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This makes me think he was local. He may also have been young. A stranger, or an adult man, would have made her think twice about confronting him.
    If the culprit was a local youth then Kent police will have had dealings with him. He may have a father dead or in prison, and a mother who struggles to keep her children fed. It is often the case that a son, lacking the stern guidance of a father, rejects the control of his mother and turns to crime.
    Such a family would have been known to Mrs Luard through her charity work. Her friends describe her as a confident and clever person with a genuine concern for the plight of widows and deserted wives. She went to their houses and watched their children grow up.
    If she knew the trespasser, there’s a good chance she took him to task. What was he up to? Why wasn’t he at work? Did he think his mother wanted him to spend his days in idleness and crime?
    Even if she guessed that he had a friend or friends in tow, she wasn’t expecting one of them to come up behind her. She saw the trespasser as a layabout and a petty thief, not as a killer. Her mistake may have been to say that she was going to report him to the police.
    The threat would have been taken seriously by anyone who knew that Mrs Luard was the wife of a Justice of the Peace and a friend to the Chief Constable of Kent. To a stranger, she was just a woman walking through Frankfield Park. To a local good-for-nothing, she was a woman of status and influence.
    I see this as a crime of stupidity and panic rather than a pre-set plan to murder Mrs Luard. Whether through hot-headedness or a desire to shut her up, the person behind her used the revolver as a club. It may be that both culprits were intoxicated and acted under the madness of alcohol.
    Once the blow was struck, it could not be taken back. Simple trespass had become violent assault and Mrs Luard would be able to name at least one of her attackers. It is my belief that most of the missing fifteen minutes were taken up in an argument about what to do next. Leave her alive or kill her?
    From the outset of this inquiry, police have been confused by the way Mrs Luard died. Was she murdered by a stranger or by someone she knew? Was her death the result of a bungled robbery? Or were her rings stolen to make it seem that way? Why was she shot twice when one bullet would have done?
    I believe the answers to these questions are simple. She was killed by people she knew. They took her rings and purse to make it look as if the motive was robbery. If they were local, they would have known she wore rings on her left hand – which was the only glove that was removed.
    The murder was planned in so far as a choice was made to kill her rather than leave her alive. Neither culprit was safe if she was able to name one of them. And neither culprit was prepared to go to prison for assaulting the wife of Major-General Luard.
    To protect themselves, they took it in turns to fire into her brain. As long as they both played a part in her murder, they could rely on each other to keep quiet about what they had done.
    If the killer or killers are local, there is a good chance the weapon is still in their possession. There is a good chance too that it was acquired during an earlier house burglary in the Ightham area.
    I propose that Kent Police go back through their records of the last five years. If they find a description of a stolen .32 revolver, they will have reason to go house-to-house looking for it . . .
    * * *
    Henry Warde folded his hands over Taylor’s report, which lay on the desk between them. ‘I’ll be lynched if I give an order to search every house,’ he said. ‘The people of Ightham will say I’d rather cast suspicion on them than admit my friend shot his wife.’
    ‘It’s a better line of inquiry than anything else we have.’
    ‘Assuming you’re right,’ said Warde. ‘But you’re opening a can of worms with what you’ve written. You’re asking me to come down