Not even the sea was interested in it. Sea grasses had grown tall around it even when the tide was high enough to drown a horse.
It was originally owned by Sir Charles Offen, cousin to then King George. He built his mansion so he could wake every morning to the sound of waves crashing and gulls squawking out their usual calls.
There was another more sinister reason for building a mansion near the sea that no one else would consider right and proper.
His wife. Eleanora Dumont, a French beauty also possessed royal lineage though only through her great great grand aunt who was mistress to King Philip V.
Sir Charles retired from his duties in government when he began building his mansion shortly after.
Eleanora hated the place from the minute she first saw it. She snickered it was like a mausoleum's tribute to death. She wouldn't be too far from the truth with her remark.
The Offen mansion was not located on any map. It didn't need to be. Sir Charles didn't plan to invite any guests even though there was a huge, ornate ballroom just beyond the large glass entrance doors.
Eleanora laughed at the emptiness of that ballroom until Sir Charles temperament had gone from mild chastisement to warning glances.
Every day was like the day before in the mansion. Sir Charles inherited both his title and wealth from his father, Sir Frederick Offen. However, there had always been a dark shadow over the Offen name.
It had to do with the fact that Sir Frederick's wife was German born. In the days building up to the war, being German alcaused suspicion.
It was ironic that father and son both married outside of their royal British nationality. Charles was lured by the Frenchwoman, Eleanora, he'd seen in a ballet.
Frederick found his wife, Inga Jorgan, in a German alehouse. Not exactly the stuff of which royal marriages should be made. Be that as it may, Frederick and his wife maintained a relatively inconspicuous manor house in a northern English province in order to avoid rumors and gossip.
Charles was sent off to military school on his mother's demand at age eight years old. Inga Jorgan Offen wanted to dispose of her duties as a parent to her other more enjoyable social duties. Not that her husband filled the Yorkshire manor house with guests on a regular basis.
Rather, Inga was disposed to invite her former German friends to take up residence where their parties long into the night were always planned when Frederick was not in residence.
It was fortunate that he wasn't. Inga and her friends often drank far too much which shocked the Offen household staff by some of their more lurid "games."
When Frederick died of the Spanish Flu, Sir Charles had just returned from a tour of duty in the Boer War.
It was his misfortune to arrive home late into the night when Inga and her companions were too drunk to even know he arrived.
What he saw sickened him.
Inga was nude on the floor and pretending to be a horse. Others in her party, also nude pranced about the ballroom in varying versions of animal mimicry. Some were howling, others snorting and still others all trying to ride atop Inga's naked back, each taking turns as if she was a painted carousel horse
Charles banged his walking stick on the floor to get their attention. After a few minutes, Inga realized her son has seen her baccanale
"Vell? Vat do you vant?" Inga asked brazenly.
"What do I want mother? I VANT you out of my father's house. NOW! All of you! Get out!" Charles bellowed mockingly.
"You cannot put me out, Charles. You did not inherit your father's estate. I did."
"Wrong mother. Did you think Father didn't know about you? Do you think I didn't know all those years before you sent me off to school you were a drunken sot? Before Father died, he left everything to me. If you don't believe it, check with his solicitor.
You should not be so unhappy. Now you can return to Berteschgaden with your friends and be the serving maid you were when Father met you."
Inga walked up to her son and slapped his face. With one blow, Charles returned the attack. Inga landed on the floor as soon of her "guests" began to make their way to the door.
Only one tall older German man, Kurt Lempburg, walked over to Inga to help her up. She slipped two times in his grasp before he gave up and headed toward the door.
"So Mother, it looks as if your friends are in a hurry to leave. How many of them are German spies? Do you even know? I will check with the staff to make sure none of them have prowled about or stolen anything."
Charles didn't really care where his mother went. Her maid helped her dress and packed her trunk.
"Make sure you pack ALL of Mother's belongings. I want never to see her again."
Charles readied the manor house for sale. He knew the house, property and his father's art collection would bring him a tidy sum.
He felt so ashamed by his mother that all he wanted was a place to hide. He knew his mother's wild revelry was known to the locals. How could it not be? She had spent most of her monthly stipend on liquor, particularly the popular and expensive Jagermeister, her favorite liqueur. Not to mention the food her guests looked forward to feasting on.
The local suppliers were owed sums of money which Charles was indebted to pay.
Once all of the financial details were finally put to rest and the manor finally had a buyer, Charles treated himself to a performance of Giselle, by a touring ballet company.
One of the principal ballet dancers, Eleanora Dumont, seemed to be dancing only for him. Charles sensed a strange magnetic attraction to Eleanora. He dismissed it as foolishness.
But her face followed him wherever he went. At night in his bed, he dreamed of her perfectly oval shaped faced with its impossibly large dark eyes, framed by her raven hair and alabaster skin.
He had no idea why he was impulsed to find her. When he did, he realized though she was lithe, graceful and quite fashionable, her voice and diction was far below his own class. Still, Eleanora managed to light a fire in him he found unable to contain.
The more he saw of her, the more he realized his desire for her was overwhelming. They were married in a quiet ceremony soon after the mansion on the moors was completed.
Sir Charles spent most of his time in London "on business," while his bride spent hers remodeling parts of the mansion.
At dinner when Charles returned, he never mentioned precisely what his business in London was. Eleanora didn't find that particularly unusual since women of those days were not supposed to ask questions about a husband's business.
More's the pity she hadn't. What she might have learned would have sent her running as far away as her dancer's feet could take her.
She hope to return to the stage and planned to discuss it with Charles when the moment seemed right. In the meantime, she had a room in the attic converted into her own practice studio.
Every morning she donned leotard, tights and her pointe shoes, put a piece of classical music on the phonograph and kept her dancer's body in perfect form and flexibility. She ran through the barre excercises for almost a hour noting her every flaw in the wall to wall mirrors she had installed.
Next came porte de bra, arm movements to keep her arms as limber as her long legs.
Charles indulged his wife's whims and Eleanora doted on him in return.
The first two years of marriage were relatively uneventful, even when Charles inexplicably decided to renovate the storage building at the back of the property.
This puzzled Eleanora because the building had prior damage from storms. She remembered that when Charles gave her a full tour of their estate.
"Charles, is this building abandoned because to the damage?," she remembers asking.
"Yes. It still has a few things the gardener stores in there when the gardening shed has overflow," Charles said.
As she peered out the attic window, she could see most of the renovations were nearly complete. Charles had installed a kind of "moat" around the building. Eleanora assumed it was a precaution against future water damage.
The only thing Eleanora disliked most about her new home was the moors. The servants warned her to have a care about them. They told of places in the moors where the footing was dangerously deluding.
She refused to believe their stories about ghosts that haunted the moors. John Lamb, the gardener, told her he saw the ghost of an old sailor walking on the soupy moor bog.
To her, the moors reminded her of a corps de ballet with their reeds swaying in a silent rhythm.
She heeded the words of the servants and gazed at them from a distance. She found the movements to be almost hypnotic. In truth, she hoped in her loneliness to see the ghost of the old sailor.
Life in the mansion on the moors changed radically when Sir Charles Offen fell victim to a strange illness. He lay abed for three days, his color like that of the thick green moor bog. By the time, Dr. Waterston arrived, Charles was barely breathing.
Charles recovered and Eleanora and the nurse, Jamison, took turns keeping watch over him until he was well enough to be mobile again.
Charles, in his sick bed, assessed his situation. He realized having spent so much time in London, he needed to restrict his travels seriously. Whatever the cause of his illness, he knew London was its origin.
He struggled to remember his last days in London and what he had done that could have caused him such grave illness.
He hated that his memory was no longer as sharp as it had been.
Eleanora and his nurse took him out to the stone patio just outside the conservatory when weather allowed.
Charles seemed to lose interest in most everything except his hand carved ivory miniatures. Every day, he demanded to see a special figure. Most of the figures were nothing more than replicas of chess pieces like the rook, king, queen, bishop and pawn.
Eleanora watched as he fingered each piece.
"Charles, would you teach me how to play chess?" she asked one rainy afternoon.
Rainy afternoons on the moors gave one the overwhelming feeling of drowning in a thick fog.
Charles looked up from his miniatures.
"You don't know how to play chess?" he asked with an edge to his voice.
"You know I don't. Is it like playing checkers?"
Charles looked disgusted with that question. It told him how wrong it had been for him to marry a person who spent her life in the theater.
"No. It is nothing like that. Children learn to play chess. Why haven't you?"
"You know why. I spent my childhood training for ballet."
"And where has that choice ever gotten you?"
"Why on the stage as a featured ballerina of course," she replied.
Charles inhaled deeply and glared at his wife.
He rarely actually looked directly at her. More and more often of late, Charles seemed to be reflecting his father's wife, Inga's characteristics on Eleanora. He refused to refer to her as "mother."
The very thought of Inga made him feel enraged at how low she had brought the family name.
"Well Charles? Will you or won't you teach me to play chess?" Eleanora persisted.
"Come here my dear. I want to show you the pieces you will need to know."
The two sat on the divan nearest the French doors of his study. The room was always so dark that Eleanora could barely make out Charles figure even in daylight. It had the peculiar odor of old wood that couldn't really be attributable to the walnut paneling on the walls.
A few days later, Charles had the servants set up a small table upon which he placed an antique chess board that was rescued from the attic along with the rest of the chess pieces he needed to teach his wife how to play.
To Eleanora, it seemed as if Charles was suddenly more alert. Until she found just how much of his memory was already deteriorated. He would tell her how to move a chess piece only to repeat himself a few minutes later.
She realized that the Offen Mansion daily decisions were left to her. The only visitors to the mansion on the moors was Charles physician and the vendor who brought in their goods. Once in a while, a repairman would be called upon to repair a slate roof tile or the chimney sweep would do his regular cleaning of the six chimney throughout the mansion.
"Madam! Madam! Sir Charles is not answering when I knocked to bring in his breakfast," Lily Wallen, their housekeeper said.
"Did you go into his room?" Eleanora asked.
"No Madam, I felt it was not my place unless Sir Charles answered," she said.
Eleanora hurried up the white marble stairs to Charles room.
"Lily, send for the doctor. I think Sir Charles is dead."
By the time the physician arrived, it was clear Charles Offen was dead.
He would be buried at the Yorkshire family mausoleum with his father. Eleanora bore the loss of her husband without much grieving. She was his sole heir. She was determined she would remain in the mansion he built for her.
She noticed a withered old woman with a walking stick in one hand and a small bouquet of what looked like dried weeds in the other.
When the old woman and her younger male companion walked toward her, the old woman eyed Eleanora from stem to stern.
"So you are Charles wife?"
"Yes. And you are?"
"I am his mother. This is his step brother, Thomas Lawes. Thomas will be looking into a claim against the Offen estate. When Charles turned me out, he gave me only a small annual pittance which barely covered the rental of a flat."
"And now you think you will force me to sell my mansion and lay claim into any of our assets? I can assure you that will be a waste of your time. I've already engaged the assistance of my husband's solicitor to see to any outside claims."
Inga would not be put off. She knew as a woman long into her dotage she may not be physically as hale as Charles' wife but she was more than mentally capable of forcing this woman's to concede to her demands.
This was how the nightly ordeal began for Eleanora. She had found the trip to the family crypt at Yorkshire quite diverting but was glad to return to the mansion on the moors. She shouldn't have been.
On the first night of her return, she sat in their drawing room with the drapes drawn when she noticed the draperies seem to be unusually lit. She pulled one of the drapes and saw there was a huge fire near the old shed.
She pulled on her robe and called for Lily and George, Charles butler.
"George, there appears to be a fire of some kind just beyond the old shed out there. Please see what it is all about," she said.
"Yes. Madam."
"And George, do be careful about your footing. I cannot bear to lose Sir Charles' manservant."
George and the gardener saw the strangest sight of their entire lives as they slowly neared the site of the fire. There was fire atop a small pool of water. The flames were a peculiar bluish hue near the base as if there was something gaseous in the water.
The odor from the fire was so innocuous that they had to cover their noses and mouths with their collars.
"There is no putting this fire out," MacManus the gardener said.
"I agree. Pitching water at it is of no use," George said.
When they explained what they'd seen to Eleanora, she was incredulous.
"You mean there is no way to put that fire out?"
"No madam. We tried using pails of water to no avail," George responded.
So the fire on the moors lit up the night in a conical shaped column Eleanora loathed.
That fire was to begin a series of other strange occurances at the mansion on the moors.
In daylight, Eleanora kept vigilant watch for the anyone who might be responsible for the continually burning fire.
Rumors filtered back to Eleanora from her servants that a war was brewing with Germany. She kept herself busy ignoring the rumors.
Her life was only slightly more fulfilling than when Sir Charles was still alive. She had the chauffeur drive her into town to buy a new hat at the milliner's or to have a new frock made and fitted.
On occasion, she attended a ballet at the province theater where she was invited to the cast soiree after the ballet with a few of her old friends, patrons of the art and the usual round of pressmen looking for a story or bit of gossip.
Eleanora was an object of curiosity since she retired two decades earlier from her dance career. She was fascinated how the faces in the crowd of soiree guests had changed so radially since those early days.
Now, it seemed as if there were as many retired military among the crowd as she had never seen in the past. She considered this might be a result of the rumors about war.
One older gentleman with salt and pepper hair and shoe button eyes approached her. Eleanora demurred as she had no wish for male acquaintances.
"Madam, you are Lady Eleanora Offen, are you not?" the man asked.
"And you ...are...?" Eleanora replied.
"I am the retired Colonel George Limpton," he said.
"Forgive me if I do not recognize you. I do not spend much time on this city."
"I should think as the sole heir to the Offen fortune, you would be busy maintaining your late husband's business," he said.
"I do not. I leave that all to our solicitor."
Eleanora did not like this gentleman. A fact she decided almost instantly. There was something about him she disliked intensely. She took two steps back to take in his entire facade. He knows far too much about my husband and our business, Eleanora thought.
"That is as it should be. Your husband's business was quite successful and I should think he would not want to trouble his wife with the mundanities."
When Eleanora arrived home she realized how little she actually knew about her husband's "business." It could not have had any dark attachments or she would not have inherited such a generous settlement after his death nearly a year ago.
On her next trip to the city, she decided to sate her curiosity and speak with Sir Charles' solicitor, Archibald Connerton.
Archibald Connerton was a sixty five year old conservative gentleman who wore a monocle even when the fashion for monocles seemed out of fashion. He had snowy white hair and in contradiction, a thick black mustache and short perfectly coiffed pointed goatee.
"Lady Offen, How good of you to come. Please have a seat. How can I be of service?" he asked.
"I realized that while you do such an excellent job of managing Sir Charles' affairs, I know nothing about the details of his business," Eleanora said.
"Lady Offen, as you are well aware, Sir Charles was a member of Parliament. His job there was as an attache to a very proprietary office. I am not certain of myself what precisely his duties were...if that is what you wish to know," he said.
Eleanora remained silent. Connerton furtively fixed his eyes on the still beautiful Lady Offen. She reminded him of an oil painting he once viewed in an art gallery in France. He wondered what she was thinking and why her husband's business had suddenly piqued her interest.
"Lady Offen? Suffice it to say that Sir Charles' had the respect of his fellow MPs. As you know, with the impending rumors of war, they are not likely to share such highly classified information with even the wife of such a respected MP," Connerton said.
"Do you know if Sir Charles had befriended a retired military Colonel...George Limpton?"
Connerton tugged at the ends of his bountiful mustache.
"No. I do not recall Sir Charles ever mentioning any associations with such a gentleman. Why do you ask?"
"Several months ago, I attended a soiree after the ballet and was approached in the crowded room by a man named Colonel George Limpton. He seemed to have deep knowledge of Sir Charles business. I realized how little I actually knew what Sir Charles business is."
"All I can say madam is that I never recall Sir Charles mentioning a man by the name. In fact, now that you mention it, I don't recall he ever mentioned anyone in the military. I had the impression he would not want an association with anyone in the military," Connerton said.
"Why do you think that?"
"Well, it wasn't so much what he and I ever discussed, mind you. Just a vague impression he wanted to keep distance between himself and the military."
Eleanora felt as if she had no real answers forthcoming as she hoped from Connerton.
"Sir Charles never served in the military as you know Lady Offen, given his status as an only child whose first duty is to preserve the family name. He did so with the honor and grace Old Sir Frederick Offen would be quite proud of," Connerton said.
As the gray days of winter were upon the mansion on the moors, Eleanora found herself even more curious about her husband's business.
She appropriated the key to the attic where Sir Charles stored all of his old or unused effects. Their housekeeper, Mrs. Jennings, was skeptical about handing over the key.
Eleanora found this odd since Mrs. Jennings was normally a benign personality whose officious preservation of traditional housekeeping Eleanora found restrictive.
She knew so very little about the personal lives of her servants. This too, she realized required change. Mrs. Jennings tended to the daily household functions, even to being the interface between Eleanora and Mrs. Waitley, the cook and her two kitchen maids.
Mrs. Jennings ran the household of the mansion on the moors as if it was a battleship headed into a war at sea. For Eleanora, a little of that rigidity went a long way.
She awoke early one foggy morning to the sound of Mrs. Jennings household keys unlocking her door and Frances, one of the maids, with the breakfast tray in hand.
"Mrs. Jennings. I would like the key to the attic, please."
"My lady, I don't ..." Mrs. Jennings began.
"I am unanimous in this. I plan to spend the day in the attic. I would appreciate you hold all phone calls,, visitors and mail until high tea," Eleanora said, choosing her words carefully.
"Will my lady require my assistance with your work?"
"No, Mrs. Jennings. I am planning to discard a lot of the effects that are of little or no use," Eleanora said.
Eleanora unlocked the attic door on second floor of the mansion. She climbed the stairs and felt the dust rising with each footfall.
The mansion's attic was quite large and spanned two areas located at the top of the stairs, one section to the right and the other to the left. Both sides of the attic had two small, hexagonal shaped windows that reminded Eleonora of the type she'd seen on cruise ships.
Without rhyme or reason, she walked toward the left side of the attic. It was a good choice. She found several trunks loaded down with her husband's papers. She rummaged through one trunk that had no lock.
She was flummoxed when she tried to open the second trunk and found the lock and hasp to be slightly rusted.
"Hmm. Where could rust come from being stored up here for so long?" she wondered aloud.
She pulled a hairpin from her chignon and fidgeted with the lock until she heard the familiar click.
"There! I did it!"
What she saw inside the trunk looked as if it was never intended to be found. It was a skeleton of what appeared to be a young woman.
Eleanora screamed and almost immediately after vomited from the odor. For some reason, the naked body of the young woman was only partially decomposed.
She ran down the stairs as fast as she could, wrote a note to the local constabulary and had one of the servants deliver it.
The local constabulary was not so very local and it took almost an hour and a half before the constable and two of his men showed up.
Eleanora refused to go back up the stairs to the attic and so she described to the constable where she found the body.
The two men with the constable came back down the stairs with the trunk and loaded it onto their horse drawn wagon.
The constable then walked into the drawing room where Eleanora sat in shock.
"Lady Offen, I know these questions may be disturbing to you but it is imperative I have some answers," Constable Mayhaven said.
"I understand. I will answer to the best of my ability."
"Why were you in the attic? Had you ever been there before?"
"As you know, I am now the widow of Sir Charles Offen. His estate and assets were all bequeathed to me. I know so little about the business my husband was involved in that I thought perhaps I might find information in the old trunks Sir Charles said he kept all of his papers.
I never bothered to go up to the attic because I knew Sir Charles said he stored a lot of his old papers and such up there. Once in a while, I would remove a painting or object d'art and ask the servants to stored those effects up there.
I have a tendency toward vapors easily and with this mansion so close to the sea, I also suffer from congestion of the nose and lungs," she said looking around the mansion as if seeing it for the first time.
The Constable took notes as she spoke and didn't look up until she folded her hands on her lap, spine arrow straight and her facial expression stolid.
As the Constable rose to leave, Eleanora asked one additional question, "Will you let me know who this young woman is...was?"
"I am hoping we learn her identity and will let you know when we have that information."
Life went on as normal for several months after the discovery of the body in the attic. Eleanora decided it was best to go through Sir Charles desk and the books in his library rather than revisit the attic trunks. She was afraid to open any of the others for fear there might be more bodies in them.
From what she was able to gather, Sir Charles was quite an enterprising man in his own right. He must have also been quite esteemed while in Parliament from what she gathered from the honorariums on the wall of the library.
It can be said Eleanora was a woman with a suspicious nature. It would not be unlike her to realize most desks of famous men had hidden drawers. She would rue the day she found the hidden drawer in Sir Charles desk.
When she first went through some of the papers in the hidden drawer, she noticed something that explained her husband's seemingly abrupt departure from government. It was a letter from the then Prime Minister, Delroy V. Hartingale.
Eleanora read with shock that in fact Sir Charles had been asked to remove himself from his duties as a member of Parliament due to his extraneous dealings with characters of impute. Eleanora had to sit down in Sir Charles desk chair such was her shock at discovering this.
The rest of the items she found in his desk were not as specific as that of the Prime Minister's and Eleanora wondered what the key in the small manila envelope was for.
She sat there trying to fit together like a puzzle what the bits of notes and the small leatherbound notebook was for and what it was an indication of.
The Mansion on the Moors in its day required endless vigilance to keep it from deteriorating. For the next while, Eleanora brought in a professional roofer to replace the missing slate roof tiles. Next, she decided to tend to the large gardens that, while maintained, were like an oil painting that had begun to smear the original picture.
She decided that even though she could hear the sound of the sea quite clearly from several of the mansion windows, she preferred a more formal water garden with a waterfall cascade. This required a team of landscapers to bring in massive stones, most of which were hauled from the areas near the cliffs surrounding the moors.
She sat at her desk as the digging of the water garden began.
That noise is fraying my nerves! Eleanora stood up and looked out her drawing room window to where the landscapers were digging. Then, she noticed they were not digging but staring into the hole they'd dug. She hurried down the stairs and out to the water garden construction area.
"What is going on?" Eleanora asked.
"See for yourself my lady," one of them answered.
Eleanora peered into the now gaping hole that was nearly four feet deep and four feet wide.
"It can't be! Another woman's body? This is outrageous!" she cried.
She hurried back to the mansion to call the Constable.
When he arrived with four of his men, he went right over to the site where the body was found.
After the body was removed, he made his way to the mansion to speak with Eleanora seated in the morning room at her desk.
"Lady Offen, this is now the second body found here on your land," Constable Mayhaven said.
"I have absolutely no explanation for any of this," she replied.
'Are we to find more of these dead women's bodies all over your property?"
"I should hope not! But, I may have something to help you."
She rose and bade the Constable follow her to the library. She handed over all but the letter from the Prime Minister. She refused to allow the Offen name to be smeared by ugly gossip.
"Where did you find these?" Constable Mayhaven asked.
"In a hidden drawer in Sir Charles' desk. What do they mean? He must have had a reason to keep them hidden," she added.
"I recognize two of the names, Brodenham and Wringley. These are two quite unsavory characters. Is it possible your husband was as a member of Parliament acting in a covert capacity to uncover what these two were about?"
Eleanora shrugged her slim, bony shoulders.
"I have already said I didn't know my husband's business. But, your explanation sounds plausible."
When the Constable returned to the Constabulary, he immediately handed over the letters and notebook to his detectives, Spurn and Ellis. These were his two best detectives who were matchless in their ability to solve a crime.
Not that this relatively rural village had much in the way of crime other than petty theft and a few cases of spouses mixing it up usually after a night at the local pub.
News from a constabulary has a way of reaching Parliament as if on the wings of a firefly. It was not surprising that even the slimmest rumour about Sir Charles Offen would have the members of Parliament abuzz.
What was strange was that several MPs who were not especially loyalists to Sir Charles seemed his staunchest supporters.
Sir Roald Whitcombe, Sir Francis Steffington and Sir Thomas Howard were unusually silent about the rumours. That didn't miss notice of Sir Andrew Reynold, not exactly fond of the late Sir Charles Offen or the current sitting PM, Sir Nigel Kenton.
"I don't like the sound of what's in these letters of Sir Charles Offen, Why would he be involed with those two shadowy figures, Brodenham and Wrigley. Those two have remained just shy of court for over a decade," Constable Mayhaven said.
"Sir, I've been reviewing their past records. They travel out of the country on a regular basis," Assistant Constable Tom Hallivan, said.
"Is there a record of their passports?" Constable Mayhaven asked
"Yes. .The copies I received from the Home Office shows they traveled to Thailand."
"I am sure they were not involved in tea brokering," Constable Mayhaven replied.
"No sir. In fact, there is a blank where their business in Thailand is concerned."
"Blank? What do you mean blank? How can that be? They are required by law to detail all business they transact while out of the country."
"That may be. But the records seem to end with their return to England."
The following week, Constable Mayhaven received a visitor for the Home Office of the Department of Trade. His visitor was none other than the head of the department, Sir Francis Steffington.
Mayhaven had to admit he felt intimidated by the sight of such a higher up MP. He sensed something was about to change radically.
"Constable Mayhaven? I am Sir Francis Steffington. I am required to ask that you turn over the documents given to you by the wife of the late Sir Charles Offen," Steffington said, officiously.
"This is an open case, Sir. We need those documents to complete our investigation," Mayhaven said.
"That may well be the situation. But, as of this moment. The Home Office will take over this case."
With that Mayhaven knew he was outranked and turned over the letters Eleanora Offen had given him.
Steffington was gone in seconds as if he had never appeared.
"Sir? What was that about?" Tom Hallivan asked.
"I am as baffled as you are. Get Spurn and Ellis in here now. We need to know why someone as high ranking as Sir Francis Steffington is so interested in a small village case like this. I can't help feeling this is much more to this dirty affair of Sir Charles than we know."
Spurn and Ellis were two of the sharpest detectives in the Constabulary. To Mayhaven, they might be considered the sharpest in all of the county. Their work was always impeccable and so fully detailed that any case against a suspect always resulted in incarceration.
Of course, in the village there wasn't much in the way of major crimes. Any murder that occurred was generally a crime of passion where a husband or wife was having an extramarital affair. The only other crime of note was petty theft.
But finding a woman's body in the mansion on the moors of such a celebrated, high ranking MP as Sir Charles Offen given Mayhaven the shivers.
William Spurn and James Ellis were two of the most non-descript looking men. Seeing them at first sight might have one believe they were just two ordinary blokes you might see on the train depot platform.
"Men, I have just turned over the documents from Sir Charles Offen to Sir Francis Steffington," Constable Mayhaven said.
"A MP was here in this office?" Spurn asked.
"Yes."
"Are we still investigating this case?" Ellis asked.
"Yes but on a very different basis. This case occurred in our jurisdiction. Whatever the reason for Sir Francis to take those letters, our investigation goes on. Do you understand?"
"But sir. You know the Home office will remove all the evidence at the Offen mansion," Spurn said.
"That's more than likely. This is why we must tie up the loose ends as we have them before anyone else," Mayhaven said.
"Do we have any additional information on who the dead woman might be?" Tom Hallivan asked.
"As a matter of routine, we had the body found in the trunk in the mansion attic examined by our local medical expert. The test results show she was a female but not an adult. From the forensics we received, she was Asian and not more than twelve years old," Ellis said.
"Whaaaat???"
"There was some decomposition. But the medical expert believes she might have been abused as a very young child," Ellis continued.
"Sir, what Ellis is not saying is that she was a child prostitute."
"Well that certainly would fit into why Brodenham and Wrigley traveled out of the the country to Thailand so frequently. But, that doesn't tie into why she was buried in a trunk in the attic and the second was buried on the Offen mansion land," Mayhaven said.
"If I may Sir? Those letters Sir Francis took, may be a clue to the basis of these murders."
:How so?"
"Sir Francis was not well know to the general public as a procurer for the most wealthy."
"You think he took those letters becase it might implcate him in a murder?"
"By now Sir Francis has already destroyed those letters because they were evidence of how very mentally depraved Sir Charles Offen was and that his mansion on the moors hid more than just a young girl's body."
"Even from his wife?"
"Especially from his wife. Such a scandal would have stripped him of his lordship's status, as well as his annual stipend. He had every reason to hide the abuse he heaped on this young girl, not the least of which was a wife who cares little about scandal."
When the medical examiner filed the report on the body found buried by the landscapers, it too was of a young Asian girl approximately fourteen years old.
Soon the pieces of the puzzle began to fit. Another body of a young female was found buried under the tool shed. When the Offen property was fully examined, a total of eight young nAsian females were buried at various places on the property.
Eleanora Offen was beside herself. A year af ter all the digging, it was clear that sir Francis was the intermediary who mde arrangements with Brodenham and Wrigley to import female children they purchased from parents in Thailand to be used and abused by Sir charles Offen.
When this news leaked to newspapers, Eleanora Offen abandoned the mansion on nthe moors and returned to France,
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