Читать книгу When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead. A Thrilling Detective Story онлайн

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Nor was he mistaken. Poor Wear was, as the housemaid had said, in mortal agony. An hour later she was dead. Annie, though she was tired and heartsick, was with her to the last, rendering what help she could, and wondering all the while if this terrible event could be the accident it was supposed to be. For the woman’s death at this juncture, with Hugh Stavanger’s secret still unbetrayed by her, was so strangely opportune an occurrence that less suspicious natures than Annie’s might easily suspect some of the Stavangers to have had a hand in it.

Wear was known to be rather fond of an occasional drink of Hollands. On her box in her room was found a gin bottle, from which she had evidently been drinking. But the bottle contained no gin, but a deadly poison sometimes used for disinfecting purposes. How this happened to be in an unlabelled bottle, and how Wear happened to mistake it for gin, are mysteries which have never been elucidated, and never will be now. The dead woman can reveal neither of these secrets, nor that other one which was so important to the people in whose house she died.