Jessica Shaw—Sid Towers

Jessica Shaw’s relationship with Sid Towers began as an act of sympathy within the Bloodhounds: she made time for a painfully shy member whom most people left alone, and met him at the Moon and Sixpence after club meetings. Those encounters later acquired an uneasy significance when Jessica did not volunteer them during questioning and Shirley-Ann Miller speculated that the pair might have worked together. The evidence establishes Jessica’s efforts to befriend Sid and her initial silence about them; it does not establish that they were lovers, accomplices, or enemies.

A shy member on the edge of the group

Sid had belonged to the Bloodhounds before Jessica joined. According to Jessica, Polly Wycherley had once explained that Sid came on his doctor’s advice: he enjoyed crime fiction, and the club might encourage him to contribute. In practice, he was so painfully shy that he hardly ever spoke. On the rare occasions when he did, the members turned to look at him, a response that only made him more rigid. The group’s attention, though not described as hostile, could itself intensify his discomfort.

Polly sometimes fussed over Sid, but Jessica’s account suggested that care from one member did not make him socially at ease with the rest. She thought that if anyone else spoke to him for more than a couple of words, he would have run a mile. Asked whether anyone disliked him, she said there was nothing about Sid that one could dislike. Her portrait presents him as isolated rather than disliked: someone whose reserve discouraged contact, even though it did not invite animosity.

Jessica’s efforts to draw him out

Jessica said she felt sorry for Sid and thought someone should try to draw him out for his own sake. She met him at the Moon and Sixpence on more than one occasion after Bloodhounds meetings. When Peter Diamond raised those visits, she colored slightly and objected to the implication that her concern suggested infidelity. She explained the meetings as kindness toward a man whom the others largely ignored, not as evidence of a romantic attachment.

Her account draws a distinction between social contact and intimacy. The meetings were repeated, and Jessica had chosen to spend time with Sid beyond the formal club gathering; nevertheless, the available evidence gives no detail of what they discussed or how close they became. Her embarrassment at Diamond’s question records the pressure of being suspected, but does not by itself show that she had a concealed affair. What she said directly was that she pitied Sid and wanted to help him participate more comfortably.

Omission under questioning

The meetings became relevant because Jessica did not mention them at first. Diamond knew from Milo Motion that she had made definite efforts to be friendly with Sid and had taken him to the pub after the Bloodhounds finished. In the interview, Jessica spoke about Polly’s attention to him, and described how other members would have frightened him off by speaking too much, but did not initially volunteer her own visits. Diamond introduced that information; she then had to acknowledge it.

This omission shaped the investigators’ reading of the relationship. Diamond regarded the contrast between Jessica’s account of Polly’s kindness and her silence about her own repeated meetings as potentially meaningful. The evidence supports that contrast and the fact that Jessica admitted the visits when challenged. It does not settle why she withheld them. Her reputation mattered to her, a consideration raised in the surrounding conversation, but the supplied account does not prove that reputation was the reason for this particular omission. The distinction between an undisclosed fact and a demonstrated motive remains important: the drinks were real; the explanation for not mentioning them is less certain.

Suspicion and imagined collaboration

Shirley-Ann Miller, thinking aloud to Bert after midnight, built a more dramatic theory from Jessica’s contact with Sid. She imagined that Jessica had planned the Penny Black theft with him: Sid, in this version, used his security expertise to defeat the Postal Museum’s cameras and locks and gain access to Milo’s boat, while Jessica devised the riddles and the plan to place the stamp in Milo Motion’s copy of The Hollow Man. Shirley-Ann further supposed that Jessica might have killed Sid after following him back to the boat, striking him and leaving him locked inside. She presented this as a theory she had suddenly conceived, not as knowledge established by the investigation.

The theory turns the pub meetings into planning sessions, but the known evidence does not make that transformation. Jessica’s visits gave her contact with Sid; they do not confirm collusion, participation in the theft, or responsibility for his death. Shirley-Ann’s sudden certainty therefore contrasts with the more limited account Diamond obtains: a shy club member, a woman who tried to befriend him, and an omission that warranted attention without proving the accusation. The relationship matters chiefly because it sits at that boundary between an ordinary kindness and the suspicions others build around it.