The Clevedon Case

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.
BY NANCY & JOHN OAKLEY
PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham.
I became mixed up with the Clevedon case—the Cartordale Mystery, as it has been called—in curious fashion. True, it was to some extent in my line of business, though I do not actually earn my living by straightening out tangles. With me it is all a matter of “copy.”
You may or may not have read my various books—there are eight of them now—on criminology. Their preparation has led me into all sorts of queer by-ways and has given me a curiously clear and analytical insight into the mind of the criminal. I have solved many mysteries—you will forgive the apparent boastfulness, but I have no useful Watson to detail my exploits—but I stop there, with solving them, I mean. When I know the answer, I hand the whole matter over to the police. “There is your man (or woman)—take him,” I say. And sometimes they do take him—and hang him. But occasionally they reply, “But we can’t take him—we couldn’t prove it against him.” That, however, is no business of mine. I am a scientist, not a police official, and have nothing to do with the foolery of their law courts or the flummery of what they call their rules of evidence.
I have supplied the answer to the conundrum and that suffices me. The mystery and its solution go into my notebooks, to be used eventually for my own purpose, it may be to illustrate a theory, or perhaps to demonstrate a scientific fact. I have no desire to pose and no intention of posing as a worker of miracles.
There is nothing marvellous about my methods nor wonderful in the results. I do but proceed from fact to fact, as you will see in this narrative, wherein I have set forth exactly what happened, however foolish it may make me look. The reader will accompany me step by step in my investigation of the Clevedon mystery and will learn precisely how the solution, which so bewildered and astonished the little group in Cartordale, came to me. You will see me groping in the dark, then you will discover, as I did, a pin-point of light which grows wider and wider until the whole story stands revealed. And if you guess the solution before I did, that will show that you are a cleverer detective than I am, which may very easily be.