The Vaults of Blackarden Castle

 

ONE BEAUTIFUL morning in early June in the year nineteen hundred and forty-eight a motorist was driving slowly along a lonely and rough road that wound between the salt marshes and the sea in the extreme north of the countryside of Norfolk. With his gun handy upon the seat beside him, he was hoping to get a shot at something, a duck, a teal, a snipe or indeed any kind of bird which might fly up from the marshes as he came by. His temperament was such that he would not mind if it were out of season or not.