The Rasp

Anthony Gethryn

Gethryn moves through Marling as an old friend of the Yard and a gentleman of the village, which lets him press Boyd for the wood-rasp and the fingerprint enlargements while everyone else considers the murder solved. He admits he is groping in the dark, yet the certainty of his doubt — that Deacon's guilt is too neat, too convenient — sets him against the official story. His stubborn refusal to accept an easy answer is the engine that keeps the case from closing in the early chapters.

Sir Arthur Digby-Coates

Sir Arthur is the deceased's closest friend and a guest at Abbotshall, and he throws himself into the investigation with a rage that startles even Gethryn — he speaks of torture, of sleepless nights, of getting his hands on the animal who did it. He also quietly arranges books, cigars, and Marshall, K.C. for the man accused of the crime, a generosity that sits oddly beside his fury. His grief and his interventions keep the reader guessing where his loyalties truly lie.

Mr. Deacon

Deacon is the man Scotland Yard has all but convicted: his alibi is broken, a hundred pounds from the dead man's bank sits in his collar-box, and his prints are on the wood-rasp. Yet he faces it with a composure that moves Gethryn — books, cigars, and a good counsel arranged, and a steady insistence that it will all come right. His courage and the suspicious neatness of the evidence against him make him the emotional center of the early mystery.

Lucia Lemesurier

Lucia is Dora's older sister, the composed one, the one who consoles — except that half her mind is elsewhere, tangled in a note that went unanswered and a man she barely knows. She is mortified by her own distraction, and her private thoughts about Gethryn (not fat, not white-moustached, but lean and hawky with disturbing eyes) betray an attraction she refuses to name. Her divided attention makes her the quiet emotional counterweight to the murder's noise.

Colonel Gethryn

Boyd is the official investigator, methodical and a little proud of a case he considers 'easy,' and he walks Gethryn through the locked-room problem, the open window, and the wood-rasp with the air of a man who has already closed the file. He is loyal enough to share the fingerprint enlargements and to ask Gethryn to keep quiet about them, and honest enough to admit the case has a nasty, puzzling feel. His friction with Gethryn — the sane law versus the mad amateur — gives the early investigation its productive tension.

Miss Margaret Warren

Miss Warren works for Hastings at The Owl, and she is the one who brings the first word of Hoode's murder — calm, unemotional, already thinking about the next edition. She is so sufficient, so calmly adequate, that Hastings sometimes wishes she weren't, and the one glimpse of her trembling and white-faced pleases him in a way he doesn't examine. Her competence and her single crack of feeling make her the newsroom's quiet anchor in the opening chapters.