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him?”
    â€œIt was a sort of instinct. As I came up to this shelter I kind of felt something. It may have been coincidence but …”
    â€œIt was. You just made your routine check with a torch?”
    â€œWell, yes sir. Then I saw this …”
    â€œRight. You remain here till they all come down, photographers, finger-print boys and the doctor. Touch nothing and let no one come anywhere near. They won’t be long.”
    â€œVery well, sir.”
    â€œThen go and make a full report before you go off duty. Everything you can remember. Everyone you saw. All the details you can manage. Your report may be important. I want facts, not theories. We’ll do all the theorizing and it looks to me as though we’ll have to do quite a lot.”
    There was silence for a minute and both men looked down at the dead thing on the seat.
    â€œYou say this was the second time you came to this shelter this evening. What time were you here before?”
    â€œMust have been about 9.30.”
    â€œAnyone here?”
    â€œNo, sir. I’m quite definite about that. I always take a good look at this place. It seems …”
    â€œYes. Who phoned the station?”
    â€œA passer-by. I called to this little man …”
    â€œ
What
little man? What was his name?”
    â€œI didn’t ask him.”
    â€œYou didn’t
ask
him? He was round this shelter and you didn’t even take a note of his name?”
    â€œHe was coming towards it.”
    â€œBut you’d know him again?”
    â€œHe was all muffled up.”
    John Moore’s comment was violent and profane and he left Sitwell wondering whether after all he had chosen the right career.

4
    A F ORTNIGHT later Detective Inspector John Moore drove over to Newminster where an old friend of his, Carolus Deene, taught history at the Queen’s School. His object, he assured himself, was to go over the problem with Deene and in doing so, in giving coherence to his thoughts in the matter as he stated his case, perhaps gain a clearer idea of it.
    It would not be the first time he had talked over such things with Carolus, for he had been stationed in Newminster when, as a very young man, he was transferred to the CID and made his first investigations. Carolus then had just been Released and although an uncomfortably rich man had taken up a teaching appointment rather than be idle. His girl wife had been killed in an air raid and Carolus, a lonely young widower, wanted occupation.
    The Queen’s School, Newminster, is, as its pupils find themselves under the necessity rather often of explaining, a public school. A minor, a small, a lesser-known one, they concede, but still in the required category. Its buildings are old, picturesque and very unhygienic, and one of its classrooms is a showpiece untouched from the Elizabethan age in which the school was founded.
    Some years before this time the school had been given a little reflected fame, for Carolus Deene published a successful book and did not scorn to print under his name ‘Senior History Master at the Queen’s School. Newminster’. The book was called
Who Killed William Rufus? And Other Mysteries of History,
and in it Deene most ingeniously applied the methods of a modern detective to some ofthe more spectacular crimes of the past and in more than one case seemed to have found new evidence from which to draw startling conclusions.
    On the Princes in the Tower he was particularly original and perceptive and he disposed of much unreliable detail in his study of the murder of Edward II. The book was highly praised and sold a number of editions.
    â€œIt doesn’t, unfortunately, make Deene a good disciplinarian,” said the headmaster. “His class is the noisiest rabble in the school.”
    Carolus Deene was forty years old. He had been a good, all-round athlete with a half-blue for boxing and a fine record in athletics. During the war he did violent