Paul Muniment had taken hold of Hyacinth, and said, 'I'll trouble you to stay, you little desperado. I'll be blowed if I ever expected to see you on the stump!'

Of course, closure of the West station took away the hotel's raison d'être. In May 2012, the local newspaper reported that this historic hotel, by then rated the town's worst (exemplified by its final review: Please avoid at all costs), was to be converted into 31 first-time-buyer one-bedroom flats.

The supplementary puzzles, like the half-burned note whose message we decipher (or misdecipher) in Death in Ecstasy, do not further the main investigation, and can send us down a blind alley or after a red herring.

But now she was addressing Mrs. Trenholme in a drawling, niggerfied English […]