St Michael's Church Crypt

St Michael's Church Crypt connects the Bloodhounds' locked-room discussions to a practical piece of the investigation: Peter Diamond identifies it as the likely place where Sid Towers exchanged Milo Motion's keys. Its return to the story is pointedly ordinary, with a playgroup occupying the space as Diamond and Julie Hargreaves revisit what happened there.

Setting and the Bloodhounds

The crypt served as a meeting place for the Bloodhounds, whose members gathered there to discuss locked-room murders. At one meeting, the subject was especially apt: the group was due to discuss locked-room mysteries, and Milo Motion was expected to bring and read from his copy of The Hollow Man, which contains a celebrated chapter on the subject. The Penny Black cover was later found in the book at the moment Motion was about to read that chapter, turning a literary discussion into part of a staged theft and an apparent locked-room puzzle.

The Return to the Crypt

After a theory about Rupert Darby collapsed, Diamond and Hargreaves passed St Michael's on their way down Broad Street. Diamond decided to inspect the crypt, describing it as the place where the case had begun. The room had meanwhile become a playgroup: three-year-olds squabbled over wooden trains while their supervisor attended to a tearful girl. The contrast between the children's activity and the Bloodhounds' earlier crime discussions makes the same space feel unremarkable and investigative at once.

Diamond settled the dispute over the trains rather than leaving it to the busy supervisor. Hargreaves observed that children did not seem frightened by his size or gruff manner; he listened to them seriously and spoke to them without condescension. The scene also recalls what he had told her about his wife, Stephanie, and her several miscarriages, though he had said nothing more. These details belong to the crypt's return as a lived, everyday room, not merely as the setting of a puzzle.

The Key-Switch Reconstruction

A row of hooks beside the door gave Diamond a concrete basis for reconstructing the suspected exchange. The supervisor's coat hung there alongside the children's small garments, some with gloves attached by elastic. Diamond proposed that Sid Towers had taken Milo Motion's keys from his coat pocket, removed the original key from its ring, and substituted a key bought from Foxton's. With his back turned to the circle of chairs, Towers could have made the switch without being seen.

Diamond presented this as the likely explanation, not as an act witnessed at the time. The quietness of the proposed manoeuvre explains why the switch could pass unnoticed in a room shared by a seated group. Hargreaves remarked that everyone had underestimated Towers, while Diamond added that John Wigfull had not. The crypt therefore matters twice over: first as the Bloodhounds' forum for a fictional locked-room problem, and later as the ordinary room whose hooks and coats help Diamond locate a real opportunity for concealment.