One
One night in midsummer, at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, Arthur Fane murdered a nineteen-year-old girl named Polly Allen. That was the admitted fact.
The girl was only an incident in his life; but she had fallen for him, and was threatening to make trouble with his wife. She even mentioned marriage. In Cheltenham, everybody has to be respectable. Arthur Fane, as head of the firm of Fane, Fane & Randall, family solicitors, had to be particularly respectable.
So, one night when Vicky Fane, Uncle Hubert, and the two servants were away, he invited this girl to his house. She came there secretly, expecting a party, and was strangled with her own imitation-silk scarf. During the dark hours of the night Arthur Fane put her body into his car, drove up Leckhampton Hill, and buried her near the old quarry there.
Polly Allen was a girl of doubtful origins, who drifted from town to town, reasonably respectable but with no family or particular friends; it seemed unlikely that anybody would inquire after her. And, in fact, nobody ever did. Her murder remains unproved and in general even unsuspected to the present day.
But two persons found out about it — Hubert Fane, Arthur's uncle, when it happened; and Vicky Fane, his wife, a little later.
To Vicky the realization came with slowly growing horror. She was a pretty, likeable, pleasant girl of twenty-five years as opposed to Arthur's thirty-eight. She had been married to him for two years, and was beginning quietly, strongly to dislike him even before this happened.
Realization came in patches. On the day following the murder, Vicky found Polly Allen's handkerchief, with Polly's name stitched in it, pushed down out of sight behind the cushion of an easy chair in the drawing room. She burned the handkerchief in case the servants should find it. After a time she made discreet inquiries, and discovered that Polly seemed to have left town. That meant only casual infidelity, of course. But then, during the hot nights with the moon shining on him, Arthur Fane began to talk in his sleep.
Vicky listened, white-faced in the dark. She had to know, and she guessed who else knew, by his altered position in the household since the night of July fifteenth.
Hubert Fane.