: The adventures of Dora Bell detective by Corbett George Mrs - Detective and mystery stories English; Short stories English; Women detectives Fiction

@FreeBooksWed 14 Jun, 2023

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"I shall be ruined, if this misfortune becomes known! You must help me out of the difficulty without the affair coming into the papers."

"We will do our best. But we cannot guarantee success; and I must say that it is an invaluable advantage to have the police on our side."

"The police must know nothing about it. The business lies entirely between my clients and myself. I should lose all my customers at once if, through the slightest indiscretion, they were led to suspect their valuable property to have passed into other hands pro tem."

"But suppose some of them wish to redeem the property upon which you have advanced them money?"

"They are not likely to do that at present. The season has been an exceptionally gay one, and a gay season is always an expensive one. Society dames will be glad to leave their plate and jewellery at 'their bankers' until their most pressing debts are settled. Meanwhile, I have sufficient confidence in your acumen to hope that you will speedily recover the missing goods."

We could not help thinking that Mr Davison's confidence in us was too overweening to be anything but embarrassing, even though our vanity was flattered by having the sole onus of responsibility for the recovery of stolen goods fixed upon us.

The facts are briefly as follows: -

Mr Davison drove a very peculiar trade. In society he figured as a man of culture, and of large independent means. He lived in one of the most costly of the many palatial flats in which opulent London loves to disport itself, and dispensed his hospitality on a very lavish and comprehensive scale. Assisted by his wife, a woman who was very beautiful, and as clever as himself, he gave receptions to which the titled and untitled flower of English aristocracy thought itself fortunate to be invited, and spent vast sums in apparently ostentatious extravagance.

But this extravagance was really the medium by which he found opportunities of gauging, and of trading upon, the social and financial position of his hosts of acquaintances, who never dreamed that the wherewithal of the splendid hospitality at which they wondered was derived from their own needs.

Mr Davison was really a money-lender on a huge scale, and had at least half-a-dozen flourishing West-End establishments. At one of them he traded, under a fictitious name, as a dealer in gold and silver plate, and at another, under another alias, he made costly jewellery his principal line. From still another establishment he drew plethoric profits by lending large sums of money on valuables, at another he advanced money on real estate at huge interest, and at one or two others he drove an equally lucrative trade on somewhat different lines.

But at none of his shops did he ever put in a personal appearance, though he was actually the guiding spirit of them all. He had one little room in his flat to which no one was ever allowed to penetrate except himself and his wife. Connecting this room with his various establishments was an elaborate system of telephoning, and from this so-called "study" he was able to direct the multifarious threads of his vast business.

Add to his acquisitive capacity the fact that he had the power of winning the confidence of others to an extraordinary degree, and it will be seen how much more easy it was for him to manage so complicated a business than for a man with less tact and polish, or for a man whose wife was inferior to Mrs Davison, who was her husband's very double in cunning and suavity.

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