The Box Office Murders

I

The Purple Sickle

Inspector Joseph French, of the Criminal Investigation Department of New Scotland Yard, sat writing in his room in the great building on Victoria Embankment. Before him on his desk lay sheet after sheet of memorandum paper covered with his small, neat writing, and his pen travelled so steadily over the paper that an observer might have imagined that he had given up the detection of crime and taken instead to journalism.

He was on a commonplace job, making a précis of the life history of an extremely commonplace burglar. But though he didn’t know it, Fate, weighty with the issues of life and death, was even then knocking at his door.

Its summons was prosaic enough, a ring on his telephone. As he picked up the receiver he little thought that that simple action was to be his introduction to a drama of terrible and dastardly crime, indeed one of the most terrible and dastardly crimes with which he had ever had to do.

“That Inspector French?” he heard. “Arrowsmith speaking—Arrowsmith of Lincoln’s Inn.”