- ‘It was the first murder case I ever investigated on my own’. Wexford said angrily. ‘There’s no mystery. Herbert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the head with an axe. He did it for two hundred pounds.’Chief Inspector Wexford was sure that the murder of an old lady had been carried out by her employee, Herbert Painter, and the courts agreed with him. But then Henry Archery, whose son is engaged to marry Painter’s daughter, starts questioning the case…