Skip to the main content
Nocturnal TalesMystery audiobooks for quiet evenings

The Girl Who Came Back from London

Original mysteryNo. 2551 hr 6 minMiss Marple

Play this story
0:00
1:05:44

The story

An English village where nothing can happen without being known within twenty minutes at the post office, thirty minutes at the butcher's, and, at the very latest, before evensong. A young woman has come home to Little Wycham after seven and a half years away, and the village has the news by half past eleven on Tuesday morning. She left the October after her mother died. She is twenty-six now, London has polished her, and she is staying at the cottage her family never quite got round to selling. Her mother's death was ruled accidental at the time. The coroner returned a verdict. The village returned several others, and enjoyed each of them for a season. But that is not the extraordinary part. Evelyn Bell has come back saying her mother was murdered. She says she knows who did it. And when the village sleuth asks, very gently, whether she intends to confront that person — she is told it has already been done. The Girl Who Came Back from London is an original Golden Age-style mystery about what a village remembers, what it prefers to forget, and how much can be hidden inside a description of somebody who is no longer there to correct it. FOR LISTENERS This is an original mystery written by Nocturnal Tales, inspired by the spirit of the great Golden Age crime writers and the English village tradition. The plot, characters and text are entirely our own creation. Little Wycham and everybody in it are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons or places is coincidental. No affiliation, endorsement, or official connection is implied. A village spent eight years enjoying this as a mystery — suicide for a fortnight, murder for considerably longer — without any of it costing one of them a night's sleep. Would you rather live somewhere that notices everything, or somewhere that notices nothing? CHAPTERS 00:00 - Introduction 02:02 - Chapter One - A Return to Little Wycham 11:25 - Chapter Two - Squire’s Pond 21:44 - Chapter Three - The Black Button 31:45 - Chapter Four - The Other Mother 41:33 - Chapter Five - The Letter Without a Name 53:19 - Chapter Six - A Mother’s Love 1:02:48 - Closing SUPPORT & LISTENING OPTIONS CREDITS TAGS / KEYWORDS english village mystery audiobook, golden age mystery audiobook, cosy mystery audiobook, village sleuth mystery, old lady detective audiobook, cold case mystery, accidental death mystery, english countryside whodunit, full length mystery audiobook, classic detective story audiobook, original golden age mystery, vintage detective fiction HASHTAGS

Free to listen, in full, with no account and no password. Your place is remembered in this browser, so you can stop and come back.

Enjoyed this one?

Every story on Nocturnal Tales is free, and stays free. Listeners who choose to give are the reason there is a new one tomorrow.

This is our work and what we live on: two of us, writing and producing a story every night. Giving here goes straight to us, rather than through a platform that can change its mind overnight. Why donations are important.

Choose a monthly amount

or

Give with PayPal

PayPal opens in a new page. Monthly support is easiest to manage through the card option.

No story is ever locked. Payment is handled securely by Stripe — we never see your card details. You can change or cancel your support at any time, from this page, with no explanation needed.

Be the first to comment

Tell us what you made of this one. No account and no password — just a name.

No account, no password. Your email is never shown to anyone, and is used only to reply to you unless you ask for the nightly email above.

More from the library

Cover illustration for The Comedy at Fountain Cottage

A complete change of key. After signal boxes and railway disasters, this is Ernest Bramah's blind detective in his lightest and most mischievous register, and the title is not ironic.

by Ernest Bramah

1 hr 1 minNo. 254

Cover illustration for The Gift of the Emperor

A European monarch has sent Queen Victoria a gift: a pearl of quite extraordinary value, travelling home by steamer under discreet guard. The whole affair has been managed with enormous care and almost no publicity.

by E. W. Hornung

57 minNo. 253

Cover illustration for The Ghost of Schloss Eberwald

A Bavarian mountainside in a snowstorm, and a castle on a black spur of rock with too many roofs and one red window burning beneath the highest of them. Arthur and the Belgian Detective have been summoned by an old acquaintance, the Baroness Adelheid von Eberwald, whose letter was admirably brief.

1 hr 14 minNo. 252

Cover illustration for The Moabite Cipher

The Moabite Cipher

Dr Thorndyke

It begins in a crowd on Oxford Street, waiting for one of those processions that benevolent institutions periodically inflict upon London traffic. A man dies in the press of people.

by R. Austin Freeman

59 minNo. 251