Four
Nobody came forward to identify the dead woman. The inquest elicitedthe following facts.
Shortly after one o’clock on January 8th, a well-dressed woman with aslight foreign accent had entered the offices of Messrs Butler and Park,house agents, in Knightsbridge. She explained that she wanted to rent orpurchase a house on the Thames within easy reach of London. The partic-ulars of several were given to her, including those of the Mill House. Shegave the name of Mrs. de Castina and her address at the Ritz, but thereproved to be no one of that name staying there, and the hotel people failedto identify the body.
Mrs. James, the wife of Sir Eustace Pedler’s gardener, who acted as care-taker to the Mill House and inhabited the small lodge¹ opening on the mainroad, gave evidence. About three o’clock that afternoon, a lady came to seeover the house. She produced an order from the house agents, and, as wasthe usual custom, Mrs. James gave her the keys to the house. It was situ-ated at some distance from the lodge, and she was not in the habit of ac-companying prospective² tenants³. A few minutes later a young man ar-rived. Mrs. James described him as tall and broad- shouldered, with abronzed face and light grey eyes. He was clean-shaven and was wearing abrown suit. He explained to Mrs. James that he was a friend of the ladywho had come to look over the house, but had stopped at the post office tosend a telegram. She directed him to the house, and thought no moreabout the matter.
Five minutes later he reappeared, handed back the keys and explainedthat he feared the house would not suit them. Mrs. James did not see thelady, but thought that she had gone on ahead. What she did notice wasthat the young man seemed very much upset about something. “He lookedlike a man who’d seen a ghost. I thought he was taken ill.”
On the following day another lady and gentleman came to see the prop-erty and discovered the body lying on the floor in one of the upstairsrooms. Mrs. James identified it as that of the lady who had come the daybefore. The house agents also recognized it as that of “Mrs. de Castina.”
The police surgeon gave it as his opinion that the woman had been deadabout twenty-four hours. The Daily Budget had jumped to the conclusionthat the man in the Tube had murdered the woman and afterwards com-mitted suicide. However, as the Tube victim was dead at two o’clock andthe woman was alive and well at three o’clock, the only logical conclusionto come to was that the two occurrences had nothing to do with eachother, and that the order to view the house at Marlow found in the deadman’s pocket was merely one of those coincidences which so often occurin this life.

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