“Quite a tartar, sir. Lives too late, in my opinion. Should have lived a couple of hundred years ago when the scum knuckled to their betters.”

“The body is at Edison?”

“Yes, sir. I had it conveyed to the morgue at 8.50 this morning. The doctor hadn’t completed the post mortem when I left the town at three o’clock this afternoon.”

“Then we had better run along and hurry him.” A minute later, when they were on the track, Bony said: “What accommodation does the local hotel offer?”

“Not so good, sir. I was thinking that perhaps you’d like to put up with my sister, who sometimes takes paying guests. She’s a good cook.”

“I’ll try her cooking. We must pick up my case from the service car. However, first things first, Mawson. Relate to me the happenings of today.”

“At 7.57 this morning I was called to the telephone by Miss Mary Answerth. She said that on her way to give her men their orders for the day she had found the body of her mother floating on the lake we call Answerth’s Folly. With one of the men, she had gone in the station boat and retrieved the body. There was no doubt that Mrs Answerth was dead.

“As Miss Answerth proceeded to give me orders, I cut her short by saying I would leave at once with Dr Lofty. I had to wait ten minutes for the doctor, but we reached Answerth’s Folly at 8.35. While the doctor was examining the body, I got Miss Answerth to tell me about her discovery of it.

“It appears that every work-day morning Miss Answerth leaves the house and wades over the causeway to the men’s quarters on the shore end. There’s a long story behind how the house came to be surrounded by water, and the rest. Anyway, Miss Answerth was nearly over the causeway when she saw something unusual floating on the Folly, and presently she saw it was her mother’s body. It was about twenty yards off-shore and half that distance from the causeway.