We walked across a muddy track to the farmhouse. He went to the dresser, opened a drawer full of albums and envelopes. From the topmost envelope, he took out a photograph and passed it to me. “There he is. Six feet four if he’s an inch, but the most gentle and polite fellow you could meet. I sent him to the Dell Estate. Nothing came of it.”

“Do you have a copy of this photograph?”

“Take this, if you’ll give it me back.”

I tucked the postcard size photograph in my satchel. It was an unlikely possibility that a transient worker was involved. This odd and contradictory murder appeared both totally ludicrous and carefully planned.

*   *   *

In the local post office, I penned a note to Sykes, enclosing the photograph of Kevin O’Donnell, nickname Giant Jack, an employee of a demolition firm in Pontefract, and now looking for work. I asked him to have an extra copy made.

Just as I was about to pop it in the box, the postman came and so I handed him the letter. Sykes would have my message by tomorrow’s first post.

As I turned to go, I practically bumped into Raynor. He was holding several letters, which he also handed to the postman.

“I could have done that for you, Mrs. Shackleton. Mr. Brockman says if you have any post or messages, you might just give them to me.”

He had come an awfully long way to post letters.

I thought of Commander Woodhead’s suspicions that some agitator was murdered for his Russian gold. He was wrong, that was my overwhelming feeling. This murder was home-grown.

But Josh Whitwell was right. The killer wasn’t a rhubarb grower. It was someone who didn’t know how tricky it would be to put a body on the rhubarb express.

Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The cold of the cellar rose to meet me as I went down the stone steps to my makeshift darkroom. Gertrude and I would meet an hour before dinner, so I had sufficient time to begin work on developing my photographs. When turning my attention to an absorbing activity, I sometimes come up with a solution to a problem. Developing and printing might help me find a way into the puzzle of why two murders occurred around the same time in this quiet spot.

I was close to something, had gathered threads. It was a matter of holding a kind of stillness inside while staying alert. Waiting for some chink of light to crack open an investigation can be difficult.

The cellar runs the length and breadth of the house, with large rooms, such as the wine cellar—which looked more sparsely stocked than I had ever seen it—and smaller rooms, cold stores, pantries and other mysterious places.

I pinned a note on the door of the little room that had been cleaned and prepared for me.

Do Not Disturb.