The Starvel Hollow Tragedy
An Inspector French Case
Contents
To
MY WIFE
who suggested the idea
from which this story grew
CHAPTER ONE: The Tragedy
Ruth Averill moved slowly across the drawingroom at Starvel, and stood dejectedly at thewindow, looking out at the Scotch firs swaying in thewind and the sheets of rain driving across theuntidy lawn before the house.
The view was even more depressing than usualon this gloomy autumn afternoon. Beyond thegrass-grown drive and the broken-down paling ofposts and wire which bounded the grounds, lay theopen moor, wild and lonely and forbidding. Atumble of dun-coloured sedgy grass with darkersmudges where rock out-cropped, it stretched up,bleak and dreary, to the lip of the hollow in whichthe dilapidated old house had been built.
To the girl standing in the window with abrooding look of melancholy on her pretty features theoutlook seemed symbolical of her life, for RuthAverill was not one of those whose lives could besaid to have fallen in