A Scream in Soho Read Online Free Page A

there’s nothing for it but to grope my way to Bloomsbury,” the Assistant Commissioner said, with a wry smile which no one could see.
    â€œThat’s the worst of coming out suppering with you, Mac, it’s the getting home afterwards, these nights.”
    â€œThe Lord be thanked I’m different,” McCarthy said virtuously. “I don’t put on dog and live in a mansion in a Bloomsbury square. I live near my food and my ‘clients.’ If the worst comes to the worst I can always get home to my bed on my hands and knees.
    â€œAnd talking about bed,” he observed, “when I get into mine to-night I’m not going to get out of it again for anybody. The spies can go on spying and the murderers can go on murdering, but upon this night Patrick Aloysius McCarthy is going to get his fair share of shut-eye, if he never has it again.”
    â€œIs that to be taken as meaning that you’ll refuse duty if you’re called out?” Sir William said with a laugh.
    â€œConsider it refused in advance. Good night—and don’t lose yourself between here and Bedford Square. The Yard would never get over the loss.”

Chapter III
    The Scream in the Black-Out
    Opinions in that particular portion of Soho in which the crime was committed differed as to the exact quality of the terrible scream that rang out at five minutes past one, precisely. Police Constable C. 1285, working a Soho beat, part of which forced him to inch himself through the gloom from Oxford Street the length of Dean Street to Shaftesbury Avenue, was positive that it came from the throat of a woman; anyhow, it stopped him dead. For a scream in the early hours of the morning in Soho, even from a female throat, to stop dead in his tracks a hard-boiled constable who had worked in that cosmopolitan quarter for years, had to be something entirely out of the ordinary, as, indeed, this one was!
    He was passing the short entry into Soho Square at the time, and the sound came from the left of him; that is to say from the direction of the square itself. Male or female, it undoubtedly came from the throat of a person in mortal terror and, to judge by the curious gurgling note upon which it finished, the sound had been stopped by someone other than the screamer.
    On the other hand, Detective Inspector McCarthy, but an hour or so after leaving Sir William Haynes, and at that moment in the act of switching out his light before stepping into bed, was very positive that the scream came from the throat of a man. Not a matter, it might be thought, of any great moment, but should that scream which penetrated the Cimmerian blackness herald a case of murder, as it certainly sounded to do, it could be of considerable consequence.
    The inspector promptly flung up the window of his bedroom which fronted on to Dean Street, and peered out in the direction from which the sound had seemed to him to come. For all he could see he might just as well have switched out his light and peered under the bed.
    Pulling an overcoat over his night attire and slipping an automatic pistol hurriedly into its pocket, he groped his way downstairs and was out in that thoroughfare in his slippered feet almost before the echoes of that ghastly sound had died away. To him, also, the direction from which the cry came seemed to be Soho Square, towards which he groped at such speed as he could make, thumbing back the safety-catch of his automatic as he went. The thing he had forgotten to bring was the one most necessary of all—his torch.
    The windows of flats and other lodgings situated above the shops of Dean Street were being flung up rapidly, and heads of people not usually disturbed by such sounds were being thrust out of them. Not that they could see anything, any more than anyone could see them, but it is to be supposed that they got a certain amount of satisfaction from their futile effort to penetrate the impenetrable. Which served to show still more the