Perhaps a librarian might know. There must be a goodish Public Library in Scoone.

‘I thought you weren’t interested any more?’ said the voice.

‘You go to hell.’

A mechanic, he was. What did that mean? Mechanicien. It involved an endless range of possibilities.

Whatever he did, he was successful enough to be able to travel First Class on a British railway. Which in these days made one practically a millionaire. And he had spent all that money on what, to judge by his overnight case, was a flying visit.

A girl, perhaps? The girl who had promised to wait?

But she had been French.

A woman? No Englishman would go five hundred miles for a woman, but a Frenchman might. Especially a Frenchman who had knifed his girl for letting her glance stray.

The beasts that talk

The streams that stand…