First, dogs are poisoned by sausages laced with an unknown substance. Finding the culprit – someone cruel enough to kill an innocent animal in this farming community – is not obvious. Then, Nathan hits Rick Procter and is accused the next day of possessing ketamine, which was found in his locker. That mystery will never be solved. O’Brien is still not flavour of the day in Bruncliffe and has to get his life straight. Plus, there’s plenty of tea and humour to make this a great read.
“Ken Hargreaves laughed. ‘I thought you were supposed to be helping out Samson, not turning this into some sort of one-woman sausage crusade.’
Aye, well, with the amount of information I’m getting, I’m not sure as I’m going to be helping him or hindering him. There’s just too many folk here to work through.’
‘What you need,’ said Ken, a devotee of Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘is more data. So you can cross-reference. After all, as the good man said, you can’t make bricks without clay.’
Barbara Hargreaves stared at her husband, on the verge of a sharp retort for Bruncliffe’s answer to Sherlock Holmes. But something he’d said hit a nerve.
The tail end of sausage that she’d examined. She’d said herself it had the hallmarks of a professional. Someone who knew the business. Maybe even someone who still worked with meat.
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ she muttered as she pulled her note-pad to her. It was time to begin a new list. One that might help bring her the information she’d been looking for. “