The main feature of the mansion is a magnificent oak staircase leading up to the principal rooms. These rooms themselves, with their decorated plaster ceilings and Tudor fireplaces, are, we understand, show pieces. It was in the largest and grandest of these rooms, known as the grand salon, that the ill-fated young and attractive Merle Patterson was disporting herself shortly before her tragic and horrible death.
There is no legend of the customary 'grey lady' who haunts so many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manor houses, but if we were inclined to superstition (and who is not?) we might be forgiven if we fancied we met a 'glimmering girl', as W. B. Yeats expresses it, flitting about the grounds of Hill Manor House. The police have not yet decided exactly where Merle Patterson and Mr Ward were actually done to death (it now seems unlikely that these spots were Lovers' Lane and the cottage), or what sudden panic caused the murderer to throw what seems to have been his bloody (we use the word in its Shakespearian sense-i.e. 'What bloody man is that?' Macbeth, Act I Sc. 2) his bloody weapon into the sheepwash.
Did someone who has not come forward, but who could be, perhaps, the only person on earth who could help the police with their enquiries, did someone actually surprise the murderer just as he had concluded one or other of his devilish machinations? If so, we would remind this person of his civic duties and beg him to be manly and courageous enough to come forward and tell what he knows.
If there is such a man (or woman, for the matter of that) he is assured of complete police protection from the instant he decides to open his mouth. The murderer has struck twice. It should be a matter of conscience to someone, somewhere, to come forward and help to make sure that he does not strike again.
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Post Scriptum
Your correspondent has just heard that after diligent and patient search for clues, the police have come to the conclusion that Miss Patterson was enticed or forced into the disused lodge at Hill Manor House and done to death there. The public, needless to say, are rigidly excluded from the grounds.
Part One: Verdict
CHAPTER TWELVE
MRS LESTRANGE BRADLEY TAKES A HAND
Well might I say with the Apostle, 'The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus,' for I have kept you informed to some extent, my dear Sir Walter, of what has been happening during the past weeks at the Oxfordshire village of Hill. However, it now seems possible and desirable to furnish you with a fuller and more connected narrative of events, if only to clarify my own mind by airing my theories concerning their import.
As you know, I was called to Hill Manor House in my professional capacity by Mrs Kempson, in order to examine and report upon the mental state of a man who claimed to be her brother. As you also know, she then cancelled the appointment on the score of his disappearance.
Well, he has turned up again, not quick but dead. His body has been dug up from the floor of a derelict cottage by the village idiot. As though the murder of Merle Patterson, whose body, you will remember, was found near the sheepwash at the end of the village, were not sufficiently mysterious, we now have this bizarre occurrence to add to the tally.
The inquest on Miss Patterson resulted in a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown, although the police, acting somewhat precipitately, had arrested a gypsy named Bellamy Smith for the crime. They were obliged to release him, however, as, thanks to two intelligent young children and their uncle, Bellamy was able to prove a complete alibi. The contention of the police that he had suffered a torn ear in his struggle with the girl was shown to be mistaken. His earring had been dragged out during a scuffle with some drunken louts in a wrestling booth at the annual fair.
There has been considerable speculation as to what the girl was doing down at the sheepwash at all so late at night, and still in her fancy dress, but, since the release of the gypsy, the police believe that she was not killed where she was found. They think she was murdered very much nearer the manor house, probably inside a deserted lodge in the grounds, and are busily searching for any clues which will prove this. It is a tenable hypothesis and seems to fit in with the facts so far as we know them, but they are merely skeletal and inconclusive.
Whether the two murders are connected in any way seems doubtful. The police are inclined to think that we have a homicidal maniac roaming the neighbourhood and Mrs Kempson, who has called me in again more, I think, to bear her company in that big old house than for any other reason, inclines to the same view and has despatched her young grandson, his sister and their parents to their London flat to be out of harm's way. Her adopted son is also in London, where, I understand, he has employment, so she really is very lonely and I suspect apprehensive too.
The whole case bristles with difficulties. To begin with, there seems little doubt that Mr Ward was, to say the least, an eccentric. According to the respectable people with whom, at Mrs Kempson's expense, he lodged, he was a silent, ruminative man who gave no trouble but who was strangely uncommunicative. The first indication they had of his mental derangement was when he began by digging up one of their flower-beds, passed on to a large chicken-run and dug that up, then began operations on the boardless floor of the tumbledown cottage where somebody (most probably his murderer, but this has not been established) later buried his body.
The people with whom he lodged are named Christina (Kirstie) and Arthur Landgrave, and they have staying with them the two intelligent young children I mentioned. These are aged ten and eight and from them I have derived some of my information. Having watched Mr Ward's operations on the flower-bed and in the chicken-run, they also saw him come out from the ruined cottage, where he had begun to dig a hole, and later they observed him standing in the sheepwash wielding a pickaxe. Later still, they discovered that he had considerably enlarged the hole in the cottage floor so that it resembled a grave. As we now know, this resemblance became apparent to somebody other than the children.
To revert to Mr Ward, until his body was discovered, the police, guided by a statement from Mrs Kempson after the gypsy had been released from custody, thought that Mr Ward might have killed the girl, particularly as a spade believed to be his was found at the bottom of the sheepwash. According to Mrs Kempson, she had received complaints from the Landgraves concerning his strange behaviour and had no difficulty in believing that he could have become homicidal.
The trouble about this supposition is that the medical evidence is not conclusive as to whether the girl or Ward died first. You probably know how impossible it can be to become dogmatic in such matters when the time limits can fall within a matter of hours and when one body has been in the open air for a comparatively short time, whereas the other has been buried for several days before being found.
Besides, if Ward killed the girl and then committed suicide in a most unlikely manner, who buried him? Otherwise, who killed both of them, and why? Further to that, are the police looking for two murderers in a small village which is built on only two streets? It seems unlikely.
I will tell you what else I have found out so far, although you will appreciate that, as the newspapers say of the police, I am still pursuing my enquiries. Before I go on I must add that the police have uncovered no motive for either death which seems capable of bearing closer examination. Mr Ward appears to have given up all claim to the Hill Manor estate, which is now entailed on Mrs Kempson's grandson, a boy of nine named Lionel Kempson-Conyers, and as for Merle Patterson, she appears to have known nobody in the village except the people who attended the birthday party.