JOHN DICKSON CARR THE LOCKED ROOM You may have read the facts. Francis Seton was found lying on the floor behind his desk, near death from a fractured skull. He had been struck three times across the back of the head with a piece of lead-loaded broom handle. His safe had been robbed. His body was found by his secretary-typist, Iris Lane, and his librarian, Harold Mills, who were, in the polite newspaper phrase, “being questioned.”
So far, it seems commonplace. Nothing in that account shows why Superintendent Hadley of the C.I.D. nearly went mad, or why ten o’clock of a fine June morning found him punching at the doorbell of Dr. Gideon Fell’s house in Chelsea.
Summer touched the old houses with grace. There was a smoky sparkle on the river, and on the flower-veined green of the Embankment gardens. Upstairs, in the library, with its long windows. Superintendent Hadley found the learned doctor smoking a cigar and reading a magazine.
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