A Reliquary in Stone

By Mike Adamson

For retired Detective Inspector George Trevelyan, an invitation to Britain’s “Jurassic Coast” in the May of 1890 sounds like a holiday—but he soon uncovers murder and deception, playing upon a local folklore of the sea. Are the voices in the mist the cries of long-damned sailors, or do the cliffs of Lyme Regis host a very different sort of mystery?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Cat Weekly
• Release date: Jan 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781479468010

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

A RELIQUARY IN STONE, by Mike Adamson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2024 by Mike Adamson.

Original publication by Wildside Press, LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

A RELIQUARY IN STONE,

by Mike Adamson

Some cases underline the way the things people believe interact with the facts before them and cast events in a light beneficial to a select few. This mechanism can often be found at work, especially when matters take some difficulty in explaining, and as a detective, I have encountered it from time to time—more so, indeed, since my retirement to Dorset, when I was invalided out of Scotland Yard following the Ripper riots of ’88.

One evening in the May of 1890, I received a telegram. A messenger from the post office in Winslow bicycled the mile to my home of Winterbourne Priory to deliver it, and awaited a reply, which I promptly sent. I had not heard from retired Inspector Rupert Collins—a colleague from my Yard days—since his own departure from London before the grim days of Jolly Jack to pass his later years in the quaint seaside town of Lyme Regis on the Dorset-Devon border. I was sorry to hear he was unwell and intrigued that he wished to see me on some matter he felt would be of interest. I replied, care of the Lyme Regis Hospital on Pound Road, that I would visit him on the morrow, and at once consulted my schedule for the London and South-Western Railway.

I asked the lad to convey another message for me, as I would need to hire a pony trap and driver from the livery stable in town to drive me to Moreton, where I would catch the through train westward to Dorchester and Yeovil. There, I would change trains for Crewkerne and alight at Axminster, from whence the horse-omnibus transported passengers the last five miles to Lyme Regis. One day there would be a rail service into the hill-backed sea town, but not yet.

As a detective, I had been trained to deal in facts and repudiate all else. I was not overly given to speculation, but I expected merely a pleasant couple of days visiting my old senior. Yet, as I packed a valise and set my alarm clock for an early start, I could not have imagined the turn events would take—or I would have also packed my service revolver.

* * * *

Inspector Collins had asthma; that was the long and the short of it. Too many raw nights in the corrosive fog of London and too many stones of tobacco in his years had left him weak-lunged,