Wheatley would have noticed his friend’s absence, perhaps concluding that the playboy villain was seated at a card table on the Cote D’Azur, a glass ofchampagne in his hand, a handsome woman on his arm.

The truth wasn’t so glamorous. Gordon-Tombe was not playing blackjack on the Riviera. He was headfirst down a disused well. There was a gaping wound from a shotgun blast in the back of his skull.

The body was not discovered for over a year. It was so badly decomposed it had to be transported to the coroner’s office in a sack. Gordon-Tombe’s father could identify his son only by the engraved gold watch found in his waistcoat pocket.

Related: 13 Nonfiction Espionage Books About Real-Life Secret Agents and Super Spies

By the time the police found the corpse, Ernest Dyer was also dead. He’d been killed in a Yorkshire hotel—shot with his own revolver after a scuffle with police officers who’d come to question him about bad checks. In his luggage, detectives found the passport and check-book of Eric Gordon-Tombe.

The inquiry into Gordon-Tombe’s death was marked by the appearance on the witness stand of two anonymous veiled women. One claimed to be Gordon-Tombe’s fiancée. The other—the woman from Euston Station —described herself simply as, “a friend he frequently stayed with.” Though both remained veiled throughout, British reporters—always eager to combine sex and violence —concluded they were attractive with “shapely” bodies. The inquiry judged that Dyer had shot Eric Gordon-Tombe with the intention of posing as the dead man and emptying his bank accounts, from which around £2,000 ($2,800) had been plundered.

The Grandfather of James Bond

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