Sidney Towers

Sidney Towers is found murdered aboard Milo Motion’s narrowboat after a Bloodhounds meeting, and a paper bag he had handled at an earlier gathering becomes a clue to his connection with the crime. The surviving evidence presents him through these two traces: the circumstances of his death and the words he had been jotting down.

Identity and Place in the Case

Towers is known within the Bloodhounds circle, where he appears at a Monday-evening meeting and helps Hilda Chilmark when she suffers an attack of hyperventilation. The evidence gives little biographical information about him, but it establishes that he was part of the group’s social and meeting life and that other members knew of his actions. His murder quickly turns that familiar setting into the starting point for an investigation.

The news reaches Shirley-Ann Miller through Polly Wycherley, who tells her that Towers has been found on Milo Motion’s narrowboat. Shirley-Ann is shocked; the death has been reported on local radio at eleven. Polly’s emphasis on the location sharpens the news: Towers was not merely found dead, but found aboard a boat belonging to another member of their circle, after the group had met the previous night.

Death and Investigation

By midday, the murder investigation at Manvers Street is receiving information faster than its two civilian computer operators can process it. Detectives have been sent to interview members of the Bloodhounds, the Scenes of Crime team has supplied preliminary findings, and an autopsy has been scheduled. The rapid accumulation of interviews and forensic information shows how quickly Towers’s death becomes a coordinated police inquiry rather than private news among acquaintances.

Peter Diamond asks Julie Hargreaves to attend the autopsy in his place. Though framed as a request, it is effectively an order: Diamond has a long-standing aversion to postmortems and does not want to admit that he may faint at the sight of a dissecting knife. His delegation places Julie inside the formal examination of Towers’s death while Diamond continues to direct the investigation. The account therefore separates the physical inquiry into the body from the clue that Diamond later advances through the paper bag.

The Paper Bag and Its Evidentiary Chain

On the Monday evening when Hilda Chilmark was hyperventilating, Towers produced a brown paper bag and handed it to Jessica Shaw. She held it against Chilmark’s face, helping to stop the attack; Chilmark then felt well enough to remain at the meeting. Afterward, Jessica kept the bag in case the episode recurred, put it in her handbag amid the confusion at the meeting’s end, and forgot about it. Diamond recovered it from her less than an hour before presenting it to senior officers.

The chain of custody matters because the bag reaches the investigation through an ordinary act of care, not through a deliberate attempt to preserve evidence. Jessica retains it for a practical reason, and the object remains unnoticed until Diamond recognizes its possible significance. When he lays it out for John Wigfull and Arnold Musgrave, he explains both its history and how Towers came to be holding it. The bag’s modest, everyday use thus gives the police a surviving record of something Towers had handled.

What the Clue Establishes

The discussion of the bag focuses on words Towers had been jotting down. When the word “tomb” is raised, Diamond proposes “locked room” as its association. Musgrave concludes that Towers was collecting words for a forthcoming press release and says that the clue links Towers to the crime. He also qualifies the conclusion: it is not absolute proof, but it satisfies him as a connection. The exchange makes the bag significant not because it independently explains the murder, but because it ties Towers’s own writing to the investigation’s puzzle.

Wigfull objects that Diamond should have shown him the evidence sooner. Diamond answers that he obtained it from Jessica only shortly before. That timing both explains why the clue was not available earlier and reinforces the importance of its route into police hands. Towers consequently occupies two positions in the case: he is the victim discovered on Milo Motion’s boat, and he is also linked, through the words in a bag he had used at a meeting, to the crime’s constructed mystery. The evidence presented here establishes that link without resolving every question about his intentions or the full meaning of the words.