The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald A. Knox

On the Saturday before the interview recorded in the last chapter, Mrs. Coolman, sister of the late Sir John Burtell, died quietly in her sleep.

I am sorry that so many characters in this story should appear only to disappear; but in this case, at least, no mystery hung over the circumstances. Mrs. Coolman was seventy-two years of age; she had been, for some time, in failing health; she died, unquestionably, of heart failure, and the medical certificate was signed accordingly. Her acquaintance with her great-nephews had been, as I have already indicated, of the slightest. Her atmosphere, her world, were not theirs; she had grown up, she had been wooed and won, in the great days of English respectability; her marriage with a Lancashire manufacturer had precipitated that respectability in an acute form; and if her brother, Sir John, irritated his grandsons by his fin de siècle point of view, it must be supposed that the sister's attitude towards life would have been even less congenial. Derek and Nigel, therefore, never visited her after they reached the age of protest; and it might easily have been anticipated that they would pass out of her life altogether, in view of the company they kept and the uniform dissoluteness of their character.