Carmen Ferrarez

In the short story Mr Eastwood's Adventure, writer Anthony Eastwood receives a phone call from a stranger, a woman calling herself "Carmen" who told him that it was a matter of life and death and asked him to meet her at 320 Kirk Street and to use the codeword "cucumber". The address turned out to be the second hand glassware shop of Mother Gibson. The word "cucumber" gained admittance to a private upstairs room. There Eastwood first meets "Carmen" - described as a girl of foreign extraction, with beautiful eyes and an ivory pallor which was like the characters Eastwood had often used in his novels.

Carmen is anxious to find out if Eastwood had been followed. She tells him that a "fiend" Boris is after her. Shortly thereafter, some policemen come to arrest Eastwood. It appears that Carmen has mistaken Eastwood for someone named Conrad Fleckman and the police think he is Fleckman also.

It later turns out that Eastwood had become the victim of a ruse and robbery executed by The Patterson gang. They had spun an elaborate story about the events surrounding the murder of a woman named Anna Rosenburg by Conrad Fleckman. In this story, Carmen was Carmen Ferrarez, daughter of a Spanish political refugee Don Fernando Ferrarez (see the article for Anna Rosenburg for details of her story). Carmen was actually a member of the Patterson gang and usually acted as the decoy while fellow gang members did the actual robbery. "Carmen's" real name is not known. After hearing the explanation fro the police, Eastwood wondered if the dark and good looking "Carmen" was really Spanish. However Inspector Driver tells him that she was born in Hampstead.