Anthony secretly disposes of Giuseppe's body and pistol

Anthony secretly disposes of Giuseppe’s body and pistol through a sequence of practical improvisations designed to protect Virginia Revel and preserve their ability to reach Chimneys. Rather than summon the police after Giuseppe’s death, he sends Virginia onward, uses a cloakroom trunk to move the corpse, and hides the weapon separately in a tree at Burnham Beeches. The episode turns a private emergency into a carefully managed concealment, while foreshadowing the larger pattern of false identities and diverted suspicion that Anthony later describes.

The decision to keep moving

After the death, Virginia raises the possibility that her cousin George Lomax could be suspected of murder, but Anthony is preoccupied with the immediate danger of involving the police. He argues that calling them would prevent her from getting to Chimneys that day, or even the next, and proposes that she go there because her arrival might disconcert the people they do not know. His plan is not simply to remove evidence: it is to keep Virginia moving toward the place where the wider crisis is unfolding.

Anthony first makes sure Virginia’s maid is out of the house. Virginia sends her on an errand for a particular scent, telling her that a shop will remain open until eight, though it will not; the maid is to travel after her by the next train without returning home. Once she has gone, Anthony can deal with the body without another witness in the house. The false errand gives the pair a narrow interval in which to act and leaves Virginia free to depart on the plan’s public-facing route.

The trunk and the cloakroom plan

Anthony selects a solid trunk from the variety kept in the basement and takes responsibility for preparing it, while Virginia changes from her tennis clothes into a soft brown travelling dress and an orange hat. He instructs her to take a taxi to Paddington with her luggage and the trunk, deposit the trunk in the Left Luggage Office, and drop the cloakroom ticket as she passes him on the platform. He will pick it up and return it to her, but keep it in fact, allowing him to retrieve the trunk separately after she has continued to Chimneys.

The arrangement divides their movements and makes Virginia’s travel appear ordinary. Anthony calls for a second taxi, collects the ticket, and goes to fetch a battered second-hand Morris Cowley he had acquired earlier in case it should be useful. He returns to Paddington, retrieves the trunk from the cloakroom, and wedges it into the back of the car. The luggage system becomes part of his concealment: the trunk can travel through a public station as baggage, then be removed without requiring Virginia to remain with it.

Virginia acknowledges the gravity of what she is asking a stranger to do, but Anthony responds with easy composure and says that this kind of work suits him. His confidence is not evidence that the act is harmless; it shows instead how quickly he adopts the role of planner once danger appears. He makes the decision, assigns Virginia a controlled part in it, and takes the most incriminating task upon himself.

Abandoning the body and hiding the pistol

Anthony drives out through Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush, Goldhawk Road, Brentford, and Hounslow, stopping on the well-used stretch of road between Hounslow and Staines. Before opening the trunk, he obscures the car’s number plate with mud. He waits until no car is approaching, then removes Giuseppe’s body and lays it inside a curve, where passing headlights will not fall directly on it. The busy road reduces the likelihood that footprints or tyre marks will provide useful traces; the placement of the body is chosen with the same care as the route.

The disposal itself takes exactly a minute and a half. Anthony then drives away and returns toward London by way of Burnham Beeches. There he stops at a large tree, climbs it, and conceals a small brown-paper parcel in a niche near the trunk, among the upper branches. The parcel contains the pistol. Instead of throwing the weapon into a pond or leaving it on the ground, where investigators might search, he chooses a hiding place that depends on an unusual physical difficulty: few people, he reasons, could climb the tree.

He returns to Paddington and leaves the trunk in the other cloakroom, on the Arrival side, then continues north. The separate handling of body, weapon, car, and luggage makes the episode a chain of distinct concealments rather than a single act of disposal. Anthony is not merely getting rid of objects; he is trying to prevent their recovery from reconstructing the path by which Giuseppe died.

Consequences and later explanation

The plan allows Virginia to continue to Chimneys while Anthony handles the body and pistol alone. It also places him in deliberate opposition to ordinary police procedure: he does not report the death, but arranges where the corpse will be found and where the weapon will remain hidden. The practical success of the scheme depends on timing, the cloakroom ticket, the mud-covered number plate, the concealed location of the body, and the climb into the tree.

Much later, Anthony explains that he went to Dover and that Hiram Fish followed him, believing him to be King Victor. They found a mysterious stranger imprisoned there and recognized the recurring device: the real person had been kidnapped while an impostor took his place. Anthony also explains that Superintendent Battle had suspected his French colleague and had wired to Paris for fingerprints and other identifying evidence. In that later account, Anthony describes how he encouraged the false Lemoine to think that he had supplied a clue about the jewel, while a note intended for Mademoiselle Brun kept the others occupied. These revelations place the disposal episode within a story where misleading appearances are repeatedly engineered, although they do not erase Anthony’s own choice to conceal Giuseppe’s body and weapon.

The episode’s central reversal is that Anthony’s carefulness serves both protection and obstruction. He preserves Virginia’s immediate freedom to travel, yet takes control of evidence that could matter to a murder inquiry. The separate hiding places and the exact choreography of the trunk make his ingenuity visible; the later explanation of the imposture plot shows that such ingenuity belongs to a wider contest in which people, messages, and clues are all redirected to mislead their pursuers.