Barbara Roden – författare

Mrs Cecil Forrester is utterly dismayed by her and her husband''s missing valuables. She sees no reason why her loyal maid Sarah would steal these belongings, yet is assured by both her husband and the police that Sarah is the culprit. Questioning the reliability of these assumptions, and given her husband is working so hard at the moment, Mrs Forrester takes it upon herself to visit Mr Holmes and persuade him to investigate further.

"My cousin-by-marriage Sean Lavery, knowing my love for weird and outré websites, sent me a link to the Dark Roasted Blend site (www.darkroastedblend.com)," reveals the author, "where I found several pages featuring photographs of abandoned places. "My imagination was fired by pictures taken at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, Ohio, which opened in 1878 and was abandoned in 1978, with the buildings and rides left to rot where they stood, and I began looking around for some information about the park. "I''ve always had a fondness for amusement parks, ever since I was a child visiting Vancouver''s Pacific National Exhibition with my father and my brother: an annual trip which was one of the red-letter days on my childhood calendar. The photographs of Chippewa Lake Park were equal parts eerie and sad, for anyone who has ever thrilled to the sights and sounds of a midway, and the story sprang, almost fully-formed, into my head; one of the few times that''s happened." To see some of the pictures that inspired the following story, visit: www.defunctparks.com/parks/OH/ChippewaLake/chippewa-lake.htm.