Lady Selina Arkham Kyle’s death has created a bit of a conundrum. Her body was found in the street outside the library three days ago. Doc Willougby observed the body at the scene and pronounced the cause of death to be sudden migration of the womb, leading to asphyxiation. He assured us that the damage to the back of her head must have been due to the violence with which she fell when her womb went mad and attacked her lungs. “When I see a woman’s body covered in bruises, I know it’s because of her womb,” he told me.

Much as I dislike arguing with the good Doctor in public, I cannot help but think there might be a connection between her death, and a rope dangling from an upstairs library window. As though someone had tried to climb up there, and had fallen, banging their head on the pavement and dashing out their brains. But I’m just a simple journalist and not qualified to comment on medical matters.

Given Lady Selina’s tendency to ‘discover’ unusual artefacts, I had long assumed she must have a penchant for exploring abandoned houses. And what harm does it do? The risk is always to the explorer – often such houses have been abandoned for good reason, and it’s all too easy to come out with a cursed item if you aren’t highly sensitive to these things. But why the library? Granted, no one has been upstairs there for years. To the best of my knowledge, the rooms are empty and there is nothing worth exploring, or removing.

And yet, I am certain I saw a flicker of movement at the open window. Not a human face, something much more feline. The library has always had a sizeable dustcat population, so this seems the most likely explanation, but it only deepens the mystery. Did Lady Selina fall? If she was pushed, it seems hard to imagine that a dustcat would do such a thing. But then, we do not know why she was there in the first place. We do not know if she was exiting or entering the window when she fell. We do not know if she had attempted to remove something from the library – there was nothing on her body, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

This may prove to be one of those mysteries that remains unanswered. But I have a feeling in my bones that this will turn out not to be the end of the matter.