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address of the nearest police surgeon. By the time we’d picked up this gentleman and set off back across the river time was ticking by and I was growing increasingly impatient, but we could not have returned to the house faster. The surgeon, Dr Harper, did not look best pleased at being dragged out – he had been halfway through his dinner – but Biddle was clearly elated. He is young and enthusiastic, good qualities both, but I would have preferred to have Morris there. I wondered what the total of my cab fare was going to be and hoped the expense wouldn’t be queried.
When we got back to the Jameson house, I was relieved to see the door opened by Constable Butcher.
    ‘All quiet, here, sir,’ said Butcher as soon as he saw me. ‘The ladies is in the parlour. There’s also a pair of servant girls, a-sitting in the kitchen. One of ’em works here and the other works for you, Mr Ross. They’re drinking tea and talking the hind leg off a donkey. One keeps blubbing. They wasn’t here when I got here but turned up just after. I have secured the back door – that leads out of the kitchen, too. But it occurs to me that the villain made good his escape that way and very possible his entry, too! I’ve examined all the windows on the ground floor, sir, and none of them’s been forced.’
    ‘How he got in will be the first mystery to solve,’ I murmured to Harper as we climbed the stairs. ‘But if there is only the one servant employed here, and if she left the kitchen door unlocked, it wouldn’t be difficult.’
    We had reached the room on the first floor where poor Tapley lay. Although I’d seen him earlier and braced myself for seeing him again, it was still a sickening sight.
    I have dealt with murder more often than I could have wished. Usually, in my experience, it takes place at the rougher end of society. Men kill one another in tavern brawls. They kill their wretched women in fits of drunken jealousy. Motives often seem petty and out of all proportion to the horror of the crime. Recently I had dealt with the case of a pawnbroker, killed in his shop by a customer who couldn’t raise the money to redeem his mother’s wedding ring so decided to retrieve it the direct way. I’ve known murder done for a penny-a-week life insurance. Life is hard for those on the street and little better for the labouring poor. Temptation is always at hand.
    The middle classes are on the whole subtler in dealing with a problem or an obstacle. They can afford to pay a lawyer his fee to argue their cause in the courts. They are conscious of their reputations. Of course there is violence in such homes, too. I’ve seen the signs of that also. But it seldom comes into court because they cling to a ‘good name’ with the zeal of a fanatic. The beaten wife swears she walked into a bedpost. The abused servant girl is silenced with a mix of money and threats. But murder cannot be hidden so easily. Murder is a stain that cannot be washed clean. The police cannot be turned away from an investigation into murder with a firm ‘not today, thank you!’. It is the rarity, therefore, of such an event in such a setting that makes it particularly shocking. And this time in a peace-loving Quaker home, too! There was a horrid irony in that.
    Thomas Tapley, the scholarly recluse, had been down-at-heel but, in the opinion of all it would seem, ‘a gentleman’. He would not have expected to leave life in such a way as this. Nor would I have expected to find someone like him beaten to death. I gave myself a mental shake and told myself to stop philosophising and get on with the practical details.
The poor fellow was as I had left him earlier before hurrying out to Scotland Yard. He sprawled on one side with his face turned towards the hearth. But if he had glanced in that direction before he died, he’d have seen no dancing flames. No fire burned in the grate nor was there any sign that one had been lit that day. The iron grille at the base of