The Midsummer Rose

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I could see the house where the murders had been committed from where I was waiting, on the opposite side of the river Avon. It was visible because it was two-storeyed and stood some distance from the other cottages that formed the hamlet of Rownham Passage, on a muddy spur of rock that was washed by the river at full tide.

Surprisingly for one who was not a native of Bristol, I knew its history. It had been one of the stories told to me by my long-dead first wife, Lillis Walker, and for some reason it had stuck in my memory.

Fifty years and more ago, two women — a mother and daughter who had lived there — had hacked to death the tyrannical husband and father of the household, throwing his mutilated body into the river. Unfortunately for them, the corpse had been trapped by those underwater rocks that make the Avon such a treacherous river to navigate, and instead of being carried out into the Severn estuary on the receding tide, it had floated on the next incoming tide right into the heart of the city. In due course the two women had been arrested, tried, found guilty and suffered the horrible fate of being burned alive …

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