The Will and the Way by Bernard Capes — Read

The estate of 'Scars' stands well away from the road among the flattest of South-East Essex pastures. Two miles westward lies Long Wyecombe, a respectable market-town, owning a station, a parochial hall and library, a handsome church and vicarage, a broad street flanked by good shops and staid old residential houses, an hotel, the "Red Hand, " where the assembly balls are held, and a police station, accommodating a sergeant and five constables. In the last place is epitomised, according to its own estimate the local shrewdness which has made Long Wyecombe a byword for clever dealing with its neighbours. And, indeed, Sergeant Roper is a knowing man of his inches, which are many.

At Long Wyecombe station there alighted, bag in hand, one Saturday afternoon in mid May, a tall, rather square, and exceedingly resolute-looking gentleman, by name Mr. Robert Le Strang. It was coldish weather, and he kept his coat collar turned up and his hat a little pulled down over his eyes, for he desired to attract no more attention to himself than was compatible with the arrival of a perfectly unpretending stranger. Dismissing, with a wave of his arm, the importunities of the 'Red Hand' omnibus conductor, he hurried down the station yard, passed a siding on which some trucks were standing, and out at the gates at the bottom of the slope, which discharged him upon the outskirts of the town, and, as is usual in the case of station environments, a congeries of mean and ugly tenements representing life at its dullest and most unpicturesque. But, observation being the last thing he courted, he was gratified to find his exit into quarters so suburban, and in a little he had left behind him the last of the sorry villas, and was out, walking at random, along an uninhabited country road. And then he paused to reflect.