Safe Custody [antikvár]

CHAPTER I WE ENCOUNTER TWO DEADLY SINSWhen my great-uncle, Nicolas Ferrers, died in the arms of a pedlar by the side of the Great North Road, he left a world that knew but little about him and cared still less.My cousin, Hubert Constable, and I were his only relatives, but, though we were able to swear to the dead man's face, we had not seen him alive for more than six years.We knew that he dwelled abroad and we knew his addressHohenems Castle, Carinthia, Austria: we knew he had never married and that his word was law: we had been taught to believe that he could be pleased or displeased by what we did : but, though our parents were dead, he made so little of our kinship that had we been in trouble, it would not have entered our heads to let him know. Indeed, though he had been our guardian, he had become for us a kind of lesser deity, unseen, mysterious, venerable, that never uttered a precept but by his secretary's hand.Then, out of the blue of a pleasant April morning, we each received a letter bidding us meet him in Scotland in three days' time. We were actually discussing this summons upon the telephone, when a telegram came to tell me that he had been fatally hurt and was lying at a little village on the edge of a Yorkshire dale.The message was sent to me because, I suppose, A*9