Conclusion to the story by Lord Dunsany :- Two bottles of relish

Danny McG

"Anything can happen in the next half hour!"
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Okay peeps, mega spoilers alert for this thread!

I read it in an anthology a long long time ago, I remember about three quarters of the plot but I can't recall the conclusion.

Two men sharing a flat in London, one a small travelling salesman for a fancy relish company, the other some kind of thinker.

A woman has disappeared while living in a cottage and there's no trace of a body, Scotland Yard are baffled. She lived with a vegetarian and, (for some not important reason) the police have watched this cottage for a while, before and after her disappearance.

The suspect has cut down loads of larch trees around the cottage and put the logs into stacks, he has a knife and an axe and a stove but early forensics show he hadn't cut her up and burned her.
He had two bottles of the select relish and this intrigues the salesman.

His deep thinker roomie gets him to take a trip to the possibile murder scene and have a look and report back.

Based on the findings he then solves it

How?
Has anyone else ever read it?
If you don't want to reveal in here then inbox me.

I don't particularly want to track down and buy the anthology just to help me recall a bit of the plot from one little story I read forty plus years ago

Cheers
 
Spoilers ahoy:

The two bottles of relish are meant to be used only with meat. One of the two investigators asks, couldn't the man have used it with vegetables by mistake? The other answers, not twice. Then the first one asks, why did he chop the wood? The answer is "to work up an appetite." The implication, of course, is that the killer ate the murdered woman, and that's why there is no corpse.
 
Spoilers ahoy:

The two bottles of relish are meant to be used only with meat. One of the two investigators asks, couldn't the man have used it with vegetables by mistake? The other answers, not twice. Then the first one asks, why did he chop the wood? The answer is "to work up an appetite." The implication, of course, is that the killer ate the murdered woman, and that's why there is no corpse.
Aha! That was it, I remember now.
Thank you Victoria, well done
 

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