The murder of Giuseppe Manelli at Staines is the concealed aftermath of a failed attempt to steal Count Stylptitch’s memoirs. The discovery of an unidentified foreigner shot beside a road draws the police toward Anthony Cade, who had secretly disposed of the body after Manelli’s death and hidden the pistol. As Superintendent Battle reconstructs the case, Manelli emerges as a waiter recruited for the memoir theft, then apparently drawn into blackmail and treated as a traitor by the Comrades of the Red Hand. The roadside killing thus links a private crime to the political conspiracy surrounding Prince Michael’s murder, while Cade’s concealment makes him both witness and obstacle to the investigation.

Discovery and Identification

The case reaches the reader first through reports in the newspapers. A man has been found shot beside the road near Staines; he is a foreigner, but no one has identified him, and no weapon has been found. When Superintendent Battle mentions the report to Cade, Cade responds casually and asks whether it might be connected to Prince Michael’s death. His steady manner disguises a direct personal connection: the unidentified man is the body he himself left by the roadside.

The identification comes later, after the excitement of the night at Chimneys has passed. Battle tells Cade that the dead man was Giuseppe Manelli, a waiter at the Blitz Hotel in London. The name transforms the report from a separate, unexplained shooting into the consequence of the earlier struggle over the memoirs. Manelli had entered Cade’s hotel room in the guise of a waiter and watched the manuscript parcel while Cade’s back was turned. Later, he returned to the room at night and attempted to take the manuscript, bringing a knife; Cade awoke to find him beside the suitcase.

The Roadside Disposal

After concealing the manuscript and letters, Cade had taken precautions against further intrusion, but they did not prevent Manelli’s later attempt. The roadside death and the missing weapon were therefore not initially presented as a solved case: the body was discovered without identification or a gun, while the person who knew how it had come to be there had deliberately kept that knowledge from the authorities.

Cade’s own account, given later, describes how he moved the body out of London in a trunk. He drove through Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush, Brentford, and Hounslow to a stretch of road between Hounslow and Staines, where passing traffic made the location less conspicuous. He obscured the car’s number plate with mud, waited for a gap in traffic, and placed the body beside the road on the inside of a curve. He then drove away, making the disposal a separate, deliberate act rather than an accidental consequence of the encounter at the hotel.

The concealment did not end with the body. On his return by way of Burnham Beeches, Cade climbed a large tree and hid a small parcel on a high branch. He regarded this as an effective place to conceal the pistol because a searcher would be more likely to look on the ground or in ponds than in the tree. The missing weapon in the Staines case was thus connected to a second hidden object and to Cade’s conscious effort to keep both the death and its evidence from ordinary discovery.

Manelli’s Place in the Conspiracy

Battle’s later explanation supplies a theory of how Manelli became involved. He considers Manelli a habitual thief who was employed by either King Victor or the Comrades of the Red Hand, possibly through cooperation between the two. The intended task, Battle believes, was to steal the memoirs. Manelli’s actual discovery of the letters was an accident: Cade had the letters as well as the manuscript, and Battle notes that the combination was an unusual coincidence.

According to Battle’s reconstruction, Manelli was initially frustrated when he obtained the letters rather than the memoirs. He then noticed a newspaper cutting and saw an opportunity to use the letters for blackmail against Virginia Revel. Battle stresses that Manelli did not understand the letters’ real significance. The attempted blackmail was therefore not a knowledgeable intervention in the political crisis but a private scheme built on material whose importance he did not grasp.

Battle proposes that the Comrades discovered Manelli’s independent activity and mistook it for deliberate betrayal. In his account, the organization punished suspected traitors, and Manelli’s death followed from that suspicion. This is presented as Battle’s theory, not as a fully confirmed account of the killing. He can explain a likely chain from theft to blackmail to retaliation, but the weapon and the framing of Revel point toward an additional actor.

Investigation and Concealment

The absence of the pistol obstructs the investigation. Battle believes that the weapon used to shoot Prince Michael must still be somewhere in the house or grounds at Chimneys, and he connects its recovery with the letters and the coded instructions for finding the diamond. The gun found missing in the Staines report is not simply a detail of Manelli’s case: it belongs to the overlapping inquiry into Prince Michael’s death and the concealed political evidence at Chimneys.

Cade’s position is especially compromised because he has already concealed one body and hidden a weapon before becoming entangled in the second crime. He recognizes that the earlier disposal would not withstand scrutiny and that he arrived at the scene of Prince Michael’s murder while it was being committed. When questioned, he decides to tell the truth with an alteration and a serious omission. His account of his connection to James McGrath consequently does not amount to full disclosure of his own actions at Staines.

The contrast between Battle’s public inquiry and Cade’s private knowledge drives the case’s suspense. The police begin with a newspaper report about an unidentified foreigner and no weapon; Cade knows the dead man’s name, the circumstances linking him to the memoirs, and the location where he hid the pistol. His silence protects him from immediate exposure, but it also keeps evidence out of the investigation and leaves the relationship between Manelli’s death and the wider conspiracy to be inferred.

Unresolved Evidence and Significance

The revolver bearing the name Virginia is the part of Battle’s reconstruction he cannot comfortably attribute to the Comrades. Their usual method, as he describes it, was to leave the Red Hand mark as a warning; the engraved weapon and the apparent attempt to saddle Revel with a murder seem more calculated. Battle suspects King Victor intervened, but admits that he cannot identify the motive. The theory therefore distinguishes the organization’s suspected execution of Manelli from a further, deliberate effort to implicate Revel, without claiming that every part of the plot has been proved.

Manelli’s death marks the point where Cade’s improvisations become evidence in their own right. The waiter begins as an apparent hotel intruder pursuing the memoirs, then becomes the unidentified victim of a roadside shooting, and finally is identified as a link in a larger web of theft, blackmail, and political violence. Yet the chain is disclosed unevenly: the newspaper supplies the body, Battle supplies a provisional explanation, and Cade holds back the decisive facts of his own disposal. The murder consequently matters not only for what happened to Manelli, but for how secrecy and selective testimony complicate the search for truth across the investigation into Prince Michael’s murder.