The Night-Watchman's Friend

'I shouldn't have come back! They'll never give up! There's too much to lose!'

George Pollicott and Henry Rowles live a solitary and meagre existence in a hut along the towering Sea Wall of the Welsh Lowlands. On a foggy night twenty years before, night-watchman Pollicott had found Rowles near death and nursed him back to health. Henry Rowles, an obviously educated man, shuns outside contact and relies on the devoted Pollicott for all his needs. Recently worried for his life, Rowles writes a will leaving everything to his friend, but is found murdered that very night. The police immediately set upon the night-watchman as the culprit, but the clues are confounding. Why was their hut ransacked? Who are the unrecognized signatories at the bottom of the will? What motivation would Pollicott have for murdering someone he clearly revered? And why did Henry Rowles refer to his real name as John Henry Vincent Peter Dallingsworth Clairvaux, a man dead for forty years?

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman (1897-1959), a classical scholar who taught Greek at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff. Beginning in 1937, Freeman wrote twenty-nine mysteries and a number of short stories, mostly as Mary Fitt, and was elected to the Detection Club in 1950. Aside from her detective novels, Freeman published many books on classical Greece, scholarly articles and children's stories. She lived in St Mellons in Wales with her partner Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet, a family physician and author.