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We used to walk in those ugly fields around Detton Magna and exchanged the story of our woes. She was a teacher at the national school. The children weren't pleasant, their parents were worse. The drudgery was horrible, and there wasn't any escape for her. Sometimes she would sob as we sat side by side.
Somehow or other I can't tell how another suspicion seems to have crept into the man's brain. All the time he talked to me I could see him trying to read in my face whether there wasn't something else! He'd stumbled across a puzzle of which the pieces didn't fit. He has gone to England gone to Detton Magna gone to see whether there are any missing pieces to be found. He may be back any day now."
And the women my landlady's daughter, with dyed hair, a loud voice, slatternly in the morning, a flagrant imitation of her less honest sisters at night! Who else? Where was I to meet women when I didn't even know men? I spent my poor holidays at Detton Magna. Our very loneliness brought Beatrice and me closer together.
I don't think he was a man of talent at all. I don't think he could have written, for instance, 'The House of Shams. Let us, however, leave the subject of Douglas Romilly for a moment. Let us go a little further back to Detton Magna, let us say. Curiously enough, there was another young man who disappeared from that little Derbyshire village about the same time, who has never been heard of since.
My father chose the Church, his founded the factory in which most of the people in Detton Magna were employed. When my grandfather died, it was found that he was penniless. The whole of his money had gone towards founding the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company. I won't weary with the details. The business prospered, but we remained in poverty. When my mother died I was left with nothing.
"I wish to ask you nothing which might give you pain, but I must know you see, I am really such a ordinary woman I must know about some one whom you went to visit that day, didn't you, at Detton Magna?" He answered her almost eagerly. "I want to talk about Beatrice," he declared. "I want to tell you everything about her. I know that you will understand.
"Do you remember how glad I was to see you? How we used to spend our holidays out in those dingy fields and hope and pray for better things some day? But it was all so hopeless, wasn't it! You could barely keep yourself from starving, and I oh, the misery of that awful Detton Magna and teaching those wretched children! There never were such children in the world.
I took a day's vacation and I went down to Detton Magna to see what had happened." "That was the day," she interrupted softly, "when " "That was the day," he assented. "I remember so well getting out of the train and walking up that long, miserable street. School wasn't over, and I went straight to her cottage, as I have often done before. There was a change. Her cheap furniture had gone.
"What's that? You don't think so?" the cinema magnate exclaimed. "Why not, Mr. Romilly? It's exactly the district at Detton Magna, the message said, in Derbyshire and it was a canal, too, one of the filthiest I ever saw. Can't you realise the dramatic interest of the situation now that you are confronted with this case of disappearance?
Yesterday the police recovered the body of a man who had apparently been dead for some weeks, from a canal close to Detton Magna. The body was unrecognisable but it is believed that the remains are those of Mr. Philip Romilly, the missing art teacher from London, who is alleged to have committed suicide in January last. The thought of that gruesome find scarcely blanched his cheeks.
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