Explore "The Beachy Head Murder" by Arthur Gask on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sir Roger Hake, Member of Parliament for the Saffron Walden Division of Essex was a self-made man and very proud of it. Of humble origin, his father had been a coal-miner and his mother a domestic servant; he had worked his way up from an errand-boy at eight shillings a week when fourteen years of age to be, at forty-five, the sole proprietor of a hundred and more shops known from Glasgow to Penzance as Hake's Chain Stores.
A man of considerable wealth, it was his favourite saying that he should be a happy one, too, because money would buy everything. And certainly it seemed to be so in his case. He had a town house in Berkeley Square, a large and historic estate, which he had renamed Hake Court, near Saffron Walden, he owned Wonder Boy, by far the best two-year-old in training, and, to many people, above all he had married the lovely Mary Hellister, more than twenty-five years his junior.