Daughter of Time. Singing Sands

«Daughter of Time» — the most famous novel by Josephine Tey. The Detection Club of England officially considers it the greatest English detective story. Can the bedridden inspector from Scotland Yard solve a murder that happened nearly five hundred years ago? Alan Grant is in the hospital with a broken leg and, out of boredom, decides to unravel the mystery of the most convoluted crime in medieval England — the deaths of two young princes, for which the usurping king and the hunchbacked monster from children's tales, Richard III, are blamed. The detective tries to figure out whether the king was as terrible as Shakespeare and Thomas More have described. Like a true policeman, he begins the investigation with the question: who benefited from the murder of Richard III's nephews? Inspector Alan Grant takes a night train to Scotland for vacation. In the morning, upon arrival at the station, he accidentally discovers the corpse of a young Frenchman, Charles Martin, in the neighboring compartment and mechanically picks up a newspaper from the floor that the young man had been reading shortly before his death. The police believe it unnecessary to investigate the case, considering that the passenger's death was due to natural causes; however, Grant is sure that the police are mistaken. He is haunted by a poem about the singing sands that Charles Martin had scribbled in the margins of the newspaper...