DEMOLITION

Retired Det. Superintendent Henry Christie, taken off the shelf again to question a suspect who won’t speak to anyone else, finds himself investigating a rash of crimes committed before he was born.

When Celia Twain discovers her husband’s corpse only a few hours after she’d publicly threatened to kill him over his adultery, the Kendleton constabulary are naturally interested. Since Celia refuses to talk to anyone but Henry, who’s been around forever, DS Rik Dean offers him 500 pounds for a day’s work getting her statement, which naturally doesn’t include a confession of murder. Meantime, things have heated up dramatically in the village. Although James Twain had plenty of enemies, the news that he was a business partner of Marcus Durham, whose bullet-riddled body was recently found in his own swimming pool, strongly suggests that the same person may have killed them both. A group of young toughs have attacked wheelchair-bound Veronica Gough, and one of them has tried to drown her. Then several of them break into her house, and one of them threatens her with violence, triggering her memory of her rape by another villager during the celebrations of VE-Day in 1945. The more closely Henry, now awarded the nonce title of Civilian Senior Investigating Officer, looks into the past, the more convinced he becomes that Veronica’s memories may hold the key to a pair of unsolved murders committed even earlier, back in 1941. As DS Debbie Blackstone, Henry’s old boss in the Lancaster Cold Case Unit, observes, “It’s all about people taking things from other people.” Even as Henry is making arrests, Oldham continues to multiply complications in the final chapter, and the story ends with quite a cliffhanger.

The busiest, saddest, untidiest village mystery ever.