The Victim From Another World
Chapter 6
The Writing on the Wall
Chapter 7
All the Bellas in the World
Chapter 8
Bloody Foreigners
Chapter 9
The Children of the Moon
Chapter 10
Anna and the Flying Dutchman
Chapter 11
The Spies Who Came in From the Cold
Chapter 12
Aktion Hess
Chapter 13
‘If I were a Blackbird’ and the sillier stories
Chapter 14
Lord of the Gallows
Chapter 15
The Shadow of Meon Hill
Chapter 16
The Fantasy Historian
Chapter 17
Case Closed
Chapter 18
The Raggedy Rawney
Chapter 19
The Last Days of Bella
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
No book is ever written without help from other people and this is perhaps especially true of this one. I had been fascinated by this case ever since picking up a copy of Donald McCormick’s Murder By Witchcraft in a second-hand bookshop many years ago. The case is tortuous but my researches were made simpler by being able to go to the right people to find out the little bits of nitty gritty to fill in the gaps. So, my thanks go to David Maidment, who knows everything there is to know about trains and to Helen McArthur, Community Hub Officer of the Central Library, Middlesbrough who had the very book I needed on her shelves. The staff at the Worcester Archive were helpful and interested and my thanks also go to them.
I would like to say a special thank you to Heather Williams for giving me the chance to write the first full length book on the Hagley Wood case. I would, as always, like to thank my editor Gaynor Haliday, for her sensitive work on my words and for her very positive feedback.
I always thank my wife, Carol, for all the work she does when a book is in production, but she needs special thanks this time. She has been talking this case over with me for over fifty years and knows it as well as anyone. She helped me with note taking at the Archive, with the complexities of wartime underwear and even knitted a section of a jumper, to see how it would look in the real world. So, once again, I say it; thank you.
M.J. Trow
Vectis
Date
Introduction
Some years ago, I attended a crime writers’ conference at which a panel of experts debated the idea that ‘murder was the only game in town’. Other crimes, like fraud, larceny, blackmail, even grisly ones like grievous bodily harm and rape, do not have the same impact on society.
