William Le Queux 
Red Room [EPUB ebook] 

Excerpt: "The fifteenth of January, 1907, fell on a Tuesday. I have good cause to remember it. In this narrative of startling fact there is little that concerns myself. It is mostly of the doings of others-strange doings though they were, and stranger still, perhaps, that I should be their chronicler. On that Tuesday morning, just after eleven o’clock, I was busy taking down the engine of one of the cars at my garage in the High Road, Chiswick. Dick, one of my men, had had trouble with the "forty-eight" while bringing home two young gentlemen from Oxford on the previous night, and I was trying to locate the fault. Suddenly, as I looked up, I saw standing at my side a man who lived a few doors from me in Bath Road, Bedford Park-a man who was a mystery."