Page:Fletcher - The Mortover Grange Affair.pdf/68

 One blow would have stunned Wraypoole and allowed his assailant to get off with the manuscript. But there were three or four blows—any one of them, said the doctors, sufficient to cause death. That surely means that in the manuscript and in John Wraypoole's consciousness there was a secret. The murderer kills Wraypoole to silence him, and steals the manuscript to destroy it. But—the secret?"

"Mortover is an uncommon name," said Wedgwood. "I never heard it before applied to either place or person. But here's a young woman who says it's her name, and evidently John Wraypoole knew it. Then John Wraypoole tells this young woman he'd found out something about her—good news for her, he suggests. He had been away—I know where. To his own native place, Netherwell, in Derbyshire. I think he'd known people of the name of Mortover there, in his early days: I think he made some discovery about them while he was down there, recently. Perhaps he found out that this girl is entitled to money? Anyway, he made some discovery while he was there at Netherwell, and in my opinion he put the results of that discovery in the manuscript he took to Miss Tandy to get typewritten. Eh?"

"I'm with you!" assented the inspector. "Sound all through, that!"