The Viaduct Murder by Ronald A. Knox — Read

For some time after they had left, Mordaunt Reeves sat in his armchair hunting that most difficult of quarries, an intellectual inspiration. Merely artistic inspiration greets us when it wills, at the sight of a flower or of two lovers in a lane -- we cannot chase it or make it come to our call. A merely intellectual problem can be solved by willpower, by sitting down to it with a wet towel round your head. But there are moments in an intellectual inquiry when inspiration can only come to us from dogged envisaging of the facts. Such was the point at which Reeves found himself; his clues were sufficient to exonerate, in his own mind at least, the arrested Davenant; they were not yet positive enough to mark out any victim who could be substituted. "A golf-ball," he kept saying to himself, "a golf-ball by the side of the railway line, a few yards behind the spot from which the murdered man fell. It must have something to do with it, but where, where does it fit in? " At last, weary of cudgelling his brains over the unlighted grate, he seized his cap and strode out into the air. Half of set purpose, half under the fascination of his thoughts, he found himself climbing once more the steep path that led up the railway embankment and on to the forbidden precincts of the line.

St. Luke's summer still held; the comparative silence of man's Sabbath conspired with the autumn stillness of nature -- the sunshine quiet that is disturbed no longer by clicking grasshoppers, nor yet by cawing rooks -- to hush the countryside. Far below him he could see the golfers at their orisons, fulfilling, between hope and fear, the daily cycle of their existence. Gordon and Carmichael were at the third tee now; he could have waved to them. Carmichael always made too much business about addressing the ball. Over there was the neglected house, itself radiating the silence of a forgotten past. All else was drowsing; he alone, Mordaunt Reeves, strode on relentlessly in pursuit of crime.