The Starvel Hollow Tragedy

All that day Inspector French's thoughts kept reverting to that tense moment in the cemetery when the lid of the coffin had been raised and his theory had been so dramatically established. The memory filled his mind with a deep satisfaction. He felt that he had achieved nothing less than a veritable triumph. Other cases he had handled well, indeed he thought he might say brilliantly. But in no previous case had he solved his problem by such a creative effort of the imagination. He had imagined what might have happened, he had tested his theory, and he had found it had happened. The highest kind of work, this! His superiors could not fail to be impressed.

But there was more than that in it. Seldom had he known of a case which contained such arresting and dramatic features. When the facts became known they would make something more than a nine days' wonder. The old miser, living meanly in his decaying house at the bottom of that sinister hollow on the lonely moor; the hoarded thousands in his safe; the terrible conflagration which wiped out in a night the whole building and everything it contained; the discovery that the tragedy was no accident, but that murder lurked behind it; the other murder, when Markham Giles was done to death for a purpose too dreadful and gruesome to contemplate without a thrill of horror; these things would make the Starvel Hollow crime reecho round the world. It would be the crime of the century. No one could fail to be moved by it.