19. cleaned her off here at the house there wasn’t a mark on her.

It was the rummest thing in all my life.”
Lizzie chipped in. ”When they went back to search through the ashes in the morning they found him without his head. It had been chopped right off. They found him lying there with the dead baby girl in his arms.”
“Yea, we found her too. Only her feet were all burnt off. That was strange too.”
“We found the head about 50 metres from the house the next day after the ashes from the boiler house down the road wuz emptied out. It must have rolled down the shore.” Sam grinned toothlessly.
“There was a maid at the house on the night of the fire too. I don’t know how she got out. It must have been through the back door. She soon left the place to live elsewhere but nobody could find her. Some say she is still alive today.”
“So, what you are telling me is that James Jones and his daughter were both murdered and he had his head chopped off. Is that right?”
“Well I’m not altogether sure who murdered them but everybody at the time seemed to think that it was his Russian wife who did it. Mrs. Jeffrey everybody always called her. She was having an affair with Quigley who was the Company Manager at the time. We always thought that John Jeffrey and he were the best of friends too. They always seemed to be getting along so well together. It was a right shock. Then she went and married Quigley in that Anglican School over there–in The Fall of the same year that she had murdered them both. What I’ve never been able to figure out,” said Sam in a rather hoarse voice, “is why the police never followed it up. They just did nothing about it at all .”
Richard cast his mind back to the original correspondence he had