Henry Bassington-ffrench is murdered and his death staged as suicide

Henry Bassington-ffrench is murdered and his death staged as suicide in a deception that turns an apparently secure alibi into part of the crime. Roger Bassington-ffrench kills Henry in the study, disguises the death with a farewell letter and evidence arranged to suggest suicide, and uses a delayed sound to make the staged version fit what witnesses believe they heard. The initial investigation nearly settles on that false account, with suspicion redirected toward Dr Jasper Nicholson.

The Apparent Suicide

Henry is found dead in his study, and the scene seems to support the conclusion that he shot himself. The study door is locked from the inside; its window is fastened, and Roger has to break it to enter. Sylvia Bassington-ffrench is in the house when the sound of a shot is heard. She runs into the hall, while Roger and Frankie Derwent, who have been in the garden, also hurry inside. After Roger leaves Sylvia on a settee, he goes out again with Frankie and they make their way around to the study window. The sequence supplies witnesses, a secured room, and an apparent gunshot: each detail seems to reinforce suicide rather than invite a second look at how the scene was made.

The farewell letter contributes to that impression. Before the truth is known, Bobby Jones asks Frankie whether Henry’s death is certainly suicide, noting that Moira Nicholson had said Dr Jasper Nicholson wanted two people removed. Henry is one of those people, so the apparent verdict matters beyond the question of his death: if it is accepted, a suspected pattern of threats may appear to have reached its end without revealing who acted. Frankie is convinced by what she saw and by Sylvia’s account, and Bobby reluctantly agrees that the death must be treated as suicide for the moment.

The False Trail to Dr Jasper Nicholson

Bobby tests the apparent explanation against the timing of Dr Jasper Nicholson’s arrival. Nicholson, Frankie explains, had left a stick behind earlier and returned for it. Sylvia said she saw him approach the house from the drive and went to meet him, then brought him around to the study window. That testimony seems to give Nicholson an alibi for the shooting, but Bobby distrusts the neatness of the account and considers whether Nicholson could have fired the shot, left a forged farewell letter, and escaped by locking the study door behind him.

The physical details appear to resist Bobby’s theory. The key to the study is found in Henry’s pocket, and Frankie says Nicholson found it there. Bobby points out that this discovery could itself have been staged, comparing the possibility to a conjurer’s sleight of hand. Frankie, however, argues that the locked door and window are not the only obstacles: Sylvia was inside the house when the shot was heard, and she says Nicholson arrived from outside while Roger and Frankie were going around to the study window. On her account, Nicholson could not have fired the shot and then entered by the route he claimed. The conversation leaves the suspicion unresolved rather than proving Nicholson innocent; its importance is that it shows how thoroughly the visible evidence has been arranged to make an alibi seem decisive.

Roger Bassington-ffrench’s Method

Roger’s later account reverses the apparent sequence. While he was speaking with Frankie in the garden, he decided there was no time to lose and went into the house. Henry was writing in the study. Roger sat beside him, spoke to him, and shot him; an aeroplane passing overhead drowned the sound. The plane is therefore not incidental background: it masks the actual killing and helps separate it from the later noise that witnesses take for the fatal shot.

Roger then builds the suicide scene. He writes an affecting farewell letter, removes his fingerprints from the revolver, presses Henry’s hand around it, and lets it fall to the floor. He places the study key in Henry’s pocket and leaves, locking the door from the outside with a dining-room key that fits the study lock. These acts explain the apparent contradiction at the center of Bobby and Frankie’s discussion: the key can be found on Henry, and the room can seem locked from within, without Henry having locked himself in or fired the weapon.

A small timed device in the chimney supplies the second sound. Roger says it was arranged to go off four minutes later. By then he is back in the garden with Frankie; they hear the delayed report and take it for the shot that killed Henry. Their shared presence makes the sound seem to confirm Roger’s innocence, even though he has already murdered Henry. The false alibi and the false gunshot depend on one another: the timing makes Roger appear to witness the event at the very moment his constructed version says it occurred.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The plan directs attention toward Dr Jasper Nicholson. Roger calls Nicholson’s return for his forgotten stick a misfortune for himself, because it gives Bobby a reason to question Nicholson’s sudden appearance and the apparent suicide. Yet the suspicion is also useful to Roger: Nicholson’s movements, together with the locked-room puzzle, offer an alternative explanation for details that Roger has deliberately manipulated. What first looks like evidence against Nicholson becomes part of the cover that obscures Roger’s actions.

The episode turns on the difference between witnessing a sound and knowing what produced it. Frankie and Roger really are together in the garden when the delayed report is heard; their testimony is not simply invented. Its meaning has been engineered by the earlier shooting, the aeroplane, the planted letter and weapon, the substituted key arrangement, and the timed device. Bobby’s doubts register the strain in the apparent solution, but the scene’s visible facts and Sylvia’s testimony initially make the suicide account difficult to dislodge. Roger’s confession supplies the missing causal chain and shows that the locked study was not proof of a self-inflicted death, but an apparatus for concealing a murder.