Detective Inspector Herbert Swann was sitting at his desk, on the third floor of the County Police Station in Stratford-upon-Avon, smoking his pipe and looking out of his office window at the unkempt back yard of Shakespeare’s Birthplace – which seemed to be in imminent danger of falling down – watching a young man roll a barrel from the back door of the pub adjoining the Birthplace into an outbuilding of the aforementioned backyard.

The bearded and heavily built fifty-three year old ex soldier, Herbert Merriman Swann, became a copper soon after leaving the army in 1856 (well, in reality, he’d left the army twice, well, in actuality,he’d left the British Army once, in 1856, and the American Union Army once, in 1866) now took his battered gold watch from a pocket of his red and green silk waistcoat (which, as a favoured piece of apparel, added a touch of zest to his rather dull green tweed jacket and brown tweed trousers) and made a mental note of the time: 4.20pm.

” Something’s amiss over the road, Herbert. Something’s amiss indeed.” He told himself.

Swann had been called a duffer at school, which was far from the case, but when your father keeps telling you how stupid you are, and the schoolteachers insist on explanations for the answers you give intuitively, there’s a very good chance you’re going to end up thinking you are a duffer; which might have been the case with Herbert Swann had he not had an absolute belief in himself.

As Swann refilled and relit his pipe, blowing out clouds of blue smoke from the sweet, rich, Turkish tobacco – the smell of which now impregnated every corner of the police station – he watched again as the young man rolled yet another barrel from the pub and recalled how one of his old maths teachers, a mean spirited man, would often make Swann stand at the front of the class.

” Now then, Master Swann, you say that the answer to this morning’s mental arithmetic question, that asked how long it would take five men to dig a trench one hundred yards long, one yard wide, and one yard deep, if each man was given precisely two hours to dig twenty yards, you said, if I remember correctly, that it was impossible to answer such a question without knowing the ages and fitness of the men concerned and the rate at which their energy might deteriorate, plus such imponderables as accidents and the weather. Is that correct, Master Swann?”

” Yes, sir.”

” Yes, sir.”

The teacher had then hit Swann around the head, which was a mistake because at twelve years of age Swann, who was already five feet four inches tall and nine and a half stones in weight, and something of a budding pugilist, hit the teacher squarely on the jaw, knocking him out cold. After receiving the applause of his fellow classmates the young Swann calmly walked out of the classroom, and the gates of the grammar school, to join the King’s Own Royal Dragoon Guards as a cadet. That had been in 1841, precisely forty-one years ago to the day.

The young man was now on his third barrel, but his pace had slackened considerably, which confirmed yet again Swann’s one maxim that a good copper must always take the imponderables very much into account.

There was a knock on Swann’s office door.

” Come in.”

Sergeant John Parker entered carrying a cup of strong, steaming, black coffee.

” Thought you might like a cup of coffee, sir?”

” Excellent, Parker, thank you.”

” My pleasure, sir. Do you mind if I open the window?”

” Window? No, open the ruddy thing if you think it’ll do you good.”

” Thank you, sir.”

To Be Continued…

Read Chapters 1 – 12