Raimund Speidel’s attempted meeting with Nathan Oliver

Raimund Speidel’s attempted meeting with Nathan Oliver at the Combe Island lighthouse becomes an important piece of the morning’s chronology: Speidel arrived six minutes late, found the entrance locked, and returned later to find it ajar. His account also fixes a striking detail inside the building—five climbing ropes, with the hook furthest from the door empty—without resolving why he had sought Oliver or what happened between his visits.

Appointment and First Visit

Speidel told Adam Dalgliesh that he had arranged to meet Oliver at eight o’clock that morning. He had not known Oliver personally and did not claim insight into his state of mind; his stated reason for speaking was that he might assist with the time of death. A restless night and fever delayed his departure. He reached the lighthouse at six minutes past eight, expecting that Oliver might still be waiting either outside or inside, but the door was locked.

Speidel had walked rather than ordered the buggy. After passing Atlantic Cottage, he climbed down to the under-cliff path and followed it until it became impassable about twenty metres from the lighthouse. He said he hoped to go unnoticed. He saw nobody on the outward walk or on his return, and heard nothing that might indicate the door’s bolts being shot home. He knocked as loudly as he could and received no response.

The locked entrance left Speidel with several possibilities, none of which he could confirm. He thought Oliver might have arrived first, found the lighthouse locked, and gone to fetch the key. He also considered that Oliver might not have intended to meet him, or that the message had not reached him. Rupert Maycroft explained that the door would have been bolted from inside and that the key had been missing for years. Speidel’s failure to hear the bolts does not establish when the door was secured; it records only what he heard while waiting outside.

Return to the Lighthouse

After the first attempt, Speidel decided to go to Oliver’s cottage, having asked the housekeeper where Oliver was staying. He began walking there, then reconsidered because he felt unwell. A potentially painful meeting, he thought, could be postponed until he was stronger; he believed there was no urgency because Oliver could hardly avoid encountering him eventually. He turned back toward his own cottage by way of the lighthouse, making one last check on the route.

This time the door stood ajar. Speidel pushed it open, climbed the first two flights, and called out, but nobody answered. He did not go to the top. His cough was troubling him, and he had already walked farther than he felt able to manage. His illness therefore marked the limits of what he inspected: the account establishes an entry into the lower part of the lighthouse, not a search of the entire building.

The Ropes and the Unseen Body

Dalgliesh asked directly whether Speidel had noticed coils of climbing rope hanging on the wall just inside the entrance. Speidel had. He also recalled a wooden chest beneath them, which he assumed contained other climbing equipment. Asked how many ropes there were, he answered that there were five and that the hook furthest from the door was bare. He was certain of the count, explaining that he tended to notice such details and had done some rock-climbing in his youth; the island’s climbing facilities had caught his interest.

That observation gives the return visit particular evidentiary weight. Speidel was inside the lighthouse after the locked-door visit and before leaving by the easier route across the scrubland, but he reported seeing no body. He did not circle the building, look upward, or reach its top. When Dalgliesh pressed the point, Speidel insisted that, had he gone around the lighthouse, he would have noticed a hanging body even in the morning mist. His account thus distinguishes what he actually observed—the open door, the first two flights, the ropes—from what he did not see. It does not establish who moved or used any rope, or when the missing hook became relevant.

An Undisclosed Family Matter

Dalgliesh also asked what Speidel had wanted to discuss privately with Oliver. Speidel called it a family matter and maintained that it could have no bearing on Oliver’s death. He did not disclose its substance. The distinction he had made earlier was between the confidentiality of the subject and the fact of the appointment: the latter, he said, could have been read from the hand-delivered note, whose flap had been tucked in rather than sealed. The meeting’s purpose therefore remains withheld even as its time and route are described in detail.

The episode supplies the investigation with a narrow but valuable sequence: an appointment for eight, arrival at 8:06, a locked entrance, a later return to an ajar door, and an incomplete inspection by a feverish visitor. Its force lies as much in its limits as in its particulars. Speidel can account for the ropes and for not seeing Oliver, but his illness curtailed his search, and the private matter that brought him to the lighthouse remains unexplained.