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I had listened spell-bound - not literally, thank you - to Tewel's tale, sitting as still as I could and breathing though my open mouth so as not to interrupt the flow. When Tewel fell silent, I sat motionless for a minute or two more. He showed no sign of continuing, so I felt it would be best to prompt the sad old Goblin. "Tell me how Lady Strowan actually died," I asked quietly. Tewel's focus returned from the blank wall and his eyes narrowed slightly, displaying the shred intelligence that he usually kept hidden beneath the country-bumpkin appearance. This was police work; his life's work. He couldn't help becoming engaged. "She was stabbed, furiously and repeatedly," he said in that curiously detached way which he had made his trademark . Dispassionately, Tewel told me that the first blow had meant her death, which was a mercy, and there was, he confirmed, no signs of a struggle, nothing to show that she had resisted her attacker. Whoever it was, he must have been known to her. But there was something else, something that would not have been immediately obvious to, for example, Tibbermore when he discovered her Ladyship's body, something which was only discovered when the medical examiner undertook an autopsy. It was also something that Tibbermore didn't know or, if he did, he kept it back from me, for some reason. The coroner had confirmed that both Strowan's legs were broken in several places. She had fallen heavily from some considerable height. Forensic evidence suggested that she had tumbled from the upper balcony in the entrance hall of her mansion. I could probably have jumped that height with only a slight risk of a twisted ankle, but her old and arthritic bones had simply shattered under the stress. Then somebody had picked up and carried to her own bed, and then stabbed and mutilated horribly in a murderous frenzy. In her youth, Strowan Westwood had been a slender and lovely creature but in old age, as her loveliness faded, her slenderness had turned to frailty. She had obviously not been strong when I dined with her. She had eaten very little and gave the impression she was almost wasting away. There had been almost nothing to her. I could have picked her up easily with one hand. Almost any adult Goblin would have found it easy enough to push, or even throw, Lady Strowan from her own staircase. Even after all these years, and after the countless murders I've investigated, the violent death of an innocent always comes as a shock. But, in spite of the horror at the manner of her death, my detective instincts were tingling. Was it actually the same person who broke her legs and stabbed her? Or were there two people somehow involved?
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Part 67