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anatomise them—and I promised it would be me and no other, remember—I am sure I will find signs of mortal illness in both. They were dying, Tobias, and knew it. They confessed—mark my words—to protect someone else.”
    “But surely it is more than coincidence that they both died the night before they were to be hanged!”
    “No coincidence at all. I can only surmise what was in those pies and cakes. And surmise, too, who put it in. There must have been half a dozen women bidding them goodbye, and others outside the jail. How can we bring them all to justice? Or any of them? Now, I intended to call on your father, while we are so close to Ewen Court: Will you accompany me?”
    “This Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Coates of yours,” my father greeted us, “has not presented himself at any of our embassies in Europe, nor is he known by reputation. I tell you straight, gentlemen, there’s something havey-cavey about this vicar of yours. As Lord Wychbold here avers.”
    The aged earl had ridden over to greet Lord Ewen and his guest and now sat with my father, an old political ally.
    “I fear that in my youth I did great wrong, gentlemen,” he said. “But I repented and changed my ways. So imagine how I felt when none other than a man of the cloth invited me to join him in the most nefarious debauchery. It is my opinion and that of Hartland, here, that Dr. Coates never fulfilled his aim of escaping to the Continent. The wronged villagers must have got wind of his plans and decided to make his journey from this place his last.”
    I frowned. “Surely they would do so secretly? And dispose of his body where it might never have been found?”
    “Who knows what anger his regular betrayals of village maidens—aye, and some young men too!—may have caused? Anger that drives the perpetrator beyond common sense. Anger that wished you dead, Mr. Campion. Anger that quailed in the face of your kindness to sick strangers when you were so ill yourself.”
    “So those two poor old men may have put themselves forward as soi-disant murderers,” my father mused, “in order to protect other men.”
    “My theory exactly,” Edmund declared. “And what the men started, the women completed. Human justice has prevailed, even if state justice was gulled.” He stroked his chin. “I must ask my dear wife if she has any idea what herbs they employed.”
    “I will be pleased to hear the answer myself,” my father said. “I propose to dine at this rectory of his before I return to Derbyshire. Young Tobias is such a scatterbrain he may well have engaged a cook who cannot distinguish culinary herbs from those with—let us say—a deeply soporific effect, and undoubtedly we need your expertise: yours and Mrs. Hansard’s, if you please.”
    And to my joy we exchanged a second conspiratorial smile.
    Copyright © 2011 by Judith Cutler
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    Fiction
    The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train
    by Peter Turnbull
    George Hennessey of the York P.D. is back in another involving short case. If you’d like to see him in a longer work, the latest Hennessey and Yellich novel, Deliver Us From Evil, becomes available in paperback this month; it was first published in hardcover in June 2010 by Severn House. “Throughout this long-running series,” said Booklist in reviewing the novel, “Turnbull has delivered engaging writing, involving plots, memorable characters, and realistic descriptions of police work.”
    Over the years the story of the man who took his hat off to the driver of the train grew to have three parts. Three, George Hennessey mused as he took a pleasant walk on a pleasant summer’s evening, late, from his house to the pub in Easingwold for a pint of stout, just one before “last orders” were called. Yes, he thought, the story had three distinct parts. There was, he remembered as his eye was caught by a rapidly darting bat, the incident itself and the