New Book – The Lake District Murder – Superintendent Meredith 1 – by John Bude (Pages 1 – 82)

First Published: 1935

Farmer Luke Perryman is on his way home when his car stops midway because it has run out of petrol.

There is a garage nearby, and Perryman heads for the place. There is nobody at the pumps, but he sees a light inside. When he steps in, he discovers a car and there is someone inside. When he approaches, he is horrified to find one of the owners of the garage, Jack Clayton, dead. There is a tube attached to the exhaust pipe and the end is in the inside of the car. At once, Perryman goes to the police station, and William Meredith is there. When they return to the garage, all the evidence suggests that Clayton committed suicide. However, there are a few things that don’t make sense. The table was laid for dinner, and there was a kettle on the hob. Also when Meredith examines the hose attached to the exhaust pipe, his fingers get dirty, but Clayton’s hands are clean. Then when he talks to Lily Reade, the woman who Clayton was engaged to, she says that they have plans to move to Canada after the wedding, and Meredith gets confirmation from a travel agency that Clayton did pay for two tickets to Canada.

Meredith also talks to Clayton’s partner, Higgins, who has a airtight alibi for the night as he was in a hotel because he had an appointment with a client. Meredith discovers that Higgins had a good motive to want his friend dead because in the event of his death the money invested in the business would go to Higgins. Yet, Higgins was nowhere near Clayton when he died.

With the evidence he has, Meredith manages to get a postmortem performed, and the doctors confirm that Clayton was drugged and a large quantity of a drug is found in his stomach. That means that someone left him unresponsive, so he could be dragged to the car and suffocated there. At the inquest the jury returns a verdict of wilful murder by person or persons unknown.

Meredith continues investigating. He discovers that Clayton had an account which had two thousand pounds, which at the time was a large amount of money. That isn’t the money from the profit in the garage. When Meredith talks to his superiors, they all think that the money may have come from some illegal activity which Clayton had been involved in unwillingly or not. A good theory is that maybe Clayton wanted out, and that’s why he wanted to emigrate, and he was killed by the other people involved.

Meredith discovers from the lady who cleaned for Clayton and Higgins that the partners had regular fights, and she remembers that on a couple of occasions which she dropped by the cottage, she saw a man with the two partners. This man, Meredith discovers, is William Rose, the manager of a petroleum company, and the customer that Higgins was supposed to meet the day Clayton was murdered. Apart from that, a witness that stopped at the garage that night saw one of the lorries from the petroleum company there. So this is the lead that now Meredith is following.