Roger kidnaps Frankie and Bobby and plans to stage a fatal car crash

Roger Bassington-ffrench’s kidnapping of Frankie Derwent and Bobby Jones turns a forged message into a trap and a planned fatal crash into its intended cover. The scheme depends on separating the two friends, controlling what each believes, and making their deaths appear accidental. At Tudor Cottage, their reunion exposes the deception—but not before Dr Jasper Nicholson has described the danger awaiting them.

The Forged Invitation

The immediate lure is a letter presented as a message from Bobby Jones. It says that he is on the trail, directs Frankie Derwent to meet him at Tudor Cottage in Chipping Somerton, and tells her to travel by train rather than take the Green Bentley, which would be too noticeable. It also supplies detailed directions and insists that she tell no one. The instructions appear to carry the reassurance of a private plan between friends; in practice, their secrecy isolates Frankie Derwent and makes the meeting easier to control.

Frankie Derwent follows the route from the station, reaches the cottage by way of a steep lane and a fork, and identifies it by the name on its gate. She finds no one outside and takes up a position among the surrounding pine trees, where she can watch the house. Her owl call is answered when a figure in chauffeur’s dress opens the door and beckons her in. The apparent recognition confirms her belief that Bobby Jones is waiting inside, but the dark, silent house offers none of the ordinary signs of a safe reunion.

Once inside, Frankie Derwent recognizes the danger too late to escape. She is subdued and later wakes on the cottage floor with her hands and feet tied. The staged welcome has done more than bring her to the right place: it has used her trust in the supposed sender to get her into the house without raising an alarm.

Two Captives, One Deception

Bobby Jones is already there, also bound, with cloth over his mouth. Frankie Derwent helps him free it. Their exchange establishes the central reversal: Bobby Jones says that he never wrote the letter. Frankie Derwent realizes that its instruction to tell nobody was part of the forgery’s design, not a precaution shared by the friends.

Bobby Jones explains that he had gone to The Grange and describes the sinister events that followed. After his capture, he was brought to the cottage and given food and drink. He suspects that what he consumed was drugged because he fell asleep almost at once. He had been knocked out on Wednesday evening and, when he and Frankie Derwent speak, learns that it is Friday. His account gives the kidnapping a second strand: while the false letter drew Frankie Derwent to the cottage, Bobby Jones had been intercepted after going to The Grange and kept incapacitated there.

Frankie Derwent recounts her own route to the cottage, including the account she had heard from Mr Spragge, and explains that she mistook the chauffeur-dressed figure at the door for Bobby Jones. By comparing their experiences, the captives can see how the scheme exploited separate information and arranged for each to misunderstand the other’s position. Their reunion restores communication, but they remain locked in a place selected and controlled by their captors.

The Threat of a Staged Accident

Dr Jasper Nicholson presents the intended next step as another accident. His scenario has Frankie Derwent driving with Bobby Jones as her chauffeur; after a wrong turn onto a disused road leading to a quarry, their car goes over the edge, killing them both. The plan is not an accident in any meaningful sense: the fatal outcome is deliberate, while the apparent mistake on the road is meant to disguise responsibility. Dr Jasper Nicholson says he needs a couple of hours to complete his arrangements and leaves the captives locked in the room.

Bobby Jones challenges the certainty of the plan, recalling that an earlier scheme in Wales had gone wrong. Dr Jasper Nicholson acknowledges that Bobby Jones’s tolerance of morphia had frustrated them before, but insists that this time the victims will be dead when their bodies are found. Frankie Derwent tries to use the forged letter against him, claiming that she made one exception to its demand for silence and told Roger Bassington-ffrench, who would know whom to blame if anything happened. Dr Jasper Nicholson dismisses this as a bluff. The exchange shows the limits of the captives’ immediate power: they can argue and try to unsettle their captor, but he still controls the locked room and the timing of the proposed crash.

Bobby Jones also asks whether Dr Jasper Nicholson has murdered his wife, Moira Nicholson. Dr Jasper Nicholson says she is still alive, while leaving her future uncertain. His answer broadens the threat beyond the two prisoners and makes clear that their confinement belongs to a larger pattern of danger surrounding the conspirators. When he leaves, he warns them against calling for help and locks the door behind him.

Roger Bassington-ffrench’s Part in the Scheme

Roger Bassington-ffrench later explains how he arranged Bobby Jones’s capture. Knowing that Bobby Jones would go to The Grange, Roger Bassington-ffrench waited in bushes near the path. He says that he struck Bobby Jones from behind after Bobby Jones had retreated from an earlier disturbance, carried him to a waiting car, put him in its boot, and drove him to Tudor Cottage, returning home before morning. This account identifies Roger Bassington-ffrench not merely as the forger of Frankie Derwent’s invitation but as the person who intercepted and transported Bobby Jones.

The letter and the capture therefore form coordinated parts of one operation: Roger Bassington-ffrench’s false message brings Frankie Derwent to the same hiding place as Bobby Jones, while Dr Jasper Nicholson sets out the intended fatal outcome. Roger Bassington-ffrench admits his skill at forgery, making the written invitation one of the scheme’s practical instruments. Its intimate tone and exact directions conceal a calculated division between what Frankie Derwent believes, what Bobby Jones knows, and what their captors have arranged.

The episode’s central reversal is that the promised meeting is real only in appearance. Frankie Derwent does reach the named cottage, and the figure at the door does wear a chauffeur’s clothes, but the details that seem to verify Bobby Jones’s message are components of the trap. Their reunion lets the captives expose the letter as a fraud and compare accounts; it does not itself free them. The planned quarry crash extends the same method from deception in the present to a fabricated accident in the future, with the appearance of chance intended to conceal deliberate violence.