next morning he was better,
though still very white and shaky. But the tale he

(04:43):
told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple
of constables with him to her house. There was no
crowd about it, as he fancied there would be, and
the blinds were not down. As he stood dazed in
front of the front door, it opened and she came out.

(05:03):
He held on to the door post for support. She's
all right, you see, said the constable who had found
him under the lamp. I told you you was drug,
but you would know best. When he was alone with her,
he told her not all, for that would not bear telling,
but how he had come into the commodious semi detached,

(05:25):
and how he had found the door open and the
lights out, and that he had been into that long
back room facing the stairs and had seen something in
even trying to hint at which he turned sick and
broke down and had to have brandy given him. But
my dearest, she said, I dare say the house was dark,

(05:46):
for we were all at the Crystal Palace with my uncle.
And no doubt the door was open, for the maid's
will run out if they're left. But you could not
have been in that room because I locked it when
I came away, and the key was in my pocket.
I dressed in a hurry and left all my odtern
ends lying about. I know, he said. I saw a

(06:08):
green scarf on a chair, and some long brown gloves,
and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayer
book and a lace handkerchief on the dressing table. Why
I even noticed the almanac on the mantel piece twenty
one October. At least it couldn't be that, because this
is May, and yet it was. Your almanac is at

(06:30):
twenty one October, isn't it. No, of course it isn't,
she said, smiling rather anxiously. But all the other things
were just as you say. You must have had a
dream or a vision or something. He was a very ordinary,
commonplace city young man, and he didn't believe in visions,
but he never rested day or night till he got

(06:53):
his sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious semi
detached and settled them in a quiet distance suburb. In
the course of the removal, he incidentally married her, and
the mother went on living with them. His nerves must
have been a good bit shaken, because he was very
queer for a long time, and was always inquiring if

(07:14):
anyone had taken the desirable sami detached, And when an
old stockbroker with a family took it, he went the
length of calling on the old gentleman and imploring him
by all that he held dear not to live in that
fatal house. Why, said the stockbroker, not unnaturally, And then

(07:36):
he got so vague and confused, trying to tell why,
and trying not to tell why, that the stockbroker showed
him out and thanked his God that he was not
such a fool as to allow a lunatic to stand
in the way of his taking that remarkably cheap and
desirable semi detached residence. Now, the curious and quite inexpls

(08:00):
likable part of this story is that when she came
down to breakfast on the morning of the twenty second
of October, she found him looking like death with the
morning paper in his hand. He caught hers. He couldn't speak,
and pointed to the paper, and there she read that

(08:20):
on the night of the twenty first, a young lady,
the stockbroker's daughter, had been found with her throat cut
from ear to ear, on the bed in the long
back bedroom facing the stairs of that desirable semi detached

(08:44):
End of the Mystery of the Semi Detached by e.
Nesbitt Sa