"Detective Inspector Collins stared at the whiteboard in his office. He hated the thing. It had photos of the murder victim stuck to it with little magnets, and his name in a big red circle in the centre. Other people had pictures of their family in the office. He had a boy in a blood-soaked T-shirt." Dominic Walsingham is researching the Chapter of St Cloud, a religious order his fellow historians have mostly left alone until now. That's probably because the order still exists, and...
A novella from the 'Histories of Claybrooke'. The lives of Ann, a maidservant, and Frederick, the son of an earl, should be entirely separate. But there are always cross-currents at work beneath the politesse of eighteenth-century society which link the different parts of 'the big house' – from the village children to visiting royalty – and which mean that from childhood to old age, their lives are inevitably entwined.
Three decades on, everyone who was there has long accepted their own version of events about the night Kester Johnson disappeared. But when an unexpected find lands the case on DI Collins' desk, those certainties start to crumble, and life in Abbey Hill suddenly becomes a lot less peaceful. Owen Collins has never been very good at keeping the personal and the professional separate, and even a murder from long ago can cause present-day complications. The first person he sees at the scene of...
