The Mystery Of The Semi-Detached

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Mystery of the semi detached by e Nesbitt. 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

(00:24):
was not quite like a country lane, for it had
pavement and lamp posts, but it was not a bad
place for a meeting all the same. And further up
towards the cemetery it was really quite rural and almost pretty,
especially in twilight. But twilight had long deepened into night,

(00:45):
and still he waited. He loved her, and he was
engaged to be married to her, with a complete disapproval
of every reasonable person who had been consulted. And this
half clandestine meeting was to night to take the place
of the grudging sanctioned weekly interview, because a certain rich

(01:06):
uncle was visiting at her house, and her mother was
not the woman to acknowledge to 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

(01:31):
to his good night. The bicyclist 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 towards his lodgings. His road led him by
her house, desirable, commodious, semi detached, and he walked slowly

(01:53):
as he neared it. She might 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

(02:15):
the front door was open, wide open, 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,

(02:39):
in which case he walked up the path of patent
lazed 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. The dining room and the

(03:01):
study nine feet by seven were equally blank. Everyone was out, evidently,
But the unpleasant sense that he was perhaps not the
first casual visitor to walk through the open door impelled
him to look through the house before he went away
and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and

(03:24):
at the door of the first bedroom he came to,
he struck a wax match, as he had done in
the sitting room. 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 he saw laying on the bed in
a white, loose gown, and it was his sweetheart, and

(03:46):
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 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

(04:08):
the police cells. Because a policeman had seen plenty of
drunk men before, but never won in a fit. The
next morning he was better, though still very white and shaky.
But the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and
they sent a couple of constables with him to her house.

(04:28):
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 house, it opened and
she came out. 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

(04:51):
you were drunk, 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, 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

(05:13):
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, for we all went
to the Crystal Palace with my uncle, and no doubt
the door was open for the maids will run out

(05:34):
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 I left all my odds and ends
lying about. I know, he said. I saw a green
scarf on the chair, and some long brown gloves, and
lots of hair pins and ribbons, and a prayer book

(05:57):
and a lace handkerchief on the dressing table. Why I
even noticed the almanac on the mantelpiece October twenty first.
At least it couldn't be that, because this is May,
and yet it was. Your almanac is at October twenty first,
isn't it. No, of course it isn't, she said, smiling
rather anxiously. But all the other things are just as

(06:20):
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 a day or night until he got his
sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious semi detached

(06:40):
and settled them in a quiet, distant 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 any
one had taken the desirable set I detached, And when

(07:02):
an old stockbroker with a family took it, he went
the length of calling on the old man and imploring
him by all that he held dear not to live
in that fatal house. Why, said the stockbroker, not unnaturally,
and then he got so vague and confused between trying
to tell why and trying not to tell why, that

(07:24):
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
really remarkably cheap and desirable semi detached residence. Now, the
curious and quite inexplicable part of the story is that
when she came down to breakfast on the morning of
the twenty second of October, she found him looking like

(07:47):
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 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

(08:10):
in the long back bedroom facing the stairs of that
desirable semi detached. The end of the mystery of the
semi detached