The Funeral Pyre

A hayrick burns on the Dartford marshes in the small hours. By morning the ashes have given up a skull, a clay pipe, and beads of gold from a melted watch-chain — enough to name the dead man as a City broker who insured his life for three thousand pounds less than a year ago. His insurers, who do not pay out on suicide, send down fiction's original scientific detective to watch the inquest.

Thorndyke arrives with a research-case and a spirit-lamp, and spends the morning taking plaster casts: of footprints in tidal mud, and of a dental plate picked up two hundred yards from the fire. None of it quite fits the story everyone has agreed on.