Free No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) by John Gardner

send one of my boys in for them. Coming down your way tomorrow anyway, Pip,’ pause, ‘and Pip?’
    ‘Yes, guv.’
    ‘Don’t publish in the local gossip column or I might just reciprocate with some jolly stories of your time at Camford with that old lag Harvey.’
    ‘Right, guv.’ No shame.
    Tony Harvey, one-time detective inspector, now doing an unpleasant stretch in the Scrubs. A copper who was bent as a bradawl, and had been caught bang to rights, in spades.
    *   *   *
    In room thirty-six of The Royal Victoria Hotel, hard by Sheffield’s Victoria Railway Station, Tommy Livermore stretched and thought, for a second, how nice it would be to get out of his clothes and settle down in bed. No chance of that. His old acquaintance ‘Razzy’ Berry, head of Sheffield’s CID – amazing how the old-boy network oiled everything official – waited for him downstairs. Over at the nick they had two men helping with their inquiries into Doris Butler’s death: Kenneth Craig and Pete Hill, both close friends of the late Mrs Butler. Close friends and possible murderers. Could be either of them.
    For a moment, Tommy had a picture, vivid in his head, of Doris Butler lying spreadeagled in her little kitchen with her straw-coloured hair matted dark red and brown, and her head twisted at an unnatural angle. On the small dresser there was an apple with one bite taken from it, the flesh in the bite starting to brown, a packet of Bisto and another of powdered egg nearby.
    Tommy Livermore had a golden rule with murder investigations: always get close to the victim and try to forget his or her faults. Doris Butler (née Haynes) had been silly: silly to have got herself married in 1938 at barely seventeen years of age; silly to allow her instincts to remain out of control; silly to encourage her men friends to disregard her marital status; silly to continue seeing other men in 1940 when her husband, Roger Butler – later Corporal Butler of 1 st Hampshires (only in the Army could a lad from Sheffield find himself in the 1 st Hampshires) – went off to war to be killed four years later on D+2 when his head was neatly removed by a passing shell fired from a German tank. Doris by then was already dead, battered to death in her kitchen by, Tommy was certain, one of her many other lovers. She was, as Ron Worrall succinctly put it, ‘cock happy’ a term with which Tommy wholeheartedly agreed.
    It had been Ron who had first alerted Tommy to the area of half a dozen beech trees and undergrowth just outside the Butler’s little garden, on the edge of the scrubby meadow – Blue Fields as it was erroneously called. The trees afforded an excellent view of the house, and in its early June foliage the tiny oasis provided good cover that had obviously been used well by some watcher. The ground was trampled and scuffed, there was a selection of cigarette butts trodden into the earth (they counted fifteen in all) and the bark of one of the beeches had been picked off like somebody nervously picking a scab from a grazed knee. When he stood in this natural hide, Tommy saw that the bark would have been almost level with an average man’s waist. He pictured a faceless person standing, silent and unmoving with murder in his heart, fingers scratching at the crusty bark.
    Doris would have told this shadowy lover, ‘Don’t be silly. He never touches me. Might not even be married.’ And the man would watch as Doris and Roger chased each other round the house and, maybe in this warmer weather, even leave the bedroom window open at night so that the observer could hear the sounds of the marital sport and so be driven into a frenzy of jealousy. Frenzy was the right word. Tommy had seen the results of sexual jealousy many times. Sex was a mainspring of murder. Many a nice young man or woman had been led fatally astray by sex which had the power to drop a bomb of madness into the brain.
    On their first visit to the little semi-detached house in Bluefields