As recorded by Dr. Everett Thorne
Mr. Aldous Finch was not fond of the countryside. He considered it “a vast green canvas with nowhere to sit and nothing to read.” And yet, on a wet January evening, we found ourselves travelling by carriage through the mist-drenched lowlands of Derbyshire, summoned to a house soaked in tragedy.
The telegram had arrived the day prior:
“Lord Elric Marston found dead in study. Blunt trauma, no sign of forced entry. Police baffled. Widow requests your immediate presence. —Whitebridge Hall”
“This shall be either a masterpiece of human concealment,” Finch muttered as he packed his overcoat, “or a tedious example of rural melodrama. Either way, I trust you’ve brought your notebook, Thorne.”
Whitebridge Hall was a gloomy estate, its silhouette blurred by fog and ivy, perched like an old hawk over the moors. We were met at the door by Lady Celia Marston—composed, elegant, and swathed in mourning black. Her voice trembled only once: when she asked whether justice could be swift.
“My husband,” she said, “was a difficult man, but no one deserves to die like that. Beaten… in his own study.”
Finch examined the scene with deliberate silence. The study was untouched save for the cracked whisky decanter on the floor, a shattered crystal glass near the hearth, and a thick ledger open to a blank page. Lord Marston himself had been found slumped over his desk—dead from a blow to the temple with what the constable claimed was “a decorative fireplace poker.”
“Yet the poker is still warm,” Finch noted, brushing it with his gloved hand. “As though it had been returned to the fire after use.”
“Odd,” I said.
“Very odd,” Finch agreed, “unless we consider the murderer wanted us to believe it was the murder weapon.”
The house was filled with suspects, each more suspicious than the last:
Jasper Crimley, the estate steward, who stood to lose his position under a new heir.
Miss Honor Dale, the secretary, whose voice cracked when questioned.
Reverend Pelham, a family friend who had argued with the deceased the night before.
And, of course, Lady Celia herself—who, Finch observed, had a small reddish bruise near her collarbone, hastily concealed by a high lace neckpiece.
That night, Finch walked the grounds, murmuring to himself. I heard snatches of Latin. Star references. Ledger notations.
At dawn, he announced, “The true weapon was not the poker. It was the corner of the desk ledger—struck with force from behind.”
I blinked. “Then who—?”
“Come,” he said. “Let us wake the Reverend. He’s had time enough to prepare a sermon.”
The confrontation was swift.
Finch: “You argued with Lord Marston about the will.”
Pelham: “Nonsense. I tried to console him.”
Finch: “He had discovered you were funneling church donations into your own accounts—notes about this were scribbled on that very ledger.”
Pelham: “I—”
Finch: “He confronted you. In anger, you struck him. Then staged the scene clumsily, even returning the poker to the fire to obscure time of death. But you overlooked the bloodstain inside the ledger’s binding. Also, the whisky glass you broke—yours, not his.”
Pelham crumbled.
The Reverend was taken into custody, and Lady Celia wept—softly, not from grief, but from relief.
As we departed Whitebridge, I asked Finch how he had deduced the ledger’s role.
“My dear Thorne,” he replied, “murderers rarely account for how books remember what hands forget.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
No comments:
Post a Comment