Both Wickham and Harding concurred that the General's grief was terrible to behold. He was groaning and crying and when they finally reached the veranda, he threw himself on to his knees beside his wife, seized her hand and cried out, `She's dead, she's dead. Maggie, Maggie.

The alleged use of this name is somewhat confusing. Nowhere apart from the various newspaper accounts of this interview with Harding is there any reference to the victim's being called 'Maggie'. Maggie is not generally used as an abbreviation for either of Mrs Luard's names, which were Caroline Mary. Indeed, most sources claim that Mrs Luard was known to her family and friends as Daisy, and this was borne out by wreaths addressed to `Daisy Luard' at her funeral. It is possible that the General did use the name 'Maggie', but it seems more likely that Harding misheard him, or else that the reporters misheard Harding.

Harding described the scene which confronted them in some detail: explaining that the body was lying face downwards, with a glove to one side and an umbrella to the other, while the lady's hat lay a short distance away. Harding considered that from the position of the body Mrs Luard must have been walking across the veranda when her killer struck. He speculated that this person had hidden in an angle of the building, then sprung out on Mrs Luard. There was no sign of a struggle, he said, and no footprints in the immediate area, where the ground was hard or moss-covered.

I should be very much obliged if you will permit me, through your columns, to acknowledge the very large number of telegrams, letters, and cards which I have recently received, expressing such deep sympathy for me.

The public at large has been deeply stirred by this awful crime and I may have some right to ask if the time has not arrived for clearing away from our roads, our lanes, and our woods, the many thousands of unemployed people, many of them in a desperate state from want, who may give way to temptation and commit the worst of sins.

I am sorry to have returned your kindness and hospitality and long friendship in this way, but I am satisfied it is best to join her in the second life at once, as I can be of no further use to anyone in this world, of which I am tired and in which I do not want to live any longer.

I thought my strength was strong enough to bear up against the horrible accusations and terrible letters in reference to that awful crime, which has robbed me of all my happiness, and so it was for a long time. The kindness and sympathy of so many friends has kept me going on somehow. Now in the last day or two something seems to have snapped: the strength has left me and I care for nothing except to join her again.

So goodbye, dear friend.

PS. I shall be somewhere on the line of the railway. Please send the enclosed telegrams to Elmhirst my son; my brother-in-law and my maid.

There can be little doubt that many local people suspected that the General had killed his wife. There was a widespread belief that the police net had been closing in on him and the General was tipped off that his arrest was imminent. Rather than face the disgrace of trial, arrest and the hangman's noose, the General was assumed to have `fallen on his sword'. According to one rumour, this course had been suggested to the General by a police sergeant, chosen for the delicate task because General Luard had helped him get into the police force in the first place, his father having previously worked as the Luards' gardener. This story had supposedly come from the mother of the police sergeant himself: though why a personal friend of the Chief Constable would need to have the situation spelt out by a lowly sergeant is not at all obvious - nor is there evidence that any serving police sergeant in 1908 was descended from any of the Luards' various gardeners..

In the absence of any other motive, it was suggested that the General had a lover. No candidate was named for the role and no evidence has ever been provided to link his name romantically with anyone other than Mrs Luard herself. This may have been a case of chicken and egg. The General was assumed to have killed his wife and therefore he must have had a motive and the most likely motive was that he must have had a lover.

Perhaps because the General was approaching 70, a more popular theory ran that the slightly younger Mrs Luard had a lover. In this set-piece melodrama, the summerhouse became the scene of their trysts - the fact that it was locked and there was not so much as a bench available on which the lovers could canoodle notwithstanding. One name was bandied about in connection with Mrs Luard - that of Dr Cecil Bosanquet - but it seems to have been linked to hers only long after she was dead.

Dr William Cecil Bosanquet was the bachelor son of Admiral George Bosanquet, whose house, Bitchet Wood, was a little south of Stone Street.4 The Bosanquets moved in the same social circles as the Luards, and had there been anything in this story, the Casa might have provided a useful meeting place because it was roughly half way between Ightham Knoll and Bitchet Wood.

This version of the tale has the General shooting Mrs Luard because of her affair with young Bosanquet. There is a huge problem with this theory in that by 1908 Dr Bosanquet had long ceased to live at his father's house in Kent. He ran a medical practice from Upper Wimpole Street in London, was a senior physician and medical tutor at Charing Cross Hospital, an assistant physician at Brompton Consumption Hospital, the author of numerous medical works and editor of others. Aside from the difficulties of being based 25 miles away, it is hard to see when Dr Bosanquet would have found the time to engage in an affair.

His father Admiral Bosanquet is scarcely a more likely candidate. He was 73 years old at the time of Caroline Luard's murder and would only live another five years. Arguing even more strongly against the General's entertaining the least hostility towards any member of the Bosanquet family is the fact that the Admiral was the 'dear friend' with whom Charles Luard had promised to spend two days before leaving Ightham for good - something probably not known by those who originated this rumour.

This subject has interested me for many years, particularly since the trial of Rex v. Dickman at the Newcastle Summer Assizes in July 1910, who was tried for the murder of a man named Nesbit [sic] in a train. Dickman was executed for what was an atrocious crime on 10 August 1910, his appeal at the Court of Criminal Appeal being dismissed on 22 July 1910. The case has always troubled me and converted me into an opponent of capital punishment. I attended the trial as the acting official shorthand writer under the Criminal Appeal Act. I took a different view to the jury; I thought the case was not conclusively made out against the accused. Singularly enough, in view of the nature of the crime, five of the jurymen signed the petition for reprieve, which could only be based upon the notion that the evidence was not sufficient against the accused.

It may be asked, why raise the question now? I am doing so partly because of Viscount Templewood's evidence, when he was reported as saying there was a possibility of innocent men being executed: partly because of the evidence of Viscount Buckmaster before the Barr Committee on Capital Punishment; but mainly because of the remarkable and disturbing matters concerning the Dickman case which have come to my knowledge over the intervening years, which I will now relate.

The Dickman case is the subject of a book by Sir S. Rowan Hamilton, which was published in 1914, based on the transcripts of the shorthand notes of the trial and certain other material. I did not read this book till August 1939, when owing to certain passages in the book, I wrote a letter to Sir S. Rowan-Hamilton, who had been Chief Justice of Bermuda, who replied as follows in a letter dated 26 October 1939:

The Cottage

Craijavak

Co. Down

Sir,

Your interesting letter of 24 August only reached me to-day. Of course, I was not present at the incident you referred to in the Judge's Chambers, but (Charles) Lowenthal (junior Crown counsel at Dickman's trial) was a fierce prosecutor. All the same Dickman was justly [convicted?], and it may interest you to know that he was with little doubt the murderer of Mrs Luard [who was shot dead at Ightham, near Sevenoaks, Kent, on 24 August 1908], for he had forged a cheque she had sent him in response to an advertisement in The Times (I believe) asking for help; she discovered it and wrote to him and met him outside the General's and her house and her body was found there. He was absent from Newcastle those exact days. Tindal Atkinson knew of this, but not being absolutely certain, refused to cross-examine Dickman on it. I have seen replicas of cheques. They were shown me by the Public Prosecutor. He was, I believe, mixed up in that case, but I have forgotten the details.

Yours truly

S. Rowan-Hamilton, Kt.

In 1938 there was published a book entitled Great Unsolved Crimes, by various authors. In that book there is an article by exSuperintendent Percy Savage (who was in charge of the investigations), entitled 'The Fish Ponds Wood Mystery', which deals with the murder of Mrs Luard, wife of Major-General Luard, who committed suicide shortly afterwards by putting himself on the railway line. In that article, the following passage appears: "It remains an unsolved mystery. All our work was in vain. The murderer was never caught, as not a scrap of evidence was forthcoming on which we could justify an arrest, and, to this day, I frankly admit I have no idea who the criminal was.' This book first came to my notice in February 1949, whereupon I wrote to Sir Rowan-Hamilton, reminding him of the previous letters, and asking for his observations on this statement of the officer who had conducted the inquiries into the Luard case. On 22 February 1949, I received the following reply from Sir S. Rowan-Hamilton:

Lisieux

Sandycove Road

Dunloaghaire

Co. Dublin

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your letter. Superintendent Savage was certainly not at Counsel's conference and so doubtless knew nothing of what passed between them. I am keeping your note as you are interested in the case and will send you later a note on the Luard case.

Yours truly

S. Rowan-Hamilton, Kt.

I replied, pointing out what a disturbing case of facts was revealed, as it was within my knowledge that Lord Coleridge, who tried Dickman, Lord Alverstone, Mr Justice A.T. Lawrence and Mr Justice Phillimore, who constituted the Court of Criminal Appeal, were friends of Major-General and Mrs Luard. (Lord Alverstone made a public statement denouncing in strong language the conduct of certain people who had written anonymous letters to Major-General Luard hinting that he had murdered his wife.) I did not receive any reply to this letter, nor the promised note on the Luard case.

Mr Winston Churchill, who was the Home Secretary who rejected all representations on behalf of Dickman, was also a friend of Major-General Luard.

So one has the astonishing state of things disclosed that Dickman was tried for the murder of Nesbit [sic] by judges who already had formed the view that he was guilty of the murder of the wife of a friend of theirs. If Superintendent Savage is to be believed, this was an entirely mistaken view.

I was surprised at the time of the trial at the venom which was displayed towards the prisoner by those in charge of the case. When I was called into Lord Coleridge's room to read my note before the verdict was given, on the point of the non-calling of Mrs Dickman as a witness, I was amazed to find in the judge's room Mr Lowenthal, Junior Counsel for the Crown, the police officers in charge of the case, and the solicitor for the prosecution. When I mentioned this in a subsequent interview with Lord Alverstone, he said I must not refer to the matter in view of my official position.

I did my best at the time within the limits possible. I went to Mr Burns, the only Cabinet Minister I knew well, and told him my views on the case and the incident in the judge's room; which I also told Mr Gardiner, the editor of The Daily News, who said he could not refer to that, though he permitted me to write in his room a last-day appeal for a reprieve, which appeared in The Daily News. Mr John Burns told me afterwards that he had conveyed my representations to Mr Churchill, but without avail.