Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), after a brief career as an actress, became a very popular writer of the Victorian and early Edwardian period. She is best remembered for her enormously popular sensational novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). While this work certainly deals with crimes, with themes partially based on the Road Hill House murder of 1860 which also inspired Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, it is not crime fiction in any modern sense. However, her earlier work, Trail of the Serpent (1860), has been called the first English detective novel. Elements include boy assistants for the detectives (not unlike Holmes’s Irregulars), evidence planted on a corpse, and the detective’s use of disguise. The principal detective, Joseph Peters, is also quite unusual: Not only is he mute, he is lower-class. Although Braddon wrote eighty novels, she also wrote numerous short stories. The following, which first appeared in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper for December 27, 1896, combines a ghost story with a sad tale of a crime gone badly wrong.