St Michael's

St Michael's is the church at the center of two intersecting strands of the investigation: the Bloodhounds' discussions of locked-room mysteries and the real theft of a stamp from the Postal Museum. Its crypt is more than a meeting venue. When Peter Diamond returns there with Julie Hargreaves, the room's everyday layout offers a practical explanation for how Sid Towers could have tampered with Milo Motion's keys without being noticed.

The crypt as meeting place

The Bloodhounds had discussed locked-room murders in the crypt, making the church a natural focus once an actual murder placed the reading group under suspicion. Shirley-Ann Miller observes that the police would inevitably regard the members as suspects: the crime had occurred in the same circle that was about to take up the subject in discussion. The overlap between fictional puzzles and real violence turns the crypt's role as a place of intellectual exchange into a source of investigative unease.

The group's meetings also connected detective fiction to a local unsolved crime. Miss Chilmark recalls that, before one meeting descended into chaos, she proposed applying the members' experience of detective stories to the theft of the stamp from the Postal Museum. She saw the case as a rare chance to test their reasoning against a real crime in their own city. St Michael's thus anchors both the group's puzzle-solving ambitions and the circumstances that make its members relevant to the police inquiry.

A room revisited

After a theory about Rupert Darby falters, Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves pass St Michael's on Broad Street. Diamond decides to look into the crypt, thinking of it as the place where the affair began. Their return changes the room from the remembered setting of the club's discussions into a place to examine for physical clues.

The crypt is occupied that morning by a playgroup. While the children quarrel over wooden trains, Diamond helps settle the dispute, speaking to them with a seriousness that Julie finds striking. Once order is restored, the pair can study the room's arrangement. The contrast is pointed: a space associated with murder puzzles and police suspicion is, in this visit, also an ordinary room used by young children.

The key switch

Near the crypt door, Diamond notices a row of hooks. The playgroup supervisor's coat hangs there beside the children's small garments, some with gloves attached to elastic and dangling from their sleeves. These mundane details allow him to reconstruct a concealed action. He proposes that Sid Towers took Milo Motion's keys from a coat pocket, removed the original key from the ring, and substituted one he had bought from Foxton's. Turning his back to the circle of chairs, Sid could make the exchange without being seen.

Julie recognizes the implication: Sid's quiet manner had led others to underestimate him. The discovery makes the crypt's physical arrangement part of the case's logic. Rather than requiring an elaborate mechanism, the apparent secrecy of the key switch depends on a familiar setting, an unattended moment, and the way attention was directed elsewhere.