One of the most frequent callers at Scotland Yard about this time was a 60-year-old cleric—the Rev. G. C. Tombe. His 28-year-old son, Eric Gordon Tombe, had been missing since the beginning of 1922 and the father had resigned the living of Little Tew, Enstone, in Oxfordshire, to come to London to aid in the search.
The Yard officers had made the usual routine enquiries, but when it was found that cheques drawn against the missing man's account had been cashed in Paris it was to be expected that the inquiries would not be pursued with quite as much vigour. The officers had previously gone with the father to "The Welcomes," a farm in Hayeslane, Henley, in which the son had held a partnership, but their inquiries there had met with little success, "he case had reached this stage "when Tombe's father hat a realist dream. He saw a vision of his son's body lying at the bottom of a well and half forced through a kind of hole.
"When the father told the story of his dream to Scotland Yard he found that while the detectives were, as usual, sympathetic, they had little room for dreams in their practical system, More with the intention of eppeasing the old man than in the hope of making any discovery, the area superintendent asked Divisional Det.- Inspr. Hedges, the officer in charge of the Croyden district, to put low of his men on a search of the unoccupied farm. The place was overgrown and dilapidated. But eventually three wells were found. Any of them might have been the well in the dream, At the foot of the wells mere cesspools. The first two wells were thoroughly examined without result. The third well was drained and searched.
At the bottom of this, after the rubbish had been cleared away, the men found a manhole, It was choked with debris, but when it was cleared it looked like the round hole of the dream, And it was, When the manhole cover was removed the seechers found the remains of a man's body. It had been forced down the manhole, head first, and then rubbish of every kind had been thrown into the well to hide its secret.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.